MCC Palestine Update #96
February 26, 2004
“I keep the curtains at the window drawn so I don’t have to look out at the fences that separate me from my land,” shared the mayor of Jayyous, a village of 3,000 people in the northern West Bank. During the last part of 2002 and the first part of 2003, the Israeli military constructed its separation barrier next to Jayyous village. As a result, Jayyous is a village today with a very tenuous economic future. Jayyous farmers own 12,500 dunums (1 dunum = ¼ of an acre). 600 dunums were bulldozed under to make way for the separation zone (consisting of barbed wire, foot trace paths, patrol roads, fences with electronic sensors). Another 8600 dunums are now on the western side of the separation zone. Soldiers open a gate in the fences two times a day (unless they don’t, thanks to Jewish holidays, or state holidays, or reasons unknown). In order to pass through the gate to the western side of the wall, one needs a permit issued by the Israeli civil administration of the military government. Obtaining this permit involves arduous bureaucratic procedures reminiscent of a Kafka short story. Many who apply are rejected for unspecified “security” reasons. Sometimes in one family only very young children or elderly persons who cannot carry out taxing agricultural work are given permits, while the healthy-bodied adults are denied them. As at the checkpoints throughout the West Bank, the regime instituted by the soldiers at the gates in the separation zone are arbitrary expressions of the soliders’ supreme power: at Jayyous, for example, farmers may not take their tractors through the gate, nor their sheep (unless they get permits for the sheep); in Falamiyyeh village just north of Jayyous, however, soldiers (at least sometimes) let tractors pass.
I visited Jayyous and Falamiyyeh this past Monday with a colleague from Catholic Relief Services and with videographers in the country who are working on a video sponsored by MCC, Catholic Relief Services and World Vision on the separation wall. We heard from numerous farmers in both communities tell how their livelihoods had been crushed thanks to the barrier. MCC and Catholic Relief Services are joining with the Palestinian Hydrology Group in both communities (and three other nearby towns and villages) to help farmers repair and renovate wells and water networks damaged and destroyed by Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers during the construction of the separation zone. “We sit around all day, looking out towards our land,” shared one farmer. “We see our trees dying. It’s tearing us up inside.”
This past Monday the International Court of Justice began hearing arguments from various parties about the legality of the wall. Israel has refused to attend the hearing, saying that the ICJ has no right to hand down an advisory opinion in this matter. Israel claims that the wall is to protect its citizens from violent attacks, such as the horrific suicide bombing in Jerusalem this week that claimed 8 lives. Some Israelis, however, with whom the film crew has met, disagree: “This wall won’t bring me security. It’s about grabbing land from Palestinians and separating them from one another. That won’t bring me security,” Na’ama Nagar of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, an MCC partner organization, told them.
Even as walls that divide and dispossess are being erected, there are Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for justice, peace and reconciliation. This Lenten season, please remember these peacemakers in your prayers. Pray for a future of bridges instead of walls, that the God who, in Christ, has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile might sustain the efforts of those Palestinians and Israelis who reject the legal, psychological, spiritual and physical walls that have divided and continue to divide the two peoples.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by a 15-year-old Palestinian girl from the West Bank village of Budrus where the wall is currently being built, explains why the wall is not a security barrier but a land grab. The second, by Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, looks at the tenuous future of communities trapped between the wall and the Green Line or surrounded by walls and fences inside the West Bank; with the Israeli military government demanding that residents of these villages obtain permits simply to remain in their homes, a process fraught with difficulties, the Palestinian fears of “transfer” are becoming increasingly real. Finally, Gideon Levy of Haaretz reports on the wanton, brutal exercise of power at one checkpoint in the northern West Bank.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/7994868.htm
Posted on Fri, Feb. 20, 2004
It exists not for security but for apartheid
Iltezam Morrar
A 15-year-old Palestinian student living in the West Bank
On Monday, the International Court of Justice in the Hague will begin hearings on the wall Israel is building around Palestinian cities and villages. I live in one of them: Budrus, a small village west of Ramallah. It is a very simple life here. Old women and farmers tend their sheep; children go to school, and people live together peacefully. Our village has many olive trees, which are very important for food and oil.
Americans should know that, from our viewpoint, the wall is not a security wall. Security and safety do not come from stealing land (Budrus lost about 80 percent of its village area in 1948, when Israel was formed, and stands to shrink by another 20 percent if the wall goes up). Security does not come from killing or harassing people (there is hardly a family in Palestine without some member who has been killed, hurt or imprisoned) or cutting trees (which Israeli officials have started doing around my village). So this is not a security wall. It is an apartheid wall.
