DOROTHY ONLINE NEWSLETTER

NOVANEWS
Dear friends,

Once again 6 items, and once again was difficult to select from among the many that should be read.   In any event, I doubt that you will find any of the below superfluous.

The initial item is a report on the way Israel welcomes some professors who are invited to participate in a conference.  While the report below is only about this professor, she is not the only one to have received such treatment. Hers is a typical case of how the establishment acts towards people it does not want.

Item 2 is a response by Kathleen Barry to the statistics of civilian deaths in Iraq furnished by Wikileaks.  I preface her letter with a few words, below.

In item 3 Gideon Levy justifiably censures Israel’s ‘victim’ fixation, and where it is leading us.

Item 4 is a PCHR (Palestinian Center for Human Rights) report advising that Spain has refused to grant Avi Dichter immunity. Additionally, the PCHR asks Spain to rethink its recent alteration of the law and to revise it to once again enable Spain to legally charge and try those accused of war crimes.

Item 5 reveals how the ZOA (Zionist Organization of America) under the direction of Mort Klein “is shamelessly trafficking in the language of bigotry and anti-discrimination in an effort to criminalize campus human rights activism in favor of justice and peace in Palestine and Israel.”

The final item, by Sam Bahour, is about Palestinian survival in the economic and business world under Israeli occupation.  I was surprised to read that Sam includes interaction between Israelis and Palestinians, and asked Sam how this sat with the bds movement.  He has promised me to write an article touching especially on this issue.  I will of course forward when it comes.

All the best,

Dorothy

================================================

1. Haaretz Sunday, October 31, 2010

American professor invited to Israel ‘humiliated’ by El Al security personnel Heather Bradshaw, a neuroscience professor invited to a conference at Hebrew University, says she was asked to remove clothing, board the aircraft with no luggage.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/american-professor-invited-to-israel-humiliated-by-el-al-security-personnel-1.322099

By Zohar Blumenkrantz

Tags: Israel news El Al

 An American professor who was invited to a conference in Israel claims she was humiliated by Israeli security personnel at London’s Luton airport on Thursday.

Professor Heather Bradshaw, who researches neuroscience at Indiana University, was at Cambridge University when she was invited to Hebrew University in Jerusalem for a conference.

“Our guest arrived at Luton airport on Thursday in order to fly to Israel using [Israeli airline] El Al, and she was shocked to discover that straight away, the security personnel treated her as a terror suspect,” said Haifa University professor Arik Rimmerman who submitted a complaint to El Al in her name.

“She presented numerous documents indicating the purpose of her visit and her passport – which shows she has already been to Israel several times,” said Rimmerman. “The security personnel treated her and the documents she presented with utter disrespect.”

Bradshaw told Haaretz that no one told her what she was suspected of and she wasn’t explained anything. She said that security took her to a separate room and confiscated all of her belongings. She told Haaretz that she sat and waited as every few minutes a different security official came in to question her about the items in her suitcase – which were mostly books.

After the questioning, she underwent a physical examination in which she was asked to remove her bra. The exam lasted nearly an hour, and at the end of it, she was reprimanded for holding up the flight.

Bradshaw was not allowed to bring any carry-on luggage on to the flight and was only permitted her passport and three credit cards.

When she arrived in Israel, she expected someone from the airline to wait for her and update her regarding her luggage and belongings that were left behind, but no one knew anything, Bradshaw told Haaretz. She said she felt helpless and was holding back tears.

Moreover, Bradshaw’s Israeli colleagues said that the flight attendant that was tending to her reproached her for coming to Israel without anything and without the proper permit for her luggage.

Bradshaw said it was the fourth time she had traveled to Israel and that this was the first time she was treated this way by security personnel. She told Haaretz that she had no idea why they decided to treat her differently this time.

El Al airline responded to the case by saying that “the airline acts according to the instructions of the defense authorities.”

———————————-

2.  Kathleen Barry, Author of books as Female Sexual Slavery, a Biography of Susan B. Anthony, and most recently Unmaking War, Remaking Men,  responds to Wikileaks stats on the numbers of Iraqi civilians killed. 

