Monday, October 21

MCC Palestine Update #63

MCC Palestine Update #63

October 21, 2002

Blue ID card holders in one line. Orange and green ID card holders in another. That's the system at the Qalandia checkpoint north of Jerusalem through which Palestinians must pass if they wish to go in or out of Ramallah. Neither line moves particularly quickly. Palestinians traveling through the checkpoint for medical, educational, work, or family-and-friend related reasons are greeted by an alternating display of hostility and patronizing condescension from the Israeli soldiers on duty. Hostility: a soldier shouts and runs after some school children who took the "wrong way" through the checkpoint. He trains his gun on them and cocks it; a school girl breaks into tears. Patronizing condescension: a soldier lectures Palestinians waiting impatiently to return home to family after a long day, much like a parent would a wayward child, chastising them for pushing beyond the line behind which they are to wait. "If you don't listen to me, then I'll have to close down the checkpoint," he says in the disapproving tone of the colonizer addressing the unruly "natives." Grudingly, and slowly, the line shifts backwards a few steps.

The rainy season will soon be underway in Palestine. There's no cover, no roof, over the lines at Qalandia. The dust at the heels of those in line will soon turn to mud.

At least, I tell myself, this isn't as bad as the Erez checkpoint into Gaza, where almost no Palestinians go in and out. At least there's still some movement. But movement is getting tighter and tighter, the checkpoints more and more formalized and prison-like with metal and cement fences, barbed wire and sentry posts staffed by soldiers looking through gunsights. It can't get much worse, people tell themselves. But then it does, and the world is silent.

Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Ha'aretz reporter Gideon Levy, looks at what he terms the "fictitious debate" in Israel on the status of "illegal outposts" (in contrast to the presumably "legal" settlements). The second, by Amira Hass of Ha'aretz, looks at inequities in water use. Finally, Terry Rempel of BADIL Refugee Resource Center writes in the Palestine Report about "transfer"/ethnic cleansing, the topic of the last MCC Palestine Update.

--Alain Epp Weaver


1. A fictitious debate: There are no legal settlements
Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz, October 13, 2002

There is no difference between an "illegal outpost" and a "legal settlement": the question of the settlements' legality should not even be on the public agenda. The only thing that differentiates a "legal" settlement from an "illegal" outpost is a piece of paper, usually in the form of retroactive "laundering" of the outpost by the defense establishment. Yesterday's outposts are today's settlements and both are a disaster. There are no "legal" settlements in the occupied territories and there is not one "illegal outpost" among those that are now being evacuated, which was not established without the knowledge and encouragement of the defense establishment. The latest theater of the absurd production in the infuriating history of the settlements project - entitled "evacuation of outposts" - is diverting people's attention from the real point. And that is its only purpose. In this play, everything is illusion: the defense minister is supposedly presenting an alternative policy; the settlers are ostensibly uttering cries of outrage; and a few mobile homes are moved and then brought back the next day. But the worst illusion lies in the fact that the illegal outposts are being turned into the main problem, while all the rest of this vastly expensive and vastly injurious enterprise is considered just, moral or smart. So it has to be said clearly: all the settlements, from Ariel to Asa'el, are an immoral phenomenon. They have entangled Israel in cycles of violence and bloodshed. If they had not set themselves the goal of thwarting every possibility of an agreement - and succeeding in their endeavor - we would now be close to the achievement of peace. The settlement project is a warped endeavor. Its leaders coveted more and more land, settled on it by force or by permission - it makes no difference - and instilled fear in the hearts of their neighbors. Some of the settlers made the lives of the Palestinians so unbearable that they were compelled to leave. The distinction that is often drawn between moderate, moral settlers, who are the majority, and the extremist, violent types on the margins, is also a baseless prevarication. All the settlers, to the last of them, made their homes in a country that is not theirs and on land that is not theirs. As such, they are all equally immoral. Even if the primary motivation of most of them was not ideological, their residence there reflects a criminal ideology. The insatiable expansionist campaigns - another hill, another vineyard - are no less grave than the punitive expeditions carried out by the "extremists" among them. It is not enough to clasp one's hands in sorrow at the sight of settlers (who are never apprehended) murdering Palestinians who are harvesting olives: the Israeli society should have long since denounced the entire camp that settled in its backyard and is threatening to bring about the society's destruction from there. There is no doubt that the settlement enterprise is the biggest success story of modern Zionism. For the past three decades, a small public has been dictating the national agenda. The left can only be envious. The settlers have not been branded with the mark of Cain, and no government has dared to confront them head on. The security forces seem to be struck dumb in their presence. The current war is in part the settlers' fault, but Israeli society has never settled accounts with them. People in Dimona don't ask why it is necessary to spend hundreds of thousands of shekels to armor one bus for the schoolchildren of Rafah Yam, in the Gaza Strip, and hardly any soldiers ask why they are being asked to risk their lives for a group of oddballs in the Eshtamoa lookout. Now the settlers' leaders are demanding the conquest of the Gaza Strip, no less, for the sake of the handful of residents in the Gush Katif settlements. In the face of all this, the Labor Party is presenting its ideological response: the evacuation of a few mobile homes. Against the lust for territories of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Defense Minister and Labor Party chairman Benjamin Ben-Eliezer is brandishing the evacuation of the outposts and trying - as usual in Labor - to have his cake and eat it, too: he is both against the settlements, wearing the mantle of enlightened advocate of peace, and for the settlements. It's time Ben-Eliezer and the others in his party tell us the truth. If he is in favor of the settlements, he must stop the evacuation farce immediately. And if he is against them, he must stop the farce of defending them with the lives of soldiers. For that, no Palestinian partner is needed: Israeli courage will be enough.