Palestine will be separated into little pieces. Many people will be unable to go to work. Students won't be able to travel to university. After all this, when we are without land or olive trees, unable to work or study, people will leave. That is what the Israeli occupation is for. In 1953, for example, when Ariel Sharon led a military operation resulting in 69 civilian deaths at Qibya, the next village over from us, some people in Budrus were afraid and left. Everything the Israeli government has done is to make the people leave their land.
At the first demonstration to stop the wall in Budrus, only three old women participated with the men. I asked my father if the demonstrations were just for men, and he said no, they were for women as well. Some women and girls came to the next demonstration but left when they didn't see many other women. I told my father that we needed a demonstration only for women, and we made one.
On the first day Israeli officials came to cut the trees, I was at school. I said, "We should go; the land is more important than our exams." We marched to the fields, the boys and then the girls. Soldiers threw tear gas into the middle of us. We carried on; we were still holding our schoolbooks when we came to the Israeli captain. He was very angry and shouted, "Stop here. If you walk one more step, we will hit you." He pushed me, so I stood beside him and shouted "Free, free Palestine."
Because of the occupation, I cannot see my country. I can't travel in my country. It is like a big prison, and the wall will make it worse. If there were no occupation, I could be free. For me, the day my country is free will be my birthday. In the occupation, I have no future.
I want to study to help my country. I want to be a doctor, because here in Palestine, many people get hurt and there are few hospitals or doctors and little medicine. I want four children, but then, I want to be a doctor and will work late nights, so perhaps two is enough.
We don't hate Israelis because they are Israelis. The only thing between us is what we see as their theft of our land. If they gave back our land, nothing would be between us. We need enough land that all the Palestinian refugees who live outside could come and live here. Many Palestinians live in other countries, in tents, with no work.
Peaceful struggle is very important. It is the only way in which we can become free and stop the wall, even if we know the Israeli army does not want peace and will use violence. I think: If I use violence, all the children in Israel will feel in danger and they will use violence. So this makes the two sides always live in violence. It is important to show the world we are a peaceful people and all we want is peace.
The hearings in the Hague are very important even though we are not sure they will stop the wall. It is very important that the international community does something to say the wall should be stopped, even if it doesn't succeed.
2. Has the transfer of enclaves begun?
Haaretz, Feb. 24, 2004
By Amira Hass
"The Tanzim showed up one day," said the woman, 60-ish, the fear visible in her eyes. These are not Fatah people. This is a department within the Civil Administration - "the subcommittee for supervision of the supreme planning council," whose accepted and frightening abbreviation among Palestinian residents of the West Bank is "the Tanzim" (the planning). This is the department that issues demolition orders for Palestinian houses and stop work orders for construction projects.
H.A., an official in the Civil Administration's Tanzim, which the frightened woman was referring to, came twice during the last two months to the small Bedouin town of Arab a-Ramadin, south of Qalqilyah, on December 28, 2003 and on February 10, 2004. He hung up and took down three different kinds of orders: four "stop work orders", six "final stop work and razing orders and two "notices granting the right to object to demolition orders."
The buildings designated for demolition are: tin structure 10x8, tin structure 8x6 and tin structure 12x10, cement block and tin structure 10x10, cement block and tin structure 18x8 and cement block and tin structure 14x8. Two orders dated December 28, 2003 grant the residents a three-day extension to request that another cement block structure not be razed and one to request that the generator building and electricity pylons not be razed. The rest of the buildings in this town are like the structures for which demolition orders were issued: around 10 small, simple concrete structures and another 23 tin huts, that are boiling hot in summer and freezing cold in winter, in which the 250 members of the tribe live.
Eight kilometers from the Green Line
The speakers beg that their names be omitted, that whatever they say not be attributed to them and that their photos not be printed in the newspaper. "I just want to get home to be with my family, I don't want them to prevent me from being with my family at home," said one tribe member. They are frightened; they fear possible revenge from the Civil Administration, or in its alternate, euphemistic name, "the Coordination and Liaison Administration," which issues them permits allowing them to be in their homes that are valid for six months. Arab a-Ramadin and another four neighboring Palestinian communities (Arab Abu Farda and the villages of Wadi ar-Rasha, Ras a-Tira and a-Daba) are trapped in one of 80 enclaves, the loops that have been and will be created by the separation fence between them and the Green Line.