The numbers of Palestinian civilians killed are more available than were those of Iraqis thanks to Human Rights organizations and others as B’tselem, Palestinian Red Cressent Society, OCHA,   

The reasons that Israeli soldiers kill civilians are similar to those that Barry outlines below for American soldiers.  Here again, what Israeli soldiers do is available from testimonies from Courage to Refuse and Breaking the Silence, and more recently from items uploaded on facebook.  I don’t presume that Israeli and American soldiers are worse than others fighting civilians.  That is the problem.

The question is what do we do with the information and the statistics?  Statistics do not help reduce the numbers.  Gathering them and exposing them is an important step, but it unfortunately does not end them. 

Dorothy

====================

IRAQI DEATH TOLL – WIKILEAKS REVEALS TIP OF THE ICEBERG ONLY

Since the latest Wikileaks release, the revised death toll from the war against Iraq brings the total civilians deaths to 150,000 based on military field reports. 

But this is only the tip of the iceberg.  From the testimony and descriptions given by soldiers who have been in combat, I accumulated an even more grim picture of “preventive and random killing” of civilians during the war for my book, Unmaking War, Remaking Men. 

First, the use of white phosphorus and smart bombs often makes it impossible to identify incinerated victims.  Second, U.S. soldiers had difficulty distinguishing between civilians and combatants.  Third, as for the significant number of civilians killed by Iraqis, it was US military practice to blame the killings by US soldiers on Iraqis.  Many US soldiers carried drop weapons, which they had confiscated on a previous kill of an insurgent.  When they killed a civilian they dropped an insurgent’s weapon on the body to show the victim was killed by an Iraqi.  Fourth, falsification of field reports such as those just released by Wikileaks by soldiers to protect their buddies goes all the way up the chain of command. 

The incredible bravery of those who made this massive leak of documents possible is undermined if we believe that the military in the field was accurately reporting combat actions.  For example, the US Marines 2006 massacre in Haditha was left uninvestigated and reported 15 casualties killed by Iraqis until news reporters  followed up eyewitness accounts.  It was found that instead of Iraqis killing Iraqis, the US Marines, after an IED explosion had killed one of their own in a truck,  massacred 24 women, children and babies as well as several men they executed.

I found that U.S. soldiers engaged in what I call preventive killing, which is killing because “I’m not sure if this person is an insurgent or a civilian,” and random killing. 

Thought control is used by the military to train recruits to kill without getting hung up on feelings of remorse.  They were trained to not fire at persons but at locations, so they will cover wider areas. As a result, for many in combat, killing becomes a game.  For others who are worn down by dodging pot shots at them, or who have just seen their buddy killed, it is revenge.  Either way, added to the Iraqi loss of life is the soldiers trauma for doing what most would never have considered doing outside of the military.

These, along with the fact that the US never bothered to count Iraqi dead during most of the war, validates the death toll of 655,000 in 2006 reported from the John Hopkins study that involved interviewing Iraqi families to determine how many had lost relatives in the war.  As the war continued, that death toll was revised upward to 1.3 million Iraqis.                                                                                       

-30.Professor Emerita Kathleen Barry’s latest book, Unmaking War, Remaking Men: How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves (www.unmakingwar.net) has just been released.  A sociologist and feminist activist, her first book, Female Sexual Slavery, launched an international movement against trafficking in human beings.

=================================

3.  Haaretz Sunday, October 30, 2010

Israel is proud to present: The aggressor-victim

Israelis have always loved victimization, not only when we were real victims, as often was the case in our history, but also when we were the aggressors, occupiers and abusers.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israel-is-proud-to-present-the-aggressor-victim-1.322053

By Gideon Levy

Once upon a time the staple piece of clothing was the blue shirt of the Labor Movement, and songwriter Mordechai Zeira sang about it: “And it’s much better than all jewels.” A new generation has arrived, and its shirt is darker. Today it’s black and bears the legend: We are all the victims of Goldstone.

Dozens of friends of the two Givati Brigade soldiers arrived wearing these infuriating shirts at a military court a few days ago. Their friends had been convicted of overextending their authority while risking the life of an 11-year-old, and to be precise, of conduct unbecoming of soldiers. The soldiers received the scandalous support of senior officers, and the two convicted men have become heroes.

Israel is proud to present: The aggressor-vicitim. History has known crueler and even longer occupations than the Israeli one, and there have been much worse attacks on civilian populations than Operation Cast Lead. But there has never been an occupier who presented himself like that, as a victim.

From the days of Golda Meir, who said we will never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to hurt their children, to the combatants who shot and wept, we have set, courtesy of the Givati troops, a new record of Israeli chutzpah: We are all the victims of Goldstone.