2. Scraping the bottom of the cistern
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, October 16, 2002

Where will America and the EU succeed more: In their pressure on Yasser Arafat to lead governmental, financial and security reforms, or in their pleas with Israel to guarantee enough water of reasonable quality and price to 200,000 Palestinians? Another delegation from the UN is in the country to monitor Israeli and Palestinian Authority promises to deal with the severe humanitarian crisis in the territories. The visit follows one in August by UN envoy Catherine Bertini. Her report noted that among other things, Israel promised to guarantee appropriate daily amounts of water to the Palestinians. Behind her diplomatic language was hidden an intolerable reality well known to the security forces and the international community. There are 281 Palestinian communities that are not connected to water supply lines. According to various estimates, more than 200,000 people in the West Bank - and their herds and flocks - depend on water tankers for their daily supply of water. They must make their way several times a day between their villages to the main water sources, which are usually a nearby well. In the last two years, because of the policies of closures and curfews, those 200,000 receive much less than the minimum amount required - 50 liters a day - and the water they do get is of a poor quality, unhealthy, and so costly that fewer and fewer are able to pay for it. Oxfam, the British-based international relief organization, devotes an entire chapter in its most recent report to the impact of the closures on Palestinian villages. The IDF's blockades around every village and the prohibitions on Palestinians traveling on most of the paved roads to the West Bank have doubled and tripled the distances the tankers have to travel from the water source to the villages, so instead of five to 10 trips a day, they can now only manage two or three. Instead of seven kilometers, they have to travel as far as 55 - on unpaved roads. Sometimes they encounter mobile IDF and police checkpoints, which delay their trips for hours. Because of the difficulties on the roads, the drivers demand double payment and more for every cubic meter of water they transport. Unemployed and impoverished, most residents are unable to pay the high prices. The water suppliers are no longer ready to sell on credit. People have sold their source of livelihood - sheep and goats - because they could not afford to keep them watered. In some areas, people have taken to using irrigation water for drinking and cooking. In others, they are scraping the bottoms of the cisterns for polluted water that could cause disease. Everywhere, people are saving water, using much less than 50 liters a day. In some schools, pupils are told to bring their own water. There's no need to describe the hygienic conditions in the schools. More than a month after Bertini's visit, Oxfam and B'Tselem sent a letter to the defense minister and representatives of the donor countries, detailing cases that prove no real steps were taken by Israel to meet its promises about water. The defense minister's spokesman promised Ha'aretz that "the defense establishment is working to meet all needs of the broad Palestinian population uninvolved in terror... [and that] in the West Bank, there is a steady supply of water. When there are isolated problems regarding water supply, it is enabled through tankers and with the help of the army and the civil administration." But there is no connection between those promises and reality. Last week there was a flurry of activity between the Foreign Ministry, the government coordinator in the territories and representatives from the international community over "easing" conditions for the Palestinians in general, and regarding the water crisis specifically. There were meetings, phone calls, complaints and new promises. Western sources reported that "Shimon Peres was furious when he heard the promises were not being kept" about the water. Maybe. In any case, it seems the international community knows very well that it is impossible to stand on the sidelines and continue the policies of internal closure and curfews in the West Bank and at the same time guarantee reasonable water supply to people imprisoned in their enclaves. But they don't have the strength to deal with the contradiction.


