MCC Palestine Update #69
December 23, 2002
I indicated in my last update that #68 would be the last one of 2002. That was before I received today a Christmas message from the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. I wanted to make sure that you had a chance to see it as you prepare to celebrate the birth of our Lord.
Christians in the occupied territories celebrate Jesus' birth this year in bleak circumstances. Bethlehem has been under curfew for over one month, with few breaks. Christians in the city debate about how to celebrate and remember Christ's birth. If the Israeli military governor attends the Midnight Mass, should Christians stay away from the Mass? If metal detectors are placed in Manger Square, what should be done? If curfew is lifted for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, how can Palestinian Christians help the media of the world understand what they and their Muslim compatriots live through all the other days of the year?
MCC's Palestinian Christian partners repeatedly tell us two things: first, that they are determined to celebrate Jesus' birth one way or another, even if only in their homes; second, that they want to bring some small measure of joy to all children in the Bethlehem area this season, both Christian and Muslim. MCC is contributing to an ecumenical effort coordinated by the Arab Orthodox Benevolent Society in Beit Jala to bring small toy packages to all of the homes in Beit Jala, both Muslim and Christian; a "Baba Noel," or Father Christmas, will go out accompanied by volunteers every evening from Dec. 26 to Jan. 8, delivering the presents, even if he must break curfew to do so.
Your ongoing prayers for the Palestinian churches and for the work of MCC's Palestinian partners are much appreciated. May you and your loved ones have joy and celebration on the occasion of Christ's birth.
--Alain Epp Weaver
Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center 2002 Christmas message: “Unto us a child is born”
For a child has been born for us,
A son given to us;
Authority rests upon his shoulders;
And he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
His authority shall grow continually,
And there shall be endless peace…
With justice and with righteousness
from this time onward and forevermore
(Isaiah 9:6-7)
This passage of the prophet Isaiah is a song of liberation and joy. Christians have interpreted it as a reference to the birth of Christ. It is certainly one of the most beautiful poems of the Old Testament.
In its original context in life, this poem had to do with the overthrow of an oppressive occupation. It was probably written in the aftermath of an Assyrian invasion of parts of east Jordan that extended to the coastal region of the Mediterranean Sea. The inhabitants were totally subjugated and oppressed. Isaiah describes them as living in thick darkness, anguish, and gloom.
It is worth noting that our region of the world has always experienced invasions and conquests from the dominant powers of the times. In fact, Palestine has always, geographically, resembled a corridor. It was a thoroughfare for people crossing from north to south and vice versa. It linked Egypt, the major power in the south with the successive empires of the north. Conquerors passed through it and had to subdue and control it.
In this specific beautiful poem, Isaiah envisions an end to the Assyrian occupation of the land. All the instruments of war will be burned by fire and a new divinely gifted king will reign. He will end the violence and establish a kingdom of peace based on truth and justice. For Isaiah as for many people throughout history, the possibility of peace has always been present in the imagination and dreams of human beings. Why cannot people live in peace? Why do they have wars? Why do so many people have to be killed? This poem lifts up the hope for a new day when, after the occupation has ended, the new king will be recognized as the “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace”. In other words, he would possess all the essential qualities and abilities to bring an end to war and to usher a permanent peace and prosperity.
Such a vision of “endless peace…with justice and righteousness…forevermore” was never realized, neither in Isaiah’s time nor at any other time, in the history of the world since it has to be based on the power of arms, violence, and destruction. Christians believe that the vision of an enduring peace came closest to its actualization in the coming of Jesus Christ. His birth was, indeed, the non-violent entrance of God into the world. Circumstantially, Jesus came into a world similar to that which Isaiah described. Isaiah was referring to an Assyrian occupation. Jesus was born under a Roman occupation when people were also longing for liberation and
peace.
It is important to emphasize that there is nothing called a benevolent occupation. No matter how benign any occupation claims to be, it is unacceptable and undesirable by the occupied. This is the way it was in the time of Isaiah as well as in the time of Jesus, and it is still the same today for the Palestinians; except, maybe, for a few weak souls who have been co-opted by the occupying regime and have become collaborators with it and beneficiaries of it. Most people, however, long for liberation as, indeed, do the Palestinians who long to see the end of the oppressive yoke of Israel. Yet most people think of liberation as being possible only through military might. For the prophet Isaiah, the potential of real peace lies in the reversal and abrogation of war when people “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more”(Is 2:4).
Some of us believe that this vision of peace is achievable for Israelis and Palestinians today. What needs to happen is for Israel to lift its oppressive domination and end its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and accept the resolution of the conflict on the basis of international law and not on its own laws. On the one hand, the government of Israel is literally crushing the Palestinians until they succumb to its own demands for peace by accepting further land concessions. On the other hand, the Palestinian resistance is using all the means and methods available to it to insist on international legitimacy based on UN resolutions. Obviously, since Israel is by far much stronger militarily we continue to witness the total suppression and destruction of the Palestinian people.
Isaiah’s vision for peace is realistic but conditional. It demands of both the Israelis and Palestinians to “…beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks [neither] nation shall…lift up sword against nation, neither shall…learn war any more”. Such conditions must apply equally to both the Israelis and Palestinians and not to the Palestinians alone. If Israel is asking the Palestinians to disarm for the sake of a permanent peace, is it willing to do the same for the sake of the same objective? This is the revolution that Isaiah was talking about. Many of us would love to see it happen. Unfortunately, the history of nations and individuals has always been a history where people learned the art of war and violence.
Even the psalmist praises God for his military training, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle….”(Psalm 144:1). Twenty years ago, when I was serving the church in Haifa, a church member told me about a conversation he overheard between two Israeli women. One was asking the other why she had not seen her for quite sometime. She replied, “I gave birth to a soldier”. This woman was so proud to have given birth to a son who will grow up to be a soldier. Sadly, we still live in such a mentality of war.
All of us constantly observe the birth of innocent children who grow up to become dictators, war criminals, or presidents and prime ministers who spend huge budgets on the production, purchase, and accumulation of arms, and who teach and practice war. We daily witness the presence of young Israeli soldiers oppressing the Palestinian people. They, like many others, have been trained in the skills of war.
At this Christmas season, as our thoughts turn to the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem where Jesus was born, Bethlehem is practically a closed military area. In spite of the Israeli army assurances that Bethlehem will be opened for Christmas, the facts on the ground reveal the opposite. The Palestinians, except for few hours during the day, are confined to their homes by Israeli military orders. Everything around and inside Bethlehem connotes violence and injustice against Palestinians. The young soldiers are in their tanks and armored cars patrolling, oppressing, and dehumanizing others and in the process being themselves dehumanized. All of this is totally foreign to the spirit of Christmas; and is a basic contradiction with the beauty and innocence of the birth of any child let alone the birth of Jesus Christ “the prince of peace”.
The evangelists writing the biography of Jesus from the vantage point of his death and resurrection could say that his birth, in actual fact, fulfilled the prophecy or dream of Isaiah in a more perfect way (Matthew 1:21; 4:14-16). Jesus’ coming into the world was the nonviolent coming of God. For the first time, a child grows up and walks the way of love and nonviolence; and although he suffers at the hands of violent people, he keeps clearly to the possibility and viability of a life of peace and love.
Indeed, the truest _expression of our humanity is found in children, in the birth of every boy or girl. To stay in touch with our humanity and hold on to it we must look at young children. Before they begin to learn, or more correctly, before we begin to teach them racial discrimination, prejudice, hate, violence, or the ugly art of war, they reflect our truest nature. The difference that Jesus Christ has brought through his birth is precisely the fact that he did not lose the essence of his true humanity. In order to hold on to our humanity, we must not walk the way of this world, the way of empire, the way of violence but to follow the way of Jesus Christ, the way of fidelity to God through the path of nonviolence and peace.
It is also possible whether we are Christians or not, to learn from children. Jesus recognized this when he said, “…unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”(Matthew 18:3). Jesus made children a model of the kingdom “…Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:15). Unless we become like them in simplicity, humility, ability to forgive and trust, we cannot be members of God’s kingdom. This is the nature of God’s kingdom. The children become our model. We must mirror them.
For the sake of children, we must change. The greatest tragedy of our every day life in Israel/Palestine today happens whenever a child is killed, whether Palestinian or Israeli. Every time we kill a child, we murder the truest _expression of our humanity. And the more we get used to killing child crimes because gradually and inevitably we lose our own children, the more savage and brutal we become against each other. This is the worst of humanity. Every time the crime is repeated, it points to the malady of our world.
Jesus has pointed out the way of nonviolence. Dare we follow it? At this Christmas, in the midst of the violence of the occupation and the violence of the resistance to it and the cycle of violence that continues to escalate, we are reminded again of the nonviolent coming of God in Jesus Christ. Dare we follow the way?
“For a child has been born for us, a son given to us…and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace…and there shall be endless peace…with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forevermore….”(Is. 9:6-7)
Addendum to MCC Palestine Update #69
December 24, 2002
Please pray for the family of Sami Awad, the director of the Holy Land Trust, and the other families in his apartment building in Bethlehem. The following letter from Sami details how his building has been occupied by Israeli soldiers and the families in the building are being kept locked in their apartments. The Holy Land Trust is an MCC partner which is developing a training manual in Arabic for training in nonviolent direct action.
--Alain Epp Weaver
To our friends,
With hearts full of sadness I write this letter a couple of days before Christmas to inform you that Israeli army troops have occupied the apartment building we live in and have locked us as well as twelve other families in our apartments. They have told us that they are here for an indefinite period of time and we will not be able to leave our apartments until they leave.
This afternoon (Dec 23rd, 2002 5:00 PM), as volunteers (Bob and Margaret) and myself were going around Bethlehem passing out gifts donated to needy families through Holy Land Trust, we got a call from a neighbor who said that the Israeli army had stormed our building and had forced all residents out of their homes and into one apartment. We immediately tried to return in order to see what was happening and to at least be present if the army decided to enter our apartment. (If the residents are not there, they usually blow-up the door or a hole in a wall then destroy all the furniture). I thanked God that my wife Rana and our baby were in the market doing last minute Christmas shopping. When we got close, we were welcomed by Israeli soldiers pointing their machine guns at us demanding and yelling at us to go back. An hour later I tried again and was informed that we could go to our apartment. Welcomed again by machine guns, Rana, the baby and myself, were kept outside in the cold while the soldiers went through our belongings and checked our identification cards.
Once we were escorted to our apartment we were told to leave the door key on the outside key hole. When I asked why, one soldier turned his head and walked away in what I think was a sign of shame; the other said "to lock you in."
Yes... lock us in our home! When I refused to be a prisoner in my own home, the soldier began to yell and make threats. Having no choice and fearing for my family's safety, we were locked in and the key was kept in the outside key hole so that we can not use any spare key. Christmas is two days away and we are prisoners in our home. this is our gift this holiday season. They have refused to tell us why they came here, what they want and how long "indefinite" means.
The Israeli government had falsely promised the world that it was going to pull out of Bethlehem on Christmas so that the residents of the city can celebrate. We are prove and witness to you that the occupation of Bethlehem continues, that injustice continues to innocent families. We are trapped as prisoners in our home guarded by Israeli soldiers standing in front of our apartment door as if we were criminals.
This year was going to be our baby girl's first Christmas... Even with the siege of Bethlehem and the continued curfews and suffering, we still decorated the tree, bought the gifts, took our the Christmas CDs and thought that at the least we will be able to celebrate Christmas with our families. It seems that even this simple wish will not come true this season and we will be celebrating Christmas as prisoners locked in our home...
Please pray for our safety. We do not even know what the next hour will bring us. We hear the soldiers walking up and down the staircase and we also heard them destroy furniture in the apartment below us. Are we next? We do not know!
I can only conclude this letter by saying that from the bottom of our hearts and from this Holy place, we wish you a Merry Christmas.
In Peace,
Sami Awad
Tuesday, December 24
Friday, December 13
MCC Palestine Update #68
MCC Palestine Update #68
December 13, 2002
Below you will find two pieces. The first is an Advent letter from international Christian workers in Palestine/Israel, signed by Sonia and Alain Epp Weaver, among others. Feel free to use as a bulletin or church newsletter insert or post on your church's bulletin board. The second piece is a succinct and sobering analysis by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass of how Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is positioning himself as a man of "peace" ready to make "difficult compromises" by accepting a Palestinian "state." This is the final update of 2002 from MCC Palestine. Updates will resume in mid-January. May you and your loved ones have a blessed Christmas season.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Advent Letter from Palestine/Israel
Dear Friends, Another season of Advent has begun. For Christians the world over, this means beginning a new year of reflection and action about who and what we are called to be. It is a season of choices, preparation and beginnings.
Scriptures that call us to make choices about where we stand mark the opening days of this season. They point toward Jesus’ call for a ‘new world order’ and highlight our human struggle in choosing between the powers of this world and the power of God. Serving the global church in the Holy Land, we share a joint witness of concern for the choices being made today; choices which too often create change by violence rather than by justice, compassion, or truth.
As we recall the birth of Jesus and reflect on the Biblical town of Bethlehem, we cannot help but think of the Bethlehem of today-- of Jenin, Rafah, Nablus, Hebron-- or of cities in other places which reel from the effects of injustice, hatred and conflict. Living in the midst of a war-torn land, we urgently lift up the call to wage a just peace rather than war.
Advent is a time to renew hope in a God that loved the world so much that a child was sent to proclaim a new heaven and a new earth. Christians find our way by faith in the incarnation. It is what allows us to believe that we have a choice in how to respond to daily violence. It is what allows us to believe that the larger choices of war and its destruction are not out of our hands.
Our choices shape the very reality for which we prepare. We join the leaders of our denominations in their strong opposition to our government’s unwavering desire to go to war in Iraq. Beyond any political considerations, a pre-emptive war simply finds no justification in traditional Christian teaching.
Our deep concern is also with our brothers and sisters here in the Holy Land. A war against Iraq would likely bring continued house arrest for the entire Palestinian population. It would further the severe economic distress Palestinians are already experiencing and would deepen the economic strain within Israel. The transfer of the Palestinian people is also a real fear, whether from villages to cities within the territories to actual expulsion from the country.
Any such attempts will inevitably lead to an increase in Palestinian resistance and would very likely result in heavy casualties to both Palestinians and Israelis. We find all such actions incompatible with our understandings of the Gospel and urge that we prepare for a different future, for a world built on peace and justice.
It is time to truly wrestle with Jesus’ calls to love one another, to love our enemy in both interpersonal and international relationships. It is time to fulfill Jesus’ call to be peacemakers. It is time to counter our ‘Just War Theories’ with ‘Just Peace Theories.’ There may be no more important task for the third millennium of Christian witness.
Having lived through more than two years of destruction and death, we are not naïve about the costs and struggles of such a change. We believe that peacemaking is a more viable choice than war.
Faithful choices and thoughtful preparations create ways for new beginnings. Advent is a time to rejoice that today is not too late to start anew. In the chaos of our world, we hear the angels proclaim, “Do not be afraid; I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.” (Luke 2:10)
We rejoice, for the world can be a different place, knowing that God will work miracles within us. Come, Lord Jesus.