These enclave-loops were created in order to ensure that most of the settlements are outside the fence. The enclave of Arab a-Ramadin was created to ensure that Alfei Menashe is outside the fence. The fence - with its barbed wire, ditches, patrol tracks, wide security road and the gates that should open three times a day - creates a loop here that penetrates deep into the West Bank, a distance of around eight kilometers from the Green Line. As in other enclaves, it cuts off residents from their fields, separates clinics and their medical staffs from their patients, grocery stores from their customers, students from their schools. A school and grocery store that were respectively 300 and 700 meters away until a year or two ago, are now several kilometres further away and that in turn also imposes economic hardship on the family: the cost of taxi fares.
Three of the older Bedouin who still tended sheep had to sell them: the enclave does not provide enough space for grazing. The families no longer have the means to regularly purchase fodder for the sheep and goats due to the loss of job opportunities in Israel and the West Bank. All three of the elderly shepherds became physically ill after they sold their flocks.
The IDF and the Civil Administration in October 2003 created a special category for those thousands of Palestinians who live in the area between the fence and the Green Line, which has been officially declared a military area closed to Palestinians, but not closed to Jews: "long-term residents." The regulations that apply to this new category and the fact that the area is a closed military area grant Civil Administration officials full authority to check residency permits once every few months, and to renew or not renew them.
The new category obligates the residents to request an entry permit to those areas for anyone who is not registered with the Israeli authorities as a resident of the enclave: relatives, cab drivers, doctors, sanitation men, teachers, etc. Some receive the permits; others do not. The permits issued to Arab a-Ramadin residents - so that they can stay in their homes inside the closed military area, leave and then return - are valid until April 2004. Tribe members are convinced that if they are quoted, someone in the Civil Administration or the Shin Bet General Security Service, upon whose good graces they depend, will decide "due to security reasons" not to renew their permit to enter their home.
The word "home" prompts tired smiles on the faces of Arab a-Ramadin residents. Their small tin huts and concrete structures are spread over a green hill and its rocky slopes, in between a few sheep pens, small vegetable patches, improvised fences, family diwans (spaces covered with cloth sheets and rugs). They are originally from the Be'er Sheva area and were expelled and fled in 1948. They first settled in the Hebron area and in the mid-1950s headed north with their flocks to the Qalqilyah region. Gradually, and especially after the economic changes sparked by the capture of the territories in 1967, they began to settle down, and attempted to modernize: from tents and a nomadic life of shepherding, they switched to corrugated tin huts, more urban livelihoods such as construction, and started sending their sons and daughters to study in local schools. It was a natural process, not something imposed on them from above. Some of them purchased their lands from the surrounding villages, others leased lands or swapped other parcels of land for the lands here.
Without a master plan
According to some of the final demolition orders, it seem that already in 2000 stop work orders were issued for some of the structures, including the one that houses the electricity generator. Arab a-Ramadin residents always knew that the Israeli authorities did not draw up a master plan for them and that there was no point in submitting requests to build real houses that matched the improved financial situation of several of them and their changed, modern tastes. Because there is no master plan, they also did not connect to the electricity grid - the one that lights up, for example, the neighboring community which has been developing since 1982: Alfei Menashe. They are also not officially connected to the water network: they hooked up a long plastic pipe from the village of Habla. In the summer, the water is boiling. The Oslo Accords designated them as Area C, which is under Israeli civilian and security responsibility. Several demolition and stop work orders were also issued in two nearby places: the village of Wadi ar-Rasha and the corrugated tin hut community of the small Abu Farda tribe. Each one has around 90 residents. Both of them abut Alfei Menashe: one is located adjacent to its industrial zone and the other is adjacent to its western neighborhoods.
When Israel started building the separation fence's loops around them, the workers razed one of Wadi ar-Rasha's barns, built by its owners six years earlier. The reason: It was too close to the fence. In April 2003, when construction of the fence was fully underway, five additional demolition orders arrived in Wadi ar-Rasha: for a concrete structure, for an extension of an existing house and for a large tin structure. And there were another two demolition orders for two barns. This village, like several other neighboring villages, was apparently set up in the 19th century by residents of the village of Tulat, which is located to the east, whose lands officially extend to Jaljuliya in the west. It was a natural process of Palestinian settlement, typical of the rural residents who went with their flocks several kilometers away from the parent community, made homes inside caves and gradually settled in the new location. In recent years, after the Civil Administration issued demolition orders, building extensions intended to ease the crowding in Wadi ar-Rasha were razed.