3. Of war and population transfer
Expert report by Terry Rempel, research coordinator at BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
Published at http://www.palestinereport.org, October 16, 2002.

FOLLOWING THE onset of the second Palestinian Intifada in September 2000 and the concomitant collapse of the Oslo negotiations process, the idea of population transfer as a means of solving the "Palestinian problem" has moved increasingly from the margins towards the center of Israeli public discourse. Prime ministers, cabinet ministers, military officials, the attorney general, intellectuals, educators and activists have all weighed in on the utility of population transfer. For some, transfer holds the immediate promise of ending the "troubles" in the 1967 occupied territories. For others, it is regarded as the only way to preserve the Jewish character of the state of Israel through a permanent Jewish majority and permanent Jewish control of the most of the land. Israel "is a country in which the streets are plastered with posters calling for a population transfer," comments Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, "and no one bothers to remove them or to indict those who put them up." An increasing number of voices within and outside Israel are also asking whether the threat of population transfer is lurking in the shadows of a seemingly imminent United States-led war against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. How real is the threat of population transfer? The answer lies somewhere in the annals of history of the Zionist movement and in the experience of Palestinians themselves. Transfer is not new to the Zionist movement. As Israeli historian Benny Morris recently noted in The Guardian, "The idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century. And driving it was an iron logic: There could be no viable Jewish state in all or part of Palestine unless there was a mass displacement of Arab inhabitants." Relying on Zionist archival materials, Palestinian historian Nur Masalha has documented nearly a dozen separate transfer plans prepared by various members of the Zionist movement from the beginning of the British mandate until the 1948 conflict and war in Palestine (see "Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought 1882 - 1948") and a further half dozen plans spanning the years from the formation of the Jewish state until the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 ("The 1967 Palestinian Exodus," in The Palestinian Exodus, 1948-1998). More recently, Moledet Knesset representative Benny Elon and the right-wing organization Gamla have produced transfer plans. The transfer "business" seems to generate as much paper - if not more - as the lucrative "business" of coming up with new regional peace plans. Transfer is certainly not new to the Palestinian people. During the first half of the 20th century foreign intervention in the guise of the British mandate and Zionist colonization led to the displacement/eviction of tens of thousands of Palestinian peasant farmers, punitive demolition of thousands of Palestinian homes, and the forced migration/expulsion of tens of thousands of other Palestinians actively opposed to foreign rule and colonization. Just short of half a million Palestinians were displaced between December 1947 and the beginning of the first Zionist/Israeli-Arab war in May 1948. By the time the war ended, approximately 800,000 Palestinians had become refugees. More than 500 Palestinian villages with a land base of 17,178 square kilometers were erased from the map in a process described as "cleaning up the national views." Then, between the end of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 and the beginning of the second war in 1967, tens of thousands of Palestinians who remained inside what eventually became Israel were transferred internally, forced across armistice lines and deprived of their lands. It is estimated that by the sixties Israel had expropriated some 700 square kilometers of land from the indigenous Palestinian community that remained within the borders of the Jewish state. In 1967, some 400,000 Palestinians were displaced - half of them for a second time - during the second Arab-Israeli war. Israel thus acquired immediate control of more than 400 square kilometers of land in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Throughout the post-1967 period, Palestinians remaining in areas of their historic homeland have been subject to continued displacement and dispossession through a process that includes deportation, revocation of residency rights and demolition of homes. It is estimated than more than three-quarters of a million Palestinians have been affected by these measures, as Israel has acquired control of an additional 300 square kilometers of Palestinian land inside Israel and more than 3,000 square kilometers of land in the occupied territories. At the beginning of the British mandate, the indigenous Palestinian Arab population comprised approximately 87 percent of the total population of Palestine and owned approximately 93 percent of the land. By the end of the 1948 War, half of the indigenous Palestinian Arab population was displaced with 35 percent displaced outside the borders of their historic homeland. The Palestinian population was dispossessed of some 70 percent of their land. An estimated 65 percent of the Palestinian housing stock inside the territory that became the state of Israel was destroyed, while an estimated 32 percent of the remaining housing was expropriated and occupied by