The victimhood, it turns out, belongs not to an 11-year-old child whose life was put at risk and who has been suffering from insomnia ever since, but the soldiers who ordered him to check for explosives, in clear contradiction of a ruling by the Supreme Court.

Not the Samouni family, 21 of whose members were butchered when the same Givati Brigade, under the same commander, bombed the house into which the soldiers ordered the family, but the brigade commander, Ilan Malka, whose conduct is now being investigated, shamefully late. And certainly not the residents of Gaza, who experienced Cast Lead with its hardships, horrors, destruction and war crimes, but the soldiers, who share responsibility with the commanders and politicians.

We’ve always loved victimization, not only when we were real victims, as often was the case in our history, but also when we were the aggressors, occupiers and abusers. And we don’t only cast ourselves as victims, but as the only victims. But observe our perception of our wrongdoing. It started with denial, then changed to suppression, then to shamelessness, then to dehumanization and demonization, until we arrived at the current stage: A pride parade.

The soldiers taking pictures of themselves dancing with prisoners and posing with corpses are proud of what they do. They upload the footage onto the Web, for all to see, and friends of the two Givati troops are equally proud of what their mates have done. They’re proud of the conduct of people who broke the law. Their solidarity may be understandable, but it’s much more difficult to understand the support of their brigade commander, Col. Moni Katz, and Maj. Gen. (res. ) Uzi Dayan.

What are they saying – that the soldiers acted correctly? That they should not be punished? That they are victims? In that case, we have little to claim from the soldiers, who were only acting according to the spirit emanating from their superiors. But most difficult to understand is the widespread public support for the two. Just like the Nahariya policeman convicted of placing bombs to injure suspected mobsters, they are local heroes and national victims to many.

Do we really want to be proud of the soldiers ordering children to risk their lives, in violation of the law? Is this how we want the army to behave? Will Israeli public opinion never accept that war has rules and that if Israeli soldiers break them, they must be punished? True, they may have been carrying out orders, they may have been jaded and exhausted after three weeks of the assault on Gaza, as the court has heard. But casting them as victims testifies to the chaos overtaking Israel. 

So we should go back to basics. The victims of Cast Lead are the 1.5 million residents of Gaza. The “victims” of the Goldstone report are not the two convicts, but their own victims. The shirts worn by their friends in court are proof that these basic truths have been blurred and distorted beyond recognition.

===================================

4.   

PCHR Palestinian Centre for Human Rights Press Release

Ref: 99/2010

Date: 31 October 2010

Spanish Authorities Refuse to Grant Avi Dichter Immunity

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) notes that the Spanish authorities refused to provide Avi Dichter, former Director of the Israeli General Security Services, with requested immunity prior to a planned visit to Spain. Mr. Dichter is currently the subject of a criminal lawsuit before the Spanish Courts in relation to his role in the Al Daraj assassination of July 22, 2002.

PCHR applaud this move, noting a welcome return to the rule of law. Spain, along with all other High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, is subject to a legal obligation to search for and prosecute all those suspected of committing grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.

Spain’s move comes as a reaffirmation of the desire to ensure that Spain does not become a ‘safe haven’ where suspected war criminals can travel with impunity. However, PCHR note that following intense political pressure from the Israeli government, Spain recently modified its existing universal jurisdiction laws. Such political pressure has no place in the international legal order. All those suspected of committing international crimes must be investigated, and if appropriate prosecuted; victims’ rights must be upheld. PCHR urge Spain to repeal recent amendments to the universal jurisdiction law, noting that these amendments way violate Spain’s international obligations.

The Al Daraj case, brought by PCHR, Hickman & Rose (UK) and Spanish partners Gonzalo Boye, Antonio Segura, Juan Moreno and Raul Maillo, is currently pending before the Spanish Constitutional Court.

Background information relating to the Al Daraj attack

On 22 July 2002, at approximately 11:55 pm, an Israeli Air Force F16 fighter jet dropped a 985 kilogramme bomb on a three-storey apartment building. The attack was intended to kill Salah Shehadeh, the suspected leader of the Izzidin al-Qassam Brigade, Hamas’ military wing. The apartment building was located within the densely populated Al Daraj district, a residential neighbourhood in Gaza City. At the time of the attack, Shehade was on the upper floor of the building. As a result of the blast impact, eight other adjoining and nearby apartment buildings were completely destroyed, nine were partially destroyed, and another 21 sustained considerable damage. Excluding Shehade and his guard, a total of 14 civilians were killed, including eight children. Approximately 150 civilians were injured.