In the two Bedouin communities and in Wadi ar-Rasha, residents are convinced that the Civil Administration's aim is to eliminate them completely from the area so that Alfei Menashe can develop even more, in the direction of the Green Line. One of the residents points to section six of their residence permit: "this permit does not represent proof of legal rights, including legal ownership or residency rights in the area, whichever is relevant." In other words, say the threatened residents, someone will come tomorrow and say that the land we are living on – not just the house - is not ours and that we are trespassing, that we have to leave.
And indeed, the Civil Administration, in its response to Haaretz, claims "the settlement of the Ramadin tribe, Abu Farda and Wadi ar-Rasha are illegal [the mistakes are in the original - A.H.]. Over the years, orders were issued, as they are issued for all illegal construction." The Civil Administration spokesman also stated that there is no connection between the construction of the fence and the issuing of demolition orders. "This a statutory legal process, civilian, of enforcing the law ... the Civil Administration is charged with enforcing the law as it relates to all matters of illegal construction in Area C of Judea and Samaria."
According to one Arab a-Ramadin resident, a Civil Administration official has tried over the last few months to lobby them to leave the area and settle elsewhere. In her response, the Civil Administration spokesman does not confirm or deny this claim. But, she said, "The Civil Administration is now in the middle of concerted efforts to review the correlation between master plans in Area C and the reality and the needs of the Palestinian population living in the area, in order to find solutions for issues of this nature." The Civil Administration's response also stated that work is now underway to connect the villages to the electricity grid (but in Arab a-Ramadin, for example, they do not know about that and haven't seen any signs that they're being connected to the electricity grid).
The Palestinians in the Alfei Menashe enclave do not believe the Israeli promises. For them, the demolition orders are more tangible than any promise given in response to an Israeli newspaper's query, while the discussions in The Hague are going on. "If they raze all of our tin and cement block structure," says an Arab a-Ramadin resident, "we will move into tents. The way it used to be. And if they want us to go away from here, then please, send us back to our natural place, where we were originally - Be'er Sheva."
3. When soldiers become bullies
By Gideon Levy
Three armed bullies in black ski masks get out of the jeep quickly. One breaks into shouts at the taxi driver who is letting off a female passenger, waving a rifle in the driver's face and ordering him out of the car. The bully then orders the frightened driver to hand over the keys to his taxi and get going. The helpless driver hands over his keys. In a feeble voice he asks if and when he can get his taxi back. "Maybe at the end of the day, maybe Wednesday. We'll see," says the thug, sticking the keys into his pocket, getting back in the jeep and driving away.
Highway bandits in Chechnya? Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Balata? No. The three bullies were Israeli soldiers. They confiscated the car from its owner, as they routinely do, because he let out a passenger on the other side of a blurry yellow line painted onto the Tul Karm road. The road is blocked by an unmanned iron bar. Passengers are supposed to cross on foot, from taxis on one side to taxis on the other - it's not at all clear why - and the drivers know that if they cross the yellow line the soldiers will appear out of nowhere and confiscate the cars or slice the tires. Indeed, one of the soldiers threatened to slice the tires of our car, which was parked past the remnants of the yellow line.
This "battle heritage" is passed down through the Israel Defense Forces without obstruction and all the Palestinians drivers know it. Any time they venture onto one of the few roads left to them in the West Bank, they are taking a risk. Maybe they'll be shot "by mistake," maybe their car will be confiscated for some vague reason. That's why the few roads of the West Bank where Palestinians are allowed to drive are nearly always empty. The driver whose car was confiscated, Samr Abdullah, did not know how to get home.
A brigadier who serves in the territories said in a private conversation on the weekend that the confiscation of cars and ID cards is prohibited by the army. Really? After all, if the army wanted to put an end to it, it could easily do so. The IDF Spokesman's Office also says there is no policy of confiscating cars and if it turns out that the events we witnessed last Sunday happened, "the soldiers will be severely punished."
Is the IDF Spokesman's Office being naive or disingenuous or was this really the first time it heard about soldiers confiscating the keys to a Palestinian car or slashing its tires? It's not clear what's worse. Any soldier nowadays can take any Palestinian car for any reason and for as long as he wants. When every soldier is a king, any group of soldiers can turn into a gang.
