fugitive peace

Back in the 1970s and 1980s the Colosseum was a legendary Tel Aviv nightclub. Its only concession to Rome’s Colosseum was that it was round; other than that it looked like a 1970s airport lounge plonked down on a concrete promenade overlooking the beach. I dimly remember trying to get in there once, as a teenager on a visit to Israel, and standing no chance against the tides of other teenagers who were trying to do the same thing and were older, more beautiful and much better practiced with their elbows.

Then it fell into disrepair and stood empty and tattered next to the field of giant concrete mushrooms that are also a Tel Aviv landmark and whose purpose has always remained mysterious. Now at last it’s been bought up by an entrepreneur and revamped.

And vamped is the really the operative word.

A friend took me to the first of a series of preview nights a couple of days ago. After passing through a squadron of black-clad security guards, greeters and hostesses, we were shown into a space that reminded me of the black ship in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where “when you try an’ operate one of these weird black controls which are labelled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to tell you you’ve done it.”

The furniture was black. The fittings were black. The floors and ceilings were black. The bars and the walls behind the bars were faced in so much black marble that it was a wonder the whole construction didn’t just sink through the promenade into the sand. About the only thing that wasn’t black was the house cocktail, which was a watermelon mojito (I recommend sticking to the regular kind) and the bottles on the bar. The picture I took above, with my mobile phone, doesn’t really do it justice, but it didn’t look all that different in real life.

I haven’t seen this level of post-gothic excess since I left Russia, and there they stopped building these kinds of things years ago - the place has gone all designery and minimalist. In Israel they seem to be just catching up.

Membership will cost 500 shekels a month, which amounts to a little under $2,000 a year. Private members’ clubs have never really worked in Israel before, so some of my friends were a little sceptical that this one would. But maybe there is now a class of nouveau-riche wanna-be oligarchs who want to shell out for exclusivity, obsequious (ie, un-Israeli) service and a colour scheme that makes anything you wear look good.

There were not as many people as I expected at Mahmoud Darwish’s funeral today in Ramallah. My uneducated guess is not much more than 10,000, and some of the friends I was with thought even fewer.

It was rather low-key, too. A handful of people had tears in their eyes, but for the most part the air was a curious mix of sombre and festive.

I was glad I’d been to see his last public recital a few weeks earlier. Anything else I could say is superfluous, so here are some pictures. (Anyone who wants to use them is welcome, but please credit me.)

It started off at the Muqata’a, the presidential compound in Ramallah, where Darwish’s body had been flown in from Amman. Only senior officials, diplomats and the press were allowed in, and only with prior coordination. We had no coordination and my friends weren’t even press. We got in anyway. You just keep pushing gently until the security guards get tired of blocking you.

After some speeches, his coffin was carried out and loaded on to a pickup truck.

The cortege left, followed by a few mourners, including this boy on his father’s shoulders.

Down by the Palace of Culture (a huge conference centre at the other end of town), the Palestinian scouts waited to form an honour guard.

Others carried a Palestinian flag about 50 yards long.

Boys played hide-and-seek under it.

The cortege arrived.

Darwish was buried. There was a 21-gun salute. (Seven guns, three times. Rather ragged.)

And everyone went home. As we left we saw a squad of the elite presidential guard jogging up the road singing marching songs in Arabic to the tune of “I don’t know but I’ve been told…” Seems the American security training is having an effect.

Very intrigued by the reports of the latest fighting in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah. Intrigued because it looks as if parts of Fatah are using it to undermine other parts of Fatah — which ultimately of course means undermining the whole of Fatah.

The fighting is between the Hillis clan, whose head is also Fatah’s secretary-general in Gaza. I interviewed Ahmed Hillis a few times before the Hamas takeover in July last year.

He didn’t really seem to hate Hamas. He did really seem to hate Mohammed Dahlan, who had been Arafat’s chief enforcer in Gaza, and whom Hillis accused of every kind of corruption and malpractice. Hillis was also one of the leaders of the talks between Hamas and Fatah when they were negotiating the Mecca agreement last year.

When Hamas took over Gaza, several of Hillis’s allies pointed the finger at Dahlan for stirring up the trouble. Hillis himself, though, squarely blamed Hamas. And his clan had already got into a feud, which has since continued, with members of Hamas’s Executive Force (its alternative to the PA security services), over the killing of a Hillis clan member. Nor is only the Hillis clan a target — Hamas has been trying to curtail the power of the clans in general.

So when a bomb went off at a cafe last week and killed half a dozen Hamas people, Hamas blamed the Hillis clan. The Hillis people denied it. There was a tit-for-tat round of arrests of Fatah and Hamas people in Gaza and the West Bank.

Then yesterday morning more fighting broke out. Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad both begged Israel to give refuge to Ahmed Hillis and some of his people who had fled the fighting and crowded up near the Gaza-Israel border fence.

Extraordinarily, Ehud Barak, who has been consistently blocking Abbas and Fayyad’s requests to remove checkpoints and do other things to make life easier for ordinary Palestinians in the West Bank, agreed to let 180 people including a good number of fighters (albeit unarmed) enter from Gaza, which they did late last night.

But then, strangest of all, Abbas and Fayyad withdrew their request. Israel started sending refugees back to Gaza, where Hamas immediately rounded them up. The Ha’aretz article says that it is “likely that Fayyad and Abbas’ backtracking is connected to power struggles within Fatah”. That looks like a coded way of saying that maybe Dahlan has found a way to use the fighting to screw over his old rival. A seasoned Gazan conspiracy theorist — which of course I am not — would go further and accuse him of ordering last week’s cafe bombing that set this all off in the first place.

At any rate, bad tactical mistake by Abbas to backtrack. His most reliable ally in Gaza, the Hillis clan, must now feel like it has no backing from him. This makes Fatah’s foothold in the strip even weaker than before, and it makes Abbas more dependent on Dahlan.

Dahlan is still powerful in Gaza despite not having been back there (reportedly at least) in over a year - he did well in the local elections that Fatah held earlier this year for delegates for its congress. But he doesn’t have the armed presence that the big clans do, plus he has a poor reputation in general and is believed to have had a hand in provoking the Hamas “coup” which proved such a disaster for Fatah. Depending on him as an agent for anti-Hamas change is not a good gamble.