What will happen to Libya? Assuming the revolutionaries manage to kick Qaddafi out, what kind of government can we expect? Will there be a power vacuum? A civil war?
These are some of the questions that I and a few others attempt to answer in a series of short opinion pieces that was published on the New York Times website’s Room for Debate. My piece is called Signs of a Democratic Spring.
One of the most prominent and fascinating aspects of the current Middle Eastern uprisings is the lack of opposition leaders – a charismatic figure to rally around. The Tunisian and Egyptian people organized their revolutions and overthrew their dictators without a single leader, and now the Libyan people are doing the same.
As in Egypt during the most anarchic days of the revolution, Libyans are relying on their communities for support, forming neighborhood patrols to protect their families and property from roaming mercenaries and sharing information via phone chains and online forums.
So far, much of that information has proved to be accurate. For example, a friend in Tripoli heard from a friend in Benghazi that Qaddafi loyalists had executed army and police officers as punishment for refusing orders to shoot unarmed protesters. Two days later, an amateur video clip loaded onto a social media site showed the corpses of the executed officers, still in uniform and with their hands tied behind their backs. And a day after that, Western reporters reached Benghazi and confirmed that they had witnessed the corpses of the executed officers.
Yesterday evening (21 February) I was able to speak via Skype for about 20 minutes with a friend who lives in Sarraj, a suburb of Tripoli that is located 10 kilometers west of the city’s center. He agreed to my publishing a summary of the main points of our conversation; and he also answered some follow-up questions via email. Ali, which is not his real name, speaks fluent American English; his background, which I will not specify, makes him qualified to give reliable information about certain military matters
View of Tripoli, before the uprising (photo: gordontour/flickr)
The atmosphere in Sarraj is fearful and tense, but otherwise calm. There is no violence on the streets, but everyone can hear loud caliber rounds fired every few seconds. “This proves that sniping is taking place,” writes Ali in his email. “It means, actually, that someone is aiming and shooting at something and apparently not wasting his ammo too much with careful firing. It is an eerie feeling to stand outside and hear this.”
He also saw three Chinook helicopters flying over his neighborhood, heading north toward the center of the city. More details about that below. Ali and his neighbors take turns patrolling the neighborhood around the clock, to protect it from roaming mercenary soldiers; but otherwise they stay at home. Since Qaddafi’s regime enforced a strict ban on civilians owning firearms, they are using makeshift weapons to protect themselves. Ali said he is armed with a crowbar. The mercenaries, Ali said, are everywhere. They come mostly from Chad and Darfur.
The government briefly blocked access to Aljazeera and other satellite television stations, but then stopped. Libyans are now able to watch satellite television, and they do have access to the internet, although the connection is unstable and capricious. There was quite a lot of interference during our conversation via Skype, with Ali’s voice breaking up several times. He said that he can access his Gmail account from his laptop computer, but not from his iPhone. In terms of infrastructure, water and electricity are fine. His family stocked up on food and supplies before the current troubles began, and are not worried about shortages.
Ali confirmed readily that he was afraid. He said that neither he nor his friends have any sense of how the situation in Libya would play out. “On the one hand I cannot believe that things can go back to the way they were before all this,” he said. “But on the other hand, Qaddafi obviously does not have any limits. We knew he was crazy, but it’s still a terrible shock to see him turning mercenaries on his own people and just mowing down unarmed demonstrators. So yeah, we knew he was crazy. But maybe we did not realize he was that crazy. It’s a scary and devastating feeling to be here now.” Ali said that he knew for a confirmed fact that civilian airplanes were being used to fly soldiers and weapons to Benghazi.
He also heard from several sources that officers in Benghazi, including air force officers, had been executed for refusing orders to kill the anti-government demonstrators. The same sources described a mass grave near Benghazi, containing the bodies of more than 100 executed officers.
Below are Ali’s answers to questions submitted by some people who follow me on Twitter. I’ve edited them for spelling, grammar and typos.
Q: What is the situation with the army? Are Libyan soldiers attacking demonstrators, helping or staying neutral? Do you know if soldiers are defecting to the opposition? If yes, are they doing so in significant numbers?