Israeli Jews. Less than two decades later, after a second wave of mass displacement, the percentage of displaced Palestinians had risen to two-thirds, with nearly half of these displaced outside their homeland. Ongoing displacement resulted in the loss of an additional 16 percent of Palestinian-owned land. Today, it is estimated that more than half of the Palestinian people are displaced outside the borders of their historic homeland, while Palestinians have access to just 10 percent of their land. As such, the Palestinian people lay claim to one of the largest and longest standing unresolved cases of displacement in the world today. Approximately one in three refugees worldwide is Palestinian. In total, 6 million Palestinians - more than two-thirds of the Palestinian people worldwide - are refugees or displaced persons. The lack of geographical and temporal limitations on the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people for over five decades points to a clear policy of population transfer or in more common parlance - ethnic cleansing. While some commentators are reluctant to use to the term "ethnic cleansing" as descriptive of Israeli policies and practices, it is worth remembering that the modern origins of the term ("etnicko ciscenje" in Serbo-Croatian), which conjures up images of concentration camps and mass graves in the former Yugoslavia, initially referred to administrative and non-violent policies in Kosovo, fully a decade before the mass displacement and slaughter of the civilian population in Bosnia and Kosovo. The causes of population transfer in the Palestinian case are both dramatic, as in the case of armed conflict in 1948 and 1967, and subtle and insidious - a kind of "low-intensity transfer" practiced through decades of discriminatory legislation, planning and the administration of "justice." How real is the threat of population transfer in Palestine-Israel today? The fact is that population transfer is ongoing, with or without a US-led war against Iraq, through the revocation of residency rights, destruction of thousands of Palestinian homes over the past two years, the recent suspension of family reunification for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the deportation of relatives of those accused of carrying out attacks against Israeli civilians and military personnel. That, however, is not to dismiss the threat of mass population transfer. While much of the debate about the mass displacement or transfer of Palestinians in 1948 has revolved around whether or not there was a Zionist master plan, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe noted in an October article in Between the Lines that, "Far more important for ethnic cleansing is the formulation of an ideological community, in which every member, whether a newcomer or a veteran, knows only too well that they have to contribute to a recognized formula." That atmosphere is certainly present in Israel today. In part, that consensus explains the widespread looting and vandalism carried out by Israeli soldiers in Israel's massive military assault on West Bank towns, villages and refugee camps this spring. In Israeli discussion, there no longer exists a legitimate Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence, as this very human undertaking has been collapsed into the much broader "war against terror." The international community's response to the transfer of the indigenous Palestinian population from their historic homeland over the past 50 years does not provide a great deal of assurance against the prospect of another wave of mass transfer in Palestine. The international community has and continues to be complicit in the transfer of the indigenous Palestinian population out of their historic homeland. For example, the 1937 Peel Report, which investigated the "disturbances" of 1936-1939, recommended the transfer of the Palestinian Arab population out of parts of Palestine. A decade later the majority of the members of the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of partition despite unresolved legal questions about the UN's authority to recommend partition of a country and warnings that partition raised the very real danger of mass population transfers. Today, prominent experts and institutions continue to promote various forms of transfer, from shifting the existing refugee population around the region (Donna Arzt, "From Refugees into Citizens") to shifting the borders of Israel to transfer Palestinians out of Israel (International Crisis Group), as a means of resolving the historic conflict in the Middle East. Is transfer imminent? The history of transfer in the Zionist movement, the extent of Palestinian displacement and dispossession over the past five decades, the current public discourse inside Israel, the fact that Israeli society has yet to accept responsibility for what happened in 1948, let alone over the course of the past 50 years, and the complicity of the international community all suggest that the threat of transfer, especially as America gears up for war, should be taken very seriously.

Wednesday, October 9

MCC Palestine Update #62

MCC Palestine Update #62

October 9, 2002

"No one should say they weren't warned." So ended a recent opinion piece in the leading Israeli daily Ha'aretz entitled “Preemptive Warnings of Fantastic Scenarios,” penned by former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti. The "fantastic scenario" under consideration: the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by Israeli military forces during a US-led war on Iraq.

