A Decent Bomber And Terrifying Terrorists...

This is nice. Produced by vendor to the US military Albert's Gifts, it's a roll of toilet paper inviting you 

to wipe your arse on Osama Bin Laden. I have another with Saddam on it. 

Because America is better than the bad guys, right?

Róisín handed the joint to Orla, who shook her head. ‘No thanks. Not my thing.’ She waved her glass. ‘Are you a student too?’

‘Sure, I am.’

‘What you studying?’

‘Terrorists. You?’

Orla searched Róisín’s face, but it was without guile. ‘Animal husbandry. How do you mean, terrorists?’

‘Just that. Terror studies.’

‘You’re kidding me. That’s a course?’

Róisín laughed, shaking her head. ‘What’s so odd about it? You look like someone just slapped your arse.’

‘I suppose it seems strange that someone would want to… well, that. Oh, I don’t know. Don’t we see enough about them every day?’

‘This nation was founded on terrorism. If it wasn’t for Michael Collins, Dan Breen and the likes of them there’d be no Ireland. We’d still be a British colony.’

‘Ah, come on. That’s ancient history.’

The spark at the end of the reefer stabbed at Orla, the features behind its glow knit in fury. ‘The fuck it is. What’s a freedom fighter? What’s an insurgent? What’s a terrorist? That’s what I want to know. We let ourselves be governed by old men who tell us what’s good for us and what we need and the second we question it we’re hauled off to face their idea of justice. You know what democracy is? Say you what you like, do what you’re told. And we slap the label of terrorist on anyone who happens not to agree with us and doesn’t conform to the restrictions we impose on them.’

‘Jesus. You’re best off studying anarchy studies, you.’

Róisín’s angry expression softened and she flicked the butt of her joint over the fence, a spinning ember flying through the cold darkness. ‘Fuck it. Let’s get a drink.’

Eman Hussein is a friend of mine. We used to work together. She has been with me in some of the key moments of my booky journey, from long lunches at Shemlan's Al Sakhra restaurant to meandering walks through Beirut and Amman, strange encounters in the night-time heart of Aleppo's Al Madina souk and liquorice-strong coffees at Uncle Deek's. She's Palestinian, passionately so. It's because of her that Olives has that quote from Mahmoud Darwish in it, "If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears."

Many, many years ago a colleague left - for some mad reason - a toy gun lying around in the office. And - for some mad reason - I thought it was really funny to grab said gun, jab it in Eman's face and scream 'Remember the Achille Lauro, Palestinian bitch?'

She looked at me calmly up the barrel of a plastic pistol, all serious brown eyes. And she said, 'Alexander. You will never work in UK again. Trust me in this.'

Recently she's started using the 'Your knife is freedom' logo as her Twitter AV. This is a grass roots reaction supporting the recent stabbings of Israeli settlers by Palestinians. I thought it might be interesting to get her idea about terrorism and what it means to her. Given the focus on the whole retired terrorist vs terrifying terrorist theme in A Decent Bomber...

How would you define terrorism? 
Terrorism is the act of inflicting a constant state of terror/fear among a certain group of people.

Do you think terror - or let's say violent forms of legitimate resistance - works? 
It works to a certain degree. History tells us that terror makes you heard but not necessarily accepted. When the Palestinian Front of Liberation Organisation (PFLO) started hijacking flights, it made the world listen, but not care for the “cause”. And that’s what we missed back then, we did not know that gaining public opinion is a game changer while the Israelis knew that early on.

You've adopted the 'your knife is freedom' logo. Would you do it? 
If I am living in constant oppression, denied basic human rights, watching my land stolen, and seeing that there’s no future for the young generation of my country, I would carve my way to liberation with a knife, yes.

Do you think that the campaign has improved the image of Palestinians internationally? 
Luckily, the world has become more aware, at the same time Palestinians have become more media savvy. I haven’t gauged international public opinion regarding the “knife intifada” but I haven’t seen strong opposition from world wide public figures, especially that the Israeli settlers haven’t mastered the “Victim” game yet.

If you protest peacefully, you're not heard. If you throw stones, you're shot. What is the way forwards? Is there one, or is the danger of a new intifada purely because of this frustration? 
The solution is in a balanced approach: Sit on the table to negotiate peace, but keep your fists clenched tight on that stone/knife. One person could master that, Abou Ammar - Yasser Arafat.

Why did the IRA get peace and the PLO didn't? 
Don’t know.

What can people elsewhere do to help the Palestinians? Is it as simple as BDS? 
BDS is not a simple movement. I strongly believe in it. It is the optimum of all soft power coming together to form a strong force. It speaks volumes about the illegal existence of Israel and raises awareness among young people worldwide, especially through cultural boycott, about the atrocities of Zionism.