Israeli officials have acknowledged that they decided to drop the bomb on Shehadeh’s house knowing his wife was with him, intentionally killing her as well. The decision to attack apparently also took into consideration the possibility that, along with Shehadeh, approximately 10 civilians would also be killed.

This attack was planned in advance, targeted a densely populated residential area, and was conducted at a time when it could reasonably be expected that there would be an extremely high number of civilians present. This attack constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and as part of wide spread and systematic war crimes, it also classifies as a crime against humanity.

Those implicated include: former Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, his former military advisor Michael Herzog, former IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Moshe Yaalon, former Shin Bet Director Avi Dichter, former Israel Air Force Commander General Dan Halutz, former head of the IDF Operation Branch Major-General Giora Eiland, and former Southern Command Chief Doron Almog.

Public Document

**************************************

For more information please call PCHR office in Gaza, Gaza Strip, on +972 8 2824776 – 2825893

PCHR, 29 Omer El Mukhtar St., El Remal, PO Box 1328 Gaza, Gaza Strip. E-mail: pchr@pchrgaza.org, Webpage http://www.pchrgaza.org

================================================

5.  Under the leadership of Mort Klein, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is celebrating its success in its efforts to expand federal anti-bullying guidelines stipulated under the US Civil Rights Act of 1964.  So why in the world would Mort Klein and his pro-occupation and pro-settlement ZOA be interested in federal civil rights and anti-bullying policy in the first place? Perhaps a new-found interest in protecting religious practice and reigning in on all instances of discrimination? Of course not. Read on and prepare yourself to be outraged.

In a policy statement released this week, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has adopted new guidelines that include protections against religious groups with “shared ethnic characteristics.”   Appearing alongside indisputably positive policy changes that increase protections for LGBT and disabled students facing bullying and discrimination, it may seem totally inappropriate to cast doubt on this particular aspect of the policy, no matter who has brought it to the table. After all, expanding categories of protection is a good thing. However, once we understand the ZOA’s motives, it becomes clear that this development should be cause for alarm for anybody wanting to preserve students’ rights to organize on American campuses for peace and justice in Palestine and Israel!

Indeed, the ZOA took up this effort specifically as a way to clamp down on student activism that has pushed universities to hold Israel accountable to international law. How? Title VI of the Civil Rights Act says that colleges and universities that don’t address issues of discrimination can lose their federal funding. This is part of a strategy to scare public universities into putting a stop to entirely legal and non-discriminatory activism that the ZOA and others just don’t like.

Klein is shamelessly trafficking in the language of bigotry and anti-discrimination in an effort to criminalize campus human rights activism in favor of justice and peace in Palestine and Israel. It’s hard to imagine a more reprehensible manipulation of the legacy of civil rights struggle.

The story actually begins in October 2004 when the first complaint to US Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in 2004 on the behalf of Jewish students at the University of California at Irvine. These claims, which form the centerpiece of the ZOA’s whole case to OCR, seem at best to be an extreme misrepresentation of actual goings-on, and at worst totally lack substance–and that’s coming from their subjects: UC Irvine students themselves. In response to the initial complaint the ZOA filed with OCR on behalf of Jewish students at the University of California at Irvine in October 2004, the most prominent leaders of the campus Jewish community actually came out and publicly refuted the ZOA’s claims that UCI is a hostile environment for Jewish students.

In March 2008, prominent Jewish student leaders of UCI (including the presidents of the campus Hillel, the self-described pro-Israel group Anteaters for Israel, and the Jewish Fraternity and Sorority) issued a public statement clearly and directly contradicting the ZOA’s claims about their campus, stating instead that  “Jewish student life thrives on campus, despite misinformation from outside organizations.”

In a story published in May 2008 issue of New Voices (since expunged from their website, but available below), student leaders from UCI’s Jewish community testify to being ignored, silenced, and even publicly discredited by ZOA and associated activists for speaking the truth of their experience on campus.  One student, then President of Anteaters for Israel,  even lost his position with the Israel advocacy training group StandWithUs over a statement he made that the threat of anti-Semitism on his campus has been exaggerated by community activists and organizations.

