Advent Reflection: The Defiant Spirit of Christmas
22 December 2004
Dear Friends,
Seasons Greetings from MCC Palestine. The following is a Christmas message from one of our partner organizations, the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. It offers a powerful reflection from a Palestinian Christian perspective, from a voice that we in North America often do not hear. We hope that the voices of these Palestinian sisters and brothers that are so often dismissed, silenced, and dehumanized speak loudly to you this Advent season, providing both a meaning and a challenge for your own celebration of the incarnational presence of "God with us" this Christmas.
Peace to you this Advent season.
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SABEEL’S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE 2004
The Defiant Spirit of Christmas
On behalf of Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center– Board and Staff – I would like to send to all of our friends, local and international, our sincere Christmas greetings. I would also like to express our heartfelt gratitude for all the support that our friends give us.
May the Joy, Peace, and Love of Christmas
Remain with You
Throughout the New Year
Some of our people ask how can we celebrate Christmas
with all the closures and checkpoints,
with all the injustice and oppression,
with all the violations of human rights,
with the presence of a wall that separates families and friends,
and a multitude of hardships that the occupation imposes to make people’s lives miserable,
how can we speak of love, peace and joy when most of our people and millions of others around the world do not experience liberty and peace?
The questions are legitimate. Yet Christmas and New Year must be a time of renewal, of hope and anticipation, of determination and zeal to work for a better world where people can experience these essential qualities of life. Therefore, wherever empire exists and the powers that be are in control through domination, there is a greater responsibility for all of us to take a stand against all that dehumanizes people and to work for their liberation.
The Christmas story is a story of a liberating God who comes to join an oppressed people in the work of liberation. God’s message through the angels is a message of defiance. In spite of the presence of empire, human arrogance, and oppression, God is announcing peace and goodwill. This is God’s agenda. Glory belongs to God and not to the emperor nor to the powers. Once that is genuinely acknowledged, peace is not far away.
It is in the midst of the Roman occupation that the Incarnation took place;
it is in spite of the occupation that Mary and Joseph found joy and love in the birth of Jesus;
it is in spite of the occupation and in the midst of economic hardships that the shepherds came to visit a family of modest means and discovered great joy and peace;
it is in spite of the occupation that the Magi came to offer their gifts to the child.
We celebrate in the midst of the occupation and in spite of it. Through our celebration
we defy the occupation;
we defy the injustice;
we defy the oppressors;
we defy the powers.
They do not possess the last word,
they can build high walls, but they cannot take away our hope,
they can put us in jail, but they cannot take away our joy,
they can prevent us from visiting family, but they cannot take away our love,
they can stop us at checkpoints and impose all kinds of restrictions, but they cannot take away our pursuit of freedom and liberation,
they can prevent us from going to Bethlehem, but they cannot prevent the spirit of Bethlehem from reaching us,
they can treat us as nonhumans, but they cannot crush our spirit nor can they take away our God-given human worth and dignity,
they can act with hate and disgust but, by the grace of God, we can always refuse to stoop to the level of hate and maintain our love of God and neighbor that includes them.
Therefore Christmas makes us defiant.
We defy the evildoers because we believe in the goodness which they are capable of doing,
we defy hate because we believe in the power of love and forgiveness,
we defy despair because we believe in life and hope,
we defy violence and terror - both state and individual - because we believe in the power of peace and nonviolence,
we defy war and the occupation of other people’s lands because we believe in the power of peaceful methods based on international law and legitimacy,
we defy and challenge those who humiliate and degrade others because we believe in the dignity of every human being.
The Incarnation took place when God took on our humanity, when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This happened in Palestine under Roman occupation. Then as now and in spite of all the hardships, we celebrate Christ’s birth, Emmanuel, God with us, giving us hope, joy, peace, and love.
We are defiant. We are full of hope. We will continue to work for peace through justice.
Glory to God in the Highest and on Earth Peace
Naim Ateek
Sabeel, Jerusalem
December 14, 2004
www.sabeel.org
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Wednesday, December 22
Friday, December 10
MCC Palestine Update #104
MCC Palestine Update #104
10 December 2004
Advent in the “Holy Land”
Experiencing the Advent season in a place such as this is truly unique. It carries with it incredible feelings of closeness, a concreteness even as one visits those sites—the Church of the Nativity, the Shepherd’s fields—that hold so much meaning and that themselves seem to play a role of their own in the Christmas story. Yet at the same time, those feelings of closeness are easily swallowed up by a sense of distance, of separation, of forsakeness as one surveys the situation here.
An example of this might be found in neighboring Beit Sahour at the Shepherd’s Fields. This site is holy to Christians in Palestine and around the world because it is where many believe the shepherds lay, keeping watch over their flocks at night when the angels appeared to them saying:
Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people. (Luke 2.10)
For all the people. We have visited this site several times. It is truly amazing to walk into the caves where the shepherds may have walked or survey the fields where they kept their flocks. But this sense of closeness to the joyful expectation of the coming Messiah quickly disappears as one looks up from this site and surveys these fields more closely only to see a Wall snaking through the landscape that is meant to separate, divide, and oppress people. And if we look even closer, we can see in the distance a housing development where our friends the Sahouri family live. The Sahouris, who having already received demolition orders for their home in order to make way for the continued construction of this Wall, continue to live under the fear that the next time they come home after a day of work, soldiers will be waiting at their front door. And these messengers will not be carrying good tiding of great joy but a simple “you have thirty minutes to remove all of your personal belongings before this house is demolished.”
Our friends at the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center (http://www.sabeel.org/) have provided a series of Advent reflections this year. And with most liberation theologies, this series of reflections for Advent has as its starting point a Biblical reflection on the concrete, historical realties of the poor and the oppressed of this land. The focal point that these reflections emerge out of is found in both the words of the Apostle Paul to the Church at Ephesus:
For he is our peace, in his flesh he has made both groups into one and broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. (Ephesians 2.14)
as well as the present experience of the Palestinian people as this “Separation” or “Apartheid” Wall continues to be built. As you may have already seen on MCC’s “Bridges Not Walls” website (http://www.mcc.org/bridges), these words also form the guiding focus of our advocacy campaign that will continue until the end of this month. As we have urged over these past months we would like to do so again, please consider participating in this advocacy campaign. Such displays of solidarity would be especially meaningful during this Advent season.
A New MCC Documentary on Palestinian Refugees
The time here has been very full and intense over these past weeks with the passing of Yasser Arafat, the various transitions in the Palestinian Authority, preparations for upcoming elections in January, continued discussions about Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza (not to mention the impact of the U.S. presidential elections, recent Israeli politics, and the prospect of the maintenance of a death-dealing status quo).
One project that MCC Palestine has been busy of late with was coordinating for the filming of a new documentary that will look at the situation of Palestinian refugees both in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as well as those internally displaced within Israel. We welcomed two videographers from South Africa and journeyed with them in filming and discovery of the struggles that Palestinian refugees continue to face despite their right under international law to a choice to return to their land. The help of our partners at the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights (http://www.badil.org/) as well as at the Zochrot Association (http://www.nakbainhebrew.org/) was invaluable for making this project happen. The filming is now complete and this video project has now entered into its editing stage. We will be sure to keep you updated on this project in what hopes to be another great resource for MCC to offer for education and advocacy regarding this situation.
(For additional resources that MCC currently has available including the Dividing Wall documentary that looks more closely at the continued construction of the “Apartheid” or “Separation” Wall, please visit http://www.mcc.org/us/bridges/)
On a related note, December 11 marks the 56th anniversary of United Nations resolution 194—the resolution passed guaranteeing the right of return for Palestinian refugees to their homes, villages, and land after their expulsion during the creation of the state of Israel. An event to mark the past 56 years is being organized by one of our Israeli partners the Zochrot Association. Zochrot will visit the former Palestinian village of Al-Ramla on Saturday to learn more about the Nakba, or the “Catastrophe”—the name by which Palestinians remember this event—by posting signs and listening to the voices of the Palestinian residents of this village as they describe their continued experiences of dispossession (we have included an article below for more insight into this).
The Advent Candle—A Light in the Darkness
The season of Advent is meant to be a time of somber preparation and yet at the same time filled with joyful expectation and hope. During the service at the Lutheran Christmas Church here in Bethlehem this past Sunday, I sat staring at the two Advent candles that had already been lit hearing the words from the celebrant
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
But as I sat in reflection, I also recognized that there were still two candles that were not lit—still more light to be shone, still more darkness to be dispelled…expectation and hope…
Below we are including one of the Advent reflections mentioned above from our friends at Sabeel. We hope that the voices of these Palestinian sisters and brothers that are so often dismissed, silenced, and dehumanized speak loudly to you this Advent season, providing both a meaning and a challenge for your own celebration of the incarnational presence of “God with us” this Christmas season.
Peace to you all,
Timothy and Christi Seidel.
Peace Development Workers
Mennonite Central Committee - Palestine
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Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center
For Unto Us A Child Is Born: A Reflection on Isaiah 9.6-7 for the Second Week of Advent
Rev. Naim Ateek
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, the Prince of Peace.
His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time onward and forever.
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 it, 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. 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 in a permanent peace and prosperity.
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: one under occupation (in this case Roman) 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 to the occupied. Most people long for liberation, yet most 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 study war any more” (Isaiah 2.4).
Some of us believe that this vision of peace is achievable for Israelis and Palestinians today. Isaiah’s vision for peace is realistic but conditional. It demands of both Israelis and Palestinians to “…beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks…” Such conditions must apply equally to both the Israelis and the Palestinians and not to the Palestinians alone.
The evangelist 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 pointing clearly to the possibility and viability of a life of peace and love. Jesus has pointed out the way of nonviolence. Dare we follow it?
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The Electronic Intifada
From Al Nakba to 'Anata: 56 Years of Home Demolitions
Jacob Pace
7 December 2004
"I never dreamed I would see my village," she said as the wetness pooled in the corner of her eyes. "I never dreamed I would go back there." And as I watched her choke back the tears, I couldn't help my own. But I wasn't as strong as the 16-year-old refugee girl that sat beside me and I had to reach up to wipe my eyes with the back of my hand.
I was sitting in a room on the bottom floor of the Ibdaa Cultural Center in Dheisheh Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. With me was a delegation from Berkeley Jews for Palestine (a group of anti-Zionist Jewish Americans), the Director of Ibdaa and a group of youth from the Center. Ibdaa is a cultural center for the youth of Dheisheh Camp.
Al-Nakba
The residents of Dheisheh are from 46 villages which were depopulated by Zionist forces in 1948. There were over 418 villages cleansed of their Palestinian inhabitants in 1948 as nearly 800,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes in what is now the state of Israel. Israelis mark the event as their independence day, but for Palestinians it is Al-Nakba ("The Catastrophe"). Today, there are over 5 million Palestinian refugees spread around the world. Many live in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
Al-Nakba stands as the defining moment in the Palestinian narrative. No other event captures the pain of Palestinians so wholly and unites them so closely. The goal of Ibdaa's Oral History Program is to tell the stories of Al-Nakba and of life in the depopulated villages. The program once included taking groups of children from Dheisheh for visits to their home villages inside what is now Israel. Since the renewed Israeli crackdown on Palestinian movement in 2000, however, the Israeli government has refused to allow the trips and has denied travel permits to the children of Dheisheh. Many of the kids have never seen their home village, although most are less than 20 miles from the camp.
The young girl continued to tell us about her village. She explained that many of the homes there had been occupied by Israelis. Other homes had been demolished. In fact, many of the depopulated Palestinian villages were totally destroyed soon after the war when the state of Israel was created. The new Israeli government quickly passed a series of laws to appropriate the vacated Palestinian land and define the refugees as "infiltrators" that were to be banned from the country. In the meantime, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 194, affirming the right of the 1948 refugees to return to their homes. A right that has yet to be honored.
In Dheisheh, as in other Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, life is as unstable as the conflict itself. The refugees have tried to make the camp as comfortable as possible, erecting cement houses and small gardens where once there were only tents. Many have the deeds to their land inside Israel and the keys to the homes which stood there. Consecutive Israeli governments, however, have refused to honor the Right of Return of the Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948. Meanwhile, the more than 5 million refugees wait for their rights to be addressed.
'Anata
A day after my visit to Ibdaa, I found myself in the village of 'Anata in East Jerusalem watching an Israeli bulldozer tear down the home of a Palestinian family. There were two Palestinian homes demolished on Monday (November 29) and another destroyed the following day. I received a call on Monday morning and within the hour a coworker and I were negotiating our way through the Israeli checkpoints between Bethlehem and 'Anata. We followed the Wall winding through Palestinian land east of Jerusalem and ended up on a hilltop overlooking a small valley and the ruins of several house demolitions lingering on the hillside.
The first house was already a pile of rubble when we arrived. The house belonged to the Qaboah family. Jadoah Qaboah had worked for 30 years to raise the money for the two story structure that housed 23 people. Most of the Qaboah family was lingering around the remains of their home. Their furniture sat on the dirt nearby. About 20 Israeli Border Police were spread around the top of the hill, standing with automatic assault rifles slung over their shoulder.
We walked across the rubble of the first house to look down upon another house and another group of Border Police watching a Palestinian family remove the last of their belongings. A Caterpillar backhoe moved towards the house. The owner of the house stepped out in front of the backhoe in a final act of defiance. The machine stopped for a moment but the Border Police grabbed the man and forced him to the side. The backhoe moved forward, raised its bucket and slammed the jagged points into the roof of the house. As we watched, it continued to claw at the house, ripping apart the cement walls and rebar supports. It only took about 10 minutes for the entire house to be reduced to a pile of rubble. Meanwhile, the family could only watch.
The home belonged to the Dandees family. It housed 13 people who are now left homeless. Both the Qaboa and the Dandees families held title to the lands and are in possession of the original title deeds (Tabu) dating back to the period of Ottoman rule in the 19th Century. Both families had applied repeatedly for building permits from the Israeli occupation authorities. The requests were always denied. In fact, Palestinian families in occupied East Jerusalem are hardly ever granted building permits. It is one method Israel uses to limit the Palestinian population of the city. If people cannot build homes on their land they have two choices: either leave the land or build illegally. When they build illegally, however, Palestinian families risk having their homes demolished by Israel. The Qaboa and Dandees families are the latest victims of this policy. They received demolition orders on November 26, giving them three days to destroy the home themselves or it would be demolished by Israel. The bulldozers arrived promptly three days later.
The case of 'Anata is illustrative in more ways than one. Like other East Jerusalem communities, 'Anata has been the victim of aggressive Israeli colonization schemes. In fact, over 90% of the village lands have been illegally appropriated by Israel. Four illegal Israeli settlements have been built around 'Anata and Israeli bypass roads hem it in on three sides. More recently, an Israeli military prison has been built on 'Anata land and Israeli occupying forces have served residents of the village with land seizure documents for the purpose of building the Apartheid Wall. Land clearing operations have already begun to set the groundwork for construction of the Wall. The projected path will cut around the illegal Israeli settlements, surrounding 'Anata on three sides and turning it into a tiny ethnic Palestinian ghetto.
[IMAGE]The homes demolished on Monday were very close to the projected path of the Wall. The Dandees home was only 100 meters (approximately 300 ft.) from the Wall cutting across village lands south of the built-up area. The new military prison is on the hill opposite the homes and there are plans to build a new Israeli by-pass road in the valley between. Israeli bulldozers are also busy on the ridge in front of the prison. A new development project is underway either to expand the prison or construct a new illegal settlement there.
There is so much more that can be said about the colonization of Palestinian land, the ghettoization of 'Anata, and Israel's brutal home demolition policy. Pages of information have been scripted and distributed by Palestinian and Israeli NGO's (The Israeli Coalition Against Home Demolitions has been especially active in 'Anata, rebuilding one home a total of 4 times). The facts are available for anyone to access.
But it was the rapid transition between my experience at the Ibdaa Cultural Center in Dheisheh on Sunday, and the home demolitions in 'Anata on Monday that gave me cause for further reflection. The refugee children of Dheisheh spoke of the loss of their homes. Homes their families had been expelled from in Al Nakba. And in 'Anata, I witnessed more expulsions. 56 years later, the story is startlingly similar. Israeli soldiers came to expel two more Palestinian families from their homes. Two more families were uprooted and made refugees in their own land. The experience of being uprooted is something most of us have never had to experience. But it is a reality for many Palestinian families struggling under Israeli occupation.
Jacob Pace lives in Beit Sahour and works with the Applied Research Institute- Jerusalem (ARIJ) in Bethlehem. His reports and photos are available online at www.rcnv.org/gaza. For more information on the home demolitions in 'Anata, see the upcoming case study on the ARIJ website: www.arij.org.
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Haaretz
After His Death, Still The Occupation
Amira Hass
17 November 2004
On the day that Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat died, five Palestinians were killed by Israel Defense Forces gunfire. Four of them were killed in the Gaza Strip: three in a dawn raid by tanks and helicopters on a section in southern Gaza, and the fourth because he was moving around, unarmed, in an area "forbidden" to Palestinians.
At Beit Omar in the West Bank, a young man was killed by IDF troops who were trying to disperse a procession that was throwing stones and Molotov cocktails. Ten Palestinians were injured in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by IDF gunfire, among them four children and a woman who was severely wounded.
The IDF carried out eight raids on villages and on the homes of various suspects. Twenty-one people were arrested, of them six under the age of 18. In 18 places in the West Bank they were busy building the separation fence; on one village a curfew was imposed. All this is detailed in the daily summary of the Palestine Liberation Organization negotiations unit.
During the week that preceded Arafat's death, seven Palestinians were killed, among them one child. Four of them were killed in a "pinpoint execution" in Jenin, without a fight. Only one was killed in a battle with an IDF unit. Six houses were demolished in Rafah, about 120 dunam of agricultural land were razed, and three houses were demolished in the West Bank in punitive actions. All this is detailed in the weekly report of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.
The Palestinian Applied Research Institute, Jerusalem (ARIJ) issues a monthly summary of all the activities connected to construction in the Jewish settlements in the territories, including annexations and confiscations. The detailed list for October is already on its Internet site. For example, in western Tsurif in the Hebron area, hundreds of olive trees were uprooted for the purpose of the separation fence.
In Beit Sahur, 14 families received orders for the demolishing of their homes on the grounds that they had not received building permits, even though the houses are part of an Orthodox Church housing project.
Seventeen families in Abu Dis, near the separation fence, received orders to evacuate their houses before they were demolished. Arafat's final days and the funeral - anarchy or not - and afterward the shooting in the mourners' tent - a fight over the succession or not - made people forget that there is life, that is, occupation and death and destruction, with no connection to the chairman. And the talk about how after Arafat it is possible to renew negotiations helps those who like to ignore Israeli intentions, which are embodied on the ground, to prevent the establishment of a viable Palestinian state in accordance with United Nations resolutions.
Now, without Arafat, will there be a reversal of the policy of the accelerated annexation of extensive parts of the West Bank? Will Israel stop the process of turning the West Bank into a jigsaw puzzle of Palestinian enclaves that are cut off from one another by blocs of Jewish settlements? Will it stop setting up roadblocks that are like border crossings, on roads like in the Third World? And at the same time, will Israel continue building for itself prestigious suburbs and roads of Californian width and quality? Clearly it will not.
During the Oslo years, the illusion was spun that the burning task was to "build a state." All the efforts of the countries of the world and their financial bolstering, the behavior of the PA and the addiction of its senior people to the symbols of sovereignty reinforced the illusion. There was a leap in the Israeli consciousness: The PA was already considered a state. A state whose territory was virtual, and where Israel with its military might determined its future borders, the control of natural resources, the registration of the population and its freedom of movement - but this has been forgotten.
As a state it was considered the aggressor, because of the outbreak of the uprising. Arafat's failure since 1993 was not in that he did not become a respected and respectable head of state, of a state that did not exist. His failure was that neither he nor his movement, the Fatah, developed a liberation strategy in the new conditions of Oslo: through diplomacy, through the UN General Assembly regarding the Jewish settlements, through exposing the neo-colonial relations that were enforced by the security and civilian negotiation mechanism, through the million forms of non-violent popular struggle that could have been pursued.
Personal interests and the pursuit of personal wealth by senior people, shortsightedness, objective or subjective weakness, mistaken political calculations, pro-American tendencies - no matter the reasons, the result was that Arafat, contrary to the image that his armed supporters are trying to create today in their scare campaigns, acted before the Camp David summit as someone whose people had already been liberated from occupation and whose state existed.
In the current circumstances of Palestinian weakness, it is hard to see how in the near future a Palestinian leadership will arise that is able to formulate a strategy of popular struggle for liberation and equality in principle, for the rights of the peoples in this land. The demand that it act as a sub-agent of the IDF and the Shin Bet security service will increase the instability.
As long as the individual and collective Israeli interests in the continuation of the occupation are not affected - and it does not look like they are being affected - there is not a chance that a broad popular movement will arise in Israel that will demand a change in the policy of "Bantustanization."
Therefore the challenge is to the nations of Western Europe, who paid generously for the illusion of the construction of the state, and whose governments are still committed to the two-state solution. For how long will they and their representatives be able to bear - politically, economically and morally - the entrenchment of a regime of discrimination and ethnic separation that is being created by a state that is considered an inalienable part of the democratic West?
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The Electronic Intifada
What Palestinians Should Do Now
Ali Abunimah
18 November 2004
The first priority for Palestinian leaders now must be to defend their people against Israel's relentless colonization and violence and not to negotiate with Israeli guns to Palestinian heads. They must formulate a national strategy to regain Palestinian rights enshrined in UN Resolutions, clearly explain this strategy, and organize Palestinians and allies everywhere to struggle for it, starting with full implementation of the ICJ decision on the West Bank wall. Palestinians should seek to emulate the success of the African National Congress that freed South Africans from apartheid by confronting and defeating injustice, not seeking to accommodate it.
If the PLO and the Palestinian Authority (PA) can transform themselves to take on this role, they deserve the support of every Palestinian. If, however, they plan to continue as they have before, they must dissolve. As constituted by the Oslo accords, the Palestinian Authority harms Palestinian interests, because it obscures Israel's responsibility as the occupying power without providing any minimal protection for the people against Israel's continuous onslaught. Its existence has allowed the spurious agenda of "reform" to trump Israel's obligations under the Geneva Conventions and UN resolutions. Palestinian leaders should no longer accept the responsibility for governing Palestinians on behalf of the occupying power. Israel should bear the full cost of its choices.