Douglas Dicks, Presbyterian Church (USA) Liaison Rev. Dr. Mary Jensen, Asst. for Communications to Bishop Dr. Munib Younan, Lutheran Bishop in Jerusalem Janet Lahr Lewis, General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church Catherine Nichols, Global Ministries, UCC/Disciples of Christ Rev. Sandra Olewine, United Methodist Liaison – Jerusalem, GBGM-UMC Missionary Lilian Peters, Quaker International Affairs Representative, Jerusalem Pr. Michael P. Thomas, Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, English-speaking Congregation, Jerusalem Alain Epp Weaver and Sonia Weaver, Mennonite Central Committee
2. How Sharon Became a Leftist
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, December 11, 2002
Between 1994 and 2000, Yasser Arafat would describe every piece of land the IDF evacuated as "liberated." His senior minister sand guides followed suit. Thus, Gaza was described as liberated and so were Jenin, Salfit, and everywhere else that was defined as Area A - under Palestinian administrative and security control. _ _
The process of sanctifying Area A included describing Hebron as "liberated" starting in 1997, even though 30,000 people living in the heart of the ancient city continued to suffer under direct Israeli control, meant to protect the welfare of some 500 Jews living there. _ _
The fact that no Palestinian living in those "liberated" cities of the West Bank could move more than three kilometers outside the city without encountering an Israeli military position, and that from nearly every Palestinian community, residents could see Israeli settlements expanding and encroaching, did not confuse the pubic relations artists of the PA. It did, however, cheapen the stature of the PA's leaders in the eyes oftheir public. _ _
True, Arafat was president of the (virtual) Palestinian state - it said so on the official letterheads of the PA and that is how he was addressed, but the residents of that "state" were dependent on the official stamps of the Israeli Civil Administration for their freedom of movement and their population registry, dependent on information-hungry Shin Bet officers and IDF soldiers at checkpoints to conduct the routine of their lives - no less than they were dependent on the Palestinian officials and the plethora of Palestinian security forces. _ _
The Palestinian government not "only" hid revenues from the PA's treasury, meaning the Palestinian public, and handed out funding to nurture cronies and neglect the majority. It also corrupted the language to make its terminology fit the reality that was promised and never fulfilled: ending the foreign occupation ofPalestinian land and Palestinian society. _ _
Many cooperated with the deception - representatives of the donor countries, UN envoys and Israeli peace camp activists. Symbols of sovereignty (stamps, an airport, uniforms and other perks) made people forget the main issue - that without sovereignty and authority over the land, meaning control over its development and its potential for the future, there was no meaning to the Palestinian civil-administrative responsibility for the people of the West Bank and Gaza. It was very convenient for Israeli public relations overseas, which could argue - and convince the world - that the occupation was over because Arafat controlled 99 percent of the Palestinian population. _ _
Now, and not for the first time, Ariel Sharon is juggling with the term Palestinian state, referring to the Bush framework. Maybe he really thinks it's possible to describe as a "state" a collection of administrative enclaves, which might be connected with a road that makes it possible to talk about territorial contiguity, without control over the borders and the water resources and without evacuating settlements that will continue to separate the enclaves, and as they expand, impose themselves on all the landscape and space of the West Bank and Gaza. _ _
Maybe Sharon really does think the Palestinians don't need any more than that, or that under the pressure of the Israeli military attacks they will accept it as their fate. Maybe he is interested in creating the impression of a debate inside his movement. Maybe he really is so sophisticated that he knows that such a truncated "state" is an impossible project, but that he's really addressing America and he is convinced that George Bush doesn't dwell on details. _ _
People pay attention to the fact that Sharon is speaking of a Palestinian state, not to the fact that this is the castration of a term meant to reflect the principles of the right to self- determination, equality between nations, sovereignty and independent decision- making. And that's the absurdity of our political life - empty talk has turned Sharon into "a leftist" in the Likud. In other words, we've reached the stage where someone who doesn't explicitly preach expulsion or transfer of the Palestinians out of the country or perpetuation of the militaryregime over them, is a "leftist." _ _
As in the Oslo years, with all the talk about a "state," the substance will be forgotten and the shell will be sanctified, when the state is the means, the shell. The essence of the original demand for "two states" was independence for the Palestinian people. But it was also the ability and desire of the State of Israel to be freed from its inherent urge to control the Palestinians and their future and to continue taking over as much of their available lands as possible. That is the inherent urge that sabotaged our ability to live in the region in peace. _ _
The fear is that the "leftist" Sharon's energetic statements and the seemingly sharp debate that he is conducting with his party colleagues over a "Palestinian state" will be enough to give the Labor Party an excuse to rejoin a national unity government and thus lend a hand to perpetuating the bloodshed-ridden conflict with the Palestinians. The fear is that the empty talk will be portrayed as "a political horizon" that requires the Palestinians, in exchange, to give up their hostile activity. And then it will be possible to claim that the Palestinians, once again, missed an opportunity.
December 13, 2002
Below you will find two pieces. The first is an Advent letter from international Christian workers in Palestine/Israel, signed by Sonia and Alain Epp Weaver, among others. Feel free to use as a bulletin or church newsletter insert or post on your church's bulletin board. The second piece is a succinct and sobering analysis by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass of how Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is positioning himself as a man of "peace" ready to make "difficult compromises" by accepting a Palestinian "state." This is the final update of 2002 from MCC Palestine. Updates will resume in mid-January. May you and your loved ones have a blessed Christmas season.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Advent Letter from Palestine/Israel
Dear Friends, Another season of Advent has begun. For Christians the world over, this means beginning a new year of reflection and action about who and what we are called to be. It is a season of choices, preparation and beginnings.
Scriptures that call us to make choices about where we stand mark the opening days of this season. They point toward Jesus’ call for a ‘new world order’ and highlight our human struggle in choosing between the powers of this world and the power of God. Serving the global church in the Holy Land, we share a joint witness of concern for the choices being made today; choices which too often create change by violence rather than by justice, compassion, or truth.
As we recall the birth of Jesus and reflect on the Biblical town of Bethlehem, we cannot help but think of the Bethlehem of today-- of Jenin, Rafah, Nablus, Hebron-- or of cities in other places which reel from the effects of injustice, hatred and conflict. Living in the midst of a war-torn land, we urgently lift up the call to wage a just peace rather than war.
Advent is a time to renew hope in a God that loved the world so much that a child was sent to proclaim a new heaven and a new earth. Christians find our way by faith in the incarnation. It is what allows us to believe that we have a choice in how to respond to daily violence. It is what allows us to believe that the larger choices of war and its destruction are not out of our hands.
Our choices shape the very reality for which we prepare. We join the leaders of our denominations in their strong opposition to our government’s unwavering desire to go to war in Iraq. Beyond any political considerations, a pre-emptive war simply finds no justification in traditional Christian teaching.
Our deep concern is also with our brothers and sisters here in the Holy Land. A war against Iraq would likely bring continued house arrest for the entire Palestinian population. It would further the severe economic distress Palestinians are already experiencing and would deepen the economic strain within Israel. The transfer of the Palestinian people is also a real fear, whether from villages to cities within the territories to actual expulsion from the country.
Any such attempts will inevitably lead to an increase in Palestinian resistance and would very likely result in heavy casualties to both Palestinians and Israelis. We find all such actions incompatible with our understandings of the Gospel and urge that we prepare for a different future, for a world built on peace and justice.
It is time to truly wrestle with Jesus’ calls to love one another, to love our enemy in both interpersonal and international relationships. It is time to fulfill Jesus’ call to be peacemakers. It is time to counter our ‘Just War Theories’ with ‘Just Peace Theories.’ There may be no more important task for the third millennium of Christian witness.
Having lived through more than two years of destruction and death, we are not naïve about the costs and struggles of such a change. We believe that peacemaking is a more viable choice than war.
Faithful choices and thoughtful preparations create ways for new beginnings. Advent is a time to rejoice that today is not too late to start anew. In the chaos of our world, we hear the angels proclaim, “Do not be afraid; I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.” (Luke 2:10)
We rejoice, for the world can be a different place, knowing that God will work miracles within us. Come, Lord Jesus.
Douglas Dicks, Presbyterian Church (USA) Liaison Rev. Dr. Mary Jensen, Asst. for Communications to Bishop Dr. Munib Younan, Lutheran Bishop in Jerusalem Janet Lahr Lewis, General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church Catherine Nichols, Global Ministries, UCC/Disciples of Christ Rev. Sandra Olewine, United Methodist Liaison – Jerusalem, GBGM-UMC Missionary Lilian Peters, Quaker International Affairs Representative, Jerusalem Pr. Michael P. Thomas, Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, English-speaking Congregation, Jerusalem Alain Epp Weaver and Sonia Weaver, Mennonite Central Committee
2. How Sharon Became a Leftist
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, December 11, 2002
Between 1994 and 2000, Yasser Arafat would describe every piece of land the IDF evacuated as "liberated." His senior minister sand guides followed suit. Thus, Gaza was described as liberated and so were Jenin, Salfit, and everywhere else that was defined as Area A - under Palestinian administrative and security control. _ _
The process of sanctifying Area A included describing Hebron as "liberated" starting in 1997, even though 30,000 people living in the heart of the ancient city continued to suffer under direct Israeli control, meant to protect the welfare of some 500 Jews living there. _ _
The fact that no Palestinian living in those "liberated" cities of the West Bank could move more than three kilometers outside the city without encountering an Israeli military position, and that from nearly every Palestinian community, residents could see Israeli settlements expanding and encroaching, did not confuse the pubic relations artists of the PA. It did, however, cheapen the stature of the PA's leaders in the eyes oftheir public. _ _
True, Arafat was president of the (virtual) Palestinian state - it said so on the official letterheads of the PA and that is how he was addressed, but the residents of that "state" were dependent on the official stamps of the Israeli Civil Administration for their freedom of movement and their population registry, dependent on information-hungry Shin Bet officers and IDF soldiers at checkpoints to conduct the routine of their lives - no less than they were dependent on the Palestinian officials and the plethora of Palestinian security forces. _ _
The Palestinian government not "only" hid revenues from the PA's treasury, meaning the Palestinian public, and handed out funding to nurture cronies and neglect the majority. It also corrupted the language to make its terminology fit the reality that was promised and never fulfilled: ending the foreign occupation ofPalestinian land and Palestinian society. _ _
Many cooperated with the deception - representatives of the donor countries, UN envoys and Israeli peace camp activists. Symbols of sovereignty (stamps, an airport, uniforms and other perks) made people forget the main issue - that without sovereignty and authority over the land, meaning control over its development and its potential for the future, there was no meaning to the Palestinian civil-administrative responsibility for the people of the West Bank and Gaza. It was very convenient for Israeli public relations overseas, which could argue - and convince the world - that the occupation was over because Arafat controlled 99 percent of the Palestinian population. _ _
Now, and not for the first time, Ariel Sharon is juggling with the term Palestinian state, referring to the Bush framework. Maybe he really thinks it's possible to describe as a "state" a collection of administrative enclaves, which might be connected with a road that makes it possible to talk about territorial contiguity, without control over the borders and the water resources and without evacuating settlements that will continue to separate the enclaves, and as they expand, impose themselves on all the landscape and space of the West Bank and Gaza. _ _
Maybe Sharon really does think the Palestinians don't need any more than that, or that under the pressure of the Israeli military attacks they will accept it as their fate. Maybe he is interested in creating the impression of a debate inside his movement. Maybe he really is so sophisticated that he knows that such a truncated "state" is an impossible project, but that he's really addressing America and he is convinced that George Bush doesn't dwell on details. _ _
People pay attention to the fact that Sharon is speaking of a Palestinian state, not to the fact that this is the castration of a term meant to reflect the principles of the right to self- determination, equality between nations, sovereignty and independent decision- making. And that's the absurdity of our political life - empty talk has turned Sharon into "a leftist" in the Likud. In other words, we've reached the stage where someone who doesn't explicitly preach expulsion or transfer of the Palestinians out of the country or perpetuation of the militaryregime over them, is a "leftist." _ _
As in the Oslo years, with all the talk about a "state," the substance will be forgotten and the shell will be sanctified, when the state is the means, the shell. The essence of the original demand for "two states" was independence for the Palestinian people. But it was also the ability and desire of the State of Israel to be freed from its inherent urge to control the Palestinians and their future and to continue taking over as much of their available lands as possible. That is the inherent urge that sabotaged our ability to live in the region in peace. _ _
The fear is that the "leftist" Sharon's energetic statements and the seemingly sharp debate that he is conducting with his party colleagues over a "Palestinian state" will be enough to give the Labor Party an excuse to rejoin a national unity government and thus lend a hand to perpetuating the bloodshed-ridden conflict with the Palestinians. The fear is that the empty talk will be portrayed as "a political horizon" that requires the Palestinians, in exchange, to give up their hostile activity. And then it will be possible to claim that the Palestinians, once again, missed an opportunity.
Friday, December 6
MCC Palestine Update #67
MCC Palestine Update #67
December 6, 2002
This fall saw the release of a remarkable collection of essays, edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin, entitled The Other Israel (New York: The New Press, 2002). The volume brings together essays by over 20 Israeli journalists, academics and peace activists who collectively make up a portrait of an "Other Israel," one which believes that peace and Israeli security will be built upon foundations of justice instead of imposed by tanks, bulldozers and machine guns.
Some of Mennonite Central Committee's partners, such as the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between Peoples, the Wi'am Center for Conflict Resolution, and the Badil Resource Center for Refugee and Residency Rights, work on specific projects (olive harvesting, conflict resolution workshops, a Hebrew-language packet on the rights of Palestinian refugees) with some of these "Other Israelis." Part of the job description of MCC's peace development worker-when he isn't living under curfew in Bethlehem-is to cultivate contacts with this "Other Israel."
Below you will find links to the websites of some of the Israeli peace groups who make up the "Other Israel," along with short descriptions of the groups, most of which are taken from their websites. Together, these organizations provide a timely reminder that there are not simply "two sides," Israelis and Palestinians, but that there are Israelis who join with Palestinians in working for a future of reconciliation and peace built on a foundation of justice.
Rabbis for Human Rights: http://www.rhr.israel.net/ "RHR was founded in 1998, in response to serious abuses by the Israeli military authorities in the suppression of the intifada. The indifference of much of the country religious leadership and religiously identified citizenry to the suffering of innocent people seen as the enemy was a cause of concern to RHR's organizers."
Gush Shalom: http://www.gush-shalom.org/english/ Gush Shalom calls for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and for Jerusalem to be the shared capital of the State of Israel and a future Palestinian state.
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions: http://www.icahd.org/ "ICAHD is a non-violent, direct-action group originally established to oppose and resist Israeli demolition of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territories. As our activists gained direct knowledge of the brutalities of the Occupation, we expanded our resistance activities to other areas - land expropriation, settlement expansion, by-pass road construction, policies of "closure" and "separation," the wholesale uprooting of fruit and olive trees and more. The fierce repression of Palestinian efforts to "shake off" the Occupation following the latest Intifada has only added urgency to our efforts. As a direct-action group, ICAHD is comprised of members of many Israeli peace and human rights organizations. All of our work in the Occupied Territories is closely co-ordinated with local Palestinian organizations."
Yesh Gvul: http://www.yesh-gvul.org/english.html/ Yesh Gvul (Hebrew for "There is a Limit!") "is an Israeli peace group that has shouldered the task of supporting soldiers who refuse assignments of a repressive or aggressive nature. The brutal role of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) in subjugating the Palestinian population places numerous servicemen in a grave moral and political dilemma, as they are required to enforce policies they deem illegal and immoral. The army demands compliance, but many soldiers, whether conscripts or reservists, find that they cannot in good conscience obey the orders of their superiors."
New Profile: http://www.newprofile.org/english/ We, Israeli women - Jewish and Palestinian - oppose the occupation of the Palestinian people and refuse to take part in any of its destructive aspects. We refuse to live as enemies We refuse to fulfil the roles that women are expected to fulfil during wartime We refuse to pay the economic and social price of the occupation We refuse to be ignorant and to succumb to terrorizing and silencing We refuse to raise children to war, poverty and opression We refuse to remain silent A collective refusal of women can change reality. A feminine refusal means an alternative voice and a language opposed to the language of power.
Ta'ayush: http://www.taayush.org/ Ta'ayush means "coexistence" in Arabic. The Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli members of Ta'ayush live out coexistence as they join to help Palestinian farmers harassed by Israeli settlers harvest their olives or make solidarity and relief visits to Palestinian Bedouin in the Hebron hills threatened with eviction by Israeli settlers and the military.
Bat Shalom: http://www.batshalom.org/ "Bat Shalom is a feminist peace organization of Israeli women. We work toward a just peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors that includes recognition of a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel and Jerusalem as the capital of both. Within Israel, Bat Shalom works toward a more just and democratic society shaped equally by men and women."
The Alternative Information Center: http://www.alternativenews.org/ "The AIC is a Palestinian-Israeli organization which disseminates information, research and political analysis on Palestinian and Israeli societies as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while promoting cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis based on the values of social justice, solidarity and community involvement."
Below you will find two pieces. The first, by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass, looks at life at one of the scores of military checkpoints in the occupied territories, including the role played by Israeli peace activists who volunteer their time for Makhsom Watch, a group which monitors soldiers' actions at checkpoints. The second, by Tanya Reinhart of Tel Aviv University, analyzes the prospects for a just peace coming out of the upcoming Israeli elections.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. A checkpoint for life
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, November 27, 2002
Shabbat. 7 A.M. At the checkpoint at the northern entrance to Ramallah. Four soldiers are checking cars. It's a checkpoint used only by diplomats, Palestinian VIPs, ambulances, UN vehicles and various international humanitarian organizations. Passage is forbidden to "ordinary" pedestrians from neighboring villages heading to Ramallah and back. Not even people who live around the corner are allowed through. Two young women are standing on the northern side of the checkpoint, before the entrance to Ramallah. They are waiting.
On the southern side of the checkpoint, an elderly woman is sitting in a wheelchair. Near her is a bewildered young woman. From a short conversation with her, it becomes apparent that the woman in the wheelchair receives dialysis treatment in a Ramallah hospital. One of the young women waiting on the other side of the checkpoint is her daughter. The young woman beside the daughter is a kidney patient, also a regular at the Ramallah hospital. The young bewildered woman is the sister of the elderly woman in the wheelchair.
"The soldiers don't understand Arabic," she explains. The four come from the same village. It's only by chance that the healthy sister pushed her elderly sister's wheelchair to the checkpoint, so the soldiers allowed her through while preventing the other two young women from passing. "We can't let the entire village through," said one of the soldiers. They were surprised to hear that there's another ailing woman. They said such "ordinary pedestrians" aren't allowed through. The young women said they go through the checkpoint on foot, with the elderly woman, once every two days, equipped with letters from the hospital. An ambulance driver finally shows up and confirms he picks up the women every other day. He negotiates with the soldiers and finally, they allow the daughter of the woman in the wheelchair and the kidney patient through. But they prevent the healthy sister from passing through.
A 10-year-old boy arrives on the scene from the direction of Ramallah, carrying a large pack on his back. His school, he said, is north of the checkpoint, in Kafr Bitin. The ambulance driver's lobbying doesn't help. The soldiers won't let the boy through and, frightened, he backs away.
If the women from Makhsom Watch (Checkpoint Watch), a voluntary group that sends monitors to observe and take notes at checkpoints, were present, would they have succeeded in persuading the soldiers to let the boy and the healthy sister through? They don't usually go to this checkpoint. Sometimes, at other checkpoints they manage to bring some measure of human judgment into the frequently changing rules and interpretations of the rules. Sometimes their mere presence stops the soldiers from delaying dozens of people and cars for long hours for no operational reason. Frequently, they see how dozens of people manage to "steal" through the checkpoints. Usually these are young and agile, but desperate adults, and daring children also try.