Who Speaks for Jewish Students?

In another case cited in a recent op-ed, Klein also cites a battery case filed by a female pro-Israel activist at the University of California at Berkeley against a Palestinian student activist. In fact, all charges have been dropped against the Palestinian student, Husam Zakharia, who said from the very beginning that he lost control of a shopping cart overflowing with donated toys bound for Gaza when it accidentally hit the female student.

Klein’s campaign seemed to really take off earlier this year when 13 Jewish organizations endorsed a March 16 letter to the Education Minister urging the Office of Civil Rights to investigate incidents of anti-Semitism. Among the endorsing groups are Abe Foxman’s ADL, American Jewish Congress (AJC), and Hillel– all of which have a track record of manipulating charges of anti-Semitism to silence critics of Israeli policy.

More recently, Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA) and Senator Arlen Specter (D-CA) have been championing in Congress Mort Klein and the ZOA’s proposal to amend the Civil Rights Act. In September, Sherman and Specter introduced legislation that would inscribe into federal law what the Department of Education has just changed in federal policy. Shortly after the new guidelines were announced, Congressman Sherman released a statement naming only Jewish students who face “severe and persistent anti-Semitic hostility on their campuses” among groups who will enjoy new protections under the policy.

Making no mention of any other communities facing religion-based discrimination, such as Muslims, Sikhs and other groups most impacted by the up-swell of Islamophobic discrimination, the political motives of the ZOA’s appeal is perfectly transparent. The ZOA is not and has never claimed to be an organization that fights bigotry or discrimination, nor do they purport to hold a message of universal tolerance. It is an organization set up to promote a pro-settlement, pro-occupation, right-wing Zionist agenda.

In addition to using federal anti-discrimination legislation to pursue a highly politicized agenda, one of the most troubling aspects of this campaign is that it has considerable de-amplifying effects for when authentic instances of anti-Semitism do arise.  This type of action will not make Jews, or anyone else, any safer.

=======================

[Forwarded by Elana]

6.  From: epalestine-owner@lists.riseup.net [mailto:epalestine-owner@lists.riseup.net] On Behalf Of Sam BAHOUR
Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2010 8:26 AM
To: epalestine@lists.riseup.net
Subject: [ePalestine] Arab news: A Show of Palestinian Business Resilience (By SAM BAHOUR)

Arab news  

A Show of Palestinian Business Resilience  

By SAM BAHOUR  

Published: Oct 30, 2010   

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad will most likely cut a ribbon; a handful of government officials will be jockeying for camera time to claim economic leadership; major multinationals will compete to get their logo in the limelight; international donors, like USAID, DFID and the World Bank will be prominently featured and the media will eat all of this and regurgitate it, with little or no real analysis, as economic development toward statehood.  

This is all a probable scenario in the upcoming Palestinian information and communication technology (ICT) sector’s premier annual public event, EXPOTECH Technology Week 2010 that will be held from Nov. 1-6.  

The real story however will be embedded in the exhibition’s booths, in the people who are struggling to survive under a brutal and prolonged Israeli military occupation while keeping their eye on the prize: building and information technology sector that has the potential to be a pillar of a future Palestinian state while in the meantime providing sustenance under the distress of occupation  

This exhibition is not about growth; it is about survival.  

Education  

Palestine’s ICT players are many but the key to this sector is the knowledge-based resources. The human resources that feed the sector are a mix between products of Palestine’s higher education system and Palestine’s Diaspora and expat community who have returned home during the past two decades.  

Palestinian universities have been weathering crisis after crisis ever since Israeli occupation began in 1967. In the mid 1970s university presidents and staff had to deal with being deported from their homes by Israel; in the late 1980s several Palestinian universities were closed for years on end and hundreds of staff and students were arrested by Israel; in the 1990s, with the signing of the Oslo peace accords, what was supposedly a paradigm shift toward independence turned out to be a reshuffling of the occupation with a new layer of bureaucracy called the Palestinian Authority (PA). Since the year 2000 Palestinian professors and students have been randomly blocked by Israeli checkpoints and closure regimes from reaching their classrooms and continue, all the while, to be arbitrarily harassed, humiliated and arrested.  

More recently, how higher education institutions in Gaza can sustain their existence under Israeli siege and constant shelling from the air, land and sea is a story in itself and will surely be noted in tomorrow’s history books.  