Yet the conventional wisdom says that Yasir Arafat's death provides an opportunity to revive the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Realities such as Israel's refusal in word and deed to withdraw and allow the establishment of a genuine Palestinian state in the occupied territories have simply been ignored. Dov Weissglas, the most senior advisor to Israeli premier Ariel Sharon, explained in early October that Israel's Gaza "disengagement" plan, which has been embraced by the bankrupt international peace process industry, is actually a ruse to kill--not advance--any peace process. Weissglas said, "when you freeze that [peace] process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda."
Logically, therefore, any "opportunity" for peace through the establishment of a Palestinian state depends either on a clear change of Israeli policy or a clear willingness by the United States and the international community to force Israel to change its policy. So far, the only policy announcement to come from Israel is that it plans a posthumous "anti-Arafat crusade" in the media.
President Bush has has already shattered hopes that in a second term, freed from re-election concerns, he might pressure Israel. At his November 12 press conference with UK prime minister Tony Blair, Bush was asked if Israel should at last implement a freeze on West Bank settlement expansion. He side-stepped the question, placing the entire burden on the Palestinians: "I believe that the responsibility for peace is going to rest with the Palestinian people's desire to build a democracy and Israel's willingness to help them build a democracy." Bush also stated that peace "can be reached by only one path, the path of democracy, reform and the rule of law." There is no sign yet that the EU or Arab states intend to challenge his approach.
Yet at the same time, Bush and Blair declared support for elections in the occupied territories -- a position seemingly in tune with Palestinian aspirations. But elections present both dangers and opportunities.
At a minimum, fair elections require international intervention to protect the Palestinians from the occupier and ensure all candidates have fair access to PA-controlled media and are free from intimidation whether by Israel or the PA. The danger is that snap elections in the West Bank and Gaza, under Israel's crushing rule, will offer no fair opportunity for new Palestinian leaders with new strategies to emerge. Elections must provide a genuine contest and not be mere plebiscites confirming the post-Arafat appointments of failed old guard figures like PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and their backers who control the PA apparatus with money and guns. Ominously, The New York Times reports that Israel, under American pressure, has already released $40 million in blocked PA funds to "strengthen the position" of the old guard.
In the best case, from Israel's perspective, the old guard confirmed in place by flawed elections would continue to offer disastrous concessions as they did throughout the Oslo period. And at worst, they would simply become new scapegoats to whom Israel and the US will deliver impossible demands and then heap blame when they are inevitably unfulfilled. Palestinian leaders must no longer accept this assigned role.
Palestinians should also demand elections in the diaspora as well the occupied territories. Arguably Arafat's greatest mistake is that after signing the Oslo accords, he abandoned the PLO's base in exile. Millions of Palestinians were disenfranchised and the negotiating position of the Palestinian leadership severely weakened because it could not claim that it had to refer any agreement back to its people.
Assistance from the United Nations and host countries would be essential to successful diaspora elections. The recent Afghan election, in which 740,000 refugees in Pakistan voted, proves it can be done. Currently, almost four million Palestine refugees are registered with UNRWA. All exiled Palestinians should have the right to vote and be elected to a Palestinian national assembly with the sole authority to approve any future peace agreement.
This would be in the best interests of Palestinians because it would strengthen and hold accountable any eventual Palestinian negotiating body by ensuring it accepts no deal which compromises basic rights, particularly the rights of refugees. This is exactly why such elections would be strongly opposed by Israel, the United States, the EU, and the Palestinian old guard.
But now is the time for Palestinians to set their own agenda, to build a new movement, and to see who among their self-declared allies really has their freedom, democracy and rights at heart.
Ali Abunimah is a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada.
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The Electronic Intifada
Sharon's Gaza Pullout: Not Gonna Happen!
Tanya Reinhart
16 November 2004
We gather here at difficult times, when it seems that the Palestinian cause has been almost eliminated from the international agenda. The Western world is hailing the new "peace vision" of Sharon's disengagement plan. The day this plan passed in the Israeli Knesset ("Parliament") last week was hailed by Le Monde as a historical day. Who would pay attention to the two line news piece that on that same day, the Israeli army killed 16 Palestinians in Khan Younis?
It is pretty much known even in the West that Sharon's plan is not about ending the occupation. With regard to the Gaza Strip, the disengagement plan published in the Israeli papers on Friday, April 16, specifies that "Israel will supervise and guard the external envelope on land, will maintain exclusive control in the air space of Gaza, and will continue to conduct military activities in the sea space of the Gaza Strip". In other words, the Palestinians will be imprisoned from all sides, with no connection to the world, except through Israel. Israel also reserves for itself the right to act militarily inside the Gaza Strip. In return for this "concession", Israel would be permitted to complete the wall and to maintain the situation in the West Bank as is. The innovation in the Bush-Sharon agreement that approved this plan is that this is not a proposal awaiting the approval of the Palestinian people. Now the Palestinians are not even asked. It is Israel and the U.S. who are determining the facts on the ground. Israel marks the land that it desires, and builds a wall on that route.
For those who oppose Israeli occupation, it is clear, then, that Sharon's disengagement is just a plan for maintaining the occupation with more international legitimacy. However, there is one presupposition shared in all discussions of this plan - that in the process, Sharon also intends to dismantle the settlements of the Gaza Strip, and return the land they are built on to the Palestinians. I should say that had I believed this might happen, I would have supported the plan. The Gaza settlements, together with their land reserves, security zones, Israeli-only roads, and the military array protecting them, occupy almost a third of the strip's land, which is one of the most densely populated areas of the world. Had this land been returned to its owners, it would be a step forward. We should never forget that the Palestinian struggle is not only for their liberation, but for regaining their lands in the occupied territories - lands that Israel has been appropriating since 67. As long as the Palestinians manage to hold on to their land, under even the worst occupation, they will eventually also gain their liberation. Without land, what is at stake is not just their liberation, but their survival.
But what basis is there to believe that Sharon indeed plans to dismantle settlements at some point? Certainly not the content of the resolution passed by the Israeli Knesset on October 26 - the day that has been depicted by Israeli and virtually all Western media as a "historical" day with "dramatic" resolution. In fact, the Israeli parliament voted to approve "the revised disengagement plan", which was previously approved in another "historical meeting" of the Israeli Cabinet, on June 6, 2004. So it is appropriate to check what was actually approved at that Cabinet meeting.
Ha'aretz's ceremonial headlines on June 7 declared "Disengagement on its way". But here are the smaller letters in the body of the report:
"At the end of a dramatic cabinet meeting yesterday, the government passed Ariel Sharon's revised disengagement plan, by a vote of 14-7, but the decision does not allow for the dismantling of settlements and the prime minister will have to go back to the cabinet when he actually wants to begin the evacuation process. ...The decision on the evacuation of settlements will be brought to the government at the end of a preparation period... [that] would end next March 1" ( Aluf Benn, Gideon Alon, and Nathan Guttmanm, Ha'aretz, June 7, 2004).
Elsewhere in that paper it is explained that " there was no approval of actual evacuations... A second government discussion would be held in this regard, 'taking into account the circumstances at the time' " (Aluf Benn, Ha'aretz, June 7, 2004). The only thing the Israeli government, followed now by the Israeli Knesset, have approved, then, is to have a discussion of the idea of dismantling Gaza settlements sometime next year. It was also decided that in the meanwhile, building and development in the Gaza settlements may continue: "The approved plan ensures 'support for the needs of daily life' in settlements slated for evacuation. Bans on construction permits and leasing of lands were also removed from the prime minister's proposal" (ibid). And indeed, on the ground, slots of land are still being leased (for ridiculously cheap prices) to Israelis who wish to settle in Gaza, and building permits are granted by a special committee appointed by the government in the same "dramatic" meeting on June 6.[1]
Still, none of these facts were registered in public consciousness. The actual content of the cabinet decision was reported only once - on that same day - and then disappeared from the papers that keep recycling the stories about its heroic significance. Precisely the same happened in the present round. The fact that the Knesset has only voted to approve "the amended disengagement plan" that contains no decision to dismantle settlements was reported in the Israeli media:
Knesset members voting tonight on the disengagement plan have received a copy of the "amended disengagement law" the cabinet passed on June 6, plus appendices containing the principles of the plan and its implementation... According to the compromise negotiated at the time... the cabinet decision "contains nothing to evacuate settlements." To remove any doubt in this regard, the cabinet decision also states that "after the conclusion of preparatory work, the cabinet will reconvene to separately debate and decide whether or not to evacuate settlements, which settlements, and at what speed, in consideration of circumstances at that time. (Yuval Yoaz, Ha'aretz, Oct 26, 2004)
But again, this information appeared only once or twice, buried underneath bold headlines that even compared Sharon to Churchill. This is how a myth is built.
Another test-case for how serious the evacuation intentions are is the issue of compensations for the evacuated settlers. Since the cabinet's decision in June, many of the Gaza settlers began inquiring, directly or through hired lawyers, how and when they can be compensated. Behind the noisy protest of the settlers' leadership, many are relieved to be able to finally leave, and are just waiting for the compensations. Anybody intending seriously to evacuate them, would start by compensating first those who are ready to leave immediately, leaving only the ideological minority to be evacuated forcefully. Indeed, for five months, since the cabinet's decision in June, both the settlers and the Israeli public believe that this is about to happen any moment now. Again, a faith with no basis.
Special committees have worked with much publicity on every detail of the compensation plan. Many believe this was finally approved by the Knesset on November 4. Only in the small letters of what actually happened one can learn that the compensation law has passed only its preliminary first hearing (reading). In principle, the second and third hearing could take place within few weeks, but it was clarified in advance that the second reading will take place only after the government decides on actual evacuation, in March 2005, or later (Yosi Verter, Ha'aretz, Oct 8, 2004.) Till then, no one will be compensated. As Aluf Ben summarized this, "the Knesset will vote in the first reading of the Implementation of the Disengagement Plan Law, which authorizes the government to evacuate settlements and compensate those evacuated. Then there will be debates in the committees, and a second and third reading... and the law could be blocked at any stage" (Ha'aretz, Oct 27, 2004).
Outside Israel, the details of what was actually decided didn't even make it into the news once, and all that is repeated over and over again in the Western media is the propaganda produced by the Israeli political system - headlines from which one could infer that the dismantling of settlements is around the corner. Thus, the political debate around Sharon's plan concentrates only around whether it is good enough. The possibility that this is just another Israeli deceit does not even arise. And if you try to bring it up, you are perceived as having landed from the moon, as has happened to me in several European media interviews.
Deception and lies have been a corner stone in Israeli policy, brought to a new level of perfection since Oslo. While the world believed that Rabin promised to eventually end the occupation and dismantle the settlements, the number of Israeli settlers actually doubled during his rule. At the same time that Barak declared he intended to dismantle the Golan Heights settlements, in 1999, he actually poured money into their expansion. As Sharon promised to dismantle at least the illegal settlement posts in the West Bank, their number kept increasing. Still, none of this is ever remembered. Each new lie is received with welcome cheers by the Israeli peace camp and by European governments. Since Oslo, every Israeli government knows that all it takes, to ease diplomatic pressure, is to come up with a new "peace plan".
Since Oslo, every Israeli government knows that all it takes, to ease diplomatic pressure, is to come up with a new "peace plan".
The ritual repeats itself with each new "plan" of this sort. The crucial factor in convincing the world that this time "it is for real" is right wing protest. Of course when the government comes up with a new scheme of deception, the right wing and settlers believe it as well. Rabin's deceit has cost him his life. The same threats are now being directed at Sharon. This is sufficient to convince the Israeli peace camp that Sharon is determined to dismantle settlements. Even serious anti-occupation thinkers write articles warning of the danger of "civil war" with the settlers (forgetting that for this to be even remotely possible, someone should try indeed to evacuate them first). The implication is almost unavoidable: In view of this coming civil war, Sharon is our leader. We should all unite behind him, against the dark forces in Israel.
Indeed, this massive Israeli propaganda works. Throughout the Western world, Sharon is now depicted as a messenger of peace, because he has declared that he is willing to evacuate some of the territories. All of a sudden, Sharon is viewed as the sane center of Israel, withstanding right wing pressure. The prevailing perception is that Israel is finally led by a man of peace, with a respectable determination to carry out painful concessions. And as long as this is the perspective, Sharon can do whatever he wants. The Israeli army terrorizes the Gaza Strip. dozens of Palestinians are being killed, including children on their way to school, houses are demolished and agricultural land destroyed.
At the time of operation "Defensive Shield" in the West Bank and Jenin refugee camp two years ago, there was substantial world protest. The last operation "Days of Penitence" in the Jabalia camp in the Gaza Strip has hardly received any coverage. Backed by the U.S., Sharon is realizing with frightening efficiency his long-standing vision of evicting the maximum number of Palestinians from their land. In the spirit of Orwell, it was even explained that one of the aims of "Days of Penitence" is to "expand the security zones" around the Gaza settlements (namely to enlarge their lands, pushing more Palestinians out of these lands), in order to guarantee that when they are evacuated, it would not be "under fire". (Aluf Ben, Ha'aretz, Oct 4, 2004). But Europe looks the other way, reassured of Sharon's new vision of peace.
These are difficult days, when Orwell seems to pale, compared to the power of present day propaganda, when it seems that the European governments are immovable in their support of Israel, no matter what crimes it commits; and the Palestinians are dying slowly, with their suffering not even being reported. But in such times, when governments are unwilling to impose international law, the people of the world can still take matters in their hands. Largely unreported, there is a growing on-going joint struggle of Palestinians, Israelis and internationals from the International Solidarity Movement, who stand daily in front of the army and the settlers in the Palestinian territories, in nonviolent, peaceful protest, documenting the crime, protecting as much of the land as they can, and slowing down Sharon's massive work of destruction. For the first time in the history of the occupation, we are seeing joint Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Along with Israel of the army and the settlers, a new Israel-Palestine is forming.
The breathtaking scenery of the West Bank has been sliced up by the new roads that the rulers have built for their own exclusive use. Beneath them lie the old roads of the vanquished. There, on the lower level, is where the other Israel-Palestine treads. For almost two years, Israeli youths arrive in settlement buses and then make their way on foot and in Palestinian taxis among the checkpoints. They trek between the villages in groups or alone. Some sleep in the villages. Others will travel the same route the next day to reach the demonstration. Everywhere they go they are greeted with blessings and beaming faces.
"Tfaddalu," the children in the doorways say, as if they had never heard of stone-throwing. All along the "seam line" in the West Bank, along the root of the wall, the Palestinians have opened their hearts and their homes to the Israelis and internationals who come to support their non-violent resistance to the wall and the occupation robbing them of their land. These days, hundreds of Israelis are going almost daily to the West Bank to protect the Palestinian olive harvest from the settlers, who, protected by the Israeli army, try to prevent the harvest.
What has brought young Israelis to stand with the Palestinians in front of the army is the conviction that there is a basic line of justice that must not be crossed, that there is a law that is higher than the army's laws of closed military zones: there is international law, which forbids ethnic cleansing, and there is the law of conscience. But what makes them return, day after day, is the new covenant that has been struck between the peoples of this land, a pact of fraternity and friendship between Israelis and Palestinians who love life, the land, the evening breeze. They know that it is possible to live differently on this land.
This daily struggle is our hope. It has become possible with the help of individuals from all over the world who come there to join the new form of resistance. They are facing harassment. Many are being stopped and deported, but they still keep coming. As long as more people come, even for a short time, as long as they are backed and supported by many others at home who could not join in yet, the struggle will go on, offering hope where governments fail.
Footnotes 1. eg. "Yesterday, press photographers were invited in to take a picture of the first session of the committee to deal with the construction in the [Gaza] settlements, headed by PMO Director General Ilan Cohen. The committee is meant to examine the issue of construction and other development projects in settlements that are designated for evacuation. Cohen says Sharon told him 'not to compromise over security needs'. Gaza Regional Council Chairman Avner Shimoni won approval for 26 bullet-proofed buildings in Gush Katif. The new buildings are meant for residences, and school rooms are meant for Kfar Darom, Netzarim and Neveh Dekalim. So far, some 350 development projects have been submitted to the committee" (Aluf Benn and Nir Hason, Ha'aretz, July 27, 2004).
Prof. Tanya Reinhart is a lecturer in linguistics, media and cultural studies at the Tel Aviv University. She is the author of several books, including Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. This article is the text of a speech given at the Euro/Palestine concert, Paris, on 6 November 6 2004.
10 December 2004
Advent in the “Holy Land”
Experiencing the Advent season in a place such as this is truly unique. It carries with it incredible feelings of closeness, a concreteness even as one visits those sites—the Church of the Nativity, the Shepherd’s fields—that hold so much meaning and that themselves seem to play a role of their own in the Christmas story. Yet at the same time, those feelings of closeness are easily swallowed up by a sense of distance, of separation, of forsakeness as one surveys the situation here.
An example of this might be found in neighboring Beit Sahour at the Shepherd’s Fields. This site is holy to Christians in Palestine and around the world because it is where many believe the shepherds lay, keeping watch over their flocks at night when the angels appeared to them saying:
Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people. (Luke 2.10)
For all the people. We have visited this site several times. It is truly amazing to walk into the caves where the shepherds may have walked or survey the fields where they kept their flocks. But this sense of closeness to the joyful expectation of the coming Messiah quickly disappears as one looks up from this site and surveys these fields more closely only to see a Wall snaking through the landscape that is meant to separate, divide, and oppress people. And if we look even closer, we can see in the distance a housing development where our friends the Sahouri family live. The Sahouris, who having already received demolition orders for their home in order to make way for the continued construction of this Wall, continue to live under the fear that the next time they come home after a day of work, soldiers will be waiting at their front door. And these messengers will not be carrying good tiding of great joy but a simple “you have thirty minutes to remove all of your personal belongings before this house is demolished.”
Our friends at the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center (http://www.sabeel.org/) have provided a series of Advent reflections this year. And with most liberation theologies, this series of reflections for Advent has as its starting point a Biblical reflection on the concrete, historical realties of the poor and the oppressed of this land. The focal point that these reflections emerge out of is found in both the words of the Apostle Paul to the Church at Ephesus:
For he is our peace, in his flesh he has made both groups into one and broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. (Ephesians 2.14)
as well as the present experience of the Palestinian people as this “Separation” or “Apartheid” Wall continues to be built. As you may have already seen on MCC’s “Bridges Not Walls” website (http://www.mcc.org/bridges), these words also form the guiding focus of our advocacy campaign that will continue until the end of this month. As we have urged over these past months we would like to do so again, please consider participating in this advocacy campaign. Such displays of solidarity would be especially meaningful during this Advent season.
A New MCC Documentary on Palestinian Refugees
The time here has been very full and intense over these past weeks with the passing of Yasser Arafat, the various transitions in the Palestinian Authority, preparations for upcoming elections in January, continued discussions about Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza (not to mention the impact of the U.S. presidential elections, recent Israeli politics, and the prospect of the maintenance of a death-dealing status quo).
One project that MCC Palestine has been busy of late with was coordinating for the filming of a new documentary that will look at the situation of Palestinian refugees both in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as well as those internally displaced within Israel. We welcomed two videographers from South Africa and journeyed with them in filming and discovery of the struggles that Palestinian refugees continue to face despite their right under international law to a choice to return to their land. The help of our partners at the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights (http://www.badil.org/) as well as at the Zochrot Association (http://www.nakbainhebrew.org/) was invaluable for making this project happen. The filming is now complete and this video project has now entered into its editing stage. We will be sure to keep you updated on this project in what hopes to be another great resource for MCC to offer for education and advocacy regarding this situation.
(For additional resources that MCC currently has available including the Dividing Wall documentary that looks more closely at the continued construction of the “Apartheid” or “Separation” Wall, please visit http://www.mcc.org/us/bridges/)
On a related note, December 11 marks the 56th anniversary of United Nations resolution 194—the resolution passed guaranteeing the right of return for Palestinian refugees to their homes, villages, and land after their expulsion during the creation of the state of Israel. An event to mark the past 56 years is being organized by one of our Israeli partners the Zochrot Association. Zochrot will visit the former Palestinian village of Al-Ramla on Saturday to learn more about the Nakba, or the “Catastrophe”—the name by which Palestinians remember this event—by posting signs and listening to the voices of the Palestinian residents of this village as they describe their continued experiences of dispossession (we have included an article below for more insight into this).
The Advent Candle—A Light in the Darkness
The season of Advent is meant to be a time of somber preparation and yet at the same time filled with joyful expectation and hope. During the service at the Lutheran Christmas Church here in Bethlehem this past Sunday, I sat staring at the two Advent candles that had already been lit hearing the words from the celebrant
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
But as I sat in reflection, I also recognized that there were still two candles that were not lit—still more light to be shone, still more darkness to be dispelled…expectation and hope…
Below we are including one of the Advent reflections mentioned above from our friends at Sabeel. We hope that the voices of these Palestinian sisters and brothers that are so often dismissed, silenced, and dehumanized speak loudly to you this Advent season, providing both a meaning and a challenge for your own celebration of the incarnational presence of “God with us” this Christmas season.
Peace to you all,
Timothy and Christi Seidel.
Peace Development Workers
Mennonite Central Committee - Palestine
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Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center
For Unto Us A Child Is Born: A Reflection on Isaiah 9.6-7 for the Second Week of Advent
Rev. Naim Ateek
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, the Prince of Peace.
His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time onward and forever.
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 it, 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. 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 in a permanent peace and prosperity.
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: one under occupation (in this case Roman) 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 to the occupied. Most people long for liberation, yet most 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 study war any more” (Isaiah 2.4).
Some of us believe that this vision of peace is achievable for Israelis and Palestinians today. Isaiah’s vision for peace is realistic but conditional. It demands of both Israelis and Palestinians to “…beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks…” Such conditions must apply equally to both the Israelis and the Palestinians and not to the Palestinians alone.