Last week, just a telephone call from the Makhsom Watch activists to a Jerusalem hospital made the soldiers allow a couple to pass through a checkpoint to reach Jerusalem, where they were to visit their daughter in hospital. Sometimes an appeal by the activists to the duty officer helps. He instructs the soldiers to hand back the ID cards to the dozens of people whom the soldiers have been delaying for no reason.
Many of the activists in Makhsom Watch emphasize their purpose is not to make the occupation more bearable, but to make Israelis aware of it and of the fact that the checkpoints and blockades don't prevent the suicide bombers from reaching Jerusalem, but do increase the sense of outrage and disgust against Israelis in the general Palestinian population. But often their presence, and sometimes their intervention, moderate the brutal scenes and shorten the hours of humiliation.
Apparently more than they manage to reach the Israeli public, they enable Palestinians to find out that there are "other Israelis." In that sense, their contribution to a future of sane relations between nations is greater than their immediate contribution to the debate inside Israel about the occupation and its dangers.
As one Palestinian school principal from a nearby village, who goes through humiliation and harassment at the checkpoint on a daily basis, said, "Knowing there are Israelis experiencing what we experience, if only for a few hours, eases my suffering and gives me some hope for a different future."
2. The Israeli Elections
Tanya Reinhart
Yediot Aharonot, November 26, 2002
This is an expanded version of a column in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, November 26, 2002.
For quite some time, public opinion polls in Israel appear to be contradictory. On the one hand, t here is a majority of 60-70% for Sharon and an "iron-fist" policy in the occupied territories, and on the other a majority of 60% for immediate unilateral evacuation of most of the territories and most of the settlements.
In fact, it is simple to reconcile this contradiction. Since at least the nineties, a division to three thirds can be observed in Israeli society: The ideological third on the left opposes the occupation on moral and principled ground. The ideological right supports Israel's policy of expansion and the settlers. The middle, non-ideological, third are people who just want quiet and a normal life. They don't care about the Palestinians, but also not about the settlers.
The polls reflect the confusion and despair of this middle third. It is impossible to conclude from these polls that Sharon's victory in the coming elections is guaranteed, as so commonly argued. The winner of the elections will be the candidate drawing more of the votes of the middle third.
A prevailing mistake is to call this middle third 'center'. The word 'center' has ideological content. It is associated with moderate stands, at the heart of the consensus. The ideological center is afraid of absolute positions, like getting out of the territories immediately, but it also does no t like the idea of transfer (-mass expulsion). However, this ideological center exists only in the political discourse. In real life, the middle third consists of scared citizens whose life has turned to hell - people who watch the collapsing economy and wait anxiously for the next terror attack or for the days of gas masks and sealed rooms. It is reasonable to assume that their instinct will be to vote for whoever offers a clear rescue path.
The "iron fist" platform of the right right-wing is indeed sharp and clear. But its drawback, for the middle third, is that it has been tried for two years already, and nothing has changed for the better. The question for them is what the left has to offer.
Up until now, the left left-wing offered only verbal solutions: Let's sit down and talk and discus s and negotiate - has been their message for years. That's how the Oslo model was born - a model of eternal negotiations, while Israel continues to expand settlements and appropriates more Palestinian lands. By now, everyone in Israel knows where this road leads, and it is impossible to win the elections with this message.
But Mitzna has something new to offer - a plan that started, at least, as a clear determination to act, rather than just talk. Its roots are in the resolutions of the Council for Peace and Security of February this year. As reported in Ha'aretz, "after four months of intense discussions, the Council for Peace and Security, a group of 1000 top-level reserve generals, colonels, and Shin Bet and Mossad officials are [sic] to mount a public campaign for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from all of Gaza and much of the West Bank. Unlike some of the other unilateral withdrawal plans, like 'Life Fence', for example, the council's plan involves evacuating some 40-50 settlements" (Lili Galili ,Ha'aretz, February 18, 2002).
The Council for Peace and security is definitely a mainstream body, and its plan is heavily backed by business and corporate circles in Israel. They are not necessarily motivated by moral considerations of what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, but by concerns regarding the dangerous implications of this policy to the future of Israel. Although I do not share their world-view, I believe that implementing their plan is a huge step forward. The conception underlying this plan is that the real disagreement between mainstream Israel and the Palestinians is confined to three matters: The Right of Return, Jerusalem, and the fate of the big settlement blocks in the center of the West Bank.
These center settlements are built on land confiscated from the Palestinians, but the sad reality is that there are already 150.000 Israeli s living in these blocks, who cannot be evacuated over night. However, in territorial terms, the areas under dispute are no more than 10% of the West Bank (1), and there is no reason to occupy the rest of the territories because of this dispute. The 90 percent that are agreed upon can and should be evacuated immediately, and the 40-50 isolated settlements scattered in these areas should be dismantled.
Immediately after the evacuation, negotiations should start regarding the three difficult problems under dispute. Until these problems are solved, there will be no end of conflict, and no one can promise a complete end of terror. However, when in 90% of the West Bank (and the whole of Gaza) people have reason to wake up in the morning, the danger that they will opt for suicide over the Right of Return is much smaller.
If Mitzna sticks to this plan, which offers a real alternative and hope, there is a good chance that he will be the next Israeli prime minister. But there are many dangers lurking on his way. From the right-wing pole, pressure is exerted on him to "appeal to the center" and, thus, become vague a nd meaningless.
But the bigger danger is from the pole labeled left, in his own Labor party. Beilin and the other masterminds of Oslo are working against the idea of immediate evacuation: -Why evacuate immediately - they say - when we can simply resume the road of negotiations. Let's sit down with the Palestinians; let's talk and discuss. In the meanwhile, the IDF (Israeli army) will continue to maintain order in the occupied territories. Perhaps the Palestinians will give up eventually, and allow us to implement the Beilin Abu-Mazen plan, which does not require the dismantling of a single settlement.
Mitzna is showing signs of surrender. At the eve of the Labor primaries, he spoke only about immediate evacuation from Gaza. For the West Bank he proposed a year of negotiations, which in practice means negotiations under the supervision of the Israeli army. In other words, he proposed another year of the present lunacy, but with some negotiations in the background. If, at in the end, what Mitzna offers to the middle third would turn out to be an Oslo B plan, the middle will vote Sharon. ========= (1) This is the figure in the maximalist approach of Barak, who demanded to annex these ten percent in Camp David. The actual land that the settlements sit on is much smaller. However, Barak demanded to maintain territorial continuity between the annexed settlements.
In the Taba talks the Israeli side set the figure on 8% - "6 percent annexation and additional 2 two percent under lease agreement" (Ambassador Miguel Moratinos report, Ha'aretz, February 15, 2002). The Palestinian side acknowledged "3.1 percent annexation [to Israel] in the context of a land swap", (there). For more details on the land percentage and the Taba negotiations see my Israel/Palestine: How to end the war of 1948, Seven Stories, 2002.
(2) Here is how Beilin himself described the Beilin Abu-Mazen plan (which was completed in October 1995) in an interview in March 1996: "As an outcome of my negotiations, I can say with certainty that we can reach a permanent agreement not under the overt conditions presented by the Palestinians, but under a significant compromise [on their side]...
I discovered on their side a substantial gap between their slogans and their actual understanding of reality--a much bigger gap than on our side. They are willing to accept an agreement which gives up much land, without the dismantling of settlements, with no return to the '67 border, and with an arrangement in Jerusalem which is less than municipality level." (Interview by Lili Galili, "I Want to Entangle the Likud with as Much Peace a s Possible," Ha'aretz, March 3, 1996).
December 6, 2002
This fall saw the release of a remarkable collection of essays, edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin, entitled The Other Israel (New York: The New Press, 2002). The volume brings together essays by over 20 Israeli journalists, academics and peace activists who collectively make up a portrait of an "Other Israel," one which believes that peace and Israeli security will be built upon foundations of justice instead of imposed by tanks, bulldozers and machine guns.
Some of Mennonite Central Committee's partners, such as the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between Peoples, the Wi'am Center for Conflict Resolution, and the Badil Resource Center for Refugee and Residency Rights, work on specific projects (olive harvesting, conflict resolution workshops, a Hebrew-language packet on the rights of Palestinian refugees) with some of these "Other Israelis." Part of the job description of MCC's peace development worker-when he isn't living under curfew in Bethlehem-is to cultivate contacts with this "Other Israel."
Below you will find links to the websites of some of the Israeli peace groups who make up the "Other Israel," along with short descriptions of the groups, most of which are taken from their websites. Together, these organizations provide a timely reminder that there are not simply "two sides," Israelis and Palestinians, but that there are Israelis who join with Palestinians in working for a future of reconciliation and peace built on a foundation of justice.
Rabbis for Human Rights: http://www.rhr.israel.net/ "RHR was founded in 1998, in response to serious abuses by the Israeli military authorities in the suppression of the intifada. The indifference of much of the country religious leadership and religiously identified citizenry to the suffering of innocent people seen as the enemy was a cause of concern to RHR's organizers."
Gush Shalom: http://www.gush-shalom.org/english/ Gush Shalom calls for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and for Jerusalem to be the shared capital of the State of Israel and a future Palestinian state.
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions: http://www.icahd.org/ "ICAHD is a non-violent, direct-action group originally established to oppose and resist Israeli demolition of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territories. As our activists gained direct knowledge of the brutalities of the Occupation, we expanded our resistance activities to other areas - land expropriation, settlement expansion, by-pass road construction, policies of "closure" and "separation," the wholesale uprooting of fruit and olive trees and more. The fierce repression of Palestinian efforts to "shake off" the Occupation following the latest Intifada has only added urgency to our efforts. As a direct-action group, ICAHD is comprised of members of many Israeli peace and human rights organizations. All of our work in the Occupied Territories is closely co-ordinated with local Palestinian organizations."
Yesh Gvul: http://www.yesh-gvul.org/english.html/ Yesh Gvul (Hebrew for "There is a Limit!") "is an Israeli peace group that has shouldered the task of supporting soldiers who refuse assignments of a repressive or aggressive nature. The brutal role of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) in subjugating the Palestinian population places numerous servicemen in a grave moral and political dilemma, as they are required to enforce policies they deem illegal and immoral. The army demands compliance, but many soldiers, whether conscripts or reservists, find that they cannot in good conscience obey the orders of their superiors."
New Profile: http://www.newprofile.org/english/ We, Israeli women - Jewish and Palestinian - oppose the occupation of the Palestinian people and refuse to take part in any of its destructive aspects. We refuse to live as enemies We refuse to fulfil the roles that women are expected to fulfil during wartime We refuse to pay the economic and social price of the occupation We refuse to be ignorant and to succumb to terrorizing and silencing We refuse to raise children to war, poverty and opression We refuse to remain silent A collective refusal of women can change reality. A feminine refusal means an alternative voice and a language opposed to the language of power.
Ta'ayush: http://www.taayush.org/ Ta'ayush means "coexistence" in Arabic. The Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli members of Ta'ayush live out coexistence as they join to help Palestinian farmers harassed by Israeli settlers harvest their olives or make solidarity and relief visits to Palestinian Bedouin in the Hebron hills threatened with eviction by Israeli settlers and the military.
Bat Shalom: http://www.batshalom.org/ "Bat Shalom is a feminist peace organization of Israeli women. We work toward a just peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors that includes recognition of a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel and Jerusalem as the capital of both. Within Israel, Bat Shalom works toward a more just and democratic society shaped equally by men and women."
The Alternative Information Center: http://www.alternativenews.org/ "The AIC is a Palestinian-Israeli organization which disseminates information, research and political analysis on Palestinian and Israeli societies as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while promoting cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis based on the values of social justice, solidarity and community involvement."
Below you will find two pieces. The first, by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass, looks at life at one of the scores of military checkpoints in the occupied territories, including the role played by Israeli peace activists who volunteer their time for Makhsom Watch, a group which monitors soldiers' actions at checkpoints. The second, by Tanya Reinhart of Tel Aviv University, analyzes the prospects for a just peace coming out of the upcoming Israeli elections.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. A checkpoint for life
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, November 27, 2002
Shabbat. 7 A.M. At the checkpoint at the northern entrance to Ramallah. Four soldiers are checking cars. It's a checkpoint used only by diplomats, Palestinian VIPs, ambulances, UN vehicles and various international humanitarian organizations. Passage is forbidden to "ordinary" pedestrians from neighboring villages heading to Ramallah and back. Not even people who live around the corner are allowed through. Two young women are standing on the northern side of the checkpoint, before the entrance to Ramallah. They are waiting.
On the southern side of the checkpoint, an elderly woman is sitting in a wheelchair. Near her is a bewildered young woman. From a short conversation with her, it becomes apparent that the woman in the wheelchair receives dialysis treatment in a Ramallah hospital. One of the young women waiting on the other side of the checkpoint is her daughter. The young woman beside the daughter is a kidney patient, also a regular at the Ramallah hospital. The young bewildered woman is the sister of the elderly woman in the wheelchair.
"The soldiers don't understand Arabic," she explains. The four come from the same village. It's only by chance that the healthy sister pushed her elderly sister's wheelchair to the checkpoint, so the soldiers allowed her through while preventing the other two young women from passing. "We can't let the entire village through," said one of the soldiers. They were surprised to hear that there's another ailing woman. They said such "ordinary pedestrians" aren't allowed through. The young women said they go through the checkpoint on foot, with the elderly woman, once every two days, equipped with letters from the hospital. An ambulance driver finally shows up and confirms he picks up the women every other day. He negotiates with the soldiers and finally, they allow the daughter of the woman in the wheelchair and the kidney patient through. But they prevent the healthy sister from passing through.
A 10-year-old boy arrives on the scene from the direction of Ramallah, carrying a large pack on his back. His school, he said, is north of the checkpoint, in Kafr Bitin. The ambulance driver's lobbying doesn't help. The soldiers won't let the boy through and, frightened, he backs away.
If the women from Makhsom Watch (Checkpoint Watch), a voluntary group that sends monitors to observe and take notes at checkpoints, were present, would they have succeeded in persuading the soldiers to let the boy and the healthy sister through? They don't usually go to this checkpoint. Sometimes, at other checkpoints they manage to bring some measure of human judgment into the frequently changing rules and interpretations of the rules. Sometimes their mere presence stops the soldiers from delaying dozens of people and cars for long hours for no operational reason. Frequently, they see how dozens of people manage to "steal" through the checkpoints. Usually these are young and agile, but desperate adults, and daring children also try.
Last week, just a telephone call from the Makhsom Watch activists to a Jerusalem hospital made the soldiers allow a couple to pass through a checkpoint to reach Jerusalem, where they were to visit their daughter in hospital. Sometimes an appeal by the activists to the duty officer helps. He instructs the soldiers to hand back the ID cards to the dozens of people whom the soldiers have been delaying for no reason.
Many of the activists in Makhsom Watch emphasize their purpose is not to make the occupation more bearable, but to make Israelis aware of it and of the fact that the checkpoints and blockades don't prevent the suicide bombers from reaching Jerusalem, but do increase the sense of outrage and disgust against Israelis in the general Palestinian population. But often their presence, and sometimes their intervention, moderate the brutal scenes and shorten the hours of humiliation.
Apparently more than they manage to reach the Israeli public, they enable Palestinians to find out that there are "other Israelis." In that sense, their contribution to a future of sane relations between nations is greater than their immediate contribution to the debate inside Israel about the occupation and its dangers.
As one Palestinian school principal from a nearby village, who goes through humiliation and harassment at the checkpoint on a daily basis, said, "Knowing there are Israelis experiencing what we experience, if only for a few hours, eases my suffering and gives me some hope for a different future."
2. The Israeli Elections
Tanya Reinhart
Yediot Aharonot, November 26, 2002
This is an expanded version of a column in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot, November 26, 2002.
For quite some time, public opinion polls in Israel appear to be contradictory. On the one hand, t here is a majority of 60-70% for Sharon and an "iron-fist" policy in the occupied territories, and on the other a majority of 60% for immediate unilateral evacuation of most of the territories and most of the settlements.
In fact, it is simple to reconcile this contradiction. Since at least the nineties, a division to three thirds can be observed in Israeli society: The ideological third on the left opposes the occupation on moral and principled ground. The ideological right supports Israel's policy of expansion and the settlers. The middle, non-ideological, third are people who just want quiet and a normal life. They don't care about the Palestinians, but also not about the settlers.
The polls reflect the confusion and despair of this middle third. It is impossible to conclude from these polls that Sharon's victory in the coming elections is guaranteed, as so commonly argued. The winner of the elections will be the candidate drawing more of the votes of the middle third.
A prevailing mistake is to call this middle third 'center'. The word 'center' has ideological content. It is associated with moderate stands, at the heart of the consensus. The ideological center is afraid of absolute positions, like getting out of the territories immediately, but it also does no t like the idea of transfer (-mass expulsion). However, this ideological center exists only in the political discourse. In real life, the middle third consists of scared citizens whose life has turned to hell - people who watch the collapsing economy and wait anxiously for the next terror attack or for the days of gas masks and sealed rooms. It is reasonable to assume that their instinct will be to vote for whoever offers a clear rescue path.