In spite of this bitter reality, Palestinians persevered and held on to education like there was no tomorrow. This steadfastness in the face of incredible odds should not be underestimated. In the midst of all of this chaos, universities struggled to attain their fair allocation of the PA budget to meet their payrolls, retain their teaching staff and adjust their offerings to meet the rapidly changing market needs. For better or for worse, this is the foundation that the information technology sector of Palestine stands on.  

Business drivers  

Those driving Palestine’s occupied economy are also key. Thus far, the donor community, by virtue of its funding abilities, is the back-seat driver of the entire economy and is in structural control. The US, EU, World Bank and the like are micromanaging many sectors in Palestine; the ICT sector is not an exception.  

Intervention comes in many shapes and sizes and, over time, develops its modalities. What started nearly two decades ago as charitable assistance has since moved to grants managed by each donor country’s private sector firms. Over time, and with the need to navigate through a political minefield, assistance to the sector took a new shape: partnerships with local civil society. Even multinational corporate social responsibility venues started playing a major role.  

A growing number of Palestinian software development firms and service providers are reaching out to global markets, some benefiting from this international support and others on their own. Hidden in the alleyways of Palestine’s economic landscape are Palestinians from the expat community and Diaspora who are linking local engineers to global markets.  

Firms like gSoft Technology Solutions (www.gsofttech.com), one of the leading software development companies in Palestine which provides outsourcing services to leading American companies specializing in the semiconductor, solar, insurance, medical, real-estate and mobile markets in the US, is a prime case in point. gSoft also builds and globally markets mobile and advertising products and services. This firm highlights the organic link that the Palestinian Diaspora can play in opening up markets for local firms to serve.  

Another local success story is Bisan Systems (www.bisan.ps). This firm has been providing accounting software services to the lion’s share of the Palestinian market for over 22 years. In keeping with the times, they now provide all of the occupied territory with a new version of their Java-based, multilingual, online accounting application in an application service provider model.

The firm is also providing the accounting system plumbing behind some of the main elements of the Palestinian Authority’s institutional financial reform efforts and is receiving rave reviews by international organizations like the World Bank. This is another local success story — ready, able, and willing to compete on a regional and global scale. The examples are many.  

Over the years many multinational firms have dabbled into Palestine’s ICT sector as well.  At one point TIMEX had a team of Palestinian developers working as part of their global research and development network to develop new digital watch software. Today, HP and Google are just two more examples of firms on the ground in Palestine.  

The most promising of the multinational experiences has been a three-year commitment from CISCO’s CEO John Chambers, which is due to expire at the end of this year. CISCO has hinted that they are more than pleased with the investments they have made in Palestinian firms. The sector anxiously awaits a comprehensive review of the $10 million that was invested by CISCO in order to build on this high profile platform for other multinationals to follow suit.  

Sector leadership  

The convener of the upcoming high-tech exhibition is the Palestinian Information Technology Association of Companies (PITA). PITA was founded in 1999 by a group of Palestinian entrepreneurs who wanted to create a nongovernmental body to defend the interests of the ICT sector. Operations began in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank with one employee and a paid member base of 25 Palestinian ICT companies.  

PITA can safely claim to be the most active Palestinian trade association, both on and offline. During the tough years of the second Intifada, PITA grew and today represents 100 ICT firms (29 of them based in Gaza) — everything from hardware distributors, software development firms, office automation vendors, Internet service providers, telecommunications, IT consulting, IT training and related businesses. This growth and member base diversity exemplifies the dynamism of this sector and reflects its tremendous potential.  

The newest addition to the sector has been the establishment of several university-based Centers of Excellence dedicated to incubation services to capture a pipeline of ideas emerging from Palestine’s youthful population.  

Even the Palestinian Authority itself, at least in the West Bank, has started to finally get its act together and make progress on several long-standing issues that have held back the sector, such as opening the telecommunications market for competition.  

Capital in action  

The investment leadership in the sector has also become richer and more diverse in recent years. Today Palestine is proud to host several new private equity funds that are open to ICT investments. Abraaj Capital, the region’s biggest private equity group in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, has partnered with the Palestine Investment Fund, Palestine’s sovereign wealth fund, to launch Palestine’s branch of the Riyada Enterprise Development by way of a $50 million private equity fund. Abraaj Capital Group, the parent of Riyada Enterprise Development, was a recent recipient of $150 million in financial support from the US’ Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to expand its efforts in the MENA region.  