The evangelist 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 pointing clearly to the possibility and viability of a life of peace and love. Jesus has pointed out the way of nonviolence. Dare we follow it?
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The Electronic Intifada
From Al Nakba to 'Anata: 56 Years of Home Demolitions
Jacob Pace
7 December 2004
"I never dreamed I would see my village," she said as the wetness pooled in the corner of her eyes. "I never dreamed I would go back there." And as I watched her choke back the tears, I couldn't help my own. But I wasn't as strong as the 16-year-old refugee girl that sat beside me and I had to reach up to wipe my eyes with the back of my hand.
I was sitting in a room on the bottom floor of the Ibdaa Cultural Center in Dheisheh Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. With me was a delegation from Berkeley Jews for Palestine (a group of anti-Zionist Jewish Americans), the Director of Ibdaa and a group of youth from the Center. Ibdaa is a cultural center for the youth of Dheisheh Camp.
Al-Nakba
The residents of Dheisheh are from 46 villages which were depopulated by Zionist forces in 1948. There were over 418 villages cleansed of their Palestinian inhabitants in 1948 as nearly 800,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes in what is now the state of Israel. Israelis mark the event as their independence day, but for Palestinians it is Al-Nakba ("The Catastrophe"). Today, there are over 5 million Palestinian refugees spread around the world. Many live in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
Al-Nakba stands as the defining moment in the Palestinian narrative. No other event captures the pain of Palestinians so wholly and unites them so closely. The goal of Ibdaa's Oral History Program is to tell the stories of Al-Nakba and of life in the depopulated villages. The program once included taking groups of children from Dheisheh for visits to their home villages inside what is now Israel. Since the renewed Israeli crackdown on Palestinian movement in 2000, however, the Israeli government has refused to allow the trips and has denied travel permits to the children of Dheisheh. Many of the kids have never seen their home village, although most are less than 20 miles from the camp.
The young girl continued to tell us about her village. She explained that many of the homes there had been occupied by Israelis. Other homes had been demolished. In fact, many of the depopulated Palestinian villages were totally destroyed soon after the war when the state of Israel was created. The new Israeli government quickly passed a series of laws to appropriate the vacated Palestinian land and define the refugees as "infiltrators" that were to be banned from the country. In the meantime, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 194, affirming the right of the 1948 refugees to return to their homes. A right that has yet to be honored.
In Dheisheh, as in other Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, life is as unstable as the conflict itself. The refugees have tried to make the camp as comfortable as possible, erecting cement houses and small gardens where once there were only tents. Many have the deeds to their land inside Israel and the keys to the homes which stood there. Consecutive Israeli governments, however, have refused to honor the Right of Return of the Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948. Meanwhile, the more than 5 million refugees wait for their rights to be addressed.
'Anata
A day after my visit to Ibdaa, I found myself in the village of 'Anata in East Jerusalem watching an Israeli bulldozer tear down the home of a Palestinian family. There were two Palestinian homes demolished on Monday (November 29) and another destroyed the following day. I received a call on Monday morning and within the hour a coworker and I were negotiating our way through the Israeli checkpoints between Bethlehem and 'Anata. We followed the Wall winding through Palestinian land east of Jerusalem and ended up on a hilltop overlooking a small valley and the ruins of several house demolitions lingering on the hillside.
The first house was already a pile of rubble when we arrived. The house belonged to the Qaboah family. Jadoah Qaboah had worked for 30 years to raise the money for the two story structure that housed 23 people. Most of the Qaboah family was lingering around the remains of their home. Their furniture sat on the dirt nearby. About 20 Israeli Border Police were spread around the top of the hill, standing with automatic assault rifles slung over their shoulder.
We walked across the rubble of the first house to look down upon another house and another group of Border Police watching a Palestinian family remove the last of their belongings. A Caterpillar backhoe moved towards the house. The owner of the house stepped out in front of the backhoe in a final act of defiance. The machine stopped for a moment but the Border Police grabbed the man and forced him to the side. The backhoe moved forward, raised its bucket and slammed the jagged points into the roof of the house. As we watched, it continued to claw at the house, ripping apart the cement walls and rebar supports. It only took about 10 minutes for the entire house to be reduced to a pile of rubble. Meanwhile, the family could only watch.
The home belonged to the Dandees family. It housed 13 people who are now left homeless. Both the Qaboa and the Dandees families held title to the lands and are in possession of the original title deeds (Tabu) dating back to the period of Ottoman rule in the 19th Century. Both families had applied repeatedly for building permits from the Israeli occupation authorities. The requests were always denied. In fact, Palestinian families in occupied East Jerusalem are hardly ever granted building permits. It is one method Israel uses to limit the Palestinian population of the city. If people cannot build homes on their land they have two choices: either leave the land or build illegally. When they build illegally, however, Palestinian families risk having their homes demolished by Israel. The Qaboa and Dandees families are the latest victims of this policy. They received demolition orders on November 26, giving them three days to destroy the home themselves or it would be demolished by Israel. The bulldozers arrived promptly three days later.
The case of 'Anata is illustrative in more ways than one. Like other East Jerusalem communities, 'Anata has been the victim of aggressive Israeli colonization schemes. In fact, over 90% of the village lands have been illegally appropriated by Israel. Four illegal Israeli settlements have been built around 'Anata and Israeli bypass roads hem it in on three sides. More recently, an Israeli military prison has been built on 'Anata land and Israeli occupying forces have served residents of the village with land seizure documents for the purpose of building the Apartheid Wall. Land clearing operations have already begun to set the groundwork for construction of the Wall. The projected path will cut around the illegal Israeli settlements, surrounding 'Anata on three sides and turning it into a tiny ethnic Palestinian ghetto.
[IMAGE]The homes demolished on Monday were very close to the projected path of the Wall. The Dandees home was only 100 meters (approximately 300 ft.) from the Wall cutting across village lands south of the built-up area. The new military prison is on the hill opposite the homes and there are plans to build a new Israeli by-pass road in the valley between. Israeli bulldozers are also busy on the ridge in front of the prison. A new development project is underway either to expand the prison or construct a new illegal settlement there.
There is so much more that can be said about the colonization of Palestinian land, the ghettoization of 'Anata, and Israel's brutal home demolition policy. Pages of information have been scripted and distributed by Palestinian and Israeli NGO's (The Israeli Coalition Against Home Demolitions has been especially active in 'Anata, rebuilding one home a total of 4 times). The facts are available for anyone to access.
But it was the rapid transition between my experience at the Ibdaa Cultural Center in Dheisheh on Sunday, and the home demolitions in 'Anata on Monday that gave me cause for further reflection. The refugee children of Dheisheh spoke of the loss of their homes. Homes their families had been expelled from in Al Nakba. And in 'Anata, I witnessed more expulsions. 56 years later, the story is startlingly similar. Israeli soldiers came to expel two more Palestinian families from their homes. Two more families were uprooted and made refugees in their own land. The experience of being uprooted is something most of us have never had to experience. But it is a reality for many Palestinian families struggling under Israeli occupation.
Jacob Pace lives in Beit Sahour and works with the Applied Research Institute- Jerusalem (ARIJ) in Bethlehem. His reports and photos are available online at www.rcnv.org/gaza. For more information on the home demolitions in 'Anata, see the upcoming case study on the ARIJ website: www.arij.org.
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Haaretz
After His Death, Still The Occupation
Amira Hass
17 November 2004
On the day that Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat died, five Palestinians were killed by Israel Defense Forces gunfire. Four of them were killed in the Gaza Strip: three in a dawn raid by tanks and helicopters on a section in southern Gaza, and the fourth because he was moving around, unarmed, in an area "forbidden" to Palestinians.
At Beit Omar in the West Bank, a young man was killed by IDF troops who were trying to disperse a procession that was throwing stones and Molotov cocktails. Ten Palestinians were injured in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by IDF gunfire, among them four children and a woman who was severely wounded.
The IDF carried out eight raids on villages and on the homes of various suspects. Twenty-one people were arrested, of them six under the age of 18. In 18 places in the West Bank they were busy building the separation fence; on one village a curfew was imposed. All this is detailed in the daily summary of the Palestine Liberation Organization negotiations unit.
During the week that preceded Arafat's death, seven Palestinians were killed, among them one child. Four of them were killed in a "pinpoint execution" in Jenin, without a fight. Only one was killed in a battle with an IDF unit. Six houses were demolished in Rafah, about 120 dunam of agricultural land were razed, and three houses were demolished in the West Bank in punitive actions. All this is detailed in the weekly report of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.
The Palestinian Applied Research Institute, Jerusalem (ARIJ) issues a monthly summary of all the activities connected to construction in the Jewish settlements in the territories, including annexations and confiscations. The detailed list for October is already on its Internet site. For example, in western Tsurif in the Hebron area, hundreds of olive trees were uprooted for the purpose of the separation fence.
In Beit Sahur, 14 families received orders for the demolishing of their homes on the grounds that they had not received building permits, even though the houses are part of an Orthodox Church housing project.
Seventeen families in Abu Dis, near the separation fence, received orders to evacuate their houses before they were demolished. Arafat's final days and the funeral - anarchy or not - and afterward the shooting in the mourners' tent - a fight over the succession or not - made people forget that there is life, that is, occupation and death and destruction, with no connection to the chairman. And the talk about how after Arafat it is possible to renew negotiations helps those who like to ignore Israeli intentions, which are embodied on the ground, to prevent the establishment of a viable Palestinian state in accordance with United Nations resolutions.
Now, without Arafat, will there be a reversal of the policy of the accelerated annexation of extensive parts of the West Bank? Will Israel stop the process of turning the West Bank into a jigsaw puzzle of Palestinian enclaves that are cut off from one another by blocs of Jewish settlements? Will it stop setting up roadblocks that are like border crossings, on roads like in the Third World? And at the same time, will Israel continue building for itself prestigious suburbs and roads of Californian width and quality? Clearly it will not.
During the Oslo years, the illusion was spun that the burning task was to "build a state." All the efforts of the countries of the world and their financial bolstering, the behavior of the PA and the addiction of its senior people to the symbols of sovereignty reinforced the illusion. There was a leap in the Israeli consciousness: The PA was already considered a state. A state whose territory was virtual, and where Israel with its military might determined its future borders, the control of natural resources, the registration of the population and its freedom of movement - but this has been forgotten.
As a state it was considered the aggressor, because of the outbreak of the uprising. Arafat's failure since 1993 was not in that he did not become a respected and respectable head of state, of a state that did not exist. His failure was that neither he nor his movement, the Fatah, developed a liberation strategy in the new conditions of Oslo: through diplomacy, through the UN General Assembly regarding the Jewish settlements, through exposing the neo-colonial relations that were enforced by the security and civilian negotiation mechanism, through the million forms of non-violent popular struggle that could have been pursued.
Personal interests and the pursuit of personal wealth by senior people, shortsightedness, objective or subjective weakness, mistaken political calculations, pro-American tendencies - no matter the reasons, the result was that Arafat, contrary to the image that his armed supporters are trying to create today in their scare campaigns, acted before the Camp David summit as someone whose people had already been liberated from occupation and whose state existed.
In the current circumstances of Palestinian weakness, it is hard to see how in the near future a Palestinian leadership will arise that is able to formulate a strategy of popular struggle for liberation and equality in principle, for the rights of the peoples in this land. The demand that it act as a sub-agent of the IDF and the Shin Bet security service will increase the instability.
As long as the individual and collective Israeli interests in the continuation of the occupation are not affected - and it does not look like they are being affected - there is not a chance that a broad popular movement will arise in Israel that will demand a change in the policy of "Bantustanization."
Therefore the challenge is to the nations of Western Europe, who paid generously for the illusion of the construction of the state, and whose governments are still committed to the two-state solution. For how long will they and their representatives be able to bear - politically, economically and morally - the entrenchment of a regime of discrimination and ethnic separation that is being created by a state that is considered an inalienable part of the democratic West?
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The Electronic Intifada
What Palestinians Should Do Now
Ali Abunimah
18 November 2004
The first priority for Palestinian leaders now must be to defend their people against Israel's relentless colonization and violence and not to negotiate with Israeli guns to Palestinian heads. They must formulate a national strategy to regain Palestinian rights enshrined in UN Resolutions, clearly explain this strategy, and organize Palestinians and allies everywhere to struggle for it, starting with full implementation of the ICJ decision on the West Bank wall. Palestinians should seek to emulate the success of the African National Congress that freed South Africans from apartheid by confronting and defeating injustice, not seeking to accommodate it.
If the PLO and the Palestinian Authority (PA) can transform themselves to take on this role, they deserve the support of every Palestinian. If, however, they plan to continue as they have before, they must dissolve. As constituted by the Oslo accords, the Palestinian Authority harms Palestinian interests, because it obscures Israel's responsibility as the occupying power without providing any minimal protection for the people against Israel's continuous onslaught. Its existence has allowed the spurious agenda of "reform" to trump Israel's obligations under the Geneva Conventions and UN resolutions. Palestinian leaders should no longer accept the responsibility for governing Palestinians on behalf of the occupying power. Israel should bear the full cost of its choices.
Yet the conventional wisdom says that Yasir Arafat's death provides an opportunity to revive the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Realities such as Israel's refusal in word and deed to withdraw and allow the establishment of a genuine Palestinian state in the occupied territories have simply been ignored. Dov Weissglas, the most senior advisor to Israeli premier Ariel Sharon, explained in early October that Israel's Gaza "disengagement" plan, which has been embraced by the bankrupt international peace process industry, is actually a ruse to kill--not advance--any peace process. Weissglas said, "when you freeze that [peace] process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda."
Logically, therefore, any "opportunity" for peace through the establishment of a Palestinian state depends either on a clear change of Israeli policy or a clear willingness by the United States and the international community to force Israel to change its policy. So far, the only policy announcement to come from Israel is that it plans a posthumous "anti-Arafat crusade" in the media.
President Bush has has already shattered hopes that in a second term, freed from re-election concerns, he might pressure Israel. At his November 12 press conference with UK prime minister Tony Blair, Bush was asked if Israel should at last implement a freeze on West Bank settlement expansion. He side-stepped the question, placing the entire burden on the Palestinians: "I believe that the responsibility for peace is going to rest with the Palestinian people's desire to build a democracy and Israel's willingness to help them build a democracy." Bush also stated that peace "can be reached by only one path, the path of democracy, reform and the rule of law." There is no sign yet that the EU or Arab states intend to challenge his approach.
Yet at the same time, Bush and Blair declared support for elections in the occupied territories -- a position seemingly in tune with Palestinian aspirations. But elections present both dangers and opportunities.
At a minimum, fair elections require international intervention to protect the Palestinians from the occupier and ensure all candidates have fair access to PA-controlled media and are free from intimidation whether by Israel or the PA. The danger is that snap elections in the West Bank and Gaza, under Israel's crushing rule, will offer no fair opportunity for new Palestinian leaders with new strategies to emerge. Elections must provide a genuine contest and not be mere plebiscites confirming the post-Arafat appointments of failed old guard figures like PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and their backers who control the PA apparatus with money and guns. Ominously, The New York Times reports that Israel, under American pressure, has already released $40 million in blocked PA funds to "strengthen the position" of the old guard.
In the best case, from Israel's perspective, the old guard confirmed in place by flawed elections would continue to offer disastrous concessions as they did throughout the Oslo period. And at worst, they would simply become new scapegoats to whom Israel and the US will deliver impossible demands and then heap blame when they are inevitably unfulfilled. Palestinian leaders must no longer accept this assigned role.
Palestinians should also demand elections in the diaspora as well the occupied territories. Arguably Arafat's greatest mistake is that after signing the Oslo accords, he abandoned the PLO's base in exile. Millions of Palestinians were disenfranchised and the negotiating position of the Palestinian leadership severely weakened because it could not claim that it had to refer any agreement back to its people.
Assistance from the United Nations and host countries would be essential to successful diaspora elections. The recent Afghan election, in which 740,000 refugees in Pakistan voted, proves it can be done. Currently, almost four million Palestine refugees are registered with UNRWA. All exiled Palestinians should have the right to vote and be elected to a Palestinian national assembly with the sole authority to approve any future peace agreement.
This would be in the best interests of Palestinians because it would strengthen and hold accountable any eventual Palestinian negotiating body by ensuring it accepts no deal which compromises basic rights, particularly the rights of refugees. This is exactly why such elections would be strongly opposed by Israel, the United States, the EU, and the Palestinian old guard.
But now is the time for Palestinians to set their own agenda, to build a new movement, and to see who among their self-declared allies really has their freedom, democracy and rights at heart.
Ali Abunimah is a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada.
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The Electronic Intifada
Sharon's Gaza Pullout: Not Gonna Happen!
Tanya Reinhart
16 November 2004
We gather here at difficult times, when it seems that the Palestinian cause has been almost eliminated from the international agenda. The Western world is hailing the new "peace vision" of Sharon's disengagement plan. The day this plan passed in the Israeli Knesset ("Parliament") last week was hailed by Le Monde as a historical day. Who would pay attention to the two line news piece that on that same day, the Israeli army killed 16 Palestinians in Khan Younis?
It is pretty much known even in the West that Sharon's plan is not about ending the occupation. With regard to the Gaza Strip, the disengagement plan published in the Israeli papers on Friday, April 16, specifies that "Israel will supervise and guard the external envelope on land, will maintain exclusive control in the air space of Gaza, and will continue to conduct military activities in the sea space of the Gaza Strip". In other words, the Palestinians will be imprisoned from all sides, with no connection to the world, except through Israel. Israel also reserves for itself the right to act militarily inside the Gaza Strip. In return for this "concession", Israel would be permitted to complete the wall and to maintain the situation in the West Bank as is. The innovation in the Bush-Sharon agreement that approved this plan is that this is not a proposal awaiting the approval of the Palestinian people. Now the Palestinians are not even asked. It is Israel and the U.S. who are determining the facts on the ground. Israel marks the land that it desires, and builds a wall on that route.
For those who oppose Israeli occupation, it is clear, then, that Sharon's disengagement is just a plan for maintaining the occupation with more international legitimacy. However, there is one presupposition shared in all discussions of this plan - that in the process, Sharon also intends to dismantle the settlements of the Gaza Strip, and return the land they are built on to the Palestinians. I should say that had I believed this might happen, I would have supported the plan. The Gaza settlements, together with their land reserves, security zones, Israeli-only roads, and the military array protecting them, occupy almost a third of the strip's land, which is one of the most densely populated areas of the world. Had this land been returned to its owners, it would be a step forward. We should never forget that the Palestinian struggle is not only for their liberation, but for regaining their lands in the occupied territories - lands that Israel has been appropriating since 67. As long as the Palestinians manage to hold on to their land, under even the worst occupation, they will eventually also gain their liberation. Without land, what is at stake is not just their liberation, but their survival.
But what basis is there to believe that Sharon indeed plans to dismantle settlements at some point? Certainly not the content of the resolution passed by the Israeli Knesset on October 26 - the day that has been depicted by Israeli and virtually all Western media as a "historical" day with "dramatic" resolution. In fact, the Israeli parliament voted to approve "the revised disengagement plan", which was previously approved in another "historical meeting" of the Israeli Cabinet, on June 6, 2004. So it is appropriate to check what was actually approved at that Cabinet meeting.
Ha'aretz's ceremonial headlines on June 7 declared "Disengagement on its way". But here are the smaller letters in the body of the report:
"At the end of a dramatic cabinet meeting yesterday, the government passed Ariel Sharon's revised disengagement plan, by a vote of 14-7, but the decision does not allow for the dismantling of settlements and the prime minister will have to go back to the cabinet when he actually wants to begin the evacuation process. ...The decision on the evacuation of settlements will be brought to the government at the end of a preparation period... [that] would end next March 1" ( Aluf Benn, Gideon Alon, and Nathan Guttmanm, Ha'aretz, June 7, 2004).
Elsewhere in that paper it is explained that " there was no approval of actual evacuations... A second government discussion would be held in this regard, 'taking into account the circumstances at the time' " (Aluf Benn, Ha'aretz, June 7, 2004). The only thing the Israeli government, followed now by the Israeli Knesset, have approved, then, is to have a discussion of the idea of dismantling Gaza settlements sometime next year. It was also decided that in the meanwhile, building and development in the Gaza settlements may continue: "The approved plan ensures 'support for the needs of daily life' in settlements slated for evacuation. Bans on construction permits and leasing of lands were also removed from the prime minister's proposal" (ibid). And indeed, on the ground, slots of land are still being leased (for ridiculously cheap prices) to Israelis who wish to settle in Gaza, and building permits are granted by a special committee appointed by the government in the same "dramatic" meeting on June 6.[1]
Still, none of these facts were registered in public consciousness. The actual content of the cabinet decision was reported only once - on that same day - and then disappeared from the papers that keep recycling the stories about its heroic significance. Precisely the same happened in the present round. The fact that the Knesset has only voted to approve "the amended disengagement plan" that contains no decision to dismantle settlements was reported in the Israeli media:
Knesset members voting tonight on the disengagement plan have received a copy of the "amended disengagement law" the cabinet passed on June 6, plus appendices containing the principles of the plan and its implementation... According to the compromise negotiated at the time... the cabinet decision "contains nothing to evacuate settlements." To remove any doubt in this regard, the cabinet decision also states that "after the conclusion of preparatory work, the cabinet will reconvene to separately debate and decide whether or not to evacuate settlements, which settlements, and at what speed, in consideration of circumstances at that time. (Yuval Yoaz, Ha'aretz, Oct 26, 2004)
But again, this information appeared only once or twice, buried underneath bold headlines that even compared Sharon to Churchill. This is how a myth is built.
Another test-case for how serious the evacuation intentions are is the issue of compensations for the evacuated settlers. Since the cabinet's decision in June, many of the Gaza settlers began inquiring, directly or through hired lawyers, how and when they can be compensated. Behind the noisy protest of the settlers' leadership, many are relieved to be able to finally leave, and are just waiting for the compensations. Anybody intending seriously to evacuate them, would start by compensating first those who are ready to leave immediately, leaving only the ideological minority to be evacuated forcefully. Indeed, for five months, since the cabinet's decision in June, both the settlers and the Israeli public believe that this is about to happen any moment now. Again, a faith with no basis.