Confiscating cars is only one example of how an IDF regime of bullying has emerged and is being strengthened in the territories. There is a great deal of hypocrisy in the talk about how anarchy will reign in the territories after the IDF leaves. The disintegration of the rule of law and order begins inside the army. Every day one can see soldiers confiscating ID cards from residents, making them line up for hours in the sun and rain for no reason whatsoever, and just for the fun of it smashing memorial monuments to Palestinian casualties - like last week in Beir Furik.
In the last three years, an atmosphere of anything goes has taken root in the IDF in the territories. Any soldier can do whatever he feels like to any Palestinian - the incident won't be investigated, the soldier won't be punished.
The disintegration of the rule of law does not stop with the soldiers. Brothers Naim and Ayad Murar, who organized nonviolent demonstrations against the separation fence in Budrus, were arrested a month ago with the intention of throwing them into long months of administrative detention without trial. At the last minute, Ayad was freed by a judge who ruled that nonviolent demonstrations are no cause for administrative detention. But his brother Naim was sent to four months of administrative detention for his "terror-supporting activity." Only due to the intervention of attorneys Tamar Peleg and Yal Barda, and the courageous position taken by Lieutenant Colonel Shlomi Kochav, was Naim freed on the weekend after a month in detention, thus preventing a further disgrace. Serious questions are raised by the arrogance of security officials who wanted to lock people up for attempting to organize nonviolent demonstrations against a fence being built on their property.
There is a direct and disgusting line between the car confiscators and those who jail demonstrators without trial. Both are manifestations of gangland rule. Despite the separation fence, that kind of behavior will inevitably cross the Green Line.
Thursday, February 26
Friday, February 13
MCC Palestine Update #95
MCC Palestine Update #95
February 13, 2004
“The Government of Israel does not believe that pilgrims and tourists have normal cause to visit Gaza.” That’s what an official from the Israeli Embassy in Great Britain told a Catholic priest who had called to inquire about troubling new Israeli regulations that were being handed to many international visitors upon their arrivals in Israel, informing them that entry into “Palestinian Authority” areas—Bethlehem, Gaza, Ramallah, Jericho—was forbidden without prior written authorisation. The Israeli official denied that the regulations applied say, to tourists and pilgrims wishing to visit the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, but only to Gaza. With the pattern of the past years having been one of increased restrictions on movement, and with the fences and walls Israel is erecting in the West Bank progressively giving it the capability it has in Gaza of enclosing entire populations, one can legitimately be sceptical that, in the future, entry to Bethlehem and Jericho, say, will not become difficult to impossible. For now, however, it’s abundantly clear that Israel plans to place severe limits on internationals wishing to enter the Gaza Strip. Diplomats, aid workers (including MCCers), UN staff usually can gain access, even if they have their stories of frustration. Others, however, will most likely be turned away.
On February 10, 2004, MCC workers accompanied a group of students and professors from Eastern Mennonite University, in the country as part of a cross-cultural semester in the Middle East. The group has been staying in the Bethlehem area (and thus in “Area A,” in violation of the regulations as spelled out in the recent travel warning), enjoying Palestinian hospitality, attending lectures, being immersed in the historical, social, religious, and political complexities of Palestine/Israel. The past several times EMU groups have been in the country, they have incorporated trips to Gaza, where they met with MCC mission partners.
This week the group was to have visited the local Catholic church and school in Gaza and children’s centers operated by the Culture and Free Thought Association in the refugee camps of the southern Gaza Strip. Despite the fact that I had been in repeated contact with the Israeli military officials at the Erez crossing point into the Gaza Strip, furnishing them weeks in advance with the passport information for each member of the group, the group was denied entry, simply told that authorisation had not been granted; over an hour of follow-up phone calls were in vain.
We at MCC are very disturbed by this denial of entry to the EMU group. We believe that Christians have very compelling reasons to visit the Gaza Strip (beyond enjoying the sea, which is lovely, the food, which is delicious, and visiting Byzantine, Crusader, Mamluke, and Ottoman-era churches, mosques, and baths). Christians should be allowed to visit the Gaza Strip in order to be in spiritual solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Christ who worship at Gaza’s Orthodox, Catholic, and Baptist churches. Christians should be allowed to visit the Gaza Strip as a show of support to Christian institutions such as the Near East Council of Churches and the Ahli Arabi Hospital. Christians should be allowed to visit non-Christian Organisations, such as the Culture and Free Thought Association, who join with Christian Organisations such as MCC to promote the development of healthy, thriving communities. [Persons of other faiths, of course, would have other valid reasons for wanting to visit Gaza.]