Massar International, one of Palestine’s emerging economic powerhouses, has recently received $30 million financial support from OPIC to launch the Siraj Palestine Fund I, another private equity fund.  

Some funds have tried to bury the political complexities of managing a matrix of interests in Palestine, but others have dealt with the political complexities head on. For example, as reported in America.com, the Aspen Institute “has several projects designed to encourage Middle East entrepreneurship.

It has played a key role in organizing the Middle East Venture Capital Fund, which is managed by Israeli businessman Yadin Kaufmann and Palestinian entrepreneur Saed Nashef. Backed by the European Investment Bank, Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corporation and other contributors, the fund has $50 million to fund high-growth, export- oriented ventures in information technology.”  

The UK-based aid and development agency Mercy Corps recently reported in a press release that it “received a major international award for its work to support Palestinian information and communication technology (ICT) companies…They won the prestigious Digital Opportunity Award for their program building links between Palestinian and Israeli ICT companies as a step toward peace in the region…[and]…in recognition of their ‘remarkable and successful’ work in building closer business relationships between Palestinian and Israeli companies.

The program involved an extensive awareness-raising campaign and proactively building business relationships, through meetings and the launch of a new website [see the Outsource to Palestine website at www.outsource2pal.com] and report, all aimed at promoting the capabilities of the Palestinian ICT sector to the Israeli and international market.”  

Several new private equity and venture capital funds are also in the pipeline. Thus, one can see a clear building of the needed investment infrastructure. But to be honest to Palestine’s experience, it was never the hard infrastructure which was cause for concern, but rather the soft infrastructure — that which may be called the investment eco-system — that has hindered our progress: things like freedom of movement of people and goods, the right to engage in cross border trade without Israeli restrictions, a telecommunications network which is not forced to go through an Israeli operator and the like.  

The rigorous international intervention to support Palestine’s ICT sector is surely welcomed; however, it would be meaningless if it were not accompanied by concentrated efforts from donor states to remove — not maneuver between — Israel’s illegal actions that hamper our sector’s development.  

A real display of resilience  

Palestine’s EXPOTECH Technology Week 2010 has all the trappings of any world-class exhibition. It will be the first event to be held in Palestine’s first 5-star Movenpick Hotel in Ramallah. A parallel venue in Gaza is also planned for those not permitted by Israel to attend. Aside from the business to business meetings, an array of workshops will be held on IT Business in Palestine, Telecommunication and Broadband, Technology Entrepreneurship, Technology Trends, e-Government Initiative, Technology Financing, Strategies to Grow the ICT Sector, Technology/Innovation Marketing and IT Education. If one did not know better, the exhibition agenda looks like one from any free market anywhere in the world. However, we do know better.  

In the face of the systematic Israeli stifling of our economy, our technology entrepreneurs are putting on a show of Palestinian business resilience like no other. It can be viewed as an example of a battered people, proudly standing up at the podium of a globally vibrant sector, and calling out at the top of our voice that we are a people yearning to be free, yearning to compete in a global economy. We are a people that have kept abreast of our sector’s developments across the globe even as we find it hard to move from city to city in our own homeland.  

The exhibition will physically bring together West Bank Palestinians, Jerusalemites, a few Gazan Palestinians and Palestinians from the Diaspora. It will be a symbolic sign of economic unity, albeit not fully complete. Those Palestinian technologists that are dispersed throughout our refugee community will be missing.

Yet other loved ones from our sector who are currently imprisoned by Israel will also be missing. But in spirit all will be present and all will be showing a side of Palestine that is rarely seen — a Palestine that can contribute to human knowledge; a Palestine that can improve human well being; and maybe more than anything else, a Palestine that is giving countries of the world yet another chance to uphold their obligations as signatories to the Fourth Geneva Convention and to remove the misery caused by the dirty boot of Israeli military occupation being on our necks for so many years.  

Visit this display of genuine Palestinian business resilience at www.expotech.ps.  

— The writer is a Palestinian-American business consultant living in the Palestinian city of Al- Bireh/Ramallah in the West Bank. He blogs at www.epalestine.com.  

© 2010 Arab News  

http://arabnews.com/middleeast/article175438.ece

———————————————————————– 

ePalestine Blog:

http://www.epalestine.com