Special committees have worked with much publicity on every detail of the compensation plan. Many believe this was finally approved by the Knesset on November 4. Only in the small letters of what actually happened one can learn that the compensation law has passed only its preliminary first hearing (reading). In principle, the second and third hearing could take place within few weeks, but it was clarified in advance that the second reading will take place only after the government decides on actual evacuation, in March 2005, or later (Yosi Verter, Ha'aretz, Oct 8, 2004.) Till then, no one will be compensated. As Aluf Ben summarized this, "the Knesset will vote in the first reading of the Implementation of the Disengagement Plan Law, which authorizes the government to evacuate settlements and compensate those evacuated. Then there will be debates in the committees, and a second and third reading... and the law could be blocked at any stage" (Ha'aretz, Oct 27, 2004).
Outside Israel, the details of what was actually decided didn't even make it into the news once, and all that is repeated over and over again in the Western media is the propaganda produced by the Israeli political system - headlines from which one could infer that the dismantling of settlements is around the corner. Thus, the political debate around Sharon's plan concentrates only around whether it is good enough. The possibility that this is just another Israeli deceit does not even arise. And if you try to bring it up, you are perceived as having landed from the moon, as has happened to me in several European media interviews.
Deception and lies have been a corner stone in Israeli policy, brought to a new level of perfection since Oslo. While the world believed that Rabin promised to eventually end the occupation and dismantle the settlements, the number of Israeli settlers actually doubled during his rule. At the same time that Barak declared he intended to dismantle the Golan Heights settlements, in 1999, he actually poured money into their expansion. As Sharon promised to dismantle at least the illegal settlement posts in the West Bank, their number kept increasing. Still, none of this is ever remembered. Each new lie is received with welcome cheers by the Israeli peace camp and by European governments. Since Oslo, every Israeli government knows that all it takes, to ease diplomatic pressure, is to come up with a new "peace plan".
Since Oslo, every Israeli government knows that all it takes, to ease diplomatic pressure, is to come up with a new "peace plan".
The ritual repeats itself with each new "plan" of this sort. The crucial factor in convincing the world that this time "it is for real" is right wing protest. Of course when the government comes up with a new scheme of deception, the right wing and settlers believe it as well. Rabin's deceit has cost him his life. The same threats are now being directed at Sharon. This is sufficient to convince the Israeli peace camp that Sharon is determined to dismantle settlements. Even serious anti-occupation thinkers write articles warning of the danger of "civil war" with the settlers (forgetting that for this to be even remotely possible, someone should try indeed to evacuate them first). The implication is almost unavoidable: In view of this coming civil war, Sharon is our leader. We should all unite behind him, against the dark forces in Israel.
Indeed, this massive Israeli propaganda works. Throughout the Western world, Sharon is now depicted as a messenger of peace, because he has declared that he is willing to evacuate some of the territories. All of a sudden, Sharon is viewed as the sane center of Israel, withstanding right wing pressure. The prevailing perception is that Israel is finally led by a man of peace, with a respectable determination to carry out painful concessions. And as long as this is the perspective, Sharon can do whatever he wants. The Israeli army terrorizes the Gaza Strip. dozens of Palestinians are being killed, including children on their way to school, houses are demolished and agricultural land destroyed.
At the time of operation "Defensive Shield" in the West Bank and Jenin refugee camp two years ago, there was substantial world protest. The last operation "Days of Penitence" in the Jabalia camp in the Gaza Strip has hardly received any coverage. Backed by the U.S., Sharon is realizing with frightening efficiency his long-standing vision of evicting the maximum number of Palestinians from their land. In the spirit of Orwell, it was even explained that one of the aims of "Days of Penitence" is to "expand the security zones" around the Gaza settlements (namely to enlarge their lands, pushing more Palestinians out of these lands), in order to guarantee that when they are evacuated, it would not be "under fire". (Aluf Ben, Ha'aretz, Oct 4, 2004). But Europe looks the other way, reassured of Sharon's new vision of peace.
These are difficult days, when Orwell seems to pale, compared to the power of present day propaganda, when it seems that the European governments are immovable in their support of Israel, no matter what crimes it commits; and the Palestinians are dying slowly, with their suffering not even being reported. But in such times, when governments are unwilling to impose international law, the people of the world can still take matters in their hands. Largely unreported, there is a growing on-going joint struggle of Palestinians, Israelis and internationals from the International Solidarity Movement, who stand daily in front of the army and the settlers in the Palestinian territories, in nonviolent, peaceful protest, documenting the crime, protecting as much of the land as they can, and slowing down Sharon's massive work of destruction. For the first time in the history of the occupation, we are seeing joint Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Along with Israel of the army and the settlers, a new Israel-Palestine is forming.
The breathtaking scenery of the West Bank has been sliced up by the new roads that the rulers have built for their own exclusive use. Beneath them lie the old roads of the vanquished. There, on the lower level, is where the other Israel-Palestine treads. For almost two years, Israeli youths arrive in settlement buses and then make their way on foot and in Palestinian taxis among the checkpoints. They trek between the villages in groups or alone. Some sleep in the villages. Others will travel the same route the next day to reach the demonstration. Everywhere they go they are greeted with blessings and beaming faces.
"Tfaddalu," the children in the doorways say, as if they had never heard of stone-throwing. All along the "seam line" in the West Bank, along the root of the wall, the Palestinians have opened their hearts and their homes to the Israelis and internationals who come to support their non-violent resistance to the wall and the occupation robbing them of their land. These days, hundreds of Israelis are going almost daily to the West Bank to protect the Palestinian olive harvest from the settlers, who, protected by the Israeli army, try to prevent the harvest.
What has brought young Israelis to stand with the Palestinians in front of the army is the conviction that there is a basic line of justice that must not be crossed, that there is a law that is higher than the army's laws of closed military zones: there is international law, which forbids ethnic cleansing, and there is the law of conscience. But what makes them return, day after day, is the new covenant that has been struck between the peoples of this land, a pact of fraternity and friendship between Israelis and Palestinians who love life, the land, the evening breeze. They know that it is possible to live differently on this land.
This daily struggle is our hope. It has become possible with the help of individuals from all over the world who come there to join the new form of resistance. They are facing harassment. Many are being stopped and deported, but they still keep coming. As long as more people come, even for a short time, as long as they are backed and supported by many others at home who could not join in yet, the struggle will go on, offering hope where governments fail.
Footnotes 1. eg. "Yesterday, press photographers were invited in to take a picture of the first session of the committee to deal with the construction in the [Gaza] settlements, headed by PMO Director General Ilan Cohen. The committee is meant to examine the issue of construction and other development projects in settlements that are designated for evacuation. Cohen says Sharon told him 'not to compromise over security needs'. Gaza Regional Council Chairman Avner Shimoni won approval for 26 bullet-proofed buildings in Gush Katif. The new buildings are meant for residences, and school rooms are meant for Kfar Darom, Netzarim and Neveh Dekalim. So far, some 350 development projects have been submitted to the committee" (Aluf Benn and Nir Hason, Ha'aretz, July 27, 2004).
Prof. Tanya Reinhart is a lecturer in linguistics, media and cultural studies at the Tel Aviv University. She is the author of several books, including Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. This article is the text of a speech given at the Euro/Palestine concert, Paris, on 6 November 6 2004.
Sunday, November 7
MCC Palestine Update #103
MCC Palestine Update #103
7 November 2004
As we walked up the steep hill to Manger Square this past Saturday evening, we were already hearing the small blasts of firecrackers that have come to be a normal part of our evenings during this month of Ramadan. Only one week remains in this month holy to our Moslem neighbors, and the shabab (young people) on the streets appear to be taking advantage of this time as much as possible.
We were heading up to Manger Square, to the Church of the Nativity—the birthplace of Jesus. Here we discovered that a crowd had already begun to gather in front of the church to celebrate the “Prince of Peace,” shielding the candles they were holding from the wind. We were surprised to see clergy from most all of the church traditions of Bethlehem—Armenian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic (or “Melkite”), Roman Catholic, Lutheran, United Methodist, and more. They had all gathered, as we had, in front of the Church of the Nativity, to demonstrate in solidarity and pray for justice and peace in the land and to pray for the health of their president Yasser Arafat.
Wi’am Conflict Resolution Center (www.planet.edu/~alaslah) here in Bethlehem with its director Zoughbi Zoughbi had organized this candle light vigil. We had just arrived back in Bethlehem after spending some time up north in the Galilee. As we were driving back that afternoon, Zoughbi called us on our cellphone. “We wanted to let you know that we are holding a candlelight vigil tonight, and you are very much welcomed.”
Looking down at these lit candles, standing in the midst of this display of solidarity, thoughts went back to another last minute invitation to a candlelight vigil. This time it was organized by the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between Peoples (http://www.rapprochement.org/) in neighboring Beit Sahour, who like Wi’am is another of MCC’s close partners. On this evening, back in the first week of October, we entered into the old city are of the town, greeted by our friend at Rapprochement George N. Rishmawi. “Thank you for coming on such short notice,” he said as he handed us two candles. “Of course,” we replied, realizing again the power that standing in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed of this world has.
On this cool evening in early October, we stood there amidst the crowd of Palestinians and internationals, reflecting on the horrible situation that our brothers and sisters in Gaza were being subjected to under what became known as “Operation Days of Penitence” by the Israeli Defense Forces. By the end of this 17 day incursion into northern Gaza, into the Jabaliya refugee camp, more than 140 Palestinian men, women, and children would be slaughtered, 500 wounded, and 80 homes destroyed in response to the death of two young Israeli children.
These two examples speak to many things, among them solidarity. And although such actions may not be seen by some as legitimate forms of resistance, and indeed in and of themselves they are insufficient, they speak to something very powerful for those of us who are Christians. They display a participation today in an alternative reality that has not yet fully come. They speak to the power of the crucified and risen God that has overcome death with a promise of new life.
As we have in the past, we encourage you again to reflect upon these stories as well as the attached articles and allow them to speak to you. And again we also encourage you to move beyond reflection to action. Whether this be in the form of being a voice for the voiceless to the powers that be in your government or even simply to those in your immediate communities (please visit www.mcc.org/us/bridges for further advocacy resources), or takes on other forms, in this interconnected world that we live in, we do not live our lives in isolation. The burdens of the world become our own. Listening to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And to the words of Abuna Elias Chacour, a Palestinian Christian from the Galilee:
"Peace is not a matter of contemplation but of action. Get up! Go ahead! Do something, and get your hands dirty for peace."
We also encourage you to remember the people of Palestine this month, especially on November 29. It was on this day in 1947 that the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, commonly known as the “Partition Plan.” As its name suggests, this plan would have partitioned the region into two states—one Jewish and one Arab. November 29 is now being remembered as the “Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” remembering their rights to equality and self-determination.
Though the situation here continues to look anything but hopeful—with the Wall continuing to be built, settlements being expanded, suicide bombings, land confiscation, house demolitions, etc.—speaking a word of hope into the darkness is one of the most important actions we can take.
Peace to you all,
Timothy and Christi Seidel.
Peace Development Workers
Mennonite Central Committee - Palestine
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Haaretz
Our shadow
By Meron Benvenisti
5 November 2004
The anticipation expressed by various experts and commentators of the demise of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat was not anticipation of a joyous event, but a fear of what the future without him holds in store. Even those who did not hesitate to engage publicly in plans for his "targeted assassination" went all out to offer him medical and logistical assistance. This was an attempt to remove any pretext for blaming Israel for standing in the way of efforts to save Arafat, but perhaps also a sign of some covert awe of the enemy who is at his end.
The obsessive preoccupation with the implications of his demise and with the pathetic "legacy" he leaves behind - governing a persecuted and impoverished nation - proves the real status of the prisoner from the Muqata. The very people who made sure to convince the entire world of Arafat's "irrelevance," and to humiliate the leader of the Palestinian people, recognize the historical status of the man who for half a century has embodied the wishes of an entire nation.
When all is said and done, Arafat is the shadow who follows us, and the stations of his life - from the Arab revolt to the Al-Aqsa Intifada - are the stations of our lives in reverse. Without him - and without the generation he led - there is no meaning to our history, to our sacrifices and to our victories. Anyone who scorns his enemy dwarfs his own victory and empties his history of meaning. We walk, and with us walks our shadow - the Palestinian people; we beat the shadow with a big stick, but it doesn't leave us alone.
What will we do when the sun rises and we discover that the shadow, which is embodied in the figure of the "two-legged beast," has disappeared? To whom will we give the job of the demonic villain? Nobody can fill the shoes of the person who played the role so perfectly.
The person who understood this best was former prime minister Ehud Barak, who wove the myth of Arafat "the refusenik from Camp David": the man who was offered the moon, but refused, and began a war of terror to achieve through blood what was not achieved through negotiations. Who doesn't believe in this myth? And it's no wonder; otherwise, how would we be able to deal with the violent reality, with the cruel repression and with our tortured conscience?
We need a scapegoat on whom to cast the blame for everything, and to clear our consciences. Now, when he has tired of the job of demon and discovered that he is mortal, we are looking for an heir - not a partner but the scapegoat, which carries our sins, our frustrations and our hatred.
And this is not the first time Arafat has served to salve our conscience. The distress of the Palestinian people, and his personal distress, forced him, on the eve of the Oslo Accords, to give up the sharpest weapon he had, namely to grant legitimacy to the Zionist entity. Although it's true that the Palestinians are an occupied and vanquished nation, only they, the victims of the Zionist enterprise, were capable of granting this legitimacy. Arafat - with the support of many of the activists of the first intifada, and as opposed to the view of others - decided to recognize Israel, in return for recognition of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization).
This recognition released a sigh of relief in leftist circles, since this saved them from guilt feelings over the fact that the realization of the Zionist enterprise was bound up with the destruction of the Palestinian people; if Arafat recognizes Israel, they are free of the moral dilemmas imposed on them by the conflict and their victories in it.
It didn't take long for Arafat's historic move (in cooperation with the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin) to be forgotten. New moral dilemmas made it necessary to renew the definition of Arafat as a terrorist and the PLO as a terror organization; the desire for recognition was replaced by "there's nobody to talk to," and the partner became a humiliated prisoner. Only few understood that granting legitimacy to the Zionist entity is not an irreversible step. And in fact, the retreat from "mutual recognition" harmed Arafat and the Palestinians, but it also harmed Israel, which has never faced doubts about the legitimacy of its actions to the extent that it does today.
Arafat was fated to serve as a symbol in his life and in his death. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon apparently sensed that when he declared that as long as he himself is alive, Arafat will not be buried in Jerusalem. In his haste to humiliate the sick Arafat, Sharon provided a clear symbol of the destiny he shares with many of the Palestinians: lacking a homeland, lacking a cemetery in which they can join their ancestors. How civilized it could have been had we shown understanding and empathy for our shadow - the vanquished leader - for his suffering, his successes and his failures.
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Haaretz
Killing children is no longer a big deal
By Gideon Levy
17 October 2004
More than 30 Palestinian children were killed in the first two weeks of Operation Days of Penitence in the Gaza Strip. It's no wonder that many people term such wholesale killing of children "terror." Whereas in the overall count of all the victims of the intifada the ratio is three Palestinians killed for every Israeli killed, when it comes to children the ratio is 5:1. According to B'Tselem, the human rights organization, even before the current operation in Gaza, 557 Palestinian minors (below the age of 18) were killed, compared to 110 Israeli minors.
Palestinian human rights groups speak of even higher numbers: 598 Palestinian children killed (up to age 17), according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, and 828 killed (up to age 18) according to the Red Crescent. Take note of the ages, too. According to B'Tselem, whose data are updated until about a month ago, 42 of the children who have been killed were 10; 20 were seven; and eight were two years old when they died. The youngest victims are 13 newborn infants who died at checkpoints during birth.
With horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since become very burdensome for every Israeli. Yet it is not on the public agenda. Child killers are always the Palestinians, the soldiers always only defend us and themselves, and the hell with the statistics.
The plain fact, which must be stated clearly, is that the blood of hundreds of Palestinian children is on our hands. No tortuous explanation by the IDF Spokesman's Office or by the military correspondents about the dangers posed to soldiers by the children, and no dubious excuse by the public relations people in the Foreign Ministry about how the Palestinians are making use of children will change that fact. An army that kills so many children is an army with no restraints, an army that has lost its moral code.
As MK Ahmed Tibi (Hadash) said, in a particularly emotional speech in the Knesset, it is no longer possible to claim that all these children were killed by mistake. An army doesn't make more than 500 day-to-day mistakes of identity. No, this is not a mistake but the disastrous result of a policy driven mainly by an appallingly light trigger finger and by the dehumanization of the Palestinians. Shooting at everything that moves, including children, has become normative behavior. Even the momentary mini-furor that erupted over the "confirming of the killing" of a 13-year-old girl, Iman Alhamas, did not revolve around the true question. The scandal should have been generated by the very act of the killing itself, not only by what followed.
Iman was not the only one. Mohammed Aaraj was eating a sandwich in front of his house, the last house before the cemetery of the Balata refugee camp, in Nablus, when a soldier shot him to death at fairly close range. He was six at the time of his death. Kristen Saada was in her parents' car, on the way home from a family visit, when soldiers sprayed the car with bullets. She was 12 at the time of her death. The brothers Jamil and Ahmed Abu Aziz were riding their bicycles in full daylight, on their way to buy sweets, when they sustained a direct hit from a shell fired by an Israeli tank crew. Jamil was 13, Ahmed six, at the time of their deaths.
Muatez Amudi and Subah Subah were killed by a soldier who was standing in the village square in Burkin and fired every which way in the wake of stone-throwing. Radir Mohammed from Khan Yunis refugee camp was in a school classroom when soldiers shot her to death. She was 12 when she died. All of them were innocent of wrongdoing and were killed by soldiers acting in our name.
At least in some of these cases it was clear to the soldiers that they were shooting at children, but that didn't stop them. Palestinian children have no refuge: mortal danger lurks for them in their homes, in their schools and on their streets. Not one of the hundreds of children who have been killed deserved to die, and the responsibility for their killing cannot remain anonymous. Thus the message is conveyed to the soldiers: it's no tragedy to kill children and none of you is guilty.
Death is, of course, the most acute danger that confronts a Palestinian child, but it is not the only one. According to data of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, 3,409 schoolchildren have been wounded in the intifada, some of them crippled for life. The childhood of tens of thousands of Palestinian youngsters is being lived from one trauma to the next, from horror to horror. Their homes are demolished, their parents are humiliated in front of their eyes, soldiers storm into their homes brutally in the middle of the night, tanks open fire on their classrooms. And they don't have a psychological service. Have you ever heard of a Palestinian child who is a "victim of anxiety"?
The public indifference that accompanies this pageant of unrelieved suffering makes all Israelis accomplices to a crime. Even parents, who understand what anxiety for a child's fate means, turn away and don't want to hear about the anxiety harbored by the parent on the other side of the fence. Who would have believed that Israeli soldiers would kill hundreds of children and that the majority of Israelis would remain silent? Even the Palestinian children have become part of the dehumanization campaign: killing hundreds of them is no longer a big deal.
________________________________
Reflection on the Language and Calculus of Proportionality
Timothy Seidel
3 October 2004 (updated 6 October 2004)
The Israeli offensive into northern Gaza, in and around the Jabaliya refugee camp of 100,000 Palestinians—one of the most densely populated area in the world—continues this morning. What seems to be essentially re-occupation along those lines of “Operation Defensive Shield” in the West Bank in 2002 (softened by the language of “disengagement”), this operation absurdly coined “Operation Days of Penitence” in a twisted and unholy amalgamation of militaristic and religious language has already seen the deaths of 82 Palestinians and 5 Israelis (according to a recent UNRWA statement). This offensive began last Wednesday when Israeli incursions into northern Gaza began after a “qassam” rocket fired from northern Gaza hit a target in Sderot, inside Israel, killing two small children.
The U.S. response has been predictable: affirm Israel’s right to defend itself, condemn Palestinian violence as “terrorist,” with a caveat inserted to remind Israel of the need for “proportionality” in the “civilized” making of “just” wars. This along with Powell’s statement earlier on the anniversary of the intifada (in an interview with Al-Jazeera) condemning it and its “terrorist” violence while again legitimizing Israel violence as self-defensive, seems only to have served as the needed go-ahead the warmakers in Jerusalem were looking for. Without condemnation, especially from the U.S., the silence is taken as tacit approval, as justification for acts of “civilized” barbarism such as these. It appears that if no one steps in to obstruct this momentum, this norm, that the state of Israel will not stop this ongoing systematic elimination of Palestinian existence.
U.S. complicity has never been more evident. The words of the Secretary of State, echoed by the recent U.S. veto of the proposed UN Security Council resolution condemning this recent escalation of violence, it can be argued, are directly responsible for or at least have directly contributed to this recent campaign through its silent legitimization of this “civilized” and “just” violence. The power of language—which includes silence—reveals itself in this situation. And all attempts at minimization with the language of “proportionality” are examples of hiding this complicity. The U.S. references to “proportionality,” with our own occupation in Iraq, with our pouring six billion U.S. dollars into the Israeli military complex each year, including the recent agreement to ship 5,000 new “smart” bombs—the words on “proportionality” coming out of the U.S. State Department at this time are frankly rather embarrassing.
Proportionality?
This word’s only purpose is to hide the realities of other words like occupation, apartheid, incursion, transfer, genocide or its more politically correct term “ethnic cleansing,” violence, death, justice, and last but not least power. Its purpose is, again, to paint this situation as balanced, without a clear power differential, and with the U.S. as neutral, an “honest” broker for peace.
“Proportionality” reveals the essential weakness of the “just” war tradition. War is “just” and “justified” if it meets certain criteria, among them the criterion of proportionality. And the language of “proportionality” carries with it the assumptions of “neutrality” and a “distanced objectivity.” Words that at least in this context, and perhaps it can be argued in most contexts in this “global” age of extremes (extreme wealth and extreme poverty, extreme access and extreme oppression), are at best inadequate and inappropriate—in social, political, and economic terms as well as in theological terms—but most often downright disingenuous and dangerous. The continued employment of such language reveals the inadequacy and absurdity of this “just” tradition. The language of “proportionality” immediately dehumanizes, denying the value of human life. It is too often the language of violence and oppression.