The "iron fist" platform of the right right-wing is indeed sharp and clear. But its drawback, for the middle third, is that it has been tried for two years already, and nothing has changed for the better. The question for them is what the left has to offer.
Up until now, the left left-wing offered only verbal solutions: Let's sit down and talk and discus s and negotiate - has been their message for years. That's how the Oslo model was born - a model of eternal negotiations, while Israel continues to expand settlements and appropriates more Palestinian lands. By now, everyone in Israel knows where this road leads, and it is impossible to win the elections with this message.
But Mitzna has something new to offer - a plan that started, at least, as a clear determination to act, rather than just talk. Its roots are in the resolutions of the Council for Peace and Security of February this year. As reported in Ha'aretz, "after four months of intense discussions, the Council for Peace and Security, a group of 1000 top-level reserve generals, colonels, and Shin Bet and Mossad officials are [sic] to mount a public campaign for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from all of Gaza and much of the West Bank. Unlike some of the other unilateral withdrawal plans, like 'Life Fence', for example, the council's plan involves evacuating some 40-50 settlements" (Lili Galili ,Ha'aretz, February 18, 2002).
The Council for Peace and security is definitely a mainstream body, and its plan is heavily backed by business and corporate circles in Israel. They are not necessarily motivated by moral considerations of what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, but by concerns regarding the dangerous implications of this policy to the future of Israel. Although I do not share their world-view, I believe that implementing their plan is a huge step forward. The conception underlying this plan is that the real disagreement between mainstream Israel and the Palestinians is confined to three matters: The Right of Return, Jerusalem, and the fate of the big settlement blocks in the center of the West Bank.
These center settlements are built on land confiscated from the Palestinians, but the sad reality is that there are already 150.000 Israeli s living in these blocks, who cannot be evacuated over night. However, in territorial terms, the areas under dispute are no more than 10% of the West Bank (1), and there is no reason to occupy the rest of the territories because of this dispute. The 90 percent that are agreed upon can and should be evacuated immediately, and the 40-50 isolated settlements scattered in these areas should be dismantled.
Immediately after the evacuation, negotiations should start regarding the three difficult problems under dispute. Until these problems are solved, there will be no end of conflict, and no one can promise a complete end of terror. However, when in 90% of the West Bank (and the whole of Gaza) people have reason to wake up in the morning, the danger that they will opt for suicide over the Right of Return is much smaller.
If Mitzna sticks to this plan, which offers a real alternative and hope, there is a good chance that he will be the next Israeli prime minister. But there are many dangers lurking on his way. From the right-wing pole, pressure is exerted on him to "appeal to the center" and, thus, become vague a nd meaningless.
But the bigger danger is from the pole labeled left, in his own Labor party. Beilin and the other masterminds of Oslo are working against the idea of immediate evacuation: -Why evacuate immediately - they say - when we can simply resume the road of negotiations. Let's sit down with the Palestinians; let's talk and discuss. In the meanwhile, the IDF (Israeli army) will continue to maintain order in the occupied territories. Perhaps the Palestinians will give up eventually, and allow us to implement the Beilin Abu-Mazen plan, which does not require the dismantling of a single settlement.
Mitzna is showing signs of surrender. At the eve of the Labor primaries, he spoke only about immediate evacuation from Gaza. For the West Bank he proposed a year of negotiations, which in practice means negotiations under the supervision of the Israeli army. In other words, he proposed another year of the present lunacy, but with some negotiations in the background. If, at in the end, what Mitzna offers to the middle third would turn out to be an Oslo B plan, the middle will vote Sharon. ========= (1) This is the figure in the maximalist approach of Barak, who demanded to annex these ten percent in Camp David. The actual land that the settlements sit on is much smaller. However, Barak demanded to maintain territorial continuity between the annexed settlements.
In the Taba talks the Israeli side set the figure on 8% - "6 percent annexation and additional 2 two percent under lease agreement" (Ambassador Miguel Moratinos report, Ha'aretz, February 15, 2002). The Palestinian side acknowledged "3.1 percent annexation [to Israel] in the context of a land swap", (there). For more details on the land percentage and the Taba negotiations see my Israel/Palestine: How to end the war of 1948, Seven Stories, 2002.
(2) Here is how Beilin himself described the Beilin Abu-Mazen plan (which was completed in October 1995) in an interview in March 1996: "As an outcome of my negotiations, I can say with certainty that we can reach a permanent agreement not under the overt conditions presented by the Palestinians, but under a significant compromise [on their side]...
I discovered on their side a substantial gap between their slogans and their actual understanding of reality--a much bigger gap than on our side. They are willing to accept an agreement which gives up much land, without the dismantling of settlements, with no return to the '67 border, and with an arrangement in Jerusalem which is less than municipality level." (Interview by Lili Galili, "I Want to Entangle the Likud with as Much Peace a s Possible," Ha'aretz, March 3, 1996).
Wednesday, November 27
MCC Palestine Update #66
MCC Palestine Update #66
November 27, 2002
Recent visits to the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ), a Mennonite Central Committee partner organization since the early 1990s, proved sobering. [MCC has joined with the Canadian Food Grains Bank for the past three years to provide a food security grant to ARIJ to test seed varieties best suited for rain fed farming conditions.] The director of ARIJ, Dr. Jad Ishaq, has been examining GIS satellite images of the West Bank to analyze Israeli colonial expansion (through the construction of illegal Israeli "settlements," which Jad insists should more accurately be called "colonies'). For Jad, the "facts on the ground" point in one direction: Israel is pre-empting any chances of a durable peace agreement based on a vision of two viable states, one Israeli and one Palestinian, living side by side.
Since Ariel Sharon became Israel's Prime Minister in March 2001, the growth of existing Israeli colonies and the construction of new ones have skyrocketed. ARIJ has identified 24 new colonies in the West Bank, the expansion of 45 more, and the establishing of 113 new "outposts," i.e., caravans placed on hilltops which later develop into a full-fledged colony. The placement of new colonies and outposts is strategic: first, Jerusalem is being progressively encircled by rings of Israeli colonies (extending south of Bethlehem to the Gush Etzion block of settlements, northwards to Ramallah to the colonies of Givat Ze'ev and Psagot, and eastwards towards Jericho to Ma'aleh Adumim) which break up the continguity of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and which separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank; second, the "separation" fence which cuts through the north of West Bank is isolating Qalqilayah and Tulkarem from each other, from their neighboring villages and from the rest of the West Bank ;finally, new settlements and outposts thrust out eastward from the large colony of Ariel in the north of the West Bank towards the extensive "closed military zone" which runs north-south to the west of the Jordan River. These various developments leave Palestinian population centers separated from one another and will create various isolated "cantons" (what Jad and many other observers call "Bantustans," referring back to the "homelands" created by the apartheid-era governmentin South Africa) within the West Bank--the canton of Bethlehem, for example, or of Ramallah, of Nablus/Jenin, of Hebron, etc.
Ariel Sharon has over the past week faced criticism from his challenger for the Likud leadership, Binyamin Netanyahu, for his alleged willingness to make the "painful compromise" of accepting a "Palestinian state." That Sharon has indeed voiced his readiness to accept a Palestinian state is a fact; it's also a fact that the "state" Sharon envisions is for the 35 to at most 40% of the West Bank, a state which would have no territorial contiguity, little control over vital natural resources such as water, and which would thus be economically unviable. Israeli colonial expansion, therefore, appears to be putting the nails in the coffin of any plans for a viable two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Against the daily reality of new bypass roads being built, new 25-foot high guard walls with watchtowers being built, and more colonies constructed, talk of US and "Quartet" (US-UN-European Union-Russia) "roadmaps" for the creation of a Palestinian State by 2005 appear naive at best and dangerous at worst. Naïve, because it seems clear that Israeli colonial expansion which has already happened has possibly undermined the viability of any Palestinian state. Dangerous in that Israel will attempt to present a willingness to accept a Palestinian "state" in the discontiguous 35-40% of the West Bank as a "painful compromise."
How should advocates for justice, peace, and real security for Palestinians and Israelis respond to this emerging reality? I would suggest first that we begin to free ourselves from the conceptual bind of seeing "statehood" (be it Palestinian and Israeli) as an end in itself. Various Christian bodies--denominations, church-related NGOs, etc.--have, over the years, called for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip and for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel. What to say, however, if Israeli actions (colonial expansion) have undermined a viable two-state solution?
Advocates for a just and lasting peace, I believe, are ultimately not concerned with the question of whether or not a Palestinian state comes into being. After all, Israel (and the US, and perhaps the rest of the international community) might eagerly back the creation of a Palestinian state comprising discontiguous Bantustans, a state which would not bring justice and freedom for Palestinians and which would not bring stability and security for either Palestinians or Israelis.
Statehood is simply not an end in itself. What is an end in itself is the flourishing and well being of all who inhabit "Mandate Palestine," i.e., present-day Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Many churches (not to mention the Palestinian leadership) believed for the past three decades that this flourishing and well-being could be secured with the creation of a viable Palestinian state comprising the West Bank/East Jerusalem/Gaza Strip. If facts on the ground have undermined such a solution, perhaps made it impossible, then those who care about the future flourishing, security, and well-being of Palestinians and Israelis must dream of new ways for Palestinians and Israelis to be able to live side by side in justice, freedom and equality.
Jad and others have observed that if a viable two-state solution can't be achieved, then the struggle for Palestinians becomes one of action against an apartheid reality in the occupied territories and for equal citizenship in a bi-national state, in which Palestinians and Israelis are all equal citizens before the law, in all of Mandate Palestine. The vision of one, bi-national state as a solution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict must not, therefore, be dismissed out of hand by advocates of a just peace. For the churches and church- related NGOs to point in this direction in their advocacy efforts will be difficult. First, because it would be difficult to move beyond the language of "two states" to which many have become wedded. Second, because advocacy for one, bi-national state will be perceived as being against the State of Israel and thus as anti- Zionist. If Zionism necessarily means the creation and preservation of a "Jewish demographic majority" at the expense of the rights and well-being of Palestinians, then advocacy for one, binational state is indeed anti-Zionist. Other Zionism’s might be possible, however; for example, the "cultural Zionism" of an Ahad Ha'am or a Judah Magnes (figures from the first half of the twentieth century), a Zionism which does not depend on sovereign control and demographic majority, might become meaningful once more.
Perhaps the unexpected will occur, Israel will dismantle its colonies in the occupied territories, and a viable Palestinian state will emerge next to the State of Israel. If this happens, then we will have cause for rejoicing. We must, however, soberly confront the possibility that the day of the two-state solution has already been eclipsed and start doing thinking through the theological and advocacy implications of such a possibility.
To see two detailed reports prepared with input from ARIJ, see the following URLs:
http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Separation%20wall%20Campaign/index.htm and http://www.nad-plo.org/eye/news50.html
Below you will find two pieces, both from the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. The first, by Amira Hass, explores what the proposed creation of "territorial contiguity" between the Kiryat Arba colony to the east of Hebron and the Israeli colonies inside Hebron's Old City will mean for the thousands of Palestinian residents of the Old City. The second, by former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, examines the inexorable logic of colonial expansion in the occupied territories.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. The shuttered houses on Holy Days
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, November 2002
The one and only meaning to the creation of "territorial contiguity" from Kiryat Arba to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, is expulsion. The expulsion of thousands more Palestinian residents of Hebron, people who were unlucky enough to find that their homes, shops and gardens are in the area meant for "contiguity." The IDF will protect the Jewish construction and dozens if not hundreds of Israelis - contractors, engineers, architects, carpenters - will join the work, and police will protect them. Thousands of Israelis will thus become active partners in the expulsion. They'll go home every night to their worried families in Jerusalem and Kfar Sava.
If one of them is killed in a Palestinian ambush, the response will be even more "territorial contiguity." There won't be any need to load people onto trucks. They simply won't be able to stay in their homes, let their children risk of going to school every day on the same route where their Jewish "neighbors" are building, striding the streets with their rifles like masters of the land if not the universe, speeding along streets that for security reasons are closed to Palestinian traffic. They'll lose ever more days at work when they try leaving their homes or try coming home and are faced by a noisy laughing gang of Jewish teens of both sexes, stoning them with rocks, kicking at them and spitting at them, while a policeman or a few soldiers stand idly by.
The Palestinians living in the "territorial contiguity" will go through what happened to the Palestinians of the old city of Hebron, but at an accelerated rate. It's an open secret that many of the residents of the old city have left their homes in recent years. They simply couldn't take life with the unceasing harassment from a handful of Jewish citizens of Israel who were allowed to behave that way due to the laxity or sympathy of soldiers and officers, the apathy or sympathy of police and the indifference of the Israeli public.
Dozens of shop owners in the old city have stopped opening, whether because of the unending days and nights of curfew imposed on Hebron and its ancient heart, or because the "neighbors" scare off the shoppers, or because the streets where the shops are located are closed to protect the security of the Jewish neighbors. When the curfew is lifted, and the market is reopened for a few hours, there is the illusion of life.
But last Saturday, on the day after the gun battle between armed Palestinians and soldiers, police, and armed Israeli guards from Kiryat Arba, under the full curfew imposed on Palestinian Hebron, it was possible to discern how empty the old city has become. An elderly woman and her son peeked frightened through a barred and netted window. Behind a tightly shut iron door, one could hear the murmurings of the inhabitants.
Someone, in the chilling silence, quickly opened and closed an iron door. But from one of the rooftops in the old city the abandonment could easily be seen: wide open wooden window shutters lazily flapping in the breeze and behind them black holes - empty rooms. Dried up plants, clotheslines bare of laundry - these were the signs of an empty place. Some of the Palestinian houses are already empty in Wadi Nasara, where the gun battle took place opposite the southern nook of Kiryat Arba.
The "Worshipers Way" for the Palestinians has become the path of the stone throwers and the shooters in the air, and the lack of response from the authorities for years. Fridays and Saturdays and other Jewish holidays when the worshipers walk the way, are the cursed days for the residents of Wadi Nasara and the old city. That's when they lock themselves in their homes and shutter their windows, blocking their ears when the window shatters or their plant pots are overturned and they know there's no point calling the police.
The settlements were built before the terrorism and after it. They were built whether the Palestinians expressed their opposition or not. A lengthy curfew was imposed on Palestinian Hebron after Baruch Goldstein murdered worshipers at the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs; a curfew was imposed on them when a Palestinian murdered a Jewish baby and a curfew is imposed when armed Palestinians fight armed Israelis. Jewish zealots in Hebron and throughout the West Bank harass Palestinians before attacks and after attacks.
Now they don't even hide the fact their "settlement enterprise" is part of their Transfer plans, which everywhere else in the West is known as "ethnic cleansing." Are those Jewish zealots and their lobbyists really the heirs of the Jewish Diaspora?
From inside Hebron they actually appear to be of a different heritage, scions of nationalist, anti-Semitic movements who sent pogromchiks at the head of mobs who spread fear and were full of greed for the Jewish homes, to gradually implement the plan of "cleansing the homeland of its kikes." Hebron, on Shabbat, was reminiscent of ancestral tales from Sochba, a town in northeast Romania, where on Holy Sundays, the Jews would shutter themselves up in their homes.
2. The never-ending enterprise
Meron Benvenisti
Ha'aretz, November 2002
The response to the bloody ambush in Hebron was instinctive: After all, establishing "Jewish points of presence" along a line of territorial contiguity between Jewish areas that were built in their day in the wake of previous incidents, has been "an appropriate Zionist response" ever since the days of Tel Hai and the "stockade and tower."
After more than 80 years of "appropriate responses," no wonder it has become second nature. Everyone knows their role in the sound-and-light show underway in Hebron for the 800th time - the number of Jewish "points of presence" that "have gone up on the land" since the start of the Zionist enterprise.
The government, responsible for the never-ending Zionist revolution,ordered the army - Zionism's main executive arm - to demolish houses and uproot trees so as to create empty areas in which to go ahead with Jewish construction. The housing minister "promotes" plans to expropriate Palestinian property through legal processes with "full compensation." Architects, who of course don't have a political view, only a professional one, are already planning hundreds of apartments. The zealots are making Palestinian lives intolerable, as the army and police stand by, ignoring the harassment.
The audience remains mostly apathetic, and only a minority expresses opposition to the efforts to use the old-fashioned honorable terms of pioneering Zionism to glorify looting that will only intensify and perpetuate the conflict. But even that minority doesn't dare confront the basic fault, inherent in the current project of occupying the new physical space, as in all its predecessors: either security, settlement or community needs are being served, but rather the urge to cover the frightening, hostile land with asphalt and concrete.
If anyone dares confront this Zionist pretention on it merits - and not only the harm to the Palestinians or the immorality of ethnic cleansing and persecution of the foreigner - then out of the deep will rise questions best kept deep and latent in the heart of the consensus: How is it possible that for three generations an entire country has been one big temporary construction project that never arrives at a permanent reality, with a defined topography, stable borders, and a "normal" routine of life?
The common answer, which blames the hostility of the enemy, only discloses the conceptual basis for those responsible for the construction site: Its purpose is to be an instrument in the existential struggle, which does not end, also because continuing the battle for the physical space serves powerful economic and political interests. Standards of living are a marginal goal, enjoyed by only a few, while an immigrant mentality feeds an insatiable appetite for grabbing land, both for the individual and for the collective.