Surely this is indeed a "fantastic scenario," one immediately objects, something outside the realm of possibility. Has Benvenisti, a seasoned journalist, veteran Israeli politician, and author of critically acclaimed books, succumbed to paranoia or become a practitioner of fearmongering?

Sadly, no, for, as an American-led war on Iraq draws ever closer, more and more Israelis committed to peace are warning of the danger of "transfer," the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories. Benvenisti argues that, while Israel prepares for a "worst case scenario" of an Iraqi biological or chemical attack against Israel, another, more realistic, "fantastic scenario" cannot be dismissed, specifically, the collapse of the Hashemite regime in Jordan and an Israeli decision to execute "the old 'Jordanian option'—expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians across the Jordan River." It should not be forgotten, of course, that, while he does not say so publicly at present, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been a long-time advocate of the position that Jordan is and should be the Palestinian state.

On September 23 a group of nearly 100 Israeli academics (among them Daniel Boyarin of the University of California-Berkeley and Paul Mendes-Flohr of the Hebrew University and the University of Chicago) added their voices to Benvenisti’s, issuing an "Urgent Warning" under the title, "The Israeli Government May be Contemplating Crimes Against Humanity." "We are deeply worried," the signatories wrote, "by indications that the 'fog of war' could be exploited by the Israeli government to commit further crimes against the Palestinian people, up to full-fledged ethnic cleansing." Israeli peace activists such as Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and Uri Avneri of Gush Shalom have issued similar warnings.

The warning has also been taken up by non-Israelis. Henry Seligman, senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, painted a grim picture in the International Herald Tribune of the future of Palestinians in the occupied territories, accusing members of the Sharon government (including the supposedly “dovish” Labor Party) of becoming "full partners not only in the obliteration of the Oslo accords but in paving the road for the eventual expulsion of the Palestinian population."

How have we arrived at a point where Israelis committed to peace and justice feel it necessary to warn that "fantastic scenarios" of mass expulsion of Palestinians might become a reality? Palestinians would observe that mass expulsions under cover of war have precedents in Palestinian history, specifically the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 by Israeli troops, with smaller-scale, but still sizable, expulsions in 1967. Contemporary warnings of mass expulsions during the looming war against Iraq unfold against this history of dispossession. These warnings, however, also relate to two interconnected phenomena which have grown stronger within the Israeli political scene over the past couple of years: worry about the "demographic balance" between Palestinians and Israelis in all of Mandate Palestine (Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) and calls for "unilateral separation" from Palestinians, calls now being translated into reality.

The relative growth of the Palestinian population inside Israel specifically and in all of Mandate Palestine generally vis-à-vis the Jewish population has been viewed with alarm by most Israeli politicians and pundits, from the center-left to the right. More Palestinians means a threat to the Jewish demographic majority. By 2010 at the latest, most analysts agree, the number of Palestinians will equal the number of Jews in Mandate Palestine, with those Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip denied basic citizenship rights: in short, the recipe for an apartheid regime. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, of course, argues that Israel sought to end this reality at the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000; other participants and observers at the Camp David negotiations, such as Robert Malley, cast doubt on Israel's willingness truly to end the occupation and to acquiesce to the creation of a viable, independent Palestinian state.

For present purposes, this debate can be left to the side. Rather, what should be stressed is that, barring a viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future presents three scenarios. One would be the gradual emergence of a binational state in all of Israel/Palestine; at present, this possibility appears distinctly remote. The other two scenarios are bleak and morally outrageous: "unilateral separation" and "transfer." The first, an Israeli "unilateral separation" which maintains Israeli control over the occupied territories while enclosing Palestinians—through twenty-five foot high guard walls (such as the one beginning to surround Qalqilyah), trenches, barbed wire, and checkpoints—into ever smaller pieces of territory, forms the current Israeli policy. Avi Primor, former official in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and currently a vice president at Tel Aviv University, correctly describes this policy of the current Israeli government as "Sharon's South African Strategy." "According to this policy, the West Bank and Gaza remain in Israeli hands and their Palestinian residents are turned into 'citizens' of a 'foreign country.'" Palestinians might be allowed to call these separated territorial islands a "state," but such a designation would only disguise, not alter, the reality of turning Palestinian cities into economically-dependent reservations (or, to extend the South African analogy, Bantustans). This strategy is without a doubt one of having one's cake and eating it too: Israel remains in full control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip while creating the illusion that the occupation has ended. Palestinians are "virtually transferred," kept out of sight, out of mind, behind barbed wire, cement guard walls, and trenches.