A: The Libyan army is one of the poorest and most neglected security sectors in the government. They are poorly fed , equipped, trained and paid. They are mostly ceremonial and Qaddafi does not trust them. So what we have here are private battalions with each of his sons owning the one named for him. So for example his son Khamees has a battalion belonging to him calling it “Kateebit Khamees.” Each is placed in private super huge barracks situated strategically around Tripoli for situations like these. These battalions are well-equipped, trained and paid and are extremely loyal not to the country but to the leader of their battalion.
So to answer your question the regular army is non-compliant and has mostly sided with the people. Remember they are poorly-equipped and so can be of only limited help. However, the battalions belonging to the regime itself are very much in the fight and are killing people wholesale. Still their numbers are not so great to cover this huge country so it seems they are complemented by mercenaries.
Q: How bad are the air strikes? What are they targeting?
I am not sure about the results of the air strikes since just before the assault started in Tripoli all the mobile phone lines were cut and no one standing outside can communicate anymore with anyone from a distance. I started to hear fighter jets roaring but not so loud because they were actually making sharp turns from a distance several times it seems over the same area . Then the TV confirmed what I did not even want to imagine. TV channels including Aljazeera, Al Hurra and others were talking about protesters being attacked by fixed-wing aircraft. What confirmed this was the footage of two Libyan Mirage F1 fighters defecting to Malta with their pilots announcing that they refuse to kill their people! (Click here to see photos of the Mirage fighter planes in Malta).
Q: To what extent are you (Libyans, in general) aware of world reaction to events in Libya? What do you (personally) think about world reaction? What would you like the world to do?
A: Libyans are disappointed and consider the world reaction as a very weak one. From the TV official announcements the US and the EU, for example, tried to be very careful with their condemnation. It was quite clear that they were weighing their options and the consequences of either angering a surviving Qaddafi and the shame of being silent towards this carnage. Oil contracts and work opportunities for their locals seem to have a higher priority than even frowning at a tyrant going berserk on his people. Only when Qaddafi’s chances proved to be weak did they take a bolder stance; that is when they started to actually condemn the killings – but a bit too late.
Q: Can you confirm that you saw Chinook helicopters flying over central Tripoli several times, and you hear what sounds like mortar or rocket fire (single shots) quite frequently?
A: Yes, I saw three Chinook helicopters over flying my neighborhood north bound. They either were going to drop off their load in Miteega airbase north of Tripoli or drop mercenaries in the middle of the city. These are large helicopters with a 20,000 pound load capability or 40 troopers with full gear. They passed almost 30 minutes before fixed wing jets started flying and the helis made several passes traveling southbound and north bound again. Clearly they were busy dropping off something and loading up again.
Again as soon as I went to see the TV people were wailing, saying foreign mercenaries were taking positions in the city and had 4X4 trucks and were calling people on megaphones not to leave their homes. And firing in the air to scare people. When paroling our neighborhood we hear from a distance loud high caliber rounds being fired once every few seconds, proving that sniping is taking place – that actually someone is aiming and shooting at something and apparently not wasting his ammo too much with careful firing. An eerie feeling when standing outside.
Q: What can you tell us about the tribal rivalries in Libya, and how these are affecting reactions to Qaddafi during this crisis?
A: Libya is a tribal community and although it’s a dying notion, Qaddafi made sure to keep the people aware of their tribal divisions, winning the alliance of larger ones and hence keeping the population under control. Although the larger ones like the Werfalees and the Megrahees were privileged with power and money, his recent actions angered these tribes and for the first time in decades tribal barriers have withered away. People are uniting with other formerly rival tribes or even different ethnicities like the Amazeegh or Berbers.
Q: You said Qaddafi was believed to be hiding in a bunker. Can you say where that bunker is located?
A: It is believed that this ferocious campaign in Tripoli is due to the fact that the planned million man march today was aimed to go to the last uncalibrated and hugely symbolic fortified bunker in the heart of Tripoli called “Bab al Azeezeeya.” It is a huge area surrounded by at least three thick walls and is known to be where Qaddafi spends most of his time and receives diplomats and delegates and make announcements. It seems he and his children are still there. Since the announcement to march to this place was announced yesterday evening people got shot wholesale in Tripoli and today the situation further escalated with the mercenaries, helicopters and fixed wing attack combination. At least that is what I think. Yesterday Saif al Islam [Qaddafi's son] gave Libyans 48 hours to think it over. Well, things picked up pace less than three hours after his announcement.