For 35 years, Israel has made a supreme effort to take control of the physical space of the West Bank, which is perceived as an "outback" in which the Zionist revolution can be fulfilled. But after investing tens of billions and settling hundreds of thousands, the entire uilt-up area of all the settlements is no more than 2 percent of the land in the West Bank. True, nearly half the West Bank is defined as "state land," but this formal definition does not make it controlled by Jews.
No wonder the struggle over the physical space is not measured any longer with the establishment of settlements and houses, through the denial of Palestinian use of the territory in this space -from legal limitations, and through to uprooting crops and preventing olive harvests, prohibitions on vehicular traffic, sieges and closures.
The enormous gap in the balance of forces should seemingly have tilted in favor of Israel, but the struggle is going to end in a tie in the short run, and in a Palestinian victory in the long run, because the physical space is filling up, running out, and has ceased functioning as the critical element. Instead, demography rules.
"The appropriate Zionist response," of which expanding the Jewish settlement in Hebron is but the latest expression, will yet boomerang against its perpetrators. The number of Palestinians born in Hebron in one week is more than all the Jews who live in the city. When will someone in an Israeli government get up and declare a glorious end to the Zionist enterprise?
November 27, 2002
Recent visits to the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ), a Mennonite Central Committee partner organization since the early 1990s, proved sobering. [MCC has joined with the Canadian Food Grains Bank for the past three years to provide a food security grant to ARIJ to test seed varieties best suited for rain fed farming conditions.] The director of ARIJ, Dr. Jad Ishaq, has been examining GIS satellite images of the West Bank to analyze Israeli colonial expansion (through the construction of illegal Israeli "settlements," which Jad insists should more accurately be called "colonies'). For Jad, the "facts on the ground" point in one direction: Israel is pre-empting any chances of a durable peace agreement based on a vision of two viable states, one Israeli and one Palestinian, living side by side.
Since Ariel Sharon became Israel's Prime Minister in March 2001, the growth of existing Israeli colonies and the construction of new ones have skyrocketed. ARIJ has identified 24 new colonies in the West Bank, the expansion of 45 more, and the establishing of 113 new "outposts," i.e., caravans placed on hilltops which later develop into a full-fledged colony. The placement of new colonies and outposts is strategic: first, Jerusalem is being progressively encircled by rings of Israeli colonies (extending south of Bethlehem to the Gush Etzion block of settlements, northwards to Ramallah to the colonies of Givat Ze'ev and Psagot, and eastwards towards Jericho to Ma'aleh Adumim) which break up the continguity of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and which separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank; second, the "separation" fence which cuts through the north of West Bank is isolating Qalqilayah and Tulkarem from each other, from their neighboring villages and from the rest of the West Bank ;finally, new settlements and outposts thrust out eastward from the large colony of Ariel in the north of the West Bank towards the extensive "closed military zone" which runs north-south to the west of the Jordan River. These various developments leave Palestinian population centers separated from one another and will create various isolated "cantons" (what Jad and many other observers call "Bantustans," referring back to the "homelands" created by the apartheid-era governmentin South Africa) within the West Bank--the canton of Bethlehem, for example, or of Ramallah, of Nablus/Jenin, of Hebron, etc.
Ariel Sharon has over the past week faced criticism from his challenger for the Likud leadership, Binyamin Netanyahu, for his alleged willingness to make the "painful compromise" of accepting a "Palestinian state." That Sharon has indeed voiced his readiness to accept a Palestinian state is a fact; it's also a fact that the "state" Sharon envisions is for the 35 to at most 40% of the West Bank, a state which would have no territorial contiguity, little control over vital natural resources such as water, and which would thus be economically unviable. Israeli colonial expansion, therefore, appears to be putting the nails in the coffin of any plans for a viable two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Against the daily reality of new bypass roads being built, new 25-foot high guard walls with watchtowers being built, and more colonies constructed, talk of US and "Quartet" (US-UN-European Union-Russia) "roadmaps" for the creation of a Palestinian State by 2005 appear naive at best and dangerous at worst. Naïve, because it seems clear that Israeli colonial expansion which has already happened has possibly undermined the viability of any Palestinian state. Dangerous in that Israel will attempt to present a willingness to accept a Palestinian "state" in the discontiguous 35-40% of the West Bank as a "painful compromise."
How should advocates for justice, peace, and real security for Palestinians and Israelis respond to this emerging reality? I would suggest first that we begin to free ourselves from the conceptual bind of seeing "statehood" (be it Palestinian and Israeli) as an end in itself. Various Christian bodies--denominations, church-related NGOs, etc.--have, over the years, called for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip and for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel. What to say, however, if Israeli actions (colonial expansion) have undermined a viable two-state solution?
Advocates for a just and lasting peace, I believe, are ultimately not concerned with the question of whether or not a Palestinian state comes into being. After all, Israel (and the US, and perhaps the rest of the international community) might eagerly back the creation of a Palestinian state comprising discontiguous Bantustans, a state which would not bring justice and freedom for Palestinians and which would not bring stability and security for either Palestinians or Israelis.
Statehood is simply not an end in itself. What is an end in itself is the flourishing and well being of all who inhabit "Mandate Palestine," i.e., present-day Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Many churches (not to mention the Palestinian leadership) believed for the past three decades that this flourishing and well-being could be secured with the creation of a viable Palestinian state comprising the West Bank/East Jerusalem/Gaza Strip. If facts on the ground have undermined such a solution, perhaps made it impossible, then those who care about the future flourishing, security, and well-being of Palestinians and Israelis must dream of new ways for Palestinians and Israelis to be able to live side by side in justice, freedom and equality.
Jad and others have observed that if a viable two-state solution can't be achieved, then the struggle for Palestinians becomes one of action against an apartheid reality in the occupied territories and for equal citizenship in a bi-national state, in which Palestinians and Israelis are all equal citizens before the law, in all of Mandate Palestine. The vision of one, bi-national state as a solution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict must not, therefore, be dismissed out of hand by advocates of a just peace. For the churches and church- related NGOs to point in this direction in their advocacy efforts will be difficult. First, because it would be difficult to move beyond the language of "two states" to which many have become wedded. Second, because advocacy for one, bi-national state will be perceived as being against the State of Israel and thus as anti- Zionist. If Zionism necessarily means the creation and preservation of a "Jewish demographic majority" at the expense of the rights and well-being of Palestinians, then advocacy for one, binational state is indeed anti-Zionist. Other Zionism’s might be possible, however; for example, the "cultural Zionism" of an Ahad Ha'am or a Judah Magnes (figures from the first half of the twentieth century), a Zionism which does not depend on sovereign control and demographic majority, might become meaningful once more.
Perhaps the unexpected will occur, Israel will dismantle its colonies in the occupied territories, and a viable Palestinian state will emerge next to the State of Israel. If this happens, then we will have cause for rejoicing. We must, however, soberly confront the possibility that the day of the two-state solution has already been eclipsed and start doing thinking through the theological and advocacy implications of such a possibility.
To see two detailed reports prepared with input from ARIJ, see the following URLs:
http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Separation%20wall%20Campaign/index.htm and http://www.nad-plo.org/eye/news50.html
Below you will find two pieces, both from the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. The first, by Amira Hass, explores what the proposed creation of "territorial contiguity" between the Kiryat Arba colony to the east of Hebron and the Israeli colonies inside Hebron's Old City will mean for the thousands of Palestinian residents of the Old City. The second, by former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, examines the inexorable logic of colonial expansion in the occupied territories.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. The shuttered houses on Holy Days
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, November 2002
The one and only meaning to the creation of "territorial contiguity" from Kiryat Arba to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, is expulsion. The expulsion of thousands more Palestinian residents of Hebron, people who were unlucky enough to find that their homes, shops and gardens are in the area meant for "contiguity." The IDF will protect the Jewish construction and dozens if not hundreds of Israelis - contractors, engineers, architects, carpenters - will join the work, and police will protect them. Thousands of Israelis will thus become active partners in the expulsion. They'll go home every night to their worried families in Jerusalem and Kfar Sava.
If one of them is killed in a Palestinian ambush, the response will be even more "territorial contiguity." There won't be any need to load people onto trucks. They simply won't be able to stay in their homes, let their children risk of going to school every day on the same route where their Jewish "neighbors" are building, striding the streets with their rifles like masters of the land if not the universe, speeding along streets that for security reasons are closed to Palestinian traffic. They'll lose ever more days at work when they try leaving their homes or try coming home and are faced by a noisy laughing gang of Jewish teens of both sexes, stoning them with rocks, kicking at them and spitting at them, while a policeman or a few soldiers stand idly by.
The Palestinians living in the "territorial contiguity" will go through what happened to the Palestinians of the old city of Hebron, but at an accelerated rate. It's an open secret that many of the residents of the old city have left their homes in recent years. They simply couldn't take life with the unceasing harassment from a handful of Jewish citizens of Israel who were allowed to behave that way due to the laxity or sympathy of soldiers and officers, the apathy or sympathy of police and the indifference of the Israeli public.
Dozens of shop owners in the old city have stopped opening, whether because of the unending days and nights of curfew imposed on Hebron and its ancient heart, or because the "neighbors" scare off the shoppers, or because the streets where the shops are located are closed to protect the security of the Jewish neighbors. When the curfew is lifted, and the market is reopened for a few hours, there is the illusion of life.
But last Saturday, on the day after the gun battle between armed Palestinians and soldiers, police, and armed Israeli guards from Kiryat Arba, under the full curfew imposed on Palestinian Hebron, it was possible to discern how empty the old city has become. An elderly woman and her son peeked frightened through a barred and netted window. Behind a tightly shut iron door, one could hear the murmurings of the inhabitants.
Someone, in the chilling silence, quickly opened and closed an iron door. But from one of the rooftops in the old city the abandonment could easily be seen: wide open wooden window shutters lazily flapping in the breeze and behind them black holes - empty rooms. Dried up plants, clotheslines bare of laundry - these were the signs of an empty place. Some of the Palestinian houses are already empty in Wadi Nasara, where the gun battle took place opposite the southern nook of Kiryat Arba.
The "Worshipers Way" for the Palestinians has become the path of the stone throwers and the shooters in the air, and the lack of response from the authorities for years. Fridays and Saturdays and other Jewish holidays when the worshipers walk the way, are the cursed days for the residents of Wadi Nasara and the old city. That's when they lock themselves in their homes and shutter their windows, blocking their ears when the window shatters or their plant pots are overturned and they know there's no point calling the police.
The settlements were built before the terrorism and after it. They were built whether the Palestinians expressed their opposition or not. A lengthy curfew was imposed on Palestinian Hebron after Baruch Goldstein murdered worshipers at the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs; a curfew was imposed on them when a Palestinian murdered a Jewish baby and a curfew is imposed when armed Palestinians fight armed Israelis. Jewish zealots in Hebron and throughout the West Bank harass Palestinians before attacks and after attacks.
Now they don't even hide the fact their "settlement enterprise" is part of their Transfer plans, which everywhere else in the West is known as "ethnic cleansing." Are those Jewish zealots and their lobbyists really the heirs of the Jewish Diaspora?
From inside Hebron they actually appear to be of a different heritage, scions of nationalist, anti-Semitic movements who sent pogromchiks at the head of mobs who spread fear and were full of greed for the Jewish homes, to gradually implement the plan of "cleansing the homeland of its kikes." Hebron, on Shabbat, was reminiscent of ancestral tales from Sochba, a town in northeast Romania, where on Holy Sundays, the Jews would shutter themselves up in their homes.
2. The never-ending enterprise
Meron Benvenisti
Ha'aretz, November 2002
The response to the bloody ambush in Hebron was instinctive: After all, establishing "Jewish points of presence" along a line of territorial contiguity between Jewish areas that were built in their day in the wake of previous incidents, has been "an appropriate Zionist response" ever since the days of Tel Hai and the "stockade and tower."
After more than 80 years of "appropriate responses," no wonder it has become second nature. Everyone knows their role in the sound-and-light show underway in Hebron for the 800th time - the number of Jewish "points of presence" that "have gone up on the land" since the start of the Zionist enterprise.
The government, responsible for the never-ending Zionist revolution,ordered the army - Zionism's main executive arm - to demolish houses and uproot trees so as to create empty areas in which to go ahead with Jewish construction. The housing minister "promotes" plans to expropriate Palestinian property through legal processes with "full compensation." Architects, who of course don't have a political view, only a professional one, are already planning hundreds of apartments. The zealots are making Palestinian lives intolerable, as the army and police stand by, ignoring the harassment.
The audience remains mostly apathetic, and only a minority expresses opposition to the efforts to use the old-fashioned honorable terms of pioneering Zionism to glorify looting that will only intensify and perpetuate the conflict. But even that minority doesn't dare confront the basic fault, inherent in the current project of occupying the new physical space, as in all its predecessors: either security, settlement or community needs are being served, but rather the urge to cover the frightening, hostile land with asphalt and concrete.
If anyone dares confront this Zionist pretention on it merits - and not only the harm to the Palestinians or the immorality of ethnic cleansing and persecution of the foreigner - then out of the deep will rise questions best kept deep and latent in the heart of the consensus: How is it possible that for three generations an entire country has been one big temporary construction project that never arrives at a permanent reality, with a defined topography, stable borders, and a "normal" routine of life?
The common answer, which blames the hostility of the enemy, only discloses the conceptual basis for those responsible for the construction site: Its purpose is to be an instrument in the existential struggle, which does not end, also because continuing the battle for the physical space serves powerful economic and political interests. Standards of living are a marginal goal, enjoyed by only a few, while an immigrant mentality feeds an insatiable appetite for grabbing land, both for the individual and for the collective.
For 35 years, Israel has made a supreme effort to take control of the physical space of the West Bank, which is perceived as an "outback" in which the Zionist revolution can be fulfilled. But after investing tens of billions and settling hundreds of thousands, the entire uilt-up area of all the settlements is no more than 2 percent of the land in the West Bank. True, nearly half the West Bank is defined as "state land," but this formal definition does not make it controlled by Jews.
No wonder the struggle over the physical space is not measured any longer with the establishment of settlements and houses, through the denial of Palestinian use of the territory in this space -from legal limitations, and through to uprooting crops and preventing olive harvests, prohibitions on vehicular traffic, sieges and closures.
The enormous gap in the balance of forces should seemingly have tilted in favor of Israel, but the struggle is going to end in a tie in the short run, and in a Palestinian victory in the long run, because the physical space is filling up, running out, and has ceased functioning as the critical element. Instead, demography rules.
"The appropriate Zionist response," of which expanding the Jewish settlement in Hebron is but the latest expression, will yet boomerang against its perpetrators. The number of Palestinians born in Hebron in one week is more than all the Jews who live in the city. When will someone in an Israeli government get up and declare a glorious end to the Zionist enterprise?
Wednesday, November 20
MCC Palestine Update #65
MCC Palestine Update #65
November 20, 2002
On Saturday I sent out a prayer request asking people to pray for the friends and families of those 12 Israelis killed in Hebron this past Friday evening. I take it as a given that Christians are called to mourn and grieve when any of God's beloved children is killed. I would therefore reiterate my prayer request. I would at the same time suggest that the way in which the Friday attack was initially described by spokespeople for the State of Israel demonstrates the deceptive use of language, particularly the discourse of "terrorism."
Shortly after Friday night's attack, Israeli officials were describing it as a "massacre" of worshippers on their way home from prayer. This description of Friday's events was passed on during Friday's and Saturday's news bulletins. By Saturday, however, a different picture of Friday's events was emerging. The 12 Israeli dead (three Palestinians who carried out the attack were also killed) consisted of soldiers, Border Police officers, and armed members of the security team of the Kiryat Arba settlement. The attack was thus not on civilian worshippers returning home from prayers at Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs but on armed military and paramilitary personnel. Amos Harel, military correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, presented the following analysis (Nov. 17, 2002): "Those killed Friday were killed in combat. All of the victims were armed fighters, who were more or less trained. They fell victim to a well-planned ambush that included both machine-gun fire and grenades, which trapped them in a compromising situation they found hard to overcome. There is a vast difference between what happened on Friday night and the horrific massacres carried out by Palestinian terrorists in
civilian settlements."
This incident should highlight the ambiguous (at best) use of the word "terrorism." Israel classifies all Palestinian violence as "terrorism," be it an attack on children in their home in Kibbutz Metzer or a military ambush on military targets in Hebron. From a Christian pacifist perspective, both attacks are wrong, are sinful. But if "terrorism" is to cover all forms of lethal violence, be it against civilian or military targets, then it clearly has lost any descriptive usefulness and is being used instead to delegitimize all violence carried out by one side (the Palestinian side) while legitimizing the violence carried out by the other (Israeli) side.
One should also note the irony of Israeli officials describing Friday night's attack as a "massacre." Israeli officials roundly objected when in April Palestinians characterized the killing of Palestinians in Jenin as a "massacre." The generally accepted figures of the death toll in Jenin are that a little over 50 people died, half of them civilians and half of them armed Palestinian fighters. In Friday night's attack, all of the victims were armed military or paramilitary personnel.
Again, I do not mean by the sentences above to suggest that, from a Christian perspective, some violence (namely that against soldiers) can sometimes be justified. For followers of the crucified and risen Lamb, violence simply cannot be justified. Christians can and should, however, draw attention to deceptive use of language, language which legitimizes the violence of the stronger party.