Any claims that restrictions on entry into the Gaza Strip are motivated by security are suspect at best. Israel tightly controls the Gaza Strip, with all passage in and out going through multiple passport controls, with baggage checks and metal detectors. Meanwhile, Israeli officials say, tourists and pilgrims can still go into Bethlehem (from which, for the time being, it is possible, with some determination, to exit without being subject to Israeli checks). It is hard to escape the conclusion that Israel’s primary motivation for keeping internationals out of the Gaza Strip is to reduce the number of people who witness Israeli policies of dispossession in practice. The Gaza Strip is constantly stereotyped: its people are terrorists, its cities and refugee camps are squalid, etc. Visits by tourists and pilgrims to the Strip are concrete ways of breaking down such inaccurate portrayals. The current Israeli government, however, appears much less intent on fostering bridge-building than on shoring up psychological, legal, and concrete walls that generate hate.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Amira Hass of Haaretz, critically dissects the claim made by Israeli National Security Advisor Giora Eiland that “The planners of the fence failed to predict its effects on innocent Palestinians.” The problem was not one of a failure of prediction, but rather a failure to care. The second, again by Hass, looks at life in the village of Budrus, west of Ramallah and only a few kilometres east of the “Green Line” between Israel and the West Bank; the separation wall, as Hass describes, will have a devastating effect on this community. In the final piece, US commentators Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibisih take a critical look at the rhetoric and the reality of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s proposed evacuation of Gaza Strip settlements.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Failed predictions, Haaretz, Feb. 11, 2004
By Amira Hass
"The planners of the fence failed to predict its effects on innocent Palestinians," National Security Advisor Giora Eiland told a high-level diplomatic-security forum in Germany this week (Haaretz, February 9). Like Eiland, other Israeli representatives are now trying to convince the western countries and the United States in particular that the route of the separation fence is a human, localized and almost chance error that can be corrected to minimize the damage.
We have a new sentry to blame for what has gone wrong: the rather anonymous planners of the separation fence. Some sort of personal, individual limitation caused them to fail and not to predict the extent to which "the lives of innocent people would be affected" by the construction of the fortifications, which has destroyed and is destroying wells that are essential to agriculture, is uprooting tens of thousands of olive trees and other trees and is wiping out hundreds of greenhouses in which thousands of people have invested the savings of years.
One really does need special analytical powers to predict that caging thousands of people behind iron gates and stationing 19-year-old soldiers to open them, if they feel like it, two or three times a day - would have a deleterious affect on studies at schools and universities, sabotage medical treatment for cancer and kidney patients and split up families. After all, only especially creative minds could have guessed that it would be very hard for 260,000 people to maintain "a normal fabric of life" in the 81 enclaves of various sorts that the fence creates. Eighty-one enclaves that separate them from neighboring villages, from the provincial towns and from the rest of the West Bank, shutting them in behind barbed wire fences and guard towers and excavations and double fences and bureaucratic-military systems of permits to go in and out of the enclaves that are needed by garbage collectors and doctors, family members and teachers.
The truth is that what was hard to predict was the international shock at the fence. United States National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is not pleased (and not only the United nations General Assembly) and Western diplomats are saying things in inner conclaves, especially when it turns out that development projects that had been funded by their countries have been destroyed under the fence's bulldozers.
The European countries are opposed to holding the deliberations at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, but they too have reservations about the fence's route and the damage it causes. Television channels around the world are showing documentary films about the fence and its ills, and it isn't possible to keep repeating the chorus that the motives are anti-Semitic. If it were not for all this, it is doubtful that various representatives of the state - like the Prosecutor's Office and before that, military sources - would be hinting about a change in the route of the fence and admitting a failure to "predict" how bad the damage would be to the innocent. They simply did not care about the damage.
After all, the kinds of damage that the fence is causing are not new. The Israeli occupation regime has been testing them successfully for 37 years now, sometimes in the name of security and sometimes in the name of the Jewish people's right to preferential rights in this country.
Neither the Meridor committee nor the Oslo agreement did away with the Israeli habit of harming the Palestinians' rights to water, land, freedom of movement, earning a living and development.