This is the money shot, the link. Just do it.

If Gaza Were Ireland

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As the world stands idly by and Ban Ki Moon waffles incomprehensibly about peace, it struck me what would have happened if Britain had behaved in Northern Ireland as Israel has in Gaza and the West Bank.

It's the same sort of gig, after all. The occupation of a territory and all that. Religious divisions and an artificial border. 'Freedom fighters' bringing their violent protests over that border into the heart of the occupying power.

Except the IRA was actually quite good at it, where Hamas is rubbish. The IRA killed hundreds of British citizens and soldiers, in fact murdered thousands in their campaign for Irish freedom. Hamas' rocket attacks have yet to hit a significant target or result in any major loss of life - claims for fatalities from rocket attacks so far total two Israelis and a Asian worker. Even the recent celebrated kidnapping and killing of three Israeli youths turned out to have no connection to Hamas. And the provocation dealt out in Gaza to cause these attacks is all too little discussed. Those rockets didn't come from nowhere - they were Benjy's reward for his vicious little campaign against the coming together of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

The whole - bloody - conflict in the North since the start of 'the troubles' (whether you date them back to 1916, 1922 or 1969) has taken a smaller toll of human life than the Israeli-sponsored massacres in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps alone. The Israelis are already well over a third of their way to beating the total all-time Irish Troubles Death Record after a couple of weeks' conflict in Gaza. That's some going.

Imagine the global reaction if the UK had sent in helicopter gunships to blow apart Irish Republican houses in Nationalist areas of Belfast. If our response to bombings such as Canary Wharf were to send in ground troops and tanks to lay waste swathes of houses around the Falls Road and reduce whole districts of Tyrone and Armagh to rubble? If our troops poured shells into schools and our politicians glibly trotted out platitudes about them being used as human shields for bomb-making factories? There was a huge political and civil rights fallout from the few - highly targeted - extra-judicial killings that UK forces carried out - but these (and no, I am by no means justifying them) actions were pinpoint intelligence-led operations, not high explosive bludgeoning of tenements, terraces, schools and hospitals packed with innocent civilians.

What values, then, prevented our Western style democracy from acting in the way that Israel has acted towards the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? How is it that the British - for all their pursuit of influence and power in Ireland over the centuries - found a fundamentally more decent way to manage conflict with rebellion against our occupation - against paramilitaries - than tearing their adversary's children to pieces?

Would the British people have been supportive of our government's bloody treatment of a people under our occupation if we had been blowing up their houses, degrading their basic infrastructure and killing innocents? Or would we have concluded that our government was monstrous and refused to let our whole society be led into unforgivable monstrosity in the name of a 'war against terror'?

Imagine if we'd killed a thousand Irish people in a week-long 'ground war' against the IRA in Belfast.

Do you think the world would have stood idly by as Ban Ki Moon waffled incomprehensibly about peace then?

Red/Dead Gets Go Ahead

Lynch smiled. ‘Do you actually like her? She doesn’t seem your type.’
‘That’s none of your business.’
He leaned forward, his smile fading fast.‘We need your help. Dajani’s confirmed to a journalist from one of the Arabic rags he’s going to be bidding for the water privatisation and he’s claiming he has the solution to Jordan and the West Bank’s water supply problems. We’re deeply concerned about what he’s up to, Paul. The West Bank’s none of his business and it isn’t part of the privatisation as far as we are aware. The Izzies are screaming blue murder already and asking the Jordanians for clarification – and they’re saying nothing, not confirming, not denying. Your Minister has clammed up tighter than a shark’s arse at fifty fathoms.’
From Olives - A Violent Romance

It's been on what Gulf News likes to call 'the anvil' for something like 20 years now, but the infamous Red/Dead Canal is now set to commence. The problem is the Dead Sea has been shrinking at an incredible pace, its level dropping by up to a metre a year. Maps of the sea's outline over the past five decades look like maps of the Palestinian territories since 1948. It's inexorable and the scale of the great sea's decline is mind-boggling.

There simply isn't enough water to go around - I looked at the regional water crisis in my first serious novel, Olives - A Violent Romance because it's such a big (and unexplored) topic in the region. Israel and Lebanon almost went to war over Lebanese plans to dam the Litani river and there have been squabbles aplenty between Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria as everyone tries to get more out of a well that is near dry. The River Jordan, which feeds into the Dead Sea, has been reduced to a sad trickle. You can stand on the shores of the great gloopy body of ultra-saline water and look up the shore-side cliff to see hooks let into the stone that were used to tether boats forty years ago. It's an unnerving sight.