Below you will find two pieces. The first is a letter sent from prison by Yigal Bronner, a "refusenik" who has been imprisoned because of his refusal to serve in the occupied territories. The second, from Palestine Report, looks at stories of how Israeli soldiers controlling the entrance in and out of the West Bank city of Qalqilya are demanding bribes (or "presents") before they let people pass.
-- Alain Epp Weaver
1. Letter from Yigal Bronner
Dear friends,
I have been jailed by the Israeli Military for refusing to take part in the occupation of Palestine. I have been sentenced for 28 days in military prison. the reasons which led me to say no to the humiliation, dispossession and starvation of an entire people are perhaps obvious to some of you. Nonetheless, I have explained my motivations in the form of a letter to my military superiors, and this statement is at the bottom of the letter and can also be found at http://www.yesh-gvul.org/yigal-english.html or at http://www.yesh-gvul.org/yigal.html or at http://www.seruv.org.il/signers/24_1_Heb.htm (Hebrew-version).
Please do not hesitate to send my statement to your friends as well.
Shalom, Yigal
In Response to the General By Yigal Bronner
GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.
(Bertolt Brecht)
Dear General,
In your letter to me, you wrote that "given the ongoing war in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, and in view of the military needs, I am called upon to "participate in army operations" in the West Bank.
I am writing to tell you that I do not intend to heed your call.
During the 1980s, Ariel Sharon erected dozens of settler colonies in the heart of the occupied territories, a strategy whose ultimate goal was the subjugation of the Palestinian people and the expropriation of their land. Today, these colonies control nearly half of the occupied territories and are strangling Palestinian cities and villages as well as obstructing -- if not altogether prohibiting – the movement of their residents. Sharon is now prime minister, and in the past year he has been advancing towards the definitive stage of the initiative he began twenty years ago. Indeed, Sharon gave his order to his lackey, the Defense Minister, and from there it trickled down the chain of command.
The Chief of Staff has announced that the Palestinians constitute a cancerous threat and has commanded that chemotherapy be applied against them. The brigadier has imposed curfews without time limits, and the colonel has ordered the destruction of Palestinian fields. The division commander has placed tanks on the hills between their houses, and has not allowed ambulances to evacuate their wounded. The lieutenant colonel announced that the open-fire regulations have been amended to an indiscriminate order "fire!" The tank commander, in turn, spotted a number of people and ordered his artilleryman to launch a missile.
I am that artilleryman. I am the small screw in the perfect war machine. I am the last and smallest link in the chain of command. I am supposed to simply follow orders -- to reduce my existence down to stimulus and reaction, to hear the sound of "fire" and pull the trigger, to bring the overall plan to completion. And I am supposed to do all this with the simplicity and naturalness of a robot, who -- at most -- feels the shaking tremor of the tank as the missile is launched towards the target.
But as Bertolt Brecht wrote:
“General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect: He can think.”
And indeed, general, whoever you may be-- colonel, brigadier, chief of staff, defense minister, prime minister, or all of the above-- I can think. Perhaps I am not capable of much more than that. I confess that I am not an especially gifted or courageous soldier; I am not the best shot, and my technical skills are minimal. I am not even very athletic, and my uniform does not sit comfortably on my body. But I am capable of thinking.
I can see where you are leading me. I understand that we will kill, destroy, get hurt and die, and that there is no end in sight. I know that the "ongoing war" of which you speak, will go on and on. I can see that if the "military needs" lead us to lay siege to, hunt down, and starve a hole people, then something about these "needs" is terribly wrong.
I am therefore forced to disobey your call. I will not pull the
trigger.
I do not delude myself, of course. You will shoo me away. You will find another artilleryman -- one who is more obedient and talented than I. There is no dearth of such soldiers. Your tank will continue to roll; a gadfly like me cannot stop a rolling tank, surely not a column of tanks, and definitely not the entire march of folly. But a gadfly can buzz, annoy, nudge, and at times even bite.
Eventually other artillerymen, drivers, and commanders, who will observe the senseless killings and endless cycle of violence will also begin to think and buzz. We are already hundreds strong. And at the end of the day, our buzzing will turn into a deafening roar, a roar that will echo in your ears and in those of your children. Our protest will be recorded in the history books, for all generations to see.
So general, before you shoo me away, perhaps you too should begin to think.
Sincerely,
Yigal Bronner
2. Forced bribes at Israeli military checkpoints
Sa'id Muwafi
Published at http://www.palestinereport.org, November 6, 2002.
MUHAMMED HUSSEIN was unable to convince Israeli soldiers stationed at the military checkpoint east of Qalqilya City to let him cross and deliver his load of vegetables on the other side. At least, not until he submitted to their demand that he pay a bribe in return for crossing.
"There is no way I could have crossed the checkpoint other than by agreeing to give the soldiers a cell phone," said Hussein angrily. He had waited for hours inside his truck for permission to cross, to no avail.
The residents of Qalqilya, and particularly truck drivers, suffer daily from arbitrary measures enforced by Israeli soldiers. The soldiers prevent residents from crossing the checkpoint and transporting merchandise without handing over a bribe. Adding insult to injury, the soldiers call these bribes "presents" in attempt to disguise the true nature of the disgraceful and immoral act.
Another truck driver, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that the soldiers stipulated he bring them a large can of olive oil in order to cross the checkpoint every day. "What can we do?" he asked. "We cannot transport our products except through this checkpoint, and this is exactly where soldiers from the world's 'strongest' and most corrupt army are stationed."
The occupying Israeli army placed a tight military siege on Qalqilya city two years ago, and restricts residents' movement to the city's eastern entrance. The Israeli forces also prevent trucks from driving on the main roads. Truck drivers must therefore unload their goods on one side of the checkpoint and then other trucks with Israeli license plates transport their goods to markets outside the city.
Isra' Muhammad, a resident of Qalqilya, said that Israeli soldiers held her up at the checkpoint for two hours. She was returning home after a visit to Jordan, and the soldiers finally let her cross after she surrendered several packs of cigarettes she had brought for one of her brothers, she said.
Qalqilya mayor Ma'ruf Zahran has received numerous complaints about Israeli soldiers blackmailing local residents and requesting bribes in return for allowing them to cross the checkpoint. He has submitted a number of grievances to international human rights organizations, requesting that they intervene to stop these actions.
A number of residents who have been forced to pay bribes do not want to file cases because they are afraid of the Israeli soldiers.
Zahran is worried about Qalqilya residents' increased suffering from the effects of the Israeli siege. "The Israeli forces are aiming to tighten the siege on the city and escalate attacks on civilian institutions to force the residents of Qalqilya, which lies only three kilometers from the Green Line, to migrate," says Zahran.
The Israeli siege has decreased the city's gross income by 90 percent, reports Zahran. Qalqilya's streets are always half empty, a sore reminder of the city's economic recession on the city. The economic situation has had a negative effect on residents' abilities to procure even the basic 2002.(c)Palestine necessities of life.
Translated by Jennifer Peterson from Al Ayyam on November 3
November 20, 2002
On Saturday I sent out a prayer request asking people to pray for the friends and families of those 12 Israelis killed in Hebron this past Friday evening. I take it as a given that Christians are called to mourn and grieve when any of God's beloved children is killed. I would therefore reiterate my prayer request. I would at the same time suggest that the way in which the Friday attack was initially described by spokespeople for the State of Israel demonstrates the deceptive use of language, particularly the discourse of "terrorism."
Shortly after Friday night's attack, Israeli officials were describing it as a "massacre" of worshippers on their way home from prayer. This description of Friday's events was passed on during Friday's and Saturday's news bulletins. By Saturday, however, a different picture of Friday's events was emerging. The 12 Israeli dead (three Palestinians who carried out the attack were also killed) consisted of soldiers, Border Police officers, and armed members of the security team of the Kiryat Arba settlement. The attack was thus not on civilian worshippers returning home from prayers at Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs but on armed military and paramilitary personnel. Amos Harel, military correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, presented the following analysis (Nov. 17, 2002): "Those killed Friday were killed in combat. All of the victims were armed fighters, who were more or less trained. They fell victim to a well-planned ambush that included both machine-gun fire and grenades, which trapped them in a compromising situation they found hard to overcome. There is a vast difference between what happened on Friday night and the horrific massacres carried out by Palestinian terrorists in
civilian settlements."
This incident should highlight the ambiguous (at best) use of the word "terrorism." Israel classifies all Palestinian violence as "terrorism," be it an attack on children in their home in Kibbutz Metzer or a military ambush on military targets in Hebron. From a Christian pacifist perspective, both attacks are wrong, are sinful. But if "terrorism" is to cover all forms of lethal violence, be it against civilian or military targets, then it clearly has lost any descriptive usefulness and is being used instead to delegitimize all violence carried out by one side (the Palestinian side) while legitimizing the violence carried out by the other (Israeli) side.
One should also note the irony of Israeli officials describing Friday night's attack as a "massacre." Israeli officials roundly objected when in April Palestinians characterized the killing of Palestinians in Jenin as a "massacre." The generally accepted figures of the death toll in Jenin are that a little over 50 people died, half of them civilians and half of them armed Palestinian fighters. In Friday night's attack, all of the victims were armed military or paramilitary personnel.
Again, I do not mean by the sentences above to suggest that, from a Christian perspective, some violence (namely that against soldiers) can sometimes be justified. For followers of the crucified and risen Lamb, violence simply cannot be justified. Christians can and should, however, draw attention to deceptive use of language, language which legitimizes the violence of the stronger party.
Below you will find two pieces. The first is a letter sent from prison by Yigal Bronner, a "refusenik" who has been imprisoned because of his refusal to serve in the occupied territories. The second, from Palestine Report, looks at stories of how Israeli soldiers controlling the entrance in and out of the West Bank city of Qalqilya are demanding bribes (or "presents") before they let people pass.
-- Alain Epp Weaver
1. Letter from Yigal Bronner
Dear friends,
I have been jailed by the Israeli Military for refusing to take part in the occupation of Palestine. I have been sentenced for 28 days in military prison. the reasons which led me to say no to the humiliation, dispossession and starvation of an entire people are perhaps obvious to some of you. Nonetheless, I have explained my motivations in the form of a letter to my military superiors, and this statement is at the bottom of the letter and can also be found at http://www.yesh-gvul.org/yigal-english.html or at http://www.yesh-gvul.org/yigal.html or at http://www.seruv.org.il/signers/24_1_Heb.htm (Hebrew-version).
Please do not hesitate to send my statement to your friends as well.
Shalom, Yigal
In Response to the General By Yigal Bronner
GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.
(Bertolt Brecht)
Dear General,
In your letter to me, you wrote that "given the ongoing war in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, and in view of the military needs, I am called upon to "participate in army operations" in the West Bank.
I am writing to tell you that I do not intend to heed your call.
During the 1980s, Ariel Sharon erected dozens of settler colonies in the heart of the occupied territories, a strategy whose ultimate goal was the subjugation of the Palestinian people and the expropriation of their land. Today, these colonies control nearly half of the occupied territories and are strangling Palestinian cities and villages as well as obstructing -- if not altogether prohibiting – the movement of their residents. Sharon is now prime minister, and in the past year he has been advancing towards the definitive stage of the initiative he began twenty years ago. Indeed, Sharon gave his order to his lackey, the Defense Minister, and from there it trickled down the chain of command.
The Chief of Staff has announced that the Palestinians constitute a cancerous threat and has commanded that chemotherapy be applied against them. The brigadier has imposed curfews without time limits, and the colonel has ordered the destruction of Palestinian fields. The division commander has placed tanks on the hills between their houses, and has not allowed ambulances to evacuate their wounded. The lieutenant colonel announced that the open-fire regulations have been amended to an indiscriminate order "fire!" The tank commander, in turn, spotted a number of people and ordered his artilleryman to launch a missile.
I am that artilleryman. I am the small screw in the perfect war machine. I am the last and smallest link in the chain of command. I am supposed to simply follow orders -- to reduce my existence down to stimulus and reaction, to hear the sound of "fire" and pull the trigger, to bring the overall plan to completion. And I am supposed to do all this with the simplicity and naturalness of a robot, who -- at most -- feels the shaking tremor of the tank as the missile is launched towards the target.
But as Bertolt Brecht wrote:
“General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect: He can think.”
And indeed, general, whoever you may be-- colonel, brigadier, chief of staff, defense minister, prime minister, or all of the above-- I can think. Perhaps I am not capable of much more than that. I confess that I am not an especially gifted or courageous soldier; I am not the best shot, and my technical skills are minimal. I am not even very athletic, and my uniform does not sit comfortably on my body. But I am capable of thinking.
I can see where you are leading me. I understand that we will kill, destroy, get hurt and die, and that there is no end in sight. I know that the "ongoing war" of which you speak, will go on and on. I can see that if the "military needs" lead us to lay siege to, hunt down, and starve a hole people, then something about these "needs" is terribly wrong.
I am therefore forced to disobey your call. I will not pull the
trigger.
I do not delude myself, of course. You will shoo me away. You will find another artilleryman -- one who is more obedient and talented than I. There is no dearth of such soldiers. Your tank will continue to roll; a gadfly like me cannot stop a rolling tank, surely not a column of tanks, and definitely not the entire march of folly. But a gadfly can buzz, annoy, nudge, and at times even bite.
Eventually other artillerymen, drivers, and commanders, who will observe the senseless killings and endless cycle of violence will also begin to think and buzz. We are already hundreds strong. And at the end of the day, our buzzing will turn into a deafening roar, a roar that will echo in your ears and in those of your children. Our protest will be recorded in the history books, for all generations to see.
So general, before you shoo me away, perhaps you too should begin to think.
Sincerely,
Yigal Bronner
2. Forced bribes at Israeli military checkpoints
Sa'id Muwafi
Published at http://www.palestinereport.org, November 6, 2002.
MUHAMMED HUSSEIN was unable to convince Israeli soldiers stationed at the military checkpoint east of Qalqilya City to let him cross and deliver his load of vegetables on the other side. At least, not until he submitted to their demand that he pay a bribe in return for crossing.
"There is no way I could have crossed the checkpoint other than by agreeing to give the soldiers a cell phone," said Hussein angrily. He had waited for hours inside his truck for permission to cross, to no avail.
The residents of Qalqilya, and particularly truck drivers, suffer daily from arbitrary measures enforced by Israeli soldiers. The soldiers prevent residents from crossing the checkpoint and transporting merchandise without handing over a bribe. Adding insult to injury, the soldiers call these bribes "presents" in attempt to disguise the true nature of the disgraceful and immoral act.
Another truck driver, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that the soldiers stipulated he bring them a large can of olive oil in order to cross the checkpoint every day. "What can we do?" he asked. "We cannot transport our products except through this checkpoint, and this is exactly where soldiers from the world's 'strongest' and most corrupt army are stationed."
The occupying Israeli army placed a tight military siege on Qalqilya city two years ago, and restricts residents' movement to the city's eastern entrance. The Israeli forces also prevent trucks from driving on the main roads. Truck drivers must therefore unload their goods on one side of the checkpoint and then other trucks with Israeli license plates transport their goods to markets outside the city.
Isra' Muhammad, a resident of Qalqilya, said that Israeli soldiers held her up at the checkpoint for two hours. She was returning home after a visit to Jordan, and the soldiers finally let her cross after she surrendered several packs of cigarettes she had brought for one of her brothers, she said.
Qalqilya mayor Ma'ruf Zahran has received numerous complaints about Israeli soldiers blackmailing local residents and requesting bribes in return for allowing them to cross the checkpoint. He has submitted a number of grievances to international human rights organizations, requesting that they intervene to stop these actions.
A number of residents who have been forced to pay bribes do not want to file cases because they are afraid of the Israeli soldiers.
Zahran is worried about Qalqilya residents' increased suffering from the effects of the Israeli siege. "The Israeli forces are aiming to tighten the siege on the city and escalate attacks on civilian institutions to force the residents of Qalqilya, which lies only three kilometers from the Green Line, to migrate," says Zahran.
The Israeli siege has decreased the city's gross income by 90 percent, reports Zahran. Qalqilya's streets are always half empty, a sore reminder of the city's economic recession on the city. The economic situation has had a negative effect on residents' abilities to procure even the basic 2002.(c)Palestine necessities of life.
Translated by Jennifer Peterson from Al Ayyam on November 3
Friday, November 1
MCC Palestine Update #64
MCC Palestine Update #64
November 1, 2002
This update simply comprises of two news pieces which I wanted to pass on before two weeks' worth of visitors and MCC regional meetings. The first, by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass, looks at the plight of frustrated and harassed olive farmers in the northern West Bank. The second, from Palestine Report, provides glimpses into the lives of taxi and truck drivers plying the makeshift dirt roads throughout the West Bank. Regular updates will resume in the second half of November.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1.It's the pits
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, October 27, 2002
Humiliated farmers, angry landowners, human rights activists and army personnel: A confrontation in an olive grove Four frightened farmers emerged from the old Renault that screeched to a halt in the center of the path. "The settlers didn't let us get to our grove," they told their fellow villagers of Akrabeh, who were picking olives along the sides of the path. It was Monday afternoon, four days after the majority of the residents of the neighboring village of Yanun deserted their homes, unable to bear the harassment of the settlers any longer.
The car's passengers turned down the proposal to join two television crews, one foreign and one Israeli, and return to the site where, they said, "an armed settler in an off-road vehicle and another three" people had threatened them with their rifles and taken their car key - returning it only after ordering them to leave.
