Short films from our Nov. 2009 ‘Political Pilgrimage’
Posted January 16, 2010
By Helena Cobban, Executive Director, CNI/CNIF
In late October, 2009, the Council for the National Interest Foundation sent a ten-person citizen team co-led by Amb. Jack Matlock and myself on a 16-day “Political Pilgrimage” tour that took us to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, Egypt, and Gaza.
This account of our trip is built around some short films shot and edited by our group’s talented young videographer, Dominic Musacchio. We are happy to make these films available, as they present personalities and points of view that are too often stifled or ignored in the mainstream US discourse.
Other accounts of the trip are available on our “Fair policy, Fair discussion” blog, here. We have also been hard at work preparing a hard-copy trip report, which will be available in early February.
In Lebanon, our group met with Pres. Michael Suleiman, caretaker PM Fouad Siniora, PM-elect Saad al-Hariri, Popular Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt, Free Patriotic Movement head Gen. Michel Aoun, a number of other Lebanese political leaders– and also with non-Lebanese analysts Alastair Crooke and Timur Goksel, and some diplomats from the U.S. embassy in Beirut.
On one of our days there, we had a 20-minute meeting with Hussein Haider, a ranking official in the political department of Hizbullah, a movement that has 13 members in Lebanon’s parliament and is represented in the national government. After the meeting, Haider took us to a nearby meeting-hall where Hizbullah was running a huge exhibition and trade fair featuring products made in projects run by its economic development body and by other NGO’s also working in marginalized and rural areas.
Here is Musacchio’s diary of some highlights of our time with Haider and at the fair:
In Syria, we had an excellent meeting with Dr. Samir al-Taqi and his colleagues at the Orient Center for International Studies, visited some of the country’s ancient Christian and other historic sites, shared notes with some well-established western diplomats in Damascus– and had a very informative 90-minute meeting with Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas’s 18-person political bureau, and some of his colleagues in the bureau.
Here is a cut Musacchio made of some of the interactions between Amb. Matlock, who had been Pres. Reagan’s last ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Mr. Meshaal.
From Syria we traveled overland to Amman, Jordan, where we had some great conversations with analysts, former minister– and with Mr. Bisher Khasawneh,the Chief of Staff to the country’s Foreign Minister. We also visited the King’s Academy, a pioneering residential high school a little south of Amman that is affiliated with Deerfield Academy, in Massachusetts. Musacchio captured some aspects of the three hours we spent at King’s in this short film:
From King’s Academy we traveled over the King Hussein (Allenby) Bridge to the West Bank.
In the West Bank (including occupied East Jerusalem), we had a great, off-the-record meeting in Ramallah with the Palestinian Authority’s PM, Salam Fayyad, and an on-the-record meeting with former PA Foreign Minister Ziad Abu Amr. We took an extensive tour of the illegal Israeli settlements in Greater East Jerusalem, that was organized by the Israeli NGO “Ir Amim” and led by their Assistant Director, Sarah Kreimer. We later received an excellent briefing on the alarming expansion of settler activity and control in East Jerusalem from Ir Amim head Daniel Seidmann, and a briefing on the parlous state of the peace diplomacy from the doyenne of Israel’s peace movement, former Knesset deputy speaker Naomi Chazan.
We visited Hebron University, meeting with numerous leaders, faculty members, and students there. We met with the heads of OPT’s offices of the Carter center and Oxfam-UK. And among the many other interesting experiences we had in the occuied territories, we enjoyed a great evening of hospitality in the East Jerusalem home of Dr. Mustafa Abusway, head of the Religious Studies department at Al-Quds University.
Over the days that followed, Musacchio and a female assistant from our group spent time tracing the steps of Dr. Abusway’s two talented daughters Rala, a teacher, and Amenah, a student, as they navigated some of the Israeli-imposed challenges that East Jerusalem’s 250,000 Palestinians have to deal with as they go about their daily lives. Here is a short cut that Musacchio made as a result of those expeditions:
From the West Bank we traveled to Israel, where we spent time in West Jerusalem and Jaffa. Then we flew to Egypt, and took the long bus-ride across Sinai to Gaza.
In Gaza, we were the hosts of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, whose drivers and other staff gave us a very informative tour that took us to Shifa Hospital, a pair of UNRWA schools, and a bombed-out industrial park in northeastern Gaza. The drivers also took us around the extensive areas of northern Gaza where, during the Israeli assault of winter 2008-2009, IDF bomber aircraft and ground-level bulldozers between them destroyed thousands of homes and hundreds of businesses– and where, because of Israel’s tight and continuing siege on Gaza, none of the basic materials needed for rubble-clearing or reconstruction have yet been allowed in.
Here is Musacchio’s cut from the tour of Northern Gaza:
We then returned to Cairo, Egypt, where we had good meetings with high-ranking officials in the Foreign Ministry, and with Hisham Youssef, chief of staff to Amr Mousa, the head of the Arab League. Youssef allowed us to film the discussion, and here are Musacchio’s highlights from it.
The next morning, we rose very early to catch our flight back to the U.S. But all of us had learned a lot from our whirlwind tour to Israel and all its immediate neighbors.
Big thanks to Dominic Musacchio for his work!
~HC