"Unilateral separation" in practice has meant accelerated Palestinian dispossession: more land confiscations, more demolished homes, more destroyed agricultural land. It can be viewed as "transfer" in miniature, a policy which could set the stage for larger-scale dispossession. Meron Benvenisti sharply observes that the Israeli political climate of "hatred and revenge" which underwrites collective punishment in the occupied territories creates a reality in which wholesale house demolitions "are not considered reprehensible steps toward a criminal ethnic cleansing."

The regular statements by Israeli politicians such as Knesset member Benny Elon in the Israeli media urging "transfer," be it "voluntary" or forcible, are disturbing enough. More worrying still are recent comments by Israeli military officers. Eitan Ben Eliahu, a former commander of the Israeli Air Force, opined during a discussion on Israeli television about the "demographic balance" in the region that "we can't go on like this, because in another five, 10 or 20 years we will be a minority here. So we have to step up immigration immediately and in some way also thin out the number of Arabs here." Palestinians, on this nature metaphor, are like plants or animals whose numbers can't be allowed to proliferate lest they overrun civilization. Neither the moderator of the TV discussion nor any of Ben Eliahu's fellow panelists commented on or criticized his recommendation. Ben Eliahu did later concede that "The choice of that phrase [thinning out] wasn't successful"; he refused to elaborate on how the demographic "problem" might be addressed. Ben Eliahu's "thinning out" metaphor echoed the current Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon's description in an interview with Ha'aretz of Palestinians as a "cancerous manifestation" on which the "chemotherapy" of military action was currently being applied. Ya'alon, whose analysis was endorsed by Ariel Sharon, did not rule out more radical "treatment:" extending the pathological metaphor implies an excision of the tumor.

Last spring, in the April 28 issue of the British newspaper The Telegraph, the leading Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld outlined a scenario which "could easily come about," one in which Israel would use the cover of a US-led war on Iraq to drive out Palestinians from the occupied territories using heavy artillery which would make "the damage caused to Jenin" look "like a pinprick in comparison." Ariel Sharon might not be acting as if he has a plan for the future, but van Creveld insisted that Sharon "has always harboured a very clear plan—nothing less than to rid Israel of the Palestinians." Van Creveld noted that "some believe that the international community will not permit such an ethnic cleansing. I would not count on it," he countered.

Perhaps scenarios of "transfer" will indeed turn out to be "fantastic scenarios." For that we can fervently hope and pray. The world's deafening silence, however, in the face of today's curfews, barbed wire, and settlement expansion does little to assuage fears that even worse things could be possible. As a war against Iraq looms, all who desire a just peace for Palestinians and Israelis alike would do well, therefore, to join the call of Israeli academics and peace activists upon the international community "to make it absolutely clear that crimes against humanity will not be tolerated, and to take concrete measures to prevent such crimes from taking place." No one should say they weren't warned.

--Alain Epp Weaver

Wednesday, October 2

MCC Palestine Update #61

MCC Palestine Update #61

October 2, 2002

The siege on Yasser Arafat's compound may have ended yesterday but, sadly, the siege on the rest of the occupied territories continues unabated. Nablus and Jenin remain under curfew. Travel from town to town, village to village, continues to be a (sometimes dangerous) ordeal. Poverty continues to deepen, and, with that, health and social structures disintegrate. Against this backdrop, three-year plans for peace and a Palestinian state, such as the one currently being discussed by the "Quartet" (US, European Union, United Nations, Russia) take on a distinct air of unreality. Multi-year peace plans have brought only increased land confiscation and decreased freedom of movement to Palestinians. What is called for now is for the international community to begin to take seriously UN resolutions calling for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and international law (specifically, the Fourth Geneva Conventions) which prohibits the collective punishment of an entire people. Unfortunately, the international community has a poor track record in this regard. Pending action from the international community, we can at least give thanks for courageous Israeli and Palestinian peace activists--Rabbis for Human rights, the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement, and others--who make small, symbolic, and, one trusts, ultimately meaningful acts of justice and reconciliation, removing a roadblock here, defying a curfew there.

Below you will find two pieces. The first, by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass, looks at some of the "everyday occurrences" in the occupied territories. The second, by Hass' fellow journalist Gideon Levy, looks at the ongoing curfew in Nablus, now past its hundredth day.