The reporters continued driving on the path, which winds its way toward Nablus between fields and hills planted with olive and almond trees. In the middle of the path was an off-road vehicle with an Israeli license plate (number 01-478-69), and astride it was a young bearded Israeli wearing a khaki hat and with a rifle slung over his shoulder. In the field next to the path, another young man sat on a tractor (Israeli license plate 57-000-37) that was hitched to a plow. Two young men, both wearing large skullcaps and one of them armed with a rifle, walked alongside this vehicle.
"No photographs," one of the drivers snapped. "I say no pictures. This is my private land and you will not photograph my house." He refused to say whether it was he who had blocked the Akrabeh residents from getting to their olive grove. "I don't answer you. I don't talk to you," he said. "This field is mine all my life - no, for 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 years. Since Hashem [God] created the world." He and his armed friend produced wireless radios and began talking into them.
In short order, activists of the Ta'ayush Arab Jewish Partnership group, Rabbis for Human Rights, foreign nationals in the Solidarity movement, and a few of the grove owners in the area arrived. They stopped their convoy of cars opposite the off-road vehicle and its armed driver. The activists and the farmers began to speak about the right of the tillers of the land to harvest their crops. The driver of the off-road vehicle listened and then told the Palestinians: "You are dead people."
In the meantime, another off-road vehicle (Israeli license plate 12-452-76) and another few Israelis wearing skullcaps arrived in the field. An Israel Defense Forces jeep also pulled up, parking across the width of the path, and an officer with the rank of captain emerged from it. He huddled with the driver of the off-road vehicle, and spoke with representatives of the Ta'ayush group and of the Palestinian fellahin, who complained that they were unable to get to their olive groves.
"Why is he plowing my land and you say nothing to him, but you do not let me harvest olives?" one of the Akrabeh group - the father of a youngster who was wounded by gunfire on October 6 - said bitterly. On October 6, a few young people had gone to their grove to pick olives. A group of armed Israeli civilians showed up and, from a distance, opened fire; one of the Palestinians, Hani Beni Maniyeh, 24, was killed. The police are investigating allegations that Israelis murdered him.
Awaiting the verdict The field that was being worked by the Israeli tractor is owned by the Bushnak family, from Nablus. It has leased the field for decades to residents of Akrabeh and Yanun. In the past two years, the farmers say, Israelis have prevented them from planting wheat in this plot, as they have traditionally done.
The origins of the Bushnak families that live in Palestine are in Bosnia. They were Muslim soldiers who were brought here to reinforce the Turkish army at the end of the 19th century and settled in various places in the country, including Yanun. Although they were not originally from one family, they adopted a common surname that attests to their extraction. When they moved to Nablus from Yanun, they leased their land to the residents of Akrabeh, who gradually began to leave their village and settle in the wadi, the plateau and the hill of Yanun. Payment for leasing the land could be made in the form of wheat, olive oil or cash.
About three-quarters of Yanun's 16,000 dunams (4,000 acres) of land is leased.
"We have a law that a leaser is forbidden to remove the tiller of the land," says a Yanun resident, who on Monday was one of those awaiting the verdict as to whether they would be able to harvest the olive crop.
The army captain explained to Ha'aretz: "There are places where they can harvest the crop and places where they cannot. Those are army orders - not demands of settlers - in order to prevent them from approaching a settlement and perpetrating a terrorist attack."
The settlement of Itamar is northwest of Akrabeh and Yanun. Over the years, its residents expanded their homes onto hilltops in the area. A few mobile homes on each of these hills, along with observation towers and water reservoirs, surround Yanun from the east, the north and the west. The groves of Akrabeh and Yanun abut on the settlement's ever- expanding boundaries.
The captain related that his soldiers had told the olive harvesters that they were prohibited from working the groves "on the left" (that is, the many hundreds of trees on the north side of the path). Those "on the right" can be harvested. "We are letting them harvest in most places," the captain continued, explaining the policy. "That is also in the army's interest. There is a great deal of humanity here. You can ask. They are even guarded." And what about the Israelis on the off-read vehicle and the tractor, who blocked the Palestinians from getting to the right of the path? "That is a different matter, a matter for the police," the captain said.
In the meantime, another jeep arrived, bringing a major, who wanted to talk to the Palestinians and their supporters. Rabbi Arik Ascherman, from Rabbis for Human Rights, was sent to negotiate with him. He returned with a proposal: "If we work on the south side, they will separate between us and the settlers," he said. "Their duty is to protect us if we work on this side." And one more condition: The "boundary" demarcated by the off-road vehicle can be crossed only on foot.
‘Softened version’
The villagers decided to take advantage of the presence of the Ta'ayush group and harvest their crops, even though they thought the terms were humiliating and discriminatory. The closure is causing economic bankruptcy and these days, every liter of oil than can be extracted from the olives is worth its weight in gold. "The only reason the army is letting us work is that you are here," someone remarked. "If you weren't here, the army would tell us to call the police and in the end, it does what the settlers want."
"You were witnesses to a softened version of what we have been going through for the past five years," Abd al-Latif Bani Jaber, the head of the Yanun village council, said afterward. He sat at the entrance of one of the homes whose owners left. He walked past the abandoned houses on the deserted streets with the Ta'ayush activists - who had come to stay over - and related the history of the abandonment of the small village, which consists of three groups of buildings on the plain and the Yanun hill.
"In the past few months, some of the residents left the village and moved to Akrabeh. They couldn't take the fear anymore. We were 150 residents, which gradually decreased to 100, then 87. Last Friday, only eight families were still here." The occupants of the homes closest to the hills and the mobile homes were the first to leave. At first Bani Jaber and other villagers filed complaints to the police about assaults (at the Civil Administration base in Hawarah). "Causing damage to private land, uprooting trees" is recorded under "confirmation of the filing of a complaint" in February 1998; "building a road on land owned by you," the police wrote in July 1998. However, in time, "we saw that there was no point to complaining. No one came to our aid," Bani Jaber says.
Armed Israelis showed up outside houses in the village, preventing the residents from getting to their crops and intimidating them. Sheep sometimes disappeared. One Saturday last June, Bani Jaber was sitting with his wife and children at the entrance to their home. "Those who attacked us in the past are used to us locking ourselves in our houses. That day they came down from the hill and told me to get inside. I said I will sit here wherever I want." He and a few neighbors threw stones at the Israelis in order to scare them off. More Israelis showed up and some of them fired in the air, he said.
Dozens of young people from Akrabeh rushed to the neighboring village to help. The army and the Civil Administration were also summoned. The IDF Spokesman confirmed at the time that there had been an "incident" and that the security forces had separated the "combatants."
In the middle of the night on April 17, someone set fire to the building that housed the village's power generator. The United Nations Development Program financed the installation of a generator to supply electricity to the village and to pump water from the local well into two large tanks that were placed on a cliff at the edge of the village, from which pipes were laid to the houses.
The repair will cost $17,000, but a new generator has not yet arrived. According to one of the residents, it was made clear to the villagers that the new generator would also be torched. The upshot is that since April, the village has had neither electricity nor running water. At the end of July, a group of Israelis toppled the tanks, which in any event were empty.
Since April, the villagers have been going down to the spring and filling jerricans with water, which they store in a concrete reservoir that they built. Nine days ago, two days before the abandonment of the village, they were astounded to discover three Israelis swimming in their drinking water. In the past few weeks, Israelis have harassed fellahin from Akrabeh and from the villages north of Itamar.
"It is known in the village that the assailants operate on Saturdays, in a different place each week," Bani Jaber said. "`When does Saturday come?,' our children ask their parents in fright. People thought that we were next on the list, so last Friday those who were still here decided to leave."
The Nimr family - the father, who is a teacher, his wife and their eight children - left their home together with most of the village residents that Friday, taking their sheep. Two days later, the mother returned with three of her children - her grown-up son and daughter and a three- year-old boy. "We came back when we heard that people came to protect us," she said. "We felt a bit of security." The mother, Umm Nizar, had to reassure the little boy that the Hebrew speakers around him "are not settlers." He watched with frightened eyes and wouldn't say anything.
Umm Nizar said that four Israelis, two of them armed, had surrounded the house a few days before the family left, had fired in the air and demanded that she open the door. "It is a continuing saga. They come over and over," she said. "Whenever there is noise outside, the boy says `the settlers came.'" He doesn't say "Jew," which is the word used for the army. "The army is normal, we are not afraid of them," she said.
Two brothers, Faiq and Ralub Bani Jaber, both around 70, live in a stone house that was built during the period of Jordanian rule. They and their children, totaling about 25 people, refused to leave. Ralub Bani Jaber summed up: "When I saw my neighbors leaving, I felt death."
2. Road warriors
Atef Saad
Published at http://www.palestinereport.org, October 23, 2002.
Also in this week's Palestine Report: Everyone is worried about transfer, but Palestinians inside are already quietly on the move, PR reports. The full magazine is available upon subscription.
RA'AF DARAGHMEH climbed out of the ditch where his truck had buried its nose. Fine white clay covered the twenty-five-year-old from head to foot.
"My truck got stuck after the tire blew out. It was shot out by Israeli tank fire preventing us from going on," Daraghmeh explained as he dusted the dirt from his face and hair.
Without warning, a tank and military jeep carrying four soldiers had rumbled onto the scene, Daraghmeh recounted. The soldiers disembarked, brandishing their guns, and chaos broke out. Drivers traversing the stretch of road abandoned their lorries of merchandise, fruit and flour and raced for cover behind the nearest tree or gully. But Daraghmeh was not able to escape the random gunfire and his truck lurched to a halt between a rock and a ditch.
The truck was carrying three tons of straw and had already made the difficult three and a half hour journey from Tubas to Nablus - a trip that once took just forty minutes. Daraghmeh found shelter between two boulders until the tank completed its "security operation" and departed. Timidly, the drivers ventured out to inspect the damage, and the lucky ones with usable tires went on their way.
But Daraghmeh's truck was immovable, and it took a tire repairman, two new wheels, and the strength of five men to finally budge it from its hole. "I was forced to sell my load for the first price I was offered -half of what I should have gotten," Daraghmeh says. "I spent two nights in the truck because I was afraid to leave it until an armored patrol fired into the air, warning me to get out of the area. I tried to convince them that I couldn't leave my truck stuck like this and they replied with a shower of bullets. And so I left my truck and retraced my steps to Tubas."
The next day, Daraghmeh tried to return to the area, but again the army headed him off. "The day after that, the road - if you can still call it that - was filled with ditches dug by the tanks." Finally, twelve days later, Daraghmeh succeeded in pulling his vehicle out of the ditch. The cost of the required repairs was roughly equal to the value of the straw that the Palestinian had hauled.
Napoleonic measures Incredibly, Daraghmeh's travails are not atypical among the hundreds of Palestinian drivers trying to deliver goods on now nearly impassable West Bank roads. Because the Israeli army has blocked the modern network of highways connecting Nablus to other West Bank population centers, truck drivers are forced to use paths forged by animals. Nasir Yousef, president of the public transportation workers' syndicate in the West Bank, says that the Israeli army is taking the advice of French general Napoleon: an invading army must control the roads.
Before the army clamped down on the traffic routes in late September 2000, the Nablus department of transportation had recorded nearly 14,000 licensed trucks and taxis in operation in the areas of Nablus and Salfit. "Only a few dozen of these are left now, and they work under dangerous circumstances," says Yousef. "Taxis can be destroyed or their drivers wounded, or their vehicles may be severely damaged on the rough roads they are forced to travel." With the exception of a few dozen trucks employed by international humanitarian organizations and carrying permits to cross Israeli checkpoints, most trucks and taxis are simply "out of order."
The measures have decimated the transportation sector and cemented the fracturing of Palestinian communities. A report by the Ministry of Transportation indicates that from the start of the Intifada to September 28 this year, the industry had lost nearly $2 billion and declined to a mere ten percent of its previous capacity. Of the nearly 9,000 taxis in all of the West Bank, only forty percent are now running. While buses used to make a decent day's work of $250, they now average $38 a working day.
Bullets for bread Inside the cities, public taxi drivers aren't faring much better. In Nablus, the twenty-four hour curfew has reigned for over 100 days on end. Even when the curfew is lifted, the city remains divided in half, the split enforced by a makeshift military checkpoint of a Merkava tank and two military jeeps, located just across from the destroyed Palestinian Authority headquarters. During the extended curfews, taxis play a deadly game of cat and mouse with Israeli military patrols that tour the streets and enforce the stillness.
Taxi drivers are always on the lookout for roaming tanks, because if caught unawares they can be lucky to escape with their hide. Unfortunate drivers or those who receive incorrect information can be chased down, sometimes with live gunfire. Occasionally these encounters turn tragic, as in the case of 12-year-old Ibrahim Al Madani, who was shot in the head by an army patrol chasing a taxi. The child was visiting his uncle's home in the Askar Refugee Camp, and remains in a coma today.
"Under such circumstances drivers find themselves with only two choices," says Yousef. "They can either stay in their homes under house arrest and without any freedom to move, work or earn money, or they can risk driving their cars through the city streets in the hopes that they come across passengers."
To navigate the dangerous streets, the drivers in their distinctive yellow cars swap information on the movements of armored patrols. They also benefit from the boys found lingering at the entrances to streets and alleys.
A few days in early September, the Israeli army seemed to ease its grip on the movements of students and teachers on their way to school. The city exhaled slowly. But it wasn't long before the armored patrols "changed their minds" and the strict curfew was reinstated. In just a few days, four children between the ages of 10 and 17 were killed in Nablus, Balata, and Al Ayn refugee camp. Another child lies in a coma at the local Rafidiya hospital.
Hosni Dweikat, 32, drives a shared taxi and was "caught" by a military patrol as he was "breaking" curfew orders. His punishment, meted out by the Israeli soldiers, was to have his keys confiscated and to sit for six hours in the sun.
"Aren't you afraid that they will catch you?" I asked Dweikat when I encountered him on the very same street one day later. He didn't hesitate. "What do you mean? I can't die of worry at home. I am responsible for a family of five. Who will support them?"
A matter of life Making these risky rounds with the taxi drivers, it is easy to see how local merchants have adjusted, too. New businesses have sprung up anywhere there is traffic and passersby. Cafes, sweet shops, mechanics, clothing stands and tiny movable groceries line any remaining thoroughfare, tempting the travelers. At the Ayn Al Faria junction, nearly all of the merchants once had full businesses in the curfewed city of Nablus. They, too, are trying to survive.
Fifty-three-year-old Atef Ashour is one of those who has given up. He sold his old truck for lack of work. "I have driven trucks for more than thirty years and I don't remember ever going through circumstances like this in the past," he says. "Truck drivers find work even in the worst of times. We transport food, vegetables, medicine and other things that people can't go without." Ashour worked all through the Intifada of the eighties, he says, but now he can't afford to maintain his truck. "Trucks and taxis are built to move. Without work, they die."
Several weeks ago, the Nablus curfew was lifted for five hours and truck driver Mahmoud Marzouq was asked to deliver shoes and baby towels to a Hebron merchant who was waiting at a nearby crossroads to pick up the merchandise. The Al Bazan intersection is some fifteen minutes from Nablus, but Marzouq and six other drivers were forced to take rough back roads that locals have dubbed "Tora Bora," after the vast intimidating Afghani mountains pictured on television over the last year.
On this road, the trip to Al Bazan takes three hours. But, as luck would have it, not far from Beit Fureik, the six trucks were stopped in their tracks by an Israeli military patrol.
"They didn't speak to us," says Marzouq. "The soldiers just opened fire on my front tires. My colleague's truck stopped when they shot out his back tire, and it flattened immediately. The goods he was carrying, pants and shirts, fell to the ground. The soldiers ordered us to remove our clothes to make sure that we weren't wearing explosives belts. Then they confiscated our keys and identification cards and left."
"We spent the night in our damaged trucks, and the next day began to look for a tire mechanic," continued one of the six drivers. "Then the patrol came back and took us to the army camp in Hawareh where an officer questioned us, asking 'Are you breaking the curfew?' We immediately admitted to doing so, and then he asked us, 'Why are you breaking the curfew when you know it will cost you dearly?'"
Marzouq picks up the story, saying, "We told him that we have gone without work and income for six months." The officer let the truck drivers off with a warning. Next time, he said, each would be fined the equivalent of $1,000 and their vehicles impounded, not counting the $60 a day for storage every day the car remains in dock. Released for now, the group finally found mechanics in Beit Fureik who brought them new tires - at a fee of $250 a pair.
Would they do it again? "By god," says Marzouq, "I don't have even a sack of rice, and I can't find anyone who will give me a loan. No one has surplus money to loan to those who need it." Over the last three months, Marzuq the father of two has only hauled four deliveries. "We are only living because we are not dead," he says.
Published 23/10/02
November 1, 2002
This update simply comprises of two news pieces which I wanted to pass on before two weeks' worth of visitors and MCC regional meetings. The first, by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass, looks at the plight of frustrated and harassed olive farmers in the northern West Bank. The second, from Palestine Report, provides glimpses into the lives of taxi and truck drivers plying the makeshift dirt roads throughout the West Bank. Regular updates will resume in the second half of November.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1.It's the pits
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, October 27, 2002
Humiliated farmers, angry landowners, human rights activists and army personnel: A confrontation in an olive grove Four frightened farmers emerged from the old Renault that screeched to a halt in the center of the path. "The settlers didn't let us get to our grove," they told their fellow villagers of Akrabeh, who were picking olives along the sides of the path. It was Monday afternoon, four days after the majority of the residents of the neighboring village of Yanun deserted their homes, unable to bear the harassment of the settlers any longer.