2 small, beautiful Israeli children killed—within the context of occupation.
82 Palestinians, among whom were 24 children, killed in “retaliation”—within the context of occupation.
Proportionality?
------------------------------------------------
UNRWA has completed its humanitarian assessment of the Israel’s latest incursion into northern Gaza. The report can be downloaded from http://www.un.org/unrwa/news/incursion_oct04.pdf
UNRWA Update 25 October 2004
UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees
website: http://www.unrwa.org/
7 November 2004
As we walked up the steep hill to Manger Square this past Saturday evening, we were already hearing the small blasts of firecrackers that have come to be a normal part of our evenings during this month of Ramadan. Only one week remains in this month holy to our Moslem neighbors, and the shabab (young people) on the streets appear to be taking advantage of this time as much as possible.
We were heading up to Manger Square, to the Church of the Nativity—the birthplace of Jesus. Here we discovered that a crowd had already begun to gather in front of the church to celebrate the “Prince of Peace,” shielding the candles they were holding from the wind. We were surprised to see clergy from most all of the church traditions of Bethlehem—Armenian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic (or “Melkite”), Roman Catholic, Lutheran, United Methodist, and more. They had all gathered, as we had, in front of the Church of the Nativity, to demonstrate in solidarity and pray for justice and peace in the land and to pray for the health of their president Yasser Arafat.
Wi’am Conflict Resolution Center (www.planet.edu/~alaslah) here in Bethlehem with its director Zoughbi Zoughbi had organized this candle light vigil. We had just arrived back in Bethlehem after spending some time up north in the Galilee. As we were driving back that afternoon, Zoughbi called us on our cellphone. “We wanted to let you know that we are holding a candlelight vigil tonight, and you are very much welcomed.”
Looking down at these lit candles, standing in the midst of this display of solidarity, thoughts went back to another last minute invitation to a candlelight vigil. This time it was organized by the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between Peoples (http://www.rapprochement.org/) in neighboring Beit Sahour, who like Wi’am is another of MCC’s close partners. On this evening, back in the first week of October, we entered into the old city are of the town, greeted by our friend at Rapprochement George N. Rishmawi. “Thank you for coming on such short notice,” he said as he handed us two candles. “Of course,” we replied, realizing again the power that standing in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed of this world has.
On this cool evening in early October, we stood there amidst the crowd of Palestinians and internationals, reflecting on the horrible situation that our brothers and sisters in Gaza were being subjected to under what became known as “Operation Days of Penitence” by the Israeli Defense Forces. By the end of this 17 day incursion into northern Gaza, into the Jabaliya refugee camp, more than 140 Palestinian men, women, and children would be slaughtered, 500 wounded, and 80 homes destroyed in response to the death of two young Israeli children.
These two examples speak to many things, among them solidarity. And although such actions may not be seen by some as legitimate forms of resistance, and indeed in and of themselves they are insufficient, they speak to something very powerful for those of us who are Christians. They display a participation today in an alternative reality that has not yet fully come. They speak to the power of the crucified and risen God that has overcome death with a promise of new life.
As we have in the past, we encourage you again to reflect upon these stories as well as the attached articles and allow them to speak to you. And again we also encourage you to move beyond reflection to action. Whether this be in the form of being a voice for the voiceless to the powers that be in your government or even simply to those in your immediate communities (please visit www.mcc.org/us/bridges for further advocacy resources), or takes on other forms, in this interconnected world that we live in, we do not live our lives in isolation. The burdens of the world become our own. Listening to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And to the words of Abuna Elias Chacour, a Palestinian Christian from the Galilee:
"Peace is not a matter of contemplation but of action. Get up! Go ahead! Do something, and get your hands dirty for peace."
We also encourage you to remember the people of Palestine this month, especially on November 29. It was on this day in 1947 that the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, commonly known as the “Partition Plan.” As its name suggests, this plan would have partitioned the region into two states—one Jewish and one Arab. November 29 is now being remembered as the “Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” remembering their rights to equality and self-determination.
Though the situation here continues to look anything but hopeful—with the Wall continuing to be built, settlements being expanded, suicide bombings, land confiscation, house demolitions, etc.—speaking a word of hope into the darkness is one of the most important actions we can take.
Peace to you all,
Timothy and Christi Seidel.
Peace Development Workers
Mennonite Central Committee - Palestine
________________________________
Haaretz
Our shadow
By Meron Benvenisti
5 November 2004
The anticipation expressed by various experts and commentators of the demise of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat was not anticipation of a joyous event, but a fear of what the future without him holds in store. Even those who did not hesitate to engage publicly in plans for his "targeted assassination" went all out to offer him medical and logistical assistance. This was an attempt to remove any pretext for blaming Israel for standing in the way of efforts to save Arafat, but perhaps also a sign of some covert awe of the enemy who is at his end.
The obsessive preoccupation with the implications of his demise and with the pathetic "legacy" he leaves behind - governing a persecuted and impoverished nation - proves the real status of the prisoner from the Muqata. The very people who made sure to convince the entire world of Arafat's "irrelevance," and to humiliate the leader of the Palestinian people, recognize the historical status of the man who for half a century has embodied the wishes of an entire nation.
When all is said and done, Arafat is the shadow who follows us, and the stations of his life - from the Arab revolt to the Al-Aqsa Intifada - are the stations of our lives in reverse. Without him - and without the generation he led - there is no meaning to our history, to our sacrifices and to our victories. Anyone who scorns his enemy dwarfs his own victory and empties his history of meaning. We walk, and with us walks our shadow - the Palestinian people; we beat the shadow with a big stick, but it doesn't leave us alone.
What will we do when the sun rises and we discover that the shadow, which is embodied in the figure of the "two-legged beast," has disappeared? To whom will we give the job of the demonic villain? Nobody can fill the shoes of the person who played the role so perfectly.
The person who understood this best was former prime minister Ehud Barak, who wove the myth of Arafat "the refusenik from Camp David": the man who was offered the moon, but refused, and began a war of terror to achieve through blood what was not achieved through negotiations. Who doesn't believe in this myth? And it's no wonder; otherwise, how would we be able to deal with the violent reality, with the cruel repression and with our tortured conscience?
We need a scapegoat on whom to cast the blame for everything, and to clear our consciences. Now, when he has tired of the job of demon and discovered that he is mortal, we are looking for an heir - not a partner but the scapegoat, which carries our sins, our frustrations and our hatred.
And this is not the first time Arafat has served to salve our conscience. The distress of the Palestinian people, and his personal distress, forced him, on the eve of the Oslo Accords, to give up the sharpest weapon he had, namely to grant legitimacy to the Zionist entity. Although it's true that the Palestinians are an occupied and vanquished nation, only they, the victims of the Zionist enterprise, were capable of granting this legitimacy. Arafat - with the support of many of the activists of the first intifada, and as opposed to the view of others - decided to recognize Israel, in return for recognition of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization).
This recognition released a sigh of relief in leftist circles, since this saved them from guilt feelings over the fact that the realization of the Zionist enterprise was bound up with the destruction of the Palestinian people; if Arafat recognizes Israel, they are free of the moral dilemmas imposed on them by the conflict and their victories in it.
It didn't take long for Arafat's historic move (in cooperation with the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin) to be forgotten. New moral dilemmas made it necessary to renew the definition of Arafat as a terrorist and the PLO as a terror organization; the desire for recognition was replaced by "there's nobody to talk to," and the partner became a humiliated prisoner. Only few understood that granting legitimacy to the Zionist entity is not an irreversible step. And in fact, the retreat from "mutual recognition" harmed Arafat and the Palestinians, but it also harmed Israel, which has never faced doubts about the legitimacy of its actions to the extent that it does today.
Arafat was fated to serve as a symbol in his life and in his death. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon apparently sensed that when he declared that as long as he himself is alive, Arafat will not be buried in Jerusalem. In his haste to humiliate the sick Arafat, Sharon provided a clear symbol of the destiny he shares with many of the Palestinians: lacking a homeland, lacking a cemetery in which they can join their ancestors. How civilized it could have been had we shown understanding and empathy for our shadow - the vanquished leader - for his suffering, his successes and his failures.
________________________________
Haaretz
Killing children is no longer a big deal
By Gideon Levy
17 October 2004
More than 30 Palestinian children were killed in the first two weeks of Operation Days of Penitence in the Gaza Strip. It's no wonder that many people term such wholesale killing of children "terror." Whereas in the overall count of all the victims of the intifada the ratio is three Palestinians killed for every Israeli killed, when it comes to children the ratio is 5:1. According to B'Tselem, the human rights organization, even before the current operation in Gaza, 557 Palestinian minors (below the age of 18) were killed, compared to 110 Israeli minors.
Palestinian human rights groups speak of even higher numbers: 598 Palestinian children killed (up to age 17), according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, and 828 killed (up to age 18) according to the Red Crescent. Take note of the ages, too. According to B'Tselem, whose data are updated until about a month ago, 42 of the children who have been killed were 10; 20 were seven; and eight were two years old when they died. The youngest victims are 13 newborn infants who died at checkpoints during birth.
With horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since become very burdensome for every Israeli. Yet it is not on the public agenda. Child killers are always the Palestinians, the soldiers always only defend us and themselves, and the hell with the statistics.
The plain fact, which must be stated clearly, is that the blood of hundreds of Palestinian children is on our hands. No tortuous explanation by the IDF Spokesman's Office or by the military correspondents about the dangers posed to soldiers by the children, and no dubious excuse by the public relations people in the Foreign Ministry about how the Palestinians are making use of children will change that fact. An army that kills so many children is an army with no restraints, an army that has lost its moral code.
As MK Ahmed Tibi (Hadash) said, in a particularly emotional speech in the Knesset, it is no longer possible to claim that all these children were killed by mistake. An army doesn't make more than 500 day-to-day mistakes of identity. No, this is not a mistake but the disastrous result of a policy driven mainly by an appallingly light trigger finger and by the dehumanization of the Palestinians. Shooting at everything that moves, including children, has become normative behavior. Even the momentary mini-furor that erupted over the "confirming of the killing" of a 13-year-old girl, Iman Alhamas, did not revolve around the true question. The scandal should have been generated by the very act of the killing itself, not only by what followed.
Iman was not the only one. Mohammed Aaraj was eating a sandwich in front of his house, the last house before the cemetery of the Balata refugee camp, in Nablus, when a soldier shot him to death at fairly close range. He was six at the time of his death. Kristen Saada was in her parents' car, on the way home from a family visit, when soldiers sprayed the car with bullets. She was 12 at the time of her death. The brothers Jamil and Ahmed Abu Aziz were riding their bicycles in full daylight, on their way to buy sweets, when they sustained a direct hit from a shell fired by an Israeli tank crew. Jamil was 13, Ahmed six, at the time of their deaths.
Muatez Amudi and Subah Subah were killed by a soldier who was standing in the village square in Burkin and fired every which way in the wake of stone-throwing. Radir Mohammed from Khan Yunis refugee camp was in a school classroom when soldiers shot her to death. She was 12 when she died. All of them were innocent of wrongdoing and were killed by soldiers acting in our name.
At least in some of these cases it was clear to the soldiers that they were shooting at children, but that didn't stop them. Palestinian children have no refuge: mortal danger lurks for them in their homes, in their schools and on their streets. Not one of the hundreds of children who have been killed deserved to die, and the responsibility for their killing cannot remain anonymous. Thus the message is conveyed to the soldiers: it's no tragedy to kill children and none of you is guilty.
Death is, of course, the most acute danger that confronts a Palestinian child, but it is not the only one. According to data of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, 3,409 schoolchildren have been wounded in the intifada, some of them crippled for life. The childhood of tens of thousands of Palestinian youngsters is being lived from one trauma to the next, from horror to horror. Their homes are demolished, their parents are humiliated in front of their eyes, soldiers storm into their homes brutally in the middle of the night, tanks open fire on their classrooms. And they don't have a psychological service. Have you ever heard of a Palestinian child who is a "victim of anxiety"?
The public indifference that accompanies this pageant of unrelieved suffering makes all Israelis accomplices to a crime. Even parents, who understand what anxiety for a child's fate means, turn away and don't want to hear about the anxiety harbored by the parent on the other side of the fence. Who would have believed that Israeli soldiers would kill hundreds of children and that the majority of Israelis would remain silent? Even the Palestinian children have become part of the dehumanization campaign: killing hundreds of them is no longer a big deal.
________________________________
Reflection on the Language and Calculus of Proportionality
Timothy Seidel
3 October 2004 (updated 6 October 2004)
The Israeli offensive into northern Gaza, in and around the Jabaliya refugee camp of 100,000 Palestinians—one of the most densely populated area in the world—continues this morning. What seems to be essentially re-occupation along those lines of “Operation Defensive Shield” in the West Bank in 2002 (softened by the language of “disengagement”), this operation absurdly coined “Operation Days of Penitence” in a twisted and unholy amalgamation of militaristic and religious language has already seen the deaths of 82 Palestinians and 5 Israelis (according to a recent UNRWA statement). This offensive began last Wednesday when Israeli incursions into northern Gaza began after a “qassam” rocket fired from northern Gaza hit a target in Sderot, inside Israel, killing two small children.
The U.S. response has been predictable: affirm Israel’s right to defend itself, condemn Palestinian violence as “terrorist,” with a caveat inserted to remind Israel of the need for “proportionality” in the “civilized” making of “just” wars. This along with Powell’s statement earlier on the anniversary of the intifada (in an interview with Al-Jazeera) condemning it and its “terrorist” violence while again legitimizing Israel violence as self-defensive, seems only to have served as the needed go-ahead the warmakers in Jerusalem were looking for. Without condemnation, especially from the U.S., the silence is taken as tacit approval, as justification for acts of “civilized” barbarism such as these. It appears that if no one steps in to obstruct this momentum, this norm, that the state of Israel will not stop this ongoing systematic elimination of Palestinian existence.
U.S. complicity has never been more evident. The words of the Secretary of State, echoed by the recent U.S. veto of the proposed UN Security Council resolution condemning this recent escalation of violence, it can be argued, are directly responsible for or at least have directly contributed to this recent campaign through its silent legitimization of this “civilized” and “just” violence. The power of language—which includes silence—reveals itself in this situation. And all attempts at minimization with the language of “proportionality” are examples of hiding this complicity. The U.S. references to “proportionality,” with our own occupation in Iraq, with our pouring six billion U.S. dollars into the Israeli military complex each year, including the recent agreement to ship 5,000 new “smart” bombs—the words on “proportionality” coming out of the U.S. State Department at this time are frankly rather embarrassing.
Proportionality?
This word’s only purpose is to hide the realities of other words like occupation, apartheid, incursion, transfer, genocide or its more politically correct term “ethnic cleansing,” violence, death, justice, and last but not least power. Its purpose is, again, to paint this situation as balanced, without a clear power differential, and with the U.S. as neutral, an “honest” broker for peace.
“Proportionality” reveals the essential weakness of the “just” war tradition. War is “just” and “justified” if it meets certain criteria, among them the criterion of proportionality. And the language of “proportionality” carries with it the assumptions of “neutrality” and a “distanced objectivity.” Words that at least in this context, and perhaps it can be argued in most contexts in this “global” age of extremes (extreme wealth and extreme poverty, extreme access and extreme oppression), are at best inadequate and inappropriate—in social, political, and economic terms as well as in theological terms—but most often downright disingenuous and dangerous. The continued employment of such language reveals the inadequacy and absurdity of this “just” tradition. The language of “proportionality” immediately dehumanizes, denying the value of human life. It is too often the language of violence and oppression.
2 small, beautiful Israeli children killed—within the context of occupation.
82 Palestinians, among whom were 24 children, killed in “retaliation”—within the context of occupation.
Proportionality?
------------------------------------------------
UNRWA has completed its humanitarian assessment of the Israel’s latest incursion into northern Gaza. The report can be downloaded from http://www.un.org/unrwa/news/incursion_oct04.pdf
UNRWA Update 25 October 2004
UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees
website: http://www.unrwa.org/
Saturday, October 2
MCC Palestine Update #102
MCC Palestine Update #102
2 October 2004
On the Ground in Hebron
On Tuesday, September 21, the International Day of Peace, we took a trip south to Hebron (Al Khaliil) to meet the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT). After taking a taxi and several services [serveeses] (a common form of public transportation), walking over dirt mounds and dusty roads in between, we made our way to the heart of the old town, near the fruit and vegetable market, to meet up with Chris Brown, a full-time CPTer. As we were shaking his hand, two Israeli military jeeps drove right into the market area. Soldiers emerged from the jeeps with a sense of purpose, and assumed defensive positions, guns in hand. Of course, during the course of our introductions, we were a bit distracted by this, but the activity in the market didn’t seem to change much. Chris speculated that the soldiers had come, as usual, for purposes of intimidation. Perhaps they would pull a few young men aside, ask to see their identification cards, and maybe detain one or two for a few hours before letting them go.
We walked past the soldiers, away from the market, and started down a road that used to be bustling with people before the current Intifada began. Many shop doors had been permanently closed-some of which had at one point been welded shut by Israeli soldiers in an act to “protect them from damage and loss by nearby settlers.” Unfortunately, the shopkeepers could not have access to their shops and the goods inside until the case was taken before the authorities and enough intervention took place (partly by CPT) to have the soldiers come back and cut the locks open again.
As we continued walking, Chris directed us to walk to the side of the street, under metal awnings, which lined the street on either side and were connected by a metal “net.” The net was placed there to prevent the garbage, from the settlers living above, from being thrown down upon the people below. Chris recalled a time when he was once only a few steps from being hit by hot oil, which of course would not have been stopped by the net.
We also walked past a checkpoint, on our way to the CPT house, where a middle-aged man sat blindfolded, guarded by a female Israeli soldier. A few observers from the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) were there keeping an eye on the checkpoint and trying to find out why the man was being detained.
Seeing first hand these poignant effects of the occupation helped us to appreciate groups like CPT and TIPH greatly, as they act as a presence designed to discourage harassment of Palestinians and to intervene on behalf of their protection, employing methods of nonviolence.
This past Wednesday, a week after our visit, CPTers Chris Brown and Kim Lamberty, underwent an attack while escorting children to school on a settler road. The road is not open to Palestinian drivers, but Palestinians are allowed to travel by foot on the road with permission from the Israeli military. Children are often afraid to walk to school on this road, because they are constantly harassed by settlers. A full article on the incident can be found at the end of this update.
Please hold Chris, Kim and CPT in your prayers as well as the children who witnessed the attacks. Pray for love and peace to overcome the fear that so many people experience here. Fear contributes to violence, which does not bring peace.
Holiday Season
Recently Jews everywhere celebrated Rash Hashanah, the advent of a New Year, as well as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Starting on October 16th, Muslims will be observing Ramadan, their month of fasting. Let us pray for the peace of all people and for God’s grace and love to be with them.
Upcoming Olive Harvest
In about one month, Palestinians will be setting out to harvest olives from their trees. We have been invited by friends and neighbors to join them for this year’s harvest, and we look forward to sharing this experience with them.
One million trees and thousands of acres of farmland have been destroyed in the Palestinian Territories by the Israeli Occupation Army since the beginning of the Intifada in October 2000. As a part of this policy, 367,346 olive trees have been uprooted (31.05.2004), and this destructive practice continues daily in the Occupied Territories. Some of the excuses given for the confiscation of Palestinian land and the uprooting of trees range from the expansion of Israeli settlements and their bypass roads to the building of the "Apartheid wall" which annexes 50% of the West Bank to Israel. http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2926.shtml
Now, at the end of the fourth year of the current Intifada, let us pray for a bountiful harvest, as thousands of olive trees have been uprooted to make way for the Separation Wall, and olives are a source of food and livelihood for many Palestinians.
A Word from the MCC U.N. Office
The MCC UN Liaison Office continues to be actively involved with the NGO Working Group on Israel Palestine at the UN headquarters in NY. The Working Group's recent newsletter (to government missions at the UN, UN agencies, and NGOs) looks at the implications of the International Court of Justice's advisory opinion on the wall. This newsletter is attached. You can also visit the MCC UN Office at http://www.mcc.org/bi/un/index.html.
A Note of Hope
On Monday, September 27, we walked to Manger Square to witness the “Peace Cycle,” consisting of twenty-six cyclists from various western nations, ride into Bethlehem. The cyclists were wearing shirts that stated in the front, “Free Palestine.” Our partner, Holy Land Trust, was one of the sponsors of the cycling group. Sami Awad, director of Holy Land Trust, spoke to the cyclists in a clear manner. He said that it isn’t enough to come to Palestine and stand in solidarity, but that they also must return to their respective communities and speak to the hearts and minds of the people there about the situation. That is the most powerful thing we can do. Therefore, we are also encouraged to hear of people reading the stories posted on the Bridges Not Walls website, and writing to their respective government representatives. www.mcc.org/us/bridges
We always appreciate your thoughts, prayers and feedback for us here in Palestine. God’s peace and love be with all of you.
In peace,
Chris and Tim Seidel
Peace Development Workers
Mennonite Central Committee
Bethlehem, Palestine
________________________________
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 29, 2004
CHRISTIAN PEACEMAKERS ATTACKED, INJURED BY ISRAELI SETTLERS
HEBRON, WEST BANK - Kim Lamberty (Washington DC, USA) and Christopher Brown (San Francisco, USA) were attacked and beaten by five Israeli settlers while accompanying Palestinian children walking to school this morning in the Southern Hebron District of the West Bank. The school children were able to escape uninjured. Lamberty and Brown were taken by ambulance to Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheba.
The Israeli settlers took Lamberty's waist pack with her money, passport and cell phone. Lamberty stated in a telephone interview, " We were attacked by settler men who came from the Ma'on outpost. They were dressed in black with black scarves across their faces. They threw us down to the ground and kicked us. Chris was also beaten with chains and a bat." Lamberty suffered a broken arm and knee. She has now been released from the hospital and is recovering in Jerusalem.