By the second half of 2002 it was already possible to know that the route of the fence was far from the Green Line (pre-Six Day War border), that it creates enclaves and that it harms the "vegetable garden" of the Palestinian economy. But at that time it was hard to bring to the Israeli media - which evinced no interest in the matter at that stage - reports about the extent of the fence's damage to the civilian population. The data and the reports on massive confiscations and uprooting of trees that were published by various Palestinian Organisations were not read in Hebrew. B'Tselem published its first position paper in September, 2002, which warned of the implications of the route of the fence, including a mortal blow to Palestinian life. Who remembers?
By the middle of 2003 the planners of the route of the fence had full backing - from the political system, from the print and the electronic media, from the street and from key figures in the Israeli peace camp. The idea of the fence, without going into detail, offered people frightened by the suicide terror attacks a hope that their personal security was achievable with no connection to any political solution. It offered a refuge from the disturbing knowledge that Israel is evading an offer of a sustainable political, humane, rational solution that the Palestinians can accept.
The military plan to build elevated bridges and sunken roads between the enclaves is a bone thrown to international public opinion and another vain solution offered to the Israelis that diverts attention from the essence. The planners of the route that harms the Palestinians are doing this on behalf of the state of Israel, which almost unhindered has built in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip a regime of Jewish superiority that inevitably violates the rights of the Palestinian individual and collective. Key parts of Israeli society have become blind to the damage, and the occupation regime is as much taken for granted as the sunrise in the east.
2. The village against the fence, Haaretz, Feb. 11, 2004
By Amira Hass
A serious-looking black dog, whose eyes looked almost hollow, freely crossed the naked strip of land west of the villages of Qibiya and Budrus, which stretches from the village of Rantis, about five
kilometers to the north.
A young resident of Qibiya guiding the visitors among the olive groves and fruit orchards of his village, up to the route of the fence, hastened to cross the ditch that has already been dug on both sides of the route, and to disappear among the trees. It was soon clear why – an Israeli security vehicle was approaching from the north toward those walking on the exposed strip, as soon as it detected them.
The vehicle stopped and two men got out. One, the shorter and older, carrying a rifle, was from Kfar Yonah; the second was from a Bedouin community in the Galilee. The one with the rifle angrily demanded that the visitors who came on foot leave immediately, or he would call the police so they would explain, if you insist, that this is a closed military area, even if he had no papers to prove it. His friend, who served in the army for seven years and was discharged half a year ago, calmed things down before they heated up.
The one with the rifle asserted that the presence of cameras encourages people to come and demonstrate, and that's how the waves of riots begin. "Isn't it you, by your work, who are causing the waves of rioting?" he asked, and the question wasn't quite understood. What are you talking about, we are doing our work, explained the younger man. And of course I support the fence, so I won't explode with my family in a restaurant.
The "riots" the two were talking about are a series of demonstrations against the fence that have been held by the residents of Budrus for about a month. "We decided that unlike other places until now, where international peace activists conducted the battle against the fence and the Palestinians supported them, we, the residents of Budrus, would wage our own battle."
Those are the words of Ayad Murar, 42, a veteran Fatah activist, who with his brother Naim was among the founders of the popular committee in the village "for the struggle against the apartheid wall." The popular committee, he says, emphasized to the people that the battle against the bulldozers and the many soldiers and police who protect them must be conducted without violence.
Curfew and arrests
All residents answered the call to demonstrate - young and old, men and women. What began as a strike along the route of the fence reached a climax on December 30. Somebody saw a bulldozer approaching the olive grove. The speaker in the mosque quickly announced it, and everyone who was in the village ran westward, toward the grove.
School children ran out of the classrooms, books in hand. Tear gas, rubber bullets and blows did not stop the villagers, who dispersed and returned to stand or to sit in front of the soldiers and the police, on the ground. Eyewitnesses say that the female students sat in front of the many soldiers, who retreated to their jeeps. The appearance of several television cameras helped.
During the following days, the Israel Defense Forces imposed a curfew on the village in order to prevent the residents from going out to demonstrate. Mainly young men violated the curfew and walked to the olive grove, to prevent the bulldozers from doing their work. Up to this week, the bulldozers have not returned to work - after they already uprooted about 60 olive trees. The people of Budrus attribute this to their stubbornness and determination.
A few days after this demonstration, the IDF arrested Naim Murar. He was released on January 11, but didn't manage to be home for more than three days when the army came again to arrest him and his brother Ayad. The military prosecutor demanded that they be placed under administrative detention.