--Alain Epp Weaver


1. Everyday occurrences
Amira Hass
Haaretz, September 25, 2002

Last Thursday morning; two huge bulldozers dug into the earth energetically, as they have been doing in recent months, in a wadi north of Ramallah. Over the past two years, with the gradual closure to Palestinian traffic of all the roads in the West Bank, this wadi has become a central and important juncture crossed on foot nearly every day by hundreds or thousands of people on their way to and from Ramallah from the nearby villages and from the Jalazun refugee camp. Taxis drop them off on one side of the wadi and they climb down among the boulders and dirt up to the other side, where different taxis await them. This, of course, is when soldiers are not posted there with their weapons, gas grenades, and stun grenades, who stop people from passing.

Last Thursday, passage was prevented by a police jeep and a military van. There weren't many people anyway because of the curfew on Ramallah (even before the renewal of the siege of the Muqata and its demolition).An ambulance traveling along the road that cuts across the wadi and is forbidden to Palestinians - was stopped near the police jeep and examined.

An elderly woman stepped out of the ambulance and, with the support of a young woman, began to climb on the rocks of the northern slope, stopping to rest now and then on a boulder. At the top of the northern slope of the wadi, a car arrived and a man and a woman in their 30s got out. Both of them were doctors, who had been called urgently to the village of Sinjal (about 10 kilometers north of Ramallah). At night it had been totally impossible for them to get out, and a long, hard trip awaited them, which began with bypassing the police jeep and evading the policemen's eyes and rifles.

All along the bulldozers were at work: A fence all along the road will prevent passage through the wadi and gradually complete the isolation of the Ramallah enclave, which has already been blocked to the south by a fence.

On Monday afternoon, intelligence warnings led to the blocking of all the routes to Palestinian neighborhoods in northern Jerusalem. A curfew was imposed on the village of Bir Naballah. At a large kindergarten in the village, with about 250 children aged three to five, teachers decided to hurry up and drive the kids to the A-Ram/Beit Hanina crossing point, home to their worried parents in East Jerusalem. There is no knowing how long the curfew will last and it is hard to keep so many small children in field conditions. The kindergarten teachers hoped they would be able to persuade the Border Police to let the children through, but instead the police began to throw tear gas and stun grenades at them - from a distance of only a few meters, according to one staff member. Some of the policemen held large dogs quite close to the children, which added to the huge panic. (The response of the Israel Defense Forces Spokesman did not reach Ha'aretz by press time).

These two everyday scenes have long ceased to be news items, if they ever were. This is not only because of the terror attacks in Tel Aviv and Hebron, and not because of the nine people killed in the Israel Defense Forces attack yesterday in Gaza. They are not newsworthy in Israel because they are everyday occurrences. They are not "news" because in the spontaneous catalog that has been produced by Israeli society, and therefore also in the media, they are just more "tiresome" stories about Palestinian suffering, for which the Palestinians are to blame anyway.

No routine, mass suffering, Palestinian or otherwise, is newsworthy. After all, the people who determine the public agenda are mainly politicians and the elite. Usually, "suffering" has to be noisy, if not violent, if it is to be newsworthy and for the media not to cooperate with the authorities in muffling it. But the professional mistake here is that this is not a matter of news items about suffering, the aim of which is to arouse pity in someone. Whether it is a question of Palestinian suffering, or Ethiopian suffering, or the suffering of children below the poverty line - it remains a matter of government policy, hidden from the public even though in the long term, the public is affected by it.

Tear gas thrown by police at little children and preventing doctors from reaching their patients in the villages - this is a policy that is set from above, even if Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not know about these things and did not sign the orders for every tear gas canister and every obstruction of doctors. The less that is known about this policy in Israel, the fewer questions are asked about its efficacy in the long term. The doctors could not go out at night to the village and the children -for fear of the tear gas and the dogs - did not go back to their kindergarten yesterday. But their suffering and their an gerare spurring anyone who wishes to take revenge and has already decided to die – more than the official calls to stop harming Israeli civilians are convincing them. No fence or blocked crossing point or tear gas will deter them.