Brown sustained broken ribs, one of which punctured his lung. He has undergone a surgical procedure to fix his collapsed lung. Brown also suffered a contusion on his head at his temple, but does not appear to have any brain injury. He will be recovering in the hospital for an unspecified amount of time.
Christian Peacemaker teams are present in the area of the attack at the request of Palestinian villagers who are suffering repeated harassment from Israeli settlers while Israeli authorities have failed to intervene.
Christian Peacemaker Teams places small ecumenical teams trained in nonviolent intervention in war zones, for violence reduction.
Christian Peacemaker Teams is an ecumenical initiative to support violence reduction efforts around the world. To learn more about CPT's peacemaking work, please visit our website at: http://www.cpt.org.
Photos of our projects may be viewed at: http://www.cpt.org/gallery
________________________________
BADIL Resource Center for
Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
Press Release, 15 September 2004 (E/31/04)
They say 9/11 changed the world. What about
September 16?
September 16 commemorates the 1982 Sabra and
Shatila massacre, the day almost a quarter of a
century ago, when up to 3,500 civilians, mainly
Palestinian refugees, died in Beirut, Lebanon
refugee camps.
In 1982, Ariel Sharon was Defense Minister of
Israel. An Israeli commission of inquiry found
that he and other Israelis were responsible for
the massacre. Now Ariel Sharon is Prime
Minister of Israel.
Under the Universal Jurisdiction Law of Belgium,
Ariel Sharon was charged in relation to the
Sabra and Shatila massacre. The case failed
when Belgium was forced to abandon its law
through U.S. and other pressure. The law simply
put Belgian law into agreement with the Geneva
Conventions something expected from every state
that is a signatory to the Conventions. The
Geneva Conventions call for prosecution or
extradition of anyone guilty of crimes against
humanity. Among others, Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch have supported the
concept of universal jurisdiction.
Others who had a role in the massacre remain in
positions of power both in Israel and Lebanon.
Things haven't changed much for the
Palestinians. Inquiries into the massacre were
not released. Most massacre perpetrators remain
at large. Nothing has been done to compensate
the victims.
The killing with impunity continues, especially
for Palestinians. In the occupied West Bank and
Gaza Strip more than 3,100 Palestinians have
been killed by the Israeli military and Israel
settlers in the past four years. In the same
period almost 1,000 Israeli civilians and
members of the Israeli security forces have been
killed by Palestinians.
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon remain unable to
own land and are barred from more than 70 types
of work. The Palestinians of West Bank and Gaza
remain locked in a land which is growing smaller
by the day with illegal takeovers of land and
the building of the wall by Israel.
All Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948
and through the years because of Israeli actions
have been denied the right of return.
Some say the world changed on September 11, 2001
but on 16 September, 22 years after the Sabra
and Shatila massacre, not much has changed for
the Palestinians.
-----------------
Badil-english is a dissemination list of BADIL Resource
Center. All communication with BADIL should be addressed
to: info@badil.org
In order to subscribe to this list, please send an empty
message to: badil-english-subscribe@p-ol.com
If you wish to un-subscribe, please send an empty message
to: badil-english-unsubscribe@p-ol.com
BADIL Resource Center aims to provide a resource pool
of alternative, critical and progressive information on the
question of Palestinian refugees in our quest to achieve
a just and lasting soluton for exiled Palestinians based
on their right of return.
PO Box 728, Bethlehem, Palestine;
Email: info@badil.org;
Website: www.badil.org;
Telephone/Fax: 02-2747346
>From outside of Palestine: 972-2-2747346
Badil-english mailing list
Badil-english@p-ol.com
http://mail.p-ol.com/mailman/listinfo/badil-english
________________________________
Ha’aretz
If it were the reverse
By Gideon Levy
Last update - 03:02 18/07/2004
What would happen if a Palestinian terrorist were to detonate a bomb at the entrance to an apartment building in Israel and cause the death of an elderly man in a wheelchair, who would later be found buried under the rubble of the building? The country would be profoundly shocked. Everyone would talk about the sickening cruelty of the act and its perpetrators. The shock would be even greater if it then turned out that the dead man's wife had tried to dissuade the terrorist from blowing up the house, telling him that there were people inside, but to no avail. The tabloids would come out with the usual screaming headline: "Buried alive in his wheelchair." The terrorists would be branded "animals."
Last Monday, Israel Defense Forces bulldozers in Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, demolished the home of Ibrahim Halfalla, a 75-year-old disabled man and father of seven, and buried him alive. Umm-Basel, his wife, says she tried to stop the driver of the heavy machine by shouting, but he paid her no heed. The IDF termed the act "a mistake that shouldn't have happened," and the incident was noted in passing in Israel. The country's largest-circulation paper, Yedioth Ahronoth, didn't bother to run the story at all. The blood libel in France - a woman's tale of being subjected to an anti-Semitic attack, which later turned out to be fiction - proved a great deal more upsetting to people. There we thought the assault was aimed against our people. But when the IDF bulldozes a disabled Palestinian to death? Not a story. Just like the killing, under the rubble of her home, of Noha Maqadama, a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy, before the eyes of her husband and children, in El Boureij refugee camp a few months earlier.
And what would happen if a Palestinian were to shoot an Israeli university lecturer and his son in front of his wife and their young son? That's what happened 10 days ago in the case of Dr. Salem Khaled, from Nablus, who called to the soldiers from the window of his house because he was a man of peace and the front door had jammed, so he couldn't get out. The soldiers shot him to death and then killed his 16-year-old son before the eyes of his mother and his 11-year-old brother. It's not hard to imagine how we would react to the story if the victims were ours.
But when we're implicated and the victims are Palestinians, we prefer to avert our eyes, not to know, not to take an interest and certainly not to be shocked. Palestinian victims - and their numbers, as everyone knows, are far greater than ours - don't even merit newspaper reports, not even when the chain of events is particularly brutal, as in the examples above. This is not an intellectual exercise but an attempt to demonstrate the concealment of information, the double morality and the hypocrisy. The indifference to these two very recent incidents proved again that in our eyes there is only one victim and all the others will never be considered victims.
If a European cabinet minister were to declare, "I don't want these long-nosed Jews to serve me in restaurants," all of Europe would be up in arms and this would be the minister's last comment as a minister. Three years ago, our former labor and social affairs minister, Shlomo Benizri, from Shas, stated: "I can't understand why slanty-eyed types should be the ones to serve me in restaurants." Nothing happened. We are allowed to be racists. And if a European government were to announce that Jews are not permitted to attend Christian schools? The Jewish world would rise up in protest. But when our Education Ministry announces that it will not permit Arabs to attend Jewish schools in Haifa, it's not considered racism. Only in Israel could this not be labeled racist. The heritage of Golda Meir - it was she who said that after what the Nazis did to us, we can do whatever we want - is now having a late and unfortunate revival.
What would happen if a certain country were to enact legislation forbidding members of a particular nation to become citizens there, no matter what the circumstances, including mixed couples who married and raised families? No country anywhere enacts laws like these nowadays. Apart from Israel. If the cabinet extends the validity of the new Citizenship Law today, Palestinians will not be able to undergo naturalization here, even if they are married to Israelis. We have the right, you see. And if the illegal Israeli immigrants in the United States were hunted down like animals in the dark of night, the way the Immigration Police do here, would we have a better understanding of the injustice we are doing to a community that wants nothing other than to work here?
What would we say if the parents of Israeli emigrants were separated from their children and deported, without having available any avenue of naturalization, no matter what the circumstances? And how would we classify a country that interrogates visitors about their political opinions as soon as they disembark from the plane at the airport and bars them from entering it the security authorities look askance at the opinions they express? What would happen if anti-Semites in France were to poison the drinking water of a Jewish neighborhood? Last week settlers poisoned a well at Atawana, in the southern Mount Hebron region, and the police are investigating.
And we still haven't said anything about a country that would imprison another nation, or about a regime that would prevent access to medical treatment for some of its subjects, according to its national identity, about roads that would be open only to the members of one nation or about an airport that would be closed to the other nation. All this is happening in Israel and is pulling from under us the moral ground that makes it possible for us to complain about racism and anti-Semitism abroad, even when they actually erupt.
2 October 2004
On the Ground in Hebron
On Tuesday, September 21, the International Day of Peace, we took a trip south to Hebron (Al Khaliil) to meet the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT). After taking a taxi and several services [serveeses] (a common form of public transportation), walking over dirt mounds and dusty roads in between, we made our way to the heart of the old town, near the fruit and vegetable market, to meet up with Chris Brown, a full-time CPTer. As we were shaking his hand, two Israeli military jeeps drove right into the market area. Soldiers emerged from the jeeps with a sense of purpose, and assumed defensive positions, guns in hand. Of course, during the course of our introductions, we were a bit distracted by this, but the activity in the market didn’t seem to change much. Chris speculated that the soldiers had come, as usual, for purposes of intimidation. Perhaps they would pull a few young men aside, ask to see their identification cards, and maybe detain one or two for a few hours before letting them go.
We walked past the soldiers, away from the market, and started down a road that used to be bustling with people before the current Intifada began. Many shop doors had been permanently closed-some of which had at one point been welded shut by Israeli soldiers in an act to “protect them from damage and loss by nearby settlers.” Unfortunately, the shopkeepers could not have access to their shops and the goods inside until the case was taken before the authorities and enough intervention took place (partly by CPT) to have the soldiers come back and cut the locks open again.
As we continued walking, Chris directed us to walk to the side of the street, under metal awnings, which lined the street on either side and were connected by a metal “net.” The net was placed there to prevent the garbage, from the settlers living above, from being thrown down upon the people below. Chris recalled a time when he was once only a few steps from being hit by hot oil, which of course would not have been stopped by the net.
We also walked past a checkpoint, on our way to the CPT house, where a middle-aged man sat blindfolded, guarded by a female Israeli soldier. A few observers from the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) were there keeping an eye on the checkpoint and trying to find out why the man was being detained.
Seeing first hand these poignant effects of the occupation helped us to appreciate groups like CPT and TIPH greatly, as they act as a presence designed to discourage harassment of Palestinians and to intervene on behalf of their protection, employing methods of nonviolence.
This past Wednesday, a week after our visit, CPTers Chris Brown and Kim Lamberty, underwent an attack while escorting children to school on a settler road. The road is not open to Palestinian drivers, but Palestinians are allowed to travel by foot on the road with permission from the Israeli military. Children are often afraid to walk to school on this road, because they are constantly harassed by settlers. A full article on the incident can be found at the end of this update.
Please hold Chris, Kim and CPT in your prayers as well as the children who witnessed the attacks. Pray for love and peace to overcome the fear that so many people experience here. Fear contributes to violence, which does not bring peace.
Holiday Season
Recently Jews everywhere celebrated Rash Hashanah, the advent of a New Year, as well as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Starting on October 16th, Muslims will be observing Ramadan, their month of fasting. Let us pray for the peace of all people and for God’s grace and love to be with them.
Upcoming Olive Harvest
In about one month, Palestinians will be setting out to harvest olives from their trees. We have been invited by friends and neighbors to join them for this year’s harvest, and we look forward to sharing this experience with them.
One million trees and thousands of acres of farmland have been destroyed in the Palestinian Territories by the Israeli Occupation Army since the beginning of the Intifada in October 2000. As a part of this policy, 367,346 olive trees have been uprooted (31.05.2004), and this destructive practice continues daily in the Occupied Territories. Some of the excuses given for the confiscation of Palestinian land and the uprooting of trees range from the expansion of Israeli settlements and their bypass roads to the building of the "Apartheid wall" which annexes 50% of the West Bank to Israel. http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2926.shtml
Now, at the end of the fourth year of the current Intifada, let us pray for a bountiful harvest, as thousands of olive trees have been uprooted to make way for the Separation Wall, and olives are a source of food and livelihood for many Palestinians.
A Word from the MCC U.N. Office
The MCC UN Liaison Office continues to be actively involved with the NGO Working Group on Israel Palestine at the UN headquarters in NY. The Working Group's recent newsletter (to government missions at the UN, UN agencies, and NGOs) looks at the implications of the International Court of Justice's advisory opinion on the wall. This newsletter is attached. You can also visit the MCC UN Office at http://www.mcc.org/bi/un/index.html.
A Note of Hope
On Monday, September 27, we walked to Manger Square to witness the “Peace Cycle,” consisting of twenty-six cyclists from various western nations, ride into Bethlehem. The cyclists were wearing shirts that stated in the front, “Free Palestine.” Our partner, Holy Land Trust, was one of the sponsors of the cycling group. Sami Awad, director of Holy Land Trust, spoke to the cyclists in a clear manner. He said that it isn’t enough to come to Palestine and stand in solidarity, but that they also must return to their respective communities and speak to the hearts and minds of the people there about the situation. That is the most powerful thing we can do. Therefore, we are also encouraged to hear of people reading the stories posted on the Bridges Not Walls website, and writing to their respective government representatives. www.mcc.org/us/bridges
We always appreciate your thoughts, prayers and feedback for us here in Palestine. God’s peace and love be with all of you.
In peace,
Chris and Tim Seidel
Peace Development Workers
Mennonite Central Committee
Bethlehem, Palestine
________________________________
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 29, 2004
CHRISTIAN PEACEMAKERS ATTACKED, INJURED BY ISRAELI SETTLERS
HEBRON, WEST BANK - Kim Lamberty (Washington DC, USA) and Christopher Brown (San Francisco, USA) were attacked and beaten by five Israeli settlers while accompanying Palestinian children walking to school this morning in the Southern Hebron District of the West Bank. The school children were able to escape uninjured. Lamberty and Brown were taken by ambulance to Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheba.
The Israeli settlers took Lamberty's waist pack with her money, passport and cell phone. Lamberty stated in a telephone interview, " We were attacked by settler men who came from the Ma'on outpost. They were dressed in black with black scarves across their faces. They threw us down to the ground and kicked us. Chris was also beaten with chains and a bat." Lamberty suffered a broken arm and knee. She has now been released from the hospital and is recovering in Jerusalem.
Brown sustained broken ribs, one of which punctured his lung. He has undergone a surgical procedure to fix his collapsed lung. Brown also suffered a contusion on his head at his temple, but does not appear to have any brain injury. He will be recovering in the hospital for an unspecified amount of time.
Christian Peacemaker teams are present in the area of the attack at the request of Palestinian villagers who are suffering repeated harassment from Israeli settlers while Israeli authorities have failed to intervene.
Christian Peacemaker Teams places small ecumenical teams trained in nonviolent intervention in war zones, for violence reduction.
Christian Peacemaker Teams is an ecumenical initiative to support violence reduction efforts around the world. To learn more about CPT's peacemaking work, please visit our website at: http://www.cpt.org.
Photos of our projects may be viewed at: http://www.cpt.org/gallery
________________________________
BADIL Resource Center for
Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
Press Release, 15 September 2004 (E/31/04)
They say 9/11 changed the world. What about
September 16?
September 16 commemorates the 1982 Sabra and
Shatila massacre, the day almost a quarter of a
century ago, when up to 3,500 civilians, mainly
Palestinian refugees, died in Beirut, Lebanon
refugee camps.
In 1982, Ariel Sharon was Defense Minister of
Israel. An Israeli commission of inquiry found
that he and other Israelis were responsible for
the massacre. Now Ariel Sharon is Prime
Minister of Israel.
Under the Universal Jurisdiction Law of Belgium,
Ariel Sharon was charged in relation to the
Sabra and Shatila massacre. The case failed
when Belgium was forced to abandon its law
through U.S. and other pressure. The law simply
put Belgian law into agreement with the Geneva
Conventions something expected from every state
that is a signatory to the Conventions. The
Geneva Conventions call for prosecution or
extradition of anyone guilty of crimes against
humanity. Among others, Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch have supported the
concept of universal jurisdiction.
Others who had a role in the massacre remain in
positions of power both in Israel and Lebanon.
Things haven't changed much for the
Palestinians. Inquiries into the massacre were
not released. Most massacre perpetrators remain
at large. Nothing has been done to compensate
the victims.
The killing with impunity continues, especially
for Palestinians. In the occupied West Bank and
Gaza Strip more than 3,100 Palestinians have
been killed by the Israeli military and Israel
settlers in the past four years. In the same
period almost 1,000 Israeli civilians and
members of the Israeli security forces have been
killed by Palestinians.
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon remain unable to
own land and are barred from more than 70 types
of work. The Palestinians of West Bank and Gaza
remain locked in a land which is growing smaller
by the day with illegal takeovers of land and
the building of the wall by Israel.
All Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948
and through the years because of Israeli actions
have been denied the right of return.
Some say the world changed on September 11, 2001
but on 16 September, 22 years after the Sabra
and Shatila massacre, not much has changed for
the Palestinians.
-----------------
Badil-english is a dissemination list of BADIL Resource
Center. All communication with BADIL should be addressed
to: info@badil.org
In order to subscribe to this list, please send an empty
message to: badil-english-subscribe@p-ol.com
If you wish to un-subscribe, please send an empty message
to: badil-english-unsubscribe@p-ol.com
BADIL Resource Center aims to provide a resource pool
of alternative, critical and progressive information on the
question of Palestinian refugees in our quest to achieve
a just and lasting soluton for exiled Palestinians based
on their right of return.
PO Box 728, Bethlehem, Palestine;
Email: info@badil.org;
Website: www.badil.org;
Telephone/Fax: 02-2747346
>From outside of Palestine: 972-2-2747346
Badil-english mailing list
Badil-english@p-ol.com
http://mail.p-ol.com/mailman/listinfo/badil-english
________________________________
Ha’aretz
If it were the reverse
By Gideon Levy
Last update - 03:02 18/07/2004
What would happen if a Palestinian terrorist were to detonate a bomb at the entrance to an apartment building in Israel and cause the death of an elderly man in a wheelchair, who would later be found buried under the rubble of the building? The country would be profoundly shocked. Everyone would talk about the sickening cruelty of the act and its perpetrators. The shock would be even greater if it then turned out that the dead man's wife had tried to dissuade the terrorist from blowing up the house, telling him that there were people inside, but to no avail. The tabloids would come out with the usual screaming headline: "Buried alive in his wheelchair." The terrorists would be branded "animals."
Last Monday, Israel Defense Forces bulldozers in Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, demolished the home of Ibrahim Halfalla, a 75-year-old disabled man and father of seven, and buried him alive. Umm-Basel, his wife, says she tried to stop the driver of the heavy machine by shouting, but he paid her no heed. The IDF termed the act "a mistake that shouldn't have happened," and the incident was noted in passing in Israel. The country's largest-circulation paper, Yedioth Ahronoth, didn't bother to run the story at all. The blood libel in France - a woman's tale of being subjected to an anti-Semitic attack, which later turned out to be fiction - proved a great deal more upsetting to people. There we thought the assault was aimed against our people. But when the IDF bulldozes a disabled Palestinian to death? Not a story. Just like the killing, under the rubble of her home, of Noha Maqadama, a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy, before the eyes of her husband and children, in El Boureij refugee camp a few months earlier.
And what would happen if a Palestinian were to shoot an Israeli university lecturer and his son in front of his wife and their young son? That's what happened 10 days ago in the case of Dr. Salem Khaled, from Nablus, who called to the soldiers from the window of his house because he was a man of peace and the front door had jammed, so he couldn't get out. The soldiers shot him to death and then killed his 16-year-old son before the eyes of his mother and his 11-year-old brother. It's not hard to imagine how we would react to the story if the victims were ours.
But when we're implicated and the victims are Palestinians, we prefer to avert our eyes, not to know, not to take an interest and certainly not to be shocked. Palestinian victims - and their numbers, as everyone knows, are far greater than ours - don't even merit newspaper reports, not even when the chain of events is particularly brutal, as in the examples above. This is not an intellectual exercise but an attempt to demonstrate the concealment of information, the double morality and the hypocrisy. The indifference to these two very recent incidents proved again that in our eyes there is only one victim and all the others will never be considered victims.
If a European cabinet minister were to declare, "I don't want these long-nosed Jews to serve me in restaurants," all of Europe would be up in arms and this would be the minister's last comment as a minister. Three years ago, our former labor and social affairs minister, Shlomo Benizri, from Shas, stated: "I can't understand why slanty-eyed types should be the ones to serve me in restaurants." Nothing happened. We are allowed to be racists. And if a European government were to announce that Jews are not permitted to attend Christian schools? The Jewish world would rise up in protest. But when our Education Ministry announces that it will not permit Arabs to attend Jewish schools in Haifa, it's not considered racism. Only in Israel could this not be labeled racist. The heritage of Golda Meir - it was she who said that after what the Nazis did to us, we can do whatever we want - is now having a late and unfortunate revival.
What would happen if a certain country were to enact legislation forbidding members of a particular nation to become citizens there, no matter what the circumstances, including mixed couples who married and raised families? No country anywhere enacts laws like these nowadays. Apart from Israel. If the cabinet extends the validity of the new Citizenship Law today, Palestinians will not be able to undergo naturalization here, even if they are married to Israelis. We have the right, you see. And if the illegal Israeli immigrants in the United States were hunted down like animals in the dark of night, the way the Immigration Police do here, would we have a better understanding of the injustice we are doing to a community that wants nothing other than to work here?
What would we say if the parents of Israeli emigrants were separated from their children and deported, without having available any avenue of naturalization, no matter what the circumstances? And how would we classify a country that interrogates visitors about their political opinions as soon as they disembark from the plane at the airport and bars them from entering it the security authorities look askance at the opinions they express? What would happen if anti-Semites in France were to poison the drinking water of a Jewish neighborhood? Last week settlers poisoned a well at Atawana, in the southern Mount Hebron region, and the police are investigating.
And we still haven't said anything about a country that would imprison another nation, or about a regime that would prevent access to medical treatment for some of its subjects, according to its national identity, about roads that would be open only to the members of one nation or about an airport that would be closed to the other nation. All this is happening in Israel and is pulling from under us the moral ground that makes it possible for us to complain about racism and anti-Semitism abroad, even when they actually erupt.