The Red/Dead Conduit (or even the "Two Seas Canal") aims to address the problem by piping water from the Red Sea up to the Dead Sea. It's all part of a multi-billion dollar project involving water desalination at Aqaba to feed the Israeli city of Eilat and the Jordanian capital Amman. Alongside this, 100 million cubic metres (MCM) of saline water will be diverted to feed into the Dead Sea. The deal's a complex one and involves Israel selling water to the Palestinian Authority as well as releasing more water from Lake Tiberias (The Sea of Galilee if you prefer) to Jordan. Israeli opponents of the scheme have criticised it as a water swapping deal dressed up as an environmental deal.

Part of the problem is that this all represents, literally, a drop in the ocean. Back in the 1960s, the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers used to push some 1900 MCM into the Dead Sea. Today that flow has reduced to something like 2-500 MCM depending on the season. Another 100 MCM is unlikely to make a huge difference. The original Red/Dead project called for two billion MCM to be pumped into the Dead Sea. Worse, the companies extracting potash and other minerals from the Dead Sea are themselves evaporating anything up to an estimated 350 MCM. The World Bank's feasibility study into the whole project estimated an inflow of a billion MCM per annum would stabilise the Dead Sea. So 100 MCM ain't looking like 'the solution'...

Alongside that are concerns about the environmental impact, as well as quite where all the power to feed the huge pumping stations the project demands - water is being pushed 230 metres uphill before flowing down to the Dead Sea - and the pipeline to Amman is an incredible 178 kilometres long. Part of the project plan includes hydro-electric power plants, but it's not known how much these will offset the overall consumption of the pumping stations and the project's two desalination plants.

What is clear is that it's likely going to be a mess. Few of the news stories covering the project agree on the numbers - and there are so many of them it's hard to work out quite what's what here. It's not yet been clarified how the project (which appears to be a scaled back version of what the World Bank's $16 million feasibility study called for) will be funded. And the concerns of environmentalists - both at what feeding seawater into the Dead Sea will do and at how pumping large volumes from Aqaba will affect flows around the sensitive Red Sea coral reefs - appear to have been largely sidelined.

What's sort of cute is how the water scarcity that drives Olives has remained relevant. It was all a huge mess when I first sat down to write the book in 2004 and it's no less of a mess almost ten years later, despite the Wadi Disi project being completed and the Red/Dead Project finally being agreed...

Kidon - You're Kidding!

Nightscape of the high-rise section of Dubai, Unitd Arab Emirates. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When the facts of a matter are uncomfortable, you can always give them the Hollywood treatment.

7Days reports today on the making of a new film set in Dubai, called 'Kidon'. The film is a fictionalisation of the events around the now infamous 'hit' on Hamas' Mahmoud Al Mabhouh, carried out in Dubai by a large team of Israeli intelligence operatives using third country passports.

Mossad got caught with its pants truly down by Dubai police, which operates a large and sophisticated camera network - from the second you land to the moment you leave here, you're under some sort of surveillance, as the boys and girls from Tel Aviv found when their fake identities were compromised following Mabhouh's extra-judicial murder. Dubai police amassed almost 650 hours of footage as it tracked the movement of the gang. This caused a great deal of embarrassment to Israel, which had previously undertaken to stop using third country passports - of the 29 suspects Dubai Police identified, 12 had British, six Irish and four Australian passports. All three countries subsequently expelled Israeli diplomats. In the case of the British passports, all were found to belong to Israeli residents with dual nationality. In all, a great deal of information was unearthed about Mossad's operations (including the payment systems they used), much of which we must assume has been kept private and quietly used as currency between various agencies.

And so now we have 'Kidon', an Israeli-French film by Emmanuel Naccache which will dramatise the killing of Mabhouh, including the interesting plot twist that he wasn't actually killed by Mossad but by a 'small time gang' which is attempting to frame Mossad. Kidon (Hebrew for bayonet) is the name of Mossad's assassination and kidnap arm.

Neatly, the plot twist maintains that precious 'purity of arms'. At the same time, the story's also been changed to have Al Mabhouh lured to his end by a seductress. So he gets nicely smeared, too. In fact, as the film (which is set post-hit) unfolds, we find that Mossad was completely innocent and the shadowy forces behind the gang that actually carried out the operation are... Iranian.

The film, tellingly, is not being shot in Dubai. Oh, no. It's being shot in Eilat with an all-Israeli cast. So you can expect lots of fake sheikhs, idiotic Arabs and camel-riding caricatures. And, most wonderful of all, it's a comedy. About a murder. Nice.