2. A suffocating curfew
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, September 30, 2002

Sayef Abu Kishaq did not sleep a wink all night on Friday. He is a 21-year-old volunteer in the International Solidarity Movement and a resident of the Iskar refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus, in the West Bank. Slightly before midnight, the residents were startled out of their sleep when the Israeli army began to shell the camp. In the morning, Abu Kishaq started out for the organization's local office, which is situated in the heart of Nablus. He walked across the hills that surround the city, taking refuge in houses along the way when he heard a tank approaching.

At week's end the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) again tightened the supervision of the ongoing curfew on the city: Once again it is dangerous to walk the streets of Nablus. Friday marked the 10th consecutive day of full curfew in Nablus, a curfew that has not been lifted for a minute, and this week will mark 100 days since the imposition of the general curfew, which is lifted only rarely, and for only a few hours, at very short notice.

This is the lengthiest curfew that has been imposed on the largest city in the West Bank. Its 200,000 residents and a few tens of thousands more in the surrounding villages are effectively locked in their homes without a break. Are Israelis capable of imagining what this is like?

For how long is it possible to incarcerate an entire city, to force tens of thousands of people to remain indoors and prevent them from pursuing their ordinary way of life? For how long can Israel continue to abuse a civilian population in this way, citing dubious security needs as a pretext?

Such questions are rarely asked in Israel, mainly because people are not aware of, or do not want to think about, the fact that the curfew in the West Bank, and in Nablus especially, is beginning to reach suffocating proportions. The 200,000 residents of the city are apparently close to reaching the outer limits of their ability to cope with the horrific situation the IDF is forcing on them. On Friday, a few of them tried to get to the Othman Mosque on Amman Street, in the center of the city, in order to pray. For the past month, not a single worshiper has entered the mosque. Others violated the curfew and went out to demonstrate in the face of the tanks that are stationed at the barrier in front of the mosque.

Two and a half weeks ago, the commander of the Paratroops battalion in the city, Lieutenant Colonel Amir Baram, told Ha'aretz: "We will not be able to maintain the curfew indefinitely. We must not 'Hezbollize' the population. We don't want suicide to become the only source of livelihood in the city ... It's impossible to keep the residents cooped up forever." Since then two and a half weeks have gone by and the IDF is proving that it is in fact possible to lock up an entire city indefinitely.

The most beautiful city in the West Bank lies in ruins and the lives of its residents have become inhumane. The Old City of Nablus, where some of the buildings are more than a thousand years old, has been destroyed almost entirely. The Nablus Road is pockmarked with pits that the IDF dug across it in order to prevent vehicles from passing through the city streets. The municipality's Internet site, on which the last report is five months old, looks like a disaster area. It contains only lists of those who were killed (84 in the IDF's April incursion), reports about devastated sites (two mosques that were more than a thousand years old, 60 ancient buildings, 200 houses partially destroyed, 500 shops, two soap factories that were 500 years old, and even the Turkish hamam, which was struck by two missiles) and a list of the location of the roadblocks that are choking the city. Nablus paid the highest price in blood during the IDF incursions, even higher than its famous neighbor to the north, Jenin.

Nablus exacted a heavy price in blood from Israel. Many suicide bombers and other terrorists came from Nablus. However, even that fact cannot justify the harsh and prolonged collective punishment that Israel is inflicting on all the city's residents. From Defensive Shield to Determined Path and Maybe This Time - the colorful names of the IDF's operations - the lives of the residents have become increasingly impossible.

A few days ago, the IDF allowed the schools in the city to reopen, despite the curfew, after weeks in which there were no classes or makeshift classes were started in private homes. But it's not difficult to guess the feelings of parents who have to send their children to school along a street that is crawling with tanks. There is food in the stores, but who can buy anything after three months without income and two years of massive unemployment? Representatives of aid organizations report problems in getting assistance to the hungry and the indigent in the city: Their self-respect prevents them from asking for help or from accepting it in public.

The IDF has taken over a few houses in the city and turned them into fortified positions, forcing the occupants to crowd into one room and unable to leave, in some cases even when the curfew is lifted. Last week the army captured the tall Zafer Building, situated next to An-Najah University, and its 60 occupants are now forced to crowd onto three floors.

How much longer will it continue? The IDF Spokesperson did not bother replying to that question. In any event, the answer would be something along the lines of, "As long as the IDF sees fit," or "As long as security needs dictate this." And what about the lives of the 200,000 residents? No one gives a damn.