Middle East
Olives with Mr Husseini
Maxwell MacLeod
Last year I found myself sitting eating olives in Bethlehem with a fat man. It had been a cracker of an Arab wedding and had been going on for some days, and after a while a waiter came round and offered us dessert. I declined, I am fat too, and so did the fat man.
We fell to talking. Ah, the problems of losing your belly after you reach 50. It’s a sair fecht. We must have blethered for half an hour.
They say in Jerusalem that, if you get stuck in a lift for an hour with five people, by the time you are released you will have heard five different solutions to the problems of the Middle East, a new political party will have been formed and someone will have threatened to shoot someone else.
Everyone talks politics all the time, and it’s hard to know what to believe, it drives you nuts.
And so it was with the fat man. His own news line on the interminable tale was the iniquity of what he claimed was the Israelis’ latest scam which was to dig archaeological trenches in east Jerusalem in such a fashion as to undermine the foundations of the Palestinian homes. Even by the standards of the Middle East this seemed a bit fatuous and I half-listened to his riff before trying to edge the conversation back to the best route to weight loss. But he wasn’t having it and offered to take the day off to show me round and prove his case.
As he left I asked him what he did for a living. He paused, genuinely amazed. He was Rafiq Husseini, the chief of staff to President Abass, and I, an investigative journalist looking for a new angle, had just wasted over an hour with one of the main players mostly talking about carbohydrates.
You have to hand it to the Isrealis, their public relations monster
is a formidable beast.
Three things have happened since the olives. First, Mr Husseini almost immediately lost his job through being caught in a classic honey pot scam with his secretary. Second, journalists revealed the scoop that the Isrealis were using archaeological trenches to destabilise Palestinian houses. Third, the inexorable progress of the Isrealis to take over east Jerusalem has moved forward at an increasingly alarming rate.
Mr Husseini and I did manage to have one serious conversation before his official car arrived.
It was about perception. He said that no matter what the truth of the Middle East conflict the Palestinian cause would always lose out because they were so lousy at handling their public relations. With the virtual collapse of proper investigative reporting, more and more papers were happy to just recycle press releases and, as the Israeli press machine was just so much better than the Palestinian one, there was really no contest. That was why he was prepared to take the day off to show a scrubby wee freelancer round east Jerusalem.
I thought of my meeting with Mr Husseini last week as the press briefings on the report about the attempts to break the Gaza blockade and the email exposes on the pre-discussions crossed my screen.
You have to hand it to the Isrealis, their public relations monster is a formidable beast.
Struck by this thought I sent an email to a Palestinian contact, a leading politician, and assured him that not everyone here was taking the proffered line and asked when they would be building a monster to match the Israeli one.
His reply was almost too painful to read. Yes it had been a troubling day, no they would not be building a monster to match the Isreali one. They would rely on good people round the world keeping the faith, strong in the hope that one day the truth would prevail.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
Maxwell MacLeod, son of Lord (George) MacLeod, runs the Scotland Quo Vadis website: www.scotlandquovadis.net