Moving from Tel Aviv to Jaffa turned out to be about much more than lower rent and proximity to the sea. In a city plagued by ethnic, national and socio-economic divisions, there is no such thing as an apolitical decision
I moved to a mixed Arab-Jewish building in Jaffa last spring, a refugee from the astronomical rents in Tel Aviv. For more than one thousand shekels less than I paid for my previous apartment in Tel Aviv, which was an oppressively small box on a noisy street, I rented a spacious, sun-splashed space in Jaffa, with a balcony shaded by a tree, windows that open in three different directions and a breeze from the sea. The flea market is two minutes away, the local grocery shops and restaurants are excellent, and there are some serious art galleries down in the restored fishing port.
When I went to sign the contract at the home of my new landlord, a secular Ashkenazi man with a slow walk and an asthmatic wheeze who was born in Tel Aviv more than 70 years ago, he asked me why I wanted to move to Jaffa. An odd question, I thought. Did he not think his apartment was a suitable place to live? Since my financial considerations were none of his business, I said that I wanted to live closer to the sea and that I had friends in Jaffa.
“Jewish friends?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “Jewish.”
Looking at me approvingly, he said, “It’s good that educated young people like you are moving to Jaffa.”
“Why?” I asked.
“So that the Arabs won’t control Jaffa,” he said.
Later I heard from Yossi, the head of the building committee, that my landlord had taken him aside and promised that he would never rent to Arabs. “Your landlord thought I was a racist just like him,” said Yossi, who happens to sit on the board of a left-wing NGO with a bi-national agenda.
While I was abroad the following month, my landlord came over and nailed a mezuzah on my front door frame – without asking my permission. Clearly, it was important for him that people identified his property as a ‘Jewish’ apartment.
Meanwhile, friends from Tel Aviv reacted strangely when they visited me. Glancing askance at the calligraphic shahada over the door of the family next door, they asked if I felt safe living in the building. “Do you talk to your neighbours?” they asked.
“Of course I talk to my neighbours!” I answered indignantly. And I do. Samira, who works at a restaurant, feeds me cookies and gentle smiles; and Khalil, who is a garage mechanic, always has a cousin who can fix whatever breaks down. I even talk to Abed, the perpetually unsmiling drug dealer who lives on the ground floor, although he rarely answers me.
But we do not socialize. We are neighbours and acquaintances, but not friends. And the reasons are related to class – that other political issue. When my friend Issa came to visit, he, a polyglot Christian Palestinian-Israeli who is studying for a graduate degree at Tel Aviv University, laughed and said, “You certainly chose to be a real bohemian, didn’t you?” He would not dream of living in my dirty, un-renovated old building with its working-class tenants. Or, as my friend Nizo, a Palestinian refugee living in Canada, put it jokingly, after hearing my description of Abed and his family, “Habibti, you can have those Palestinians. It’s okay, we have plenty.”
It was only after I moved to Jaffa that I made this discovery: in general, upper middle-class Arabs who work in the professions (academia, law, journalism, medicine) do not live there. There are a few actors and intellectuals that gather at Café Yafa, and a small, predominantly Christian middle class that sends its children to the private schools run by the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches. But mostly, the intellectual and professional Palestinian-Israelis live in Neve Shalom, Nazareth, Haifa and Ramleh – or in the splashy new suburb built above Um El Fahm. The Palestinian-Israeli celebrities often live in Tel Aviv – as do actors Clara Khoury and Yousef Sweid.
The Arabs of Jaffa are mostly poor – impoverished, even. Some of them are migrant workers from the villages in the Galilee; others are former army informants (collaborators) from the occupied territories; or maybe Egyptians who came over to work in the 1990s, then married local women and stayed; and a few – a very few – have lived there since before 1948. They are, as a journalist from Nazareth told me, very disconnected from the Arabs in the rest of Israel. There are no Arabic-language bookshops or lending-libraries in Jaffa, unless you count the small collection of political books at Yafa Cafe. There is no cinema that screens Arabic films; no major Arab cultural events; and no local radio station in Arabic. The Alhambra Theater on Jerusalem Boulevard, where the great Egyptian singer Oum Kulthoum appeared in the late 1930s, was recently restored to its Bauhaus glory and is now a Scientology center.