The car's passengers turned down the proposal to join two television crews, one foreign and one Israeli, and return to the site where, they said, "an armed settler in an off-road vehicle and another three" people had threatened them with their rifles and taken their car key - returning it only after ordering them to leave.
The reporters continued driving on the path, which winds its way toward Nablus between fields and hills planted with olive and almond trees. In the middle of the path was an off-road vehicle with an Israeli license plate (number 01-478-69), and astride it was a young bearded Israeli wearing a khaki hat and with a rifle slung over his shoulder. In the field next to the path, another young man sat on a tractor (Israeli license plate 57-000-37) that was hitched to a plow. Two young men, both wearing large skullcaps and one of them armed with a rifle, walked alongside this vehicle.
"No photographs," one of the drivers snapped. "I say no pictures. This is my private land and you will not photograph my house." He refused to say whether it was he who had blocked the Akrabeh residents from getting to their olive grove. "I don't answer you. I don't talk to you," he said. "This field is mine all my life - no, for 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 years. Since Hashem [God] created the world." He and his armed friend produced wireless radios and began talking into them.
In short order, activists of the Ta'ayush Arab Jewish Partnership group, Rabbis for Human Rights, foreign nationals in the Solidarity movement, and a few of the grove owners in the area arrived. They stopped their convoy of cars opposite the off-road vehicle and its armed driver. The activists and the farmers began to speak about the right of the tillers of the land to harvest their crops. The driver of the off-road vehicle listened and then told the Palestinians: "You are dead people."
In the meantime, another off-road vehicle (Israeli license plate 12-452-76) and another few Israelis wearing skullcaps arrived in the field. An Israel Defense Forces jeep also pulled up, parking across the width of the path, and an officer with the rank of captain emerged from it. He huddled with the driver of the off-road vehicle, and spoke with representatives of the Ta'ayush group and of the Palestinian fellahin, who complained that they were unable to get to their olive groves.
"Why is he plowing my land and you say nothing to him, but you do not let me harvest olives?" one of the Akrabeh group - the father of a youngster who was wounded by gunfire on October 6 - said bitterly. On October 6, a few young people had gone to their grove to pick olives. A group of armed Israeli civilians showed up and, from a distance, opened fire; one of the Palestinians, Hani Beni Maniyeh, 24, was killed. The police are investigating allegations that Israelis murdered him.
Awaiting the verdict The field that was being worked by the Israeli tractor is owned by the Bushnak family, from Nablus. It has leased the field for decades to residents of Akrabeh and Yanun. In the past two years, the farmers say, Israelis have prevented them from planting wheat in this plot, as they have traditionally done.
The origins of the Bushnak families that live in Palestine are in Bosnia. They were Muslim soldiers who were brought here to reinforce the Turkish army at the end of the 19th century and settled in various places in the country, including Yanun. Although they were not originally from one family, they adopted a common surname that attests to their extraction. When they moved to Nablus from Yanun, they leased their land to the residents of Akrabeh, who gradually began to leave their village and settle in the wadi, the plateau and the hill of Yanun. Payment for leasing the land could be made in the form of wheat, olive oil or cash.
About three-quarters of Yanun's 16,000 dunams (4,000 acres) of land is leased.
"We have a law that a leaser is forbidden to remove the tiller of the land," says a Yanun resident, who on Monday was one of those awaiting the verdict as to whether they would be able to harvest the olive crop.
The army captain explained to Ha'aretz: "There are places where they can harvest the crop and places where they cannot. Those are army orders - not demands of settlers - in order to prevent them from approaching a settlement and perpetrating a terrorist attack."
The settlement of Itamar is northwest of Akrabeh and Yanun. Over the years, its residents expanded their homes onto hilltops in the area. A few mobile homes on each of these hills, along with observation towers and water reservoirs, surround Yanun from the east, the north and the west. The groves of Akrabeh and Yanun abut on the settlement's ever- expanding boundaries.
The captain related that his soldiers had told the olive harvesters that they were prohibited from working the groves "on the left" (that is, the many hundreds of trees on the north side of the path). Those "on the right" can be harvested. "We are letting them harvest in most places," the captain continued, explaining the policy. "That is also in the army's interest. There is a great deal of humanity here. You can ask. They are even guarded." And what about the Israelis on the off-read vehicle and the tractor, who blocked the Palestinians from getting to the right of the path? "That is a different matter, a matter for the police," the captain said.
In the meantime, another jeep arrived, bringing a major, who wanted to talk to the Palestinians and their supporters. Rabbi Arik Ascherman, from Rabbis for Human Rights, was sent to negotiate with him. He returned with a proposal: "If we work on the south side, they will separate between us and the settlers," he said. "Their duty is to protect us if we work on this side." And one more condition: The "boundary" demarcated by the off-road vehicle can be crossed only on foot.
‘Softened version’
The villagers decided to take advantage of the presence of the Ta'ayush group and harvest their crops, even though they thought the terms were humiliating and discriminatory. The closure is causing economic bankruptcy and these days, every liter of oil than can be extracted from the olives is worth its weight in gold. "The only reason the army is letting us work is that you are here," someone remarked. "If you weren't here, the army would tell us to call the police and in the end, it does what the settlers want."
"You were witnesses to a softened version of what we have been going through for the past five years," Abd al-Latif Bani Jaber, the head of the Yanun village council, said afterward. He sat at the entrance of one of the homes whose owners left. He walked past the abandoned houses on the deserted streets with the Ta'ayush activists - who had come to stay over - and related the history of the abandonment of the small village, which consists of three groups of buildings on the plain and the Yanun hill.
"In the past few months, some of the residents left the village and moved to Akrabeh. They couldn't take the fear anymore. We were 150 residents, which gradually decreased to 100, then 87. Last Friday, only eight families were still here." The occupants of the homes closest to the hills and the mobile homes were the first to leave. At first Bani Jaber and other villagers filed complaints to the police about assaults (at the Civil Administration base in Hawarah). "Causing damage to private land, uprooting trees" is recorded under "confirmation of the filing of a complaint" in February 1998; "building a road on land owned by you," the police wrote in July 1998. However, in time, "we saw that there was no point to complaining. No one came to our aid," Bani Jaber says.
Armed Israelis showed up outside houses in the village, preventing the residents from getting to their crops and intimidating them. Sheep sometimes disappeared. One Saturday last June, Bani Jaber was sitting with his wife and children at the entrance to their home. "Those who attacked us in the past are used to us locking ourselves in our houses. That day they came down from the hill and told me to get inside. I said I will sit here wherever I want." He and a few neighbors threw stones at the Israelis in order to scare them off. More Israelis showed up and some of them fired in the air, he said.
Dozens of young people from Akrabeh rushed to the neighboring village to help. The army and the Civil Administration were also summoned. The IDF Spokesman confirmed at the time that there had been an "incident" and that the security forces had separated the "combatants."
In the middle of the night on April 17, someone set fire to the building that housed the village's power generator. The United Nations Development Program financed the installation of a generator to supply electricity to the village and to pump water from the local well into two large tanks that were placed on a cliff at the edge of the village, from which pipes were laid to the houses.
The repair will cost $17,000, but a new generator has not yet arrived. According to one of the residents, it was made clear to the villagers that the new generator would also be torched. The upshot is that since April, the village has had neither electricity nor running water. At the end of July, a group of Israelis toppled the tanks, which in any event were empty.
Since April, the villagers have been going down to the spring and filling jerricans with water, which they store in a concrete reservoir that they built. Nine days ago, two days before the abandonment of the village, they were astounded to discover three Israelis swimming in their drinking water. In the past few weeks, Israelis have harassed fellahin from Akrabeh and from the villages north of Itamar.
"It is known in the village that the assailants operate on Saturdays, in a different place each week," Bani Jaber said. "`When does Saturday come?,' our children ask their parents in fright. People thought that we were next on the list, so last Friday those who were still here decided to leave."
The Nimr family - the father, who is a teacher, his wife and their eight children - left their home together with most of the village residents that Friday, taking their sheep. Two days later, the mother returned with three of her children - her grown-up son and daughter and a three- year-old boy. "We came back when we heard that people came to protect us," she said. "We felt a bit of security." The mother, Umm Nizar, had to reassure the little boy that the Hebrew speakers around him "are not settlers." He watched with frightened eyes and wouldn't say anything.
Umm Nizar said that four Israelis, two of them armed, had surrounded the house a few days before the family left, had fired in the air and demanded that she open the door. "It is a continuing saga. They come over and over," she said. "Whenever there is noise outside, the boy says `the settlers came.'" He doesn't say "Jew," which is the word used for the army. "The army is normal, we are not afraid of them," she said.
Two brothers, Faiq and Ralub Bani Jaber, both around 70, live in a stone house that was built during the period of Jordanian rule. They and their children, totaling about 25 people, refused to leave. Ralub Bani Jaber summed up: "When I saw my neighbors leaving, I felt death."
2. Road warriors
Atef Saad
Published at http://www.palestinereport.org, October 23, 2002.
Also in this week's Palestine Report: Everyone is worried about transfer, but Palestinians inside are already quietly on the move, PR reports. The full magazine is available upon subscription.
RA'AF DARAGHMEH climbed out of the ditch where his truck had buried its nose. Fine white clay covered the twenty-five-year-old from head to foot.
"My truck got stuck after the tire blew out. It was shot out by Israeli tank fire preventing us from going on," Daraghmeh explained as he dusted the dirt from his face and hair.
Without warning, a tank and military jeep carrying four soldiers had rumbled onto the scene, Daraghmeh recounted. The soldiers disembarked, brandishing their guns, and chaos broke out. Drivers traversing the stretch of road abandoned their lorries of merchandise, fruit and flour and raced for cover behind the nearest tree or gully. But Daraghmeh was not able to escape the random gunfire and his truck lurched to a halt between a rock and a ditch.
The truck was carrying three tons of straw and had already made the difficult three and a half hour journey from Tubas to Nablus - a trip that once took just forty minutes. Daraghmeh found shelter between two boulders until the tank completed its "security operation" and departed. Timidly, the drivers ventured out to inspect the damage, and the lucky ones with usable tires went on their way.
But Daraghmeh's truck was immovable, and it took a tire repairman, two new wheels, and the strength of five men to finally budge it from its hole. "I was forced to sell my load for the first price I was offered -half of what I should have gotten," Daraghmeh says. "I spent two nights in the truck because I was afraid to leave it until an armored patrol fired into the air, warning me to get out of the area. I tried to convince them that I couldn't leave my truck stuck like this and they replied with a shower of bullets. And so I left my truck and retraced my steps to Tubas."
The next day, Daraghmeh tried to return to the area, but again the army headed him off. "The day after that, the road - if you can still call it that - was filled with ditches dug by the tanks." Finally, twelve days later, Daraghmeh succeeded in pulling his vehicle out of the ditch. The cost of the required repairs was roughly equal to the value of the straw that the Palestinian had hauled.
Napoleonic measures Incredibly, Daraghmeh's travails are not atypical among the hundreds of Palestinian drivers trying to deliver goods on now nearly impassable West Bank roads. Because the Israeli army has blocked the modern network of highways connecting Nablus to other West Bank population centers, truck drivers are forced to use paths forged by animals. Nasir Yousef, president of the public transportation workers' syndicate in the West Bank, says that the Israeli army is taking the advice of French general Napoleon: an invading army must control the roads.
Before the army clamped down on the traffic routes in late September 2000, the Nablus department of transportation had recorded nearly 14,000 licensed trucks and taxis in operation in the areas of Nablus and Salfit. "Only a few dozen of these are left now, and they work under dangerous circumstances," says Yousef. "Taxis can be destroyed or their drivers wounded, or their vehicles may be severely damaged on the rough roads they are forced to travel." With the exception of a few dozen trucks employed by international humanitarian organizations and carrying permits to cross Israeli checkpoints, most trucks and taxis are simply "out of order."
The measures have decimated the transportation sector and cemented the fracturing of Palestinian communities. A report by the Ministry of Transportation indicates that from the start of the Intifada to September 28 this year, the industry had lost nearly $2 billion and declined to a mere ten percent of its previous capacity. Of the nearly 9,000 taxis in all of the West Bank, only forty percent are now running. While buses used to make a decent day's work of $250, they now average $38 a working day.
Bullets for bread Inside the cities, public taxi drivers aren't faring much better. In Nablus, the twenty-four hour curfew has reigned for over 100 days on end. Even when the curfew is lifted, the city remains divided in half, the split enforced by a makeshift military checkpoint of a Merkava tank and two military jeeps, located just across from the destroyed Palestinian Authority headquarters. During the extended curfews, taxis play a deadly game of cat and mouse with Israeli military patrols that tour the streets and enforce the stillness.
Taxi drivers are always on the lookout for roaming tanks, because if caught unawares they can be lucky to escape with their hide. Unfortunate drivers or those who receive incorrect information can be chased down, sometimes with live gunfire. Occasionally these encounters turn tragic, as in the case of 12-year-old Ibrahim Al Madani, who was shot in the head by an army patrol chasing a taxi. The child was visiting his uncle's home in the Askar Refugee Camp, and remains in a coma today.
"Under such circumstances drivers find themselves with only two choices," says Yousef. "They can either stay in their homes under house arrest and without any freedom to move, work or earn money, or they can risk driving their cars through the city streets in the hopes that they come across passengers."
To navigate the dangerous streets, the drivers in their distinctive yellow cars swap information on the movements of armored patrols. They also benefit from the boys found lingering at the entrances to streets and alleys.
A few days in early September, the Israeli army seemed to ease its grip on the movements of students and teachers on their way to school. The city exhaled slowly. But it wasn't long before the armored patrols "changed their minds" and the strict curfew was reinstated. In just a few days, four children between the ages of 10 and 17 were killed in Nablus, Balata, and Al Ayn refugee camp. Another child lies in a coma at the local Rafidiya hospital.
Hosni Dweikat, 32, drives a shared taxi and was "caught" by a military patrol as he was "breaking" curfew orders. His punishment, meted out by the Israeli soldiers, was to have his keys confiscated and to sit for six hours in the sun.
"Aren't you afraid that they will catch you?" I asked Dweikat when I encountered him on the very same street one day later. He didn't hesitate. "What do you mean? I can't die of worry at home. I am responsible for a family of five. Who will support them?"
A matter of life Making these risky rounds with the taxi drivers, it is easy to see how local merchants have adjusted, too. New businesses have sprung up anywhere there is traffic and passersby. Cafes, sweet shops, mechanics, clothing stands and tiny movable groceries line any remaining thoroughfare, tempting the travelers. At the Ayn Al Faria junction, nearly all of the merchants once had full businesses in the curfewed city of Nablus. They, too, are trying to survive.
Fifty-three-year-old Atef Ashour is one of those who has given up. He sold his old truck for lack of work. "I have driven trucks for more than thirty years and I don't remember ever going through circumstances like this in the past," he says. "Truck drivers find work even in the worst of times. We transport food, vegetables, medicine and other things that people can't go without." Ashour worked all through the Intifada of the eighties, he says, but now he can't afford to maintain his truck. "Trucks and taxis are built to move. Without work, they die."
Several weeks ago, the Nablus curfew was lifted for five hours and truck driver Mahmoud Marzouq was asked to deliver shoes and baby towels to a Hebron merchant who was waiting at a nearby crossroads to pick up the merchandise. The Al Bazan intersection is some fifteen minutes from Nablus, but Marzouq and six other drivers were forced to take rough back roads that locals have dubbed "Tora Bora," after the vast intimidating Afghani mountains pictured on television over the last year.
On this road, the trip to Al Bazan takes three hours. But, as luck would have it, not far from Beit Fureik, the six trucks were stopped in their tracks by an Israeli military patrol.
"They didn't speak to us," says Marzouq. "The soldiers just opened fire on my front tires. My colleague's truck stopped when they shot out his back tire, and it flattened immediately. The goods he was carrying, pants and shirts, fell to the ground. The soldiers ordered us to remove our clothes to make sure that we weren't wearing explosives belts. Then they confiscated our keys and identification cards and left."
"We spent the night in our damaged trucks, and the next day began to look for a tire mechanic," continued one of the six drivers. "Then the patrol came back and took us to the army camp in Hawareh where an officer questioned us, asking 'Are you breaking the curfew?' We immediately admitted to doing so, and then he asked us, 'Why are you breaking the curfew when you know it will cost you dearly?'"
Marzouq picks up the story, saying, "We told him that we have gone without work and income for six months." The officer let the truck drivers off with a warning. Next time, he said, each would be fined the equivalent of $1,000 and their vehicles impounded, not counting the $60 a day for storage every day the car remains in dock. Released for now, the group finally found mechanics in Beit Fureik who brought them new tires - at a fee of $250 a pair.
Would they do it again? "By god," says Marzouq, "I don't have even a sack of rice, and I can't find anyone who will give me a loan. No one has surplus money to loan to those who need it." Over the last three months, Marzuq the father of two has only hauled four deliveries. "We are only living because we are not dead," he says.
Published 23/10/02
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