Wednesday, September 1
MCC Palestine Update #101
MCC Palestine Update #101
1 September 2004
It has been several months since the last MCC Palestine Update went out, and since then much has happened. Unfortunately, this update goes out at a very sad time. As many of you have most likely heard, this past week saw two bombings in the city of Beer Es Saba / Beersheba with subsequent demolition of homes in the West Bank city of Al Khaliil / Hebron. We are reminded of something Dr. King once said
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.…Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.…Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
As the families of so many are experiencing pain today, please pray for them and for a love that will one day put an end to this cycle of hurt and violence.
A Season of Change
The summer has since arrived and the fall is fast approaching, and these past months have indeed been a season of change here in the MCC Palestine program. After living in Palestine for nine years, Alain, Sonia, Sam, and Kate Weaver have settled nicely into their new home in Amman, and into their new positions as MCC regional representatives for the Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq programs. We welcomed Sri Mayasandra to the region at the end of July to begin his new assignment as Jerusalem Representative, assuming most of the day-to-day administrative duties there in Jerusalem. Ed Nyce has been enjoying his time back home with family after five years here in Bethlehem as Peace Development Worker. He is preparing for a speaking tour that will take him once again around the United States, telling the stories of the people here in Palestine. Tim and Chris Seidel arrived here in late June to pick up where Ed left off. We all miss Ed greatly but are happy for the continued presence of Alain and Sonia in this program.
“Bridges Not Walls”—MCC’s New Advocacy Campaign
The Separation / Apartheid Wall continues to creep across the Palestinian landscape. Despite the ruling in July by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that condemned the wall as illegal, Israel shows no sign of acquiescing to international law. As was displayed in the UN General Assembly, Israel and only a handful of other states voted against the UN General Assembly resolution to recognize and affirm the ruling in the Hague (which was overwhelmingly approved 150 to 6 with 10 abstentions). Unfortunately, that handful of member-nations included the United States. In keeping with such a position, the U.S. House of Representatives passed its own resolution condemning the ICJ’s ruling earlier this summer. The U.S. Senate is considering its own resolution to be voted on this month (within weeks). For more information on the ICJ’s ruling visit http://stopthewall.org/news/thehague.shtml. And also for a Palestinian Christian perspective on the Wall from one of our partners visit
http://www.sabeel.org/documents/Statement%20-%20the%20Wall.htm.
In response to these recent activities, the MCC Washington Office has launched an advocacy campaign called “Bridges Not Walls” to encourage advocacy regarding these issues. To learn more about this campaign and how you can become involved visit the “Bridges Not Walls” website at http://www.mcc.org/us/bridges. Such advocacy is needed, especially now. Please consider writing your U.S. senator, urging them to oppose their pending resolution condemning the Hague’s ruling.
New MCC Resources
As was mentioned in the last update, MCC of late has produced many items related to the situation here in Palestine. You can check out some of these on the web, including:
· The most recent MCC Peace Office newsletter “Walling Off the Future for Palestinians and Israelis” at http://www.mcc.org/respub/pon/mcc_pon04_03.pdf
· Preview the current a Common Place issue profiling the Occupied Palestinian Territories at http://www.mcc.org/acp/current.html
· A recent booklet by Sonia Weaver entitled Palestine/Israel: Answers to Common Questions is soon to be released and can be found at http://www.mcc.org/us/washington/bridges/paper.pdf
· The new DVD The Dividing Wall can be ordered online at http://www.mcc.org/catalog
A Busy Summer
As we mentioned summer is coming to an end, and school has already started this past week in Bethlehem. This summer saw many camps here with many of our partners involved in children’s lives. We had the pleasure of visiting a camp in Beit Sahour that our partners at the Wi’am Conflict Resolution Center were putting on. Earlier this summer we had the great opportunity to visit with other partners at the Culture and Free Thought Association as they held a race for children on the streets of Khan Younis in Gaza. At a time of such incredible stress in people’s lives there is seldom the opportunity for children to just be children. It was great to catch these small glimpses of life in the smiles of small children as attempts to resist the shadow of death cast by this occupation continue.
Nonviolent direct actions against the occupation were also stepped up during the summer season. Whether in the form of demonstrations in Beit Jala against the destruction of olive trees (some as old as two-thousand years) uprooted for the purpose of making way for the Separation / Apartheid Wall or in the visit of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, who participated in demonstrations in Ramallah, Abu-Dis, and Bethlehem—Palestinians, Israelis, and international activists have made their presence known this past summer.
One of the most poignant displays of late has been a hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners in jails all over Israel, protesting the inhumane treatment they continue to receive as “non-persons” inside the state of Israel. For more information on this hunger strike, see the statement published online by the our partners at the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center at http://www.sabeel.org/documents/Sabeel.
Reflection and Action
Recent approval of the expansion of colonies / settlements within the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in violation of several UN resolutions, the Fourth Geneva Convention, and even the recently touted “Roadmap for Peace,” only brings more despair to a people who already feel as if the rest of the world has forgotten about them. And now especially with tacit approval of these expansions by the White House (not to mention this administration’s mishandling of the refugee issues), Palestinians are not only asking “Where in the international community?” they are asking “Ween Allah?”…“Where is God?”
This is a challenge to us. May the following pieces offer an opportunity for reflection about our own identity as followers of the God of Life who was made known and continues to be made known to humanity through the “least of these” (Matthew 25.40). But not only reflection, may we all be challenged to move beyond our positions of privilege to action, participating in the coming of the justice of the kingdom of God here and proclaiming the reality of the resurrection now in this time on earth (Matthew 6.10).
Peace to you all,
Timothy and Christi Seidel.
Peace Development Workers
Mennonite Central Committee - Palestine
________________________________
Washington Post
Letting Israel Self-Destruct
By Daniel Seidemann
Thursday, August 26, 2004; Page A23
JERUSALEM -- Take a run down the four-mile stretch of road that leads from Jerusalem to Maleh Adumim, which, with its 31,000 residents, is the West Bank's largest settlement. As you hit the "T" junction at the old road to Jericho, look to your left, up the wooded hill. The few Caterpillar earthmovers cutting into the terrain seem benign in comparison to the frenetic construction taking place elsewhere in the West Bank. Looks deceive. These earthworks may portend the end of the state of Israel as we know it.
The excavations represent the commencement of work on the plan known as E-1, which will create a continuous built-up area connecting Maleh Adumim to Jerusalem. If the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City is the center of a clock face, and with Maleh Adumim due east of the city, E-1 seals Jerusalem on its 12 o'clock-3 o'clock quadrant.
The ramifications of this could hardly be starker. E-1 will cut East Jerusalem off from its environs in the West Bank, virtually ruling out the possibility of East Jerusalem ever becoming the national seat of Palestine. Given the topography, it will dismember the West Bank into two cantons, with no natural connection between them. If implemented, the plan will create a critical mass of facts on the ground that will render nearly impossible the creation of a sustainable Palestinian state with any semblance of geographical integrity. And denying the possibility of a sustainable Palestinian state leaves only one default option: the one-state, bi-national solution that signifies the end of Israel as the home of the Jewish people.
There is nothing new in the E-1 plan; it has been on the planning boards for a decade. Until now, each successive U.S. administration has made it clear that E-1 is the quintessential, unilateral act that predisposes the outcome of final status. As such, implementation will not be tolerated. The fate of E-1 is to be determined around a negotiating table, not by bulldozers.
Until now. The work on E-1's infrastructures has commenced, and the plans for building the neighborhoods proceed apace, only months from execution. And Jerusalem is interpreting the messages it is receiving from Washington, their style and substance, as a green light to proceed.
E-1 may be the most dangerous example of recent trends, but it is hardly alone. Schemes abound -- some embryonic, some well advanced -- to "line" the security fence being erected around Jerusalem and in its environs with new settlements. On its own, the fence is an eminently reversible defensive measure. Dovetailed with settlement activity, it threatens to create the critical mass of political fact that further undermines the feasibility of the two-state solution.
For the past 13 years, I have gotten up in the morning, scanned the horizon here and asked: "What the hell can go wrong today?" What can happen that will undermine the stability of this delicate ecosystem in Jerusalem? What facts created today will deprive us, or our children, of the possibility of arriving at a final status agreement in the future? Dealing with the most sensitive, primordial materials of Israel's conflict with the Palestinians has often been lonely work. But I have never been alone.
Throughout, three consecutive U.S. administrations have engaged Israel in "reality-principle diplomacy," closely monitoring these "facts on the ground" and discreetly applying the brakes. Diplomatic pressure? On rare occasions, yes, but more often just a pointed inquiry to the Israeli authorities has sufficed to prevent the more detrimental actions -- and at little or no political cost in Israel or in the United States. Discreet, nonpartisan diplomacy has contributed significantly to the stability of Jerusalem and kept the prospect of a political resolution of the conflict alive -- however remote that prospect may seem at the moment.
But now all that appears to have changed. It is not only that the current administration has disengaged from micromanagement of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. The Bush administration is turning a blind eye to Israel's disingenuous representations regarding settlement expansion, indicating to Ariel Sharon's government that so long as it proceeds with plans to withdraw from Gaza, Israel is at liberty to consolidate its hegemony over the public domain in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The discreet braking mechanism has all but disappeared -- and, silently, trends have been unleashed that will soon make the two-state solution impossible.
All this takes place under the auspices of an administration that professes unprecedented support for Israel. If that is the intent, it is hardly the result. Nothing undermines the feasibility of President Bush's two-state vision more than President Bush's abandonment of reality-principle diplomacy. As such, the president is neither friend nor supporter of the Jewish state -- because friends don't let friends drive drunk. And that is precisely what this administration is doing.
The next administration -- be it a second-term Bush or a first-term Kerry -- will in all likelihood reengage. Too much is at stake. The dynamic that has been created does not signal the emergence of a new equilibrium in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and vital U.S. interests are jeopardized. Whether this reengagement takes place in time to save the two-state solution remains to be seen.
The writer is a lawyer in Jerusalem and legal counsel to Ir Amim, an Israeli organization concerned with the future of that city.
________________________________
Ha’aretz
The beginning of the start of the end
By Gideon Levy
Sunday, August 29, 2004
How long can the costume ball go on? How long can we pretend the spit in our faces is rain? There are now signs that it can't go on forever - it is not the beginning of the end, but it looks like the beginning of the start of the end of the occupation.
Some of the criticism we are absorbing is beginning to have an impact. It may not happen tomorrow, but it is possible to notice a flicker of hope. First cracks have started to appear in the mask of self-righteousness we have worn for 37 years.
The bad news is that the cracks are only the result of international pressure; the good news is that this pressure is mounting. After hope ran out that we would manage to come to our senses on our own, now we need to hope the world doesn't give up until we return to being a just state. Those anxious for the future of Israel must hope the world will move from vehement words to no less vehement action.
The apartheid regime was finally brought to an end through sanctions and by excommunication from the family of nations. That, regrettably, is apparently the only way to ending the Israeli occupation.
After long years of ignoring international criticism, apparently the fear of the world taking action - sometime between the festivities of A Star is Born to the festivities over the medals at Athens - has started to take root in Israeli society.
It began with the disengagement plan and the prime minister's comments on the impossibility of permanent occupation - no matter how hollow they sounded. It continued with the High Court ruling against the separation fence - no matter how partial. And now, it ended with the recommendation by the attorney general to "thoroughly reexamine" applying the Fourth Geneva Convention to the territories - no matter how belatedly.
All these developments show that the occupied land is beginning to burn beneath our feet. For all the years of the occupation, Israel brutally trampled over the Fourth Geneva Convention, one of the most important and enlightened international documents that the world, including Israel, adopted.
But Israel made a mockery of the spirit of the treaty on the baseless argument that the territories were not captured from a sovereign power - as if that would change the act of occupation and its ramifications for the occupied population and its rights.
Israel violated and continues to violate Article 27 of the treaty that says: "Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honor, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs. They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof and against insults and public curiosity."
It violates this by controlling the Palestinians with military orders, imposing collective punishments, damages their property and puts severe limits on their freedom of movement, with all that implies for their lives.
Article 32, prohibiting causing physical suffering to the residents of the territories is not applied, nor is Article 47, which prohibits moving prisoners from the occupied territories to the state of the occupation power, and it certainly does not abide by the Article that prohibits moving civilian population from the occupying country to the occupied territories.
By the way, it's not only the Palestinians who are taught that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to them, Israeli children are also taught that. Civilized countries world-wide, though not our country, have long since become fed up with all of these.
But there's U.S. support and Europe hesitation about taking more aggressive steps. Now there is a bit of hope that the rope has been stretched too far. There are no more international bodies, from the World Health Organization and the World Bank through the European Union and the Organization of Non-Aligned countries, let alone UN agencies, which have not recently laid harsh accusations against Israel.
It's very easy to ask Menachem Mazuz, what happened? What's different from one more day of occupation to two more days? It is depressing to think that his eyes only began to open when UN sanctions are at the door, as he lately warned. And the Supreme Court's eyes opened only when the ruling at The Hague was at the door.
It is tempting to condemn the awful tardiness of adopting what should have been applied from the start of the occupation. But it is certainly better late than never. The worries that have hit Mazuz about the world are indeed good tidings.
We have no Israeli leader capable of acting, we have an army that has been corrupted beyond all recognition, we have a Supreme Court that stays away from occupation issues like they were fire. So, who knows - maybe it will be an attorney general whom nobody suspected of greatness, who will be the one who brings the good tidings home from out there.
________________________________
London Review of Books, Vol.26 No.9
As long as the plan contains the magic term 'withdrawal', it is seen as a good thing
Ilan Pappe warns that Israel is heading for disaster
By Ilan Pappe
May 6, 2004
The day after the assassination in Gaza of the Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, Yuval Steinitz was interviewed on Israeli radio. Steinitz is the Likud chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee in the Knesset. Before that he taught Western philosophy at the University of Haifa, where his epistemological world-view was shaped by romantic nationalists such as Gobineau and Fichte, who stressed purity of race as a precondition for national excellence. The translation of these European notions of racial superiority to Israel became evident as soon as the interviewer asked him about the government's plans for the remaining Palestinian leaders. Interviewer and interviewee giggled and agreed that the policy will be, as it should be, the assassination or expulsion of the entire current leadership: namely, all the members of the Palestinian Authority - about forty thousand people. 'I am so happy,' Steinitz said, 'that the Americans have finally come to their senses and are fully supporting our policies.'
On television, Benny Morris of Ben Gurion University repeated his support for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, claiming this as the best means of solving the conflict in Palestine. The New York Times and the New Republic were among the many stages on which Morris was invited to rehearse his views.
Opinions that used to be considered at best marginal, at worst lunatic, are now at the heart of the Israeli Jewish consensus, and disseminated by establishment academics on prime-time television as the only truth. Israel in 2004 is a paranoid society led by a fanatical political elite, determined to bring the conflict to an end by force and destruction, whatever the price to its society or its potential victims. Often this elite is supported only by the American administration, while the rest of the world watches helpless and bewildered.
Israel nowadays is like a plane flying on autopilot. The course is preplanned, the speed predetermined. The destination is the creation of a Greater Israel which will include half of the West Bank and a small part of the Gaza Strip (almost 90 per cent of historical Palestine): this will be a Greater Israel without a Palestinian presence, with high walls separating it from the indigenous population of Palestine, who will be crammed into two huge prison camps in Gaza and what's left of the West Bank. Palestinians inside Israel can either leave and join the millions of refugees languishing in the camps or submit to an apartheid system of discrimination and abuse. In many parts of the Western world the media still describe this as the only safe route to peace and stability. The discourse of peace employed by the Quartet - the US, the EU, Russia and the UN - since the Road Map came into being seems to blind many reasonable observers, who still seem to believe that this course makes sense. But it should have long been clear that Israel is heading for disaster.
Ariel Sharon's latest proposal - yet another destructive ploy masquerading as a peace plan - fits very naturally into the history of peace-making in Palestine since Oslo. The process began with a genuine effort to create two independent states in Palestine and Israel, but turned into a way for the Zionist centre in Israel to impose its vision of a Greater Israel with a Palestinian Bantustan alongside it, and no rights of restitution and return for Palestinian refugees. In the summer of 2000, Israel and the US demanded that the Palestinians back this vision of their future.
Sharon's 'peace' plan may not deviate much from previous Zionist schemes, and yet it seems that things have got worse in Israel during the last few weeks. The assassinations of Sheikh Yassin and Rantissi, with America's support for Sharon's plans in the background, are terrifying landmarks. The feeling is of being trapped on a plane which is following a course that will end in catastrophe for the Israeli citizens onboard, and will also annihilate the Palestinians in our way.
Yet this course has now been sanctioned by Washington, and is no longer questioned in Israel. Dissenting voices inside and outside the country seem to have weakened or disappeared. Past attempts to impose the vision of Greater Israel under the pretext of a peace plan were challenged: many used to shun such policies, or at least hesitate before supporting them publicly. This has changed: the critical instincts of both intellectuals and journalists have petered out in the last four years. There is an ethical void which allows the government to go on killing unarmed Palestinians and, thanks to curfews and long periods of closure, starving the society under occupation. Even worse, it also encourages mainstream politicians and intellectuals to call for ethnic cleansing and the further ruin of Palestine and its people.
Previous American governments supported Israeli policies, as long as they represented Jewish consensual positions, and regardless of how they affected, or were perceived by, the Palestinians. This support, however, used to require negotiation and some give and take. Even after the outbreak of the second intifada in October 2000, some in Washington tried to distance America from Israel's response to the uprising. For a while, Americans seemed uneasy about the fact that several Palestinians a day were being killed, and that a large number of the victims were children; there was also unhappiness about Israel's use of collective punishments, house demolitions and arrests. But they got used to all this, and when the Israeli Jewish consensus sanctioned the military assault on the West Bank in April 2002 - an unprecedented episode of cruelty in the unsavoury history of the occupation - America objected only to the unilateral acts of annexation and settlement that were expressly forbidden in the Anglo-American sponsored Road Map. Now, exactly two years later, Sharon has asked for American and British support for the colonialist settlement of the West Bank, and got it. His plan, which passes in Israel for a consensual peace plan, was at first rejected by the Americans as unproductive (the rest of the world condemned it in stronger terms). The Israelis, however, hoped that the similarities between American conduct in Iraq and Israel's policies in Palestine would cause the US position to change.
Sharon's plane stood on the tarmac for three hours while, inside, Sharon refused to allow it to take off for Washington until he got American approval for his new plan. He said he wouldn't be able to unite the Israeli Jewish public behind his disengagement programme without American support. It used to take a while for the US finally to submit to Israeli politicians' need for a consensus (and in this case Sharon's need to persuade the Israeli public to trust him in the face of a pending court case in which he might be found guilty of widespread personal corruption). This time it took only a few hours.
It ought to have taken the American administration much longer than that. In essence, Sharon was asking Bush to forgo almost every commitment the Americans have made over Palestine. The plan offers an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (although the Israelis left it in 1993), and the closure of the handful of settlements which remain there, as well as several others in the West Bank, in return for the annexation of the majority of the West Bank settlements to Israel. This will happen only after Israel has cordoned off the entire West Bank with a wall which will take years to complete and which most countries believe constitutes a violation of the Palestinians' human rights. Sharon also demanded a clear American rejection of the Palestinian right of return - a right which was recognised by the UN in December 1948. For the first time, Washington gave its support to a road map that leaves most of the West Bank in Israeli hands and all of the refugees in exile.
Bush is influenced by Christian Zionists who see in the present Israeli ploy yet another step towards the fulfilment of a doomsday scenario that will bring about the Second Coming of Christ. His more secular neo-con advisers are impressed by the war against Hamas which accompanies Israel's promises of eviction and peace. The seemingly successful Israeli operations are a proof by proxy that America's own 'war against terror' is bound to triumph. Israel's 'success', trumpeted every day by the defence minister, is a cynical distortion of the facts on the ground. The relative decline in guerrilla and terror activity has been achieved by curfews and closures, by imprisoning more than two million people in their homes without work or food for protracted periods of time. Even neo-conservatives should be able to see that this is not going to provide a long-term solution to the hostility and violence provoked by an occupying power, whether in Iraq or Palestine.
Sharon's plan has been approved by Bush's spin doctors, who can present it as another step towards peace and a distraction from failures in Iraq. It is probably also acceptable to more even-handed advisers, who are so desperate to see something change that they have persuaded themselves that the plan offers a chance for peace and a better future. These people long ago forgot how to distinguish between the mesmerising power of language and the reality it purports to describe. As long as the plan contains the magic term 'withdrawal', it is seen as essentially a good thing by some usually cool-headed journalists in the United States, by the leaders of the Israeli Labour party (bent on joining Sharon's government in the name of the sacred consensus), and even by the newly elected leader of the Israeli Left party, Yossi Beilin.
Two senior political scientists from Tel Aviv University, one on the radio this morning, the other on the TV news this evening, explained that Hamas has moved its headquarters to Damascus, and so - they have this on good authority - Israel will have to act there as well (Haaretz carried a similar report). They also estimated that since it would take years to complete the wall around the West Bank, there would be no real withdrawal from the Gaza Strip for a long time. The good news was that the intifada had been broken and Israel has time to decide, without any outside pressure being put on it, especially not by the US, how best to construct its future state now that Palestine is gone for ever.
The key term is 'outside pressure'. The governments of Europe and the US are unwilling or unable to stop the occupation and prevent the annihilation of the Palestinians. Those Israelis who are willing to take part in an anti-occupation movement are outnumbered, demoralised and crippled in the face of the consensus and its hegemony. The onus is on civil society in Europe and the US to do all it can to make the Israelis understand that policies such as Sharon's have a price. From academic boycott to economic sanctions, every possible means should be considered and employed in the West: their governments are no less responsible than Israel for the past, present and future catastrophes of the Palestinian people. This should be done not only for moral or historical reasons, but also for the sake of Europe's security and even survival. As the violence that has followed the events of 11 September 2001 has so painfully shown us, the Palestine conflict is undermining the delicate multicultural fabric of European society, as it pushes the US and the Muslim world further and further into a nightmare. Putting pressure on Israel is a small price to pay for the sake of global peace, regional stability and reconciliation in Palestine.
