Jerusalem Diary: Monday 3 March

By Tim Franks
BBC News, Jerusalem

EAST SIDE STORY

An honest man but no longer a fighter, says filmmaker Alatar

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas donated blood in his office on Sunday, for the people of Gaza.

It was a symbolic gesture, but it may have done little to improve the view of many Palestinians of the quality of their leadership.

Mr Abbas appears a few times in a film, which held its "Palestine" premiere on Thursday last week.

Jerusalem... the East Side Story is a bludgeoning catalogue of what its director, Mohammed Alatar, believes to be the effects and injustices of the 42-year Israeli occupation of east Jerusalem.

(For those in London, the film will be shown at 1900 on 18 March, at the Curzon Soho in London.)

At a cafe in Ramallah, Alatar insisted that his prime motive was not so much to inform the rest of the world, as his fellow Palestinians.

"Palestinians outside Jerusalem have no idea what's going on in the city," he told me.

That was in large part down to the Israeli restrictions on Palestinian passage into Jerusalem (which the Israelis insist is in order to thwart attacks).

When Abbas talks to Olmert, he's not talking about Jerusalem, he's negotiating about specific checkpoints being removed. We're being sucked into the micro when we should be talking about the macro

But it was also that, as Alatar put it, "the stupid (Palestinian) politicians have elevated the city to a place where it is more than holy".

Interviewing the Palestinian leader for the film was, said Alatar, "one of the saddest things I've done".

"Mr Abbas is an honest man. But the fight has gone out of him," he said.

Eventually, despite what Alatar described as the off-putting presence of growling minders, he wrung what he felt was a sufficiently hard-hitting line out of the president.

Mr Abbas, on tape, described the changing balance of Jews and Palestinians inside Jerusalem as "ethnic cleansing".

Alatar's complaint is one that you hear more and more frequently in the West Bank: Why is the Palestinian leadership so inactive?

Alatar wondered why there was no non-violent protest aimed at re-opening Orient House (the PLO's headquarters in Jerusalem) or allowing mass prayer at al-Aqsa Mosque.

PUNCH DRUNK LEADERS

When we spoke to the president's office in Ramallah, they said that the last time Mr Abbas had visited Nablus was two years ago; the last trip to Hebron was three years ago. Nablus and Hebron are the two largest cities in the West Bank.

Disorientated: The PLO headquarters in Jerusalem was closed in 2001

Sabri Saidam has seen enough and had enough.

He is a former Palestinian minister and describes himself as a Fatah reformist.

The Fatah party is led by Mr Abbas. Mr Saidam is due, this week, to take a delegation to see Mr Abbas inside the muqataa, the presidential compound in Ramallah.

Mr Saidam says that Palestinians "have been in the ring with Tyson. They're disorientated".

"I'm sure not one of us would want to be the Palestinian president right now," he concedes. But he says that what is needed is for Fatah and PLO to reform and energise.

He has a five-point plan - one part of which is to organise properly in Jerusalem again. That has not happened since the death six years ago of Faisal Husseini, the top Palestinian official in Jerusalem.

The problem is, says Mr Saidam, that the Palestinian Authority has been so overwhelmed with internal problems, that its president has not been allowed to work on the big issues.

"When Abbas talks to Olmert, he's not talking about Jerusalem, he's negotiating about specific checkpoints being removed. We're being sucked into the micro when we should be talking about the macro."

Mr Saidam - a man who says he believes in peace and negotiations with Israel and the approach of the international quartet group - also advocates talks with Hamas, despite what he describes as their "coup" in Gaza.

The continued squeezing of the people of Gaza is, he says, only delivering support for Hamas. He believes Abbas should leave his compound in Ramallah, and go to Gaza.

"I don't think he will be killed," Mr Saidam offers.

"He will be given honour. He is the guardian, the father of Palestinian society."

It would be a symbolic act - but a profound one.

"He needs to show that he is upholding his responsibilities towards all Palestinians."

ANYONE FOR CAKE?

Abdullah, a young Gazan father who now lives in Ramallah, says the chances of any change are slim. He reaches for a put-down which he thinks I can relate to.

The president, he says, "is Marie Antoinette. He will just ask the rest of us to eat biscuit".

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Your comments:

Thanks, Mr. Franks, for your insights from within Israel. I am a young American college student who has never had any particular feelings about the situation in Israel/Palestine. Now that I am studying abroad in Egypt, however, I am urged to go into the area and see some things for myself, as you have done. To address the so-called "anti-Israeli film" and BBC's advertisement of it, I think it is a great move. It signals a continued commitment to freedom of speech that is often only half-pursued by other media outlets.
Daliso Leslie,

Good to read your piece about Israel from Israel.. finally. And where can we watch this movie if we are not in Jerusalem or Soho. pray?
Xanthe Steen, Hedera, Israel

I find it remarkable that the BBC online website advertises on its opening page an anti-Israel film to be shown in London, distorting the history of Jerusalem. Perhaps it would also like to highlight the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem in 1948 and the destruction of synagogues and graveyards thereafter. Or would that be against the BBC's version of impartiality?
Robin Stamler, Jerusalem