Lately, National-Religious (religious right-wing) Jews have been settling in Jaffa with the stated intention of ‘Judaizing’ it. Boys study for a year between high school and army service at yeshivas that were established by rabbis from West Bank settlements. Religious girls, exempt from regular army service, perform a year of national service at the local public high school, teaching Jewish holidays and customs to a student body that is 45 percent Arab.
On several occasions, these teenage national-religious youth have held loud demonstrations in mixed Jaffa neighbourhoods on Saturdays. As you can see in the video below, they wave flags, sing nationalist songs and dance in circles on the streets – on Shabbat. Which I find a bit strange, because in my religious youth we were taught that the Sabbath was a day for peaceful contemplation and harmony. Also, it seems pretty clear that they have not come to introduce themselves to the neighbours and invite them over for coffee.
Two weeks ago, a large group of those teens, who had a police license to demonstrate, gathered in front of a mosque on Jerusalem Boulevard just as evening prayers ended. According to this report (HEB) on the Maariv-owned website NRG, the teens shouted slogans that included, according to eyewitnesses quoted in the article, “Death to Arabs” and “Mohamed is a pig.” The police had to separate the Jewish and Arab teenagers; and Sami Abu Shehadah, a community organizer, said the incident could easily have ended in “a massacre.”
Al Nazha Mosque on Jaffa's Jerusalem Boulevard, where right-wing Jewish teens demonstrated and shouted "Death to Arabs" (photo: Lisa Goldman)
Jaffa radicalized me, in a way. I think about politics when I walk through Ajami, the neighbourhood that was, until recently, an Arab ghetto. Over the past few years Ajami has been going through a gentrification process that involved pushing the Arab families out of their neglected old homes in order to make way for the construction of multi-million dollar residences with underground parking.
Rifaat “Jimmy” Turk, a community organizer who was the first Arab to play in Israel’s national soccer team back in the 1970s, rages as he points at the new playground and park. “I lived here for 50 years and the city never paved a centimeter of road. I devoted most of my adult life to co-existence. When I sat on the city council I used to beg them to have the garbage collected regularly and for a playground to be built for the kids, but they always said there was no budget, and I believed them. Then the Jews moved in and suddenly there was a budget!” Two years ago, Jimmy’s 72 year-old widowed mother received an eviction notice for the house she had moved into as a 16 year-old bride, and in which she had raised nine children.
I think about politics when I look at the crumbling and neglected Muslim cemetery, right next to the architecturally striking new building that houses the Peres Center for Peace. And I think about it when I see that the section of Yehuda Hayamit Street that runs past the Army Radio building was completely repaved in less than two months, while the road’s continuation, which runs through residential blocks occupied mostly by Arabs, was left dug up for 9 months, preventing people from walking on the sidewalks. That ended up bankrupting small business owners – like the barber who had had his shop there for more than 40 years.
Peres Center for Peace in Ajami (photo: Ori/Wikimedia Commons)
I think about politics when I see riot control forces (Yasam) roaming around Jaffa, randomly stopping local Arabs and demanding to see their identity cards.
And I think about politics when I read that the principal of the local public high school forbade Arab students, who made up 45 percent of the student body, to speak Arabic between themselves in the classroom, even though Arabic is one of Israel’s two official languages. Meanwhile, the students from the former Soviet Union were not forbidden to speak Russian.
Jaffa is an interesting and cool place to live. It reminds me a bit of New York City’s Harlem 10 years ago, when it was an edgy place for bohemian whites to live – and a ghetto that most blacks wanted to leave. I just did not expect to feel like a colonizer for having moved 15 minutes’ walk from Tel Aviv. But, I do.
This post was translated into Hebrew by Ronen Wodlinguer and published on the Project Democracy blog, as well as on Ha’Okets. The English version was originally published on +972 Magazine.
I am a freelance journalist and blogger, currently based in Jaffa. I write mostly about Israel-Palestine (IsPal). Since co-founding +972 Magazine, I post all my articles in both blogs.