19 AprilIlan Pappe teaches political science at Haifa University, and is the head of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Israel. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples was published by Cambridge in 2003
1 September 2004
It has been several months since the last MCC Palestine Update went out, and since then much has happened. Unfortunately, this update goes out at a very sad time. As many of you have most likely heard, this past week saw two bombings in the city of Beer Es Saba / Beersheba with subsequent demolition of homes in the West Bank city of Al Khaliil / Hebron. We are reminded of something Dr. King once said
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.…Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.…Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
As the families of so many are experiencing pain today, please pray for them and for a love that will one day put an end to this cycle of hurt and violence.
A Season of Change
The summer has since arrived and the fall is fast approaching, and these past months have indeed been a season of change here in the MCC Palestine program. After living in Palestine for nine years, Alain, Sonia, Sam, and Kate Weaver have settled nicely into their new home in Amman, and into their new positions as MCC regional representatives for the Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq programs. We welcomed Sri Mayasandra to the region at the end of July to begin his new assignment as Jerusalem Representative, assuming most of the day-to-day administrative duties there in Jerusalem. Ed Nyce has been enjoying his time back home with family after five years here in Bethlehem as Peace Development Worker. He is preparing for a speaking tour that will take him once again around the United States, telling the stories of the people here in Palestine. Tim and Chris Seidel arrived here in late June to pick up where Ed left off. We all miss Ed greatly but are happy for the continued presence of Alain and Sonia in this program.
“Bridges Not Walls”—MCC’s New Advocacy Campaign
The Separation / Apartheid Wall continues to creep across the Palestinian landscape. Despite the ruling in July by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that condemned the wall as illegal, Israel shows no sign of acquiescing to international law. As was displayed in the UN General Assembly, Israel and only a handful of other states voted against the UN General Assembly resolution to recognize and affirm the ruling in the Hague (which was overwhelmingly approved 150 to 6 with 10 abstentions). Unfortunately, that handful of member-nations included the United States. In keeping with such a position, the U.S. House of Representatives passed its own resolution condemning the ICJ’s ruling earlier this summer. The U.S. Senate is considering its own resolution to be voted on this month (within weeks). For more information on the ICJ’s ruling visit http://stopthewall.org/news/thehague.shtml. And also for a Palestinian Christian perspective on the Wall from one of our partners visit
http://www.sabeel.org/documents/Statement%20-%20the%20Wall.htm.
In response to these recent activities, the MCC Washington Office has launched an advocacy campaign called “Bridges Not Walls” to encourage advocacy regarding these issues. To learn more about this campaign and how you can become involved visit the “Bridges Not Walls” website at http://www.mcc.org/us/bridges. Such advocacy is needed, especially now. Please consider writing your U.S. senator, urging them to oppose their pending resolution condemning the Hague’s ruling.
New MCC Resources
As was mentioned in the last update, MCC of late has produced many items related to the situation here in Palestine. You can check out some of these on the web, including:
· The most recent MCC Peace Office newsletter “Walling Off the Future for Palestinians and Israelis” at http://www.mcc.org/respub/pon/mcc_pon04_03.pdf
· Preview the current a Common Place issue profiling the Occupied Palestinian Territories at http://www.mcc.org/acp/current.html
· A recent booklet by Sonia Weaver entitled Palestine/Israel: Answers to Common Questions is soon to be released and can be found at http://www.mcc.org/us/washington/bridges/paper.pdf
· The new DVD The Dividing Wall can be ordered online at http://www.mcc.org/catalog
A Busy Summer
As we mentioned summer is coming to an end, and school has already started this past week in Bethlehem. This summer saw many camps here with many of our partners involved in children’s lives. We had the pleasure of visiting a camp in Beit Sahour that our partners at the Wi’am Conflict Resolution Center were putting on. Earlier this summer we had the great opportunity to visit with other partners at the Culture and Free Thought Association as they held a race for children on the streets of Khan Younis in Gaza. At a time of such incredible stress in people’s lives there is seldom the opportunity for children to just be children. It was great to catch these small glimpses of life in the smiles of small children as attempts to resist the shadow of death cast by this occupation continue.
Nonviolent direct actions against the occupation were also stepped up during the summer season. Whether in the form of demonstrations in Beit Jala against the destruction of olive trees (some as old as two-thousand years) uprooted for the purpose of making way for the Separation / Apartheid Wall or in the visit of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, who participated in demonstrations in Ramallah, Abu-Dis, and Bethlehem—Palestinians, Israelis, and international activists have made their presence known this past summer.
One of the most poignant displays of late has been a hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners in jails all over Israel, protesting the inhumane treatment they continue to receive as “non-persons” inside the state of Israel. For more information on this hunger strike, see the statement published online by the our partners at the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center at http://www.sabeel.org/documents/Sabeel.
Reflection and Action
Recent approval of the expansion of colonies / settlements within the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in violation of several UN resolutions, the Fourth Geneva Convention, and even the recently touted “Roadmap for Peace,” only brings more despair to a people who already feel as if the rest of the world has forgotten about them. And now especially with tacit approval of these expansions by the White House (not to mention this administration’s mishandling of the refugee issues), Palestinians are not only asking “Where in the international community?” they are asking “Ween Allah?”…“Where is God?”
This is a challenge to us. May the following pieces offer an opportunity for reflection about our own identity as followers of the God of Life who was made known and continues to be made known to humanity through the “least of these” (Matthew 25.40). But not only reflection, may we all be challenged to move beyond our positions of privilege to action, participating in the coming of the justice of the kingdom of God here and proclaiming the reality of the resurrection now in this time on earth (Matthew 6.10).
Peace to you all,
Timothy and Christi Seidel.
Peace Development Workers
Mennonite Central Committee - Palestine
________________________________
Washington Post
Letting Israel Self-Destruct
By Daniel Seidemann
Thursday, August 26, 2004; Page A23
JERUSALEM -- Take a run down the four-mile stretch of road that leads from Jerusalem to Maleh Adumim, which, with its 31,000 residents, is the West Bank's largest settlement. As you hit the "T" junction at the old road to Jericho, look to your left, up the wooded hill. The few Caterpillar earthmovers cutting into the terrain seem benign in comparison to the frenetic construction taking place elsewhere in the West Bank. Looks deceive. These earthworks may portend the end of the state of Israel as we know it.
The excavations represent the commencement of work on the plan known as E-1, which will create a continuous built-up area connecting Maleh Adumim to Jerusalem. If the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City is the center of a clock face, and with Maleh Adumim due east of the city, E-1 seals Jerusalem on its 12 o'clock-3 o'clock quadrant.
The ramifications of this could hardly be starker. E-1 will cut East Jerusalem off from its environs in the West Bank, virtually ruling out the possibility of East Jerusalem ever becoming the national seat of Palestine. Given the topography, it will dismember the West Bank into two cantons, with no natural connection between them. If implemented, the plan will create a critical mass of facts on the ground that will render nearly impossible the creation of a sustainable Palestinian state with any semblance of geographical integrity. And denying the possibility of a sustainable Palestinian state leaves only one default option: the one-state, bi-national solution that signifies the end of Israel as the home of the Jewish people.
There is nothing new in the E-1 plan; it has been on the planning boards for a decade. Until now, each successive U.S. administration has made it clear that E-1 is the quintessential, unilateral act that predisposes the outcome of final status. As such, implementation will not be tolerated. The fate of E-1 is to be determined around a negotiating table, not by bulldozers.
Until now. The work on E-1's infrastructures has commenced, and the plans for building the neighborhoods proceed apace, only months from execution. And Jerusalem is interpreting the messages it is receiving from Washington, their style and substance, as a green light to proceed.
E-1 may be the most dangerous example of recent trends, but it is hardly alone. Schemes abound -- some embryonic, some well advanced -- to "line" the security fence being erected around Jerusalem and in its environs with new settlements. On its own, the fence is an eminently reversible defensive measure. Dovetailed with settlement activity, it threatens to create the critical mass of political fact that further undermines the feasibility of the two-state solution.
For the past 13 years, I have gotten up in the morning, scanned the horizon here and asked: "What the hell can go wrong today?" What can happen that will undermine the stability of this delicate ecosystem in Jerusalem? What facts created today will deprive us, or our children, of the possibility of arriving at a final status agreement in the future? Dealing with the most sensitive, primordial materials of Israel's conflict with the Palestinians has often been lonely work. But I have never been alone.
Throughout, three consecutive U.S. administrations have engaged Israel in "reality-principle diplomacy," closely monitoring these "facts on the ground" and discreetly applying the brakes. Diplomatic pressure? On rare occasions, yes, but more often just a pointed inquiry to the Israeli authorities has sufficed to prevent the more detrimental actions -- and at little or no political cost in Israel or in the United States. Discreet, nonpartisan diplomacy has contributed significantly to the stability of Jerusalem and kept the prospect of a political resolution of the conflict alive -- however remote that prospect may seem at the moment.
But now all that appears to have changed. It is not only that the current administration has disengaged from micromanagement of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. The Bush administration is turning a blind eye to Israel's disingenuous representations regarding settlement expansion, indicating to Ariel Sharon's government that so long as it proceeds with plans to withdraw from Gaza, Israel is at liberty to consolidate its hegemony over the public domain in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The discreet braking mechanism has all but disappeared -- and, silently, trends have been unleashed that will soon make the two-state solution impossible.
All this takes place under the auspices of an administration that professes unprecedented support for Israel. If that is the intent, it is hardly the result. Nothing undermines the feasibility of President Bush's two-state vision more than President Bush's abandonment of reality-principle diplomacy. As such, the president is neither friend nor supporter of the Jewish state -- because friends don't let friends drive drunk. And that is precisely what this administration is doing.
The next administration -- be it a second-term Bush or a first-term Kerry -- will in all likelihood reengage. Too much is at stake. The dynamic that has been created does not signal the emergence of a new equilibrium in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and vital U.S. interests are jeopardized. Whether this reengagement takes place in time to save the two-state solution remains to be seen.
The writer is a lawyer in Jerusalem and legal counsel to Ir Amim, an Israeli organization concerned with the future of that city.
________________________________
Ha’aretz
The beginning of the start of the end
By Gideon Levy
Sunday, August 29, 2004
How long can the costume ball go on? How long can we pretend the spit in our faces is rain? There are now signs that it can't go on forever - it is not the beginning of the end, but it looks like the beginning of the start of the end of the occupation.
Some of the criticism we are absorbing is beginning to have an impact. It may not happen tomorrow, but it is possible to notice a flicker of hope. First cracks have started to appear in the mask of self-righteousness we have worn for 37 years.
The bad news is that the cracks are only the result of international pressure; the good news is that this pressure is mounting. After hope ran out that we would manage to come to our senses on our own, now we need to hope the world doesn't give up until we return to being a just state. Those anxious for the future of Israel must hope the world will move from vehement words to no less vehement action.
The apartheid regime was finally brought to an end through sanctions and by excommunication from the family of nations. That, regrettably, is apparently the only way to ending the Israeli occupation.
After long years of ignoring international criticism, apparently the fear of the world taking action - sometime between the festivities of A Star is Born to the festivities over the medals at Athens - has started to take root in Israeli society.
It began with the disengagement plan and the prime minister's comments on the impossibility of permanent occupation - no matter how hollow they sounded. It continued with the High Court ruling against the separation fence - no matter how partial. And now, it ended with the recommendation by the attorney general to "thoroughly reexamine" applying the Fourth Geneva Convention to the territories - no matter how belatedly.
All these developments show that the occupied land is beginning to burn beneath our feet. For all the years of the occupation, Israel brutally trampled over the Fourth Geneva Convention, one of the most important and enlightened international documents that the world, including Israel, adopted.
But Israel made a mockery of the spirit of the treaty on the baseless argument that the territories were not captured from a sovereign power - as if that would change the act of occupation and its ramifications for the occupied population and its rights.
Israel violated and continues to violate Article 27 of the treaty that says: "Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honor, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs. They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof and against insults and public curiosity."
It violates this by controlling the Palestinians with military orders, imposing collective punishments, damages their property and puts severe limits on their freedom of movement, with all that implies for their lives.
Article 32, prohibiting causing physical suffering to the residents of the territories is not applied, nor is Article 47, which prohibits moving prisoners from the occupied territories to the state of the occupation power, and it certainly does not abide by the Article that prohibits moving civilian population from the occupying country to the occupied territories.
By the way, it's not only the Palestinians who are taught that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to them, Israeli children are also taught that. Civilized countries world-wide, though not our country, have long since become fed up with all of these.
But there's U.S. support and Europe hesitation about taking more aggressive steps. Now there is a bit of hope that the rope has been stretched too far. There are no more international bodies, from the World Health Organization and the World Bank through the European Union and the Organization of Non-Aligned countries, let alone UN agencies, which have not recently laid harsh accusations against Israel.
It's very easy to ask Menachem Mazuz, what happened? What's different from one more day of occupation to two more days? It is depressing to think that his eyes only began to open when UN sanctions are at the door, as he lately warned. And the Supreme Court's eyes opened only when the ruling at The Hague was at the door.
It is tempting to condemn the awful tardiness of adopting what should have been applied from the start of the occupation. But it is certainly better late than never. The worries that have hit Mazuz about the world are indeed good tidings.
We have no Israeli leader capable of acting, we have an army that has been corrupted beyond all recognition, we have a Supreme Court that stays away from occupation issues like they were fire. So, who knows - maybe it will be an attorney general whom nobody suspected of greatness, who will be the one who brings the good tidings home from out there.
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London Review of Books, Vol.26 No.9
As long as the plan contains the magic term 'withdrawal', it is seen as a good thing
Ilan Pappe warns that Israel is heading for disaster
By Ilan Pappe
May 6, 2004
The day after the assassination in Gaza of the Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, Yuval Steinitz was interviewed on Israeli radio. Steinitz is the Likud chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee in the Knesset. Before that he taught Western philosophy at the University of Haifa, where his epistemological world-view was shaped by romantic nationalists such as Gobineau and Fichte, who stressed purity of race as a precondition for national excellence. The translation of these European notions of racial superiority to Israel became evident as soon as the interviewer asked him about the government's plans for the remaining Palestinian leaders. Interviewer and interviewee giggled and agreed that the policy will be, as it should be, the assassination or expulsion of the entire current leadership: namely, all the members of the Palestinian Authority - about forty thousand people. 'I am so happy,' Steinitz said, 'that the Americans have finally come to their senses and are fully supporting our policies.'
On television, Benny Morris of Ben Gurion University repeated his support for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, claiming this as the best means of solving the conflict in Palestine. The New York Times and the New Republic were among the many stages on which Morris was invited to rehearse his views.
Opinions that used to be considered at best marginal, at worst lunatic, are now at the heart of the Israeli Jewish consensus, and disseminated by establishment academics on prime-time television as the only truth. Israel in 2004 is a paranoid society led by a fanatical political elite, determined to bring the conflict to an end by force and destruction, whatever the price to its society or its potential victims. Often this elite is supported only by the American administration, while the rest of the world watches helpless and bewildered.
Israel nowadays is like a plane flying on autopilot. The course is preplanned, the speed predetermined. The destination is the creation of a Greater Israel which will include half of the West Bank and a small part of the Gaza Strip (almost 90 per cent of historical Palestine): this will be a Greater Israel without a Palestinian presence, with high walls separating it from the indigenous population of Palestine, who will be crammed into two huge prison camps in Gaza and what's left of the West Bank. Palestinians inside Israel can either leave and join the millions of refugees languishing in the camps or submit to an apartheid system of discrimination and abuse. In many parts of the Western world the media still describe this as the only safe route to peace and stability. The discourse of peace employed by the Quartet - the US, the EU, Russia and the UN - since the Road Map came into being seems to blind many reasonable observers, who still seem to believe that this course makes sense. But it should have long been clear that Israel is heading for disaster.
Ariel Sharon's latest proposal - yet another destructive ploy masquerading as a peace plan - fits very naturally into the history of peace-making in Palestine since Oslo. The process began with a genuine effort to create two independent states in Palestine and Israel, but turned into a way for the Zionist centre in Israel to impose its vision of a Greater Israel with a Palestinian Bantustan alongside it, and no rights of restitution and return for Palestinian refugees. In the summer of 2000, Israel and the US demanded that the Palestinians back this vision of their future.
Sharon's 'peace' plan may not deviate much from previous Zionist schemes, and yet it seems that things have got worse in Israel during the last few weeks. The assassinations of Sheikh Yassin and Rantissi, with America's support for Sharon's plans in the background, are terrifying landmarks. The feeling is of being trapped on a plane which is following a course that will end in catastrophe for the Israeli citizens onboard, and will also annihilate the Palestinians in our way.
Yet this course has now been sanctioned by Washington, and is no longer questioned in Israel. Dissenting voices inside and outside the country seem to have weakened or disappeared. Past attempts to impose the vision of Greater Israel under the pretext of a peace plan were challenged: many used to shun such policies, or at least hesitate before supporting them publicly. This has changed: the critical instincts of both intellectuals and journalists have petered out in the last four years. There is an ethical void which allows the government to go on killing unarmed Palestinians and, thanks to curfews and long periods of closure, starving the society under occupation. Even worse, it also encourages mainstream politicians and intellectuals to call for ethnic cleansing and the further ruin of Palestine and its people.
Previous American governments supported Israeli policies, as long as they represented Jewish consensual positions, and regardless of how they affected, or were perceived by, the Palestinians. This support, however, used to require negotiation and some give and take. Even after the outbreak of the second intifada in October 2000, some in Washington tried to distance America from Israel's response to the uprising. For a while, Americans seemed uneasy about the fact that several Palestinians a day were being killed, and that a large number of the victims were children; there was also unhappiness about Israel's use of collective punishments, house demolitions and arrests. But they got used to all this, and when the Israeli Jewish consensus sanctioned the military assault on the West Bank in April 2002 - an unprecedented episode of cruelty in the unsavoury history of the occupation - America objected only to the unilateral acts of annexation and settlement that were expressly forbidden in the Anglo-American sponsored Road Map. Now, exactly two years later, Sharon has asked for American and British support for the colonialist settlement of the West Bank, and got it. His plan, which passes in Israel for a consensual peace plan, was at first rejected by the Americans as unproductive (the rest of the world condemned it in stronger terms). The Israelis, however, hoped that the similarities between American conduct in Iraq and Israel's policies in Palestine would cause the US position to change.
Sharon's plane stood on the tarmac for three hours while, inside, Sharon refused to allow it to take off for Washington until he got American approval for his new plan. He said he wouldn't be able to unite the Israeli Jewish public behind his disengagement programme without American support. It used to take a while for the US finally to submit to Israeli politicians' need for a consensus (and in this case Sharon's need to persuade the Israeli public to trust him in the face of a pending court case in which he might be found guilty of widespread personal corruption). This time it took only a few hours.
It ought to have taken the American administration much longer than that. In essence, Sharon was asking Bush to forgo almost every commitment the Americans have made over Palestine. The plan offers an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (although the Israelis left it in 1993), and the closure of the handful of settlements which remain there, as well as several others in the West Bank, in return for the annexation of the majority of the West Bank settlements to Israel. This will happen only after Israel has cordoned off the entire West Bank with a wall which will take years to complete and which most countries believe constitutes a violation of the Palestinians' human rights. Sharon also demanded a clear American rejection of the Palestinian right of return - a right which was recognised by the UN in December 1948. For the first time, Washington gave its support to a road map that leaves most of the West Bank in Israeli hands and all of the refugees in exile.
Bush is influenced by Christian Zionists who see in the present Israeli ploy yet another step towards the fulfilment of a doomsday scenario that will bring about the Second Coming of Christ. His more secular neo-con advisers are impressed by the war against Hamas which accompanies Israel's promises of eviction and peace. The seemingly successful Israeli operations are a proof by proxy that America's own 'war against terror' is bound to triumph. Israel's 'success', trumpeted every day by the defence minister, is a cynical distortion of the facts on the ground. The relative decline in guerrilla and terror activity has been achieved by curfews and closures, by imprisoning more than two million people in their homes without work or food for protracted periods of time. Even neo-conservatives should be able to see that this is not going to provide a long-term solution to the hostility and violence provoked by an occupying power, whether in Iraq or Palestine.
Sharon's plan has been approved by Bush's spin doctors, who can present it as another step towards peace and a distraction from failures in Iraq. It is probably also acceptable to more even-handed advisers, who are so desperate to see something change that they have persuaded themselves that the plan offers a chance for peace and a better future. These people long ago forgot how to distinguish between the mesmerising power of language and the reality it purports to describe. As long as the plan contains the magic term 'withdrawal', it is seen as essentially a good thing by some usually cool-headed journalists in the United States, by the leaders of the Israeli Labour party (bent on joining Sharon's government in the name of the sacred consensus), and even by the newly elected leader of the Israeli Left party, Yossi Beilin.
Two senior political scientists from Tel Aviv University, one on the radio this morning, the other on the TV news this evening, explained that Hamas has moved its headquarters to Damascus, and so - they have this on good authority - Israel will have to act there as well (Haaretz carried a similar report). They also estimated that since it would take years to complete the wall around the West Bank, there would be no real withdrawal from the Gaza Strip for a long time. The good news was that the intifada had been broken and Israel has time to decide, without any outside pressure being put on it, especially not by the US, how best to construct its future state now that Palestine is gone for ever.
The key term is 'outside pressure'. The governments of Europe and the US are unwilling or unable to stop the occupation and prevent the annihilation of the Palestinians. Those Israelis who are willing to take part in an anti-occupation movement are outnumbered, demoralised and crippled in the face of the consensus and its hegemony. The onus is on civil society in Europe and the US to do all it can to make the Israelis understand that policies such as Sharon's have a price. From academic boycott to economic sanctions, every possible means should be considered and employed in the West: their governments are no less responsible than Israel for the past, present and future catastrophes of the Palestinian people. This should be done not only for moral or historical reasons, but also for the sake of Europe's security and even survival. As the violence that has followed the events of 11 September 2001 has so painfully shown us, the Palestine conflict is undermining the delicate multicultural fabric of European society, as it pushes the US and the Muslim world further and further into a nightmare. Putting pressure on Israel is a small price to pay for the sake of global peace, regional stability and reconciliation in Palestine.
19 AprilIlan Pappe teaches political science at Haifa University, and is the head of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Israel. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples was published by Cambridge in 2003
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