In the military court at the Ofer army base, the judge, Major Adrian Agassi, decided to release Ayad. "I found it proper to intervene in the decision of the military commander," ruled Agassi in his decision. "After all, we cannot allow the military commander to use his authority to order the administrative detention of a person only because of this activity [against the fence]. In my opinion, this is a mistaken decision that did not stem from clear security considerations."
But the judge decided to approve the decision of the military commander to place Naim Murar under administrative detention. As is customary in administrative detention, only the judge was allowed to peruse the classified documents given to him by members of the Shin Bet security services, and according to these documents, "the intelligence material attributes to him activity in support of terror, in the context of the Tanzim organization."
But in Budrus people are convinced that the second detention of Naim Murar - like that of eight other activists against the fence - is an attempt to dismantle the opposition in the village. From Budrus' threatened olive grove sounds of firing can be heard - sounds of training exercises. They come from the Adam military base, which is a few dozen meters to the west, 20-30 meters west of the Green Line.
In Budrus they believe that because of this army base, which is a few dozen meters from the Green Line, the route of the fence was pushed straight into the beautiful olive grove that they have been nurturing for decades. Budrus lost most of its lands in 1948 - many thousands of dunams, some count up to 20,000, remained on the western side of the Green Line.
Some land remained in the demilitarized zone, which both Israeli and Jordanian forces were forbidden to enter. Since 1967, say the villagers, the demilitarized zone has become Israeli, and they weren't allowed to return to work their land there as well.
The route that is planned according to the map of the Israeli security services looks as though it is right on the Green Line. But in reality, all the difference lies in several dozen meters east of the Green Line. Now, of the 5,000 dunams that remain to the approximately 1,400 residents of Budrus, they estimate that they will lose about one fifth.
Some of this land is being confiscated for the fence itself, part of the area of the village will remain behind the fence - between the fence and the Green Line. The villagers estimate that 3,000 olive trees, which cover an area of about 5,000 dunams, will be lost under the teeth of the bulldozers or will be trapped in areas where entry is forbidden.
They figure that the "fence" - namely, two ditches that will be dug on both sides of it, and the two barbed wire fences, and the electronic fence with the sensors, and the patrol roads between them, and the watchtowers - will almost touch some of the most western houses in the village, including the school.
Imprisoned enclave
The occupation and preparation of the land here, west of Kibiya and Budrus, are being carried out in the context of the second stage of the building of the security fence. According to the plan, and as long as it has not been decided or proved otherwise, in the context of this stage two Palestinian enclaves will be created west of Ramallah.
These are two out of 81 Palestinian enclaves that have been created and will be created all along the fence, which are discussed in the report by B'Tselem. Some will be between the fence and the Green Line, some in small "loops" created by the fence, and some will be the result of "secondary obstacles," as the army puts it.
Budrus is one of the nine Palestinian villages that will find themselves in an enclave with an area of 53.2 square kilometers. These villages include Luban al Gharabiyeh, Rantis, Shuqba, Qibiya, Shabtin, Budrus,
Midya, Na'lin and Dir Kadis. The village of Midiya will be surrounded on all sides by the separation fence, as in a loop.
According to the map of the Israeli security services, one could have concluded immediately that an enclave would be created here. The routes of the western and eastern fences are the same color, as though there is no difference between them.
Military spokesman did in fact explain to members of the support unit of the Palestinian negotiating division that the eastern fence would not be similar to the western one, and would apparently be composed of what is called a "secondary obstacle" (a system of ditches and barbed wire fences) and an eastern gate on the roads to Ramallah and the villages surrounding it - which would be locked and blocked off only in case of security alerts. But in any case, this promise does not reassure the village residents, who know that they are losing thousands of dunams of their land.
In the past three years they have already had a taste of checkpoints that prevented their access to the neighboring villages or to the district center, Ramallah. And even if the gate or the gates in the eastern, "secondary" fence are open most of the time - in Rantis, Budrus and the other villages they point to the maps and to the new political geography that is being created before their eyes.
The two small Palestinian enclaves that are being created west of Ramallah leave two large settlement blocs outside of them, which cut deep into the Palestinian territory and are joined within Israel itself,
until one can no longer see that there was a Green Line.
"That's why we are fighting against this fence," says Ayad Murar from his home, talking about this new geography. "It is part of our struggle for a peaceful solution to the conflict - the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel."
Between November and December 2003, military orders began to be posted in the Rantis, Budrus and other villages, regarding the "temporary" seizure of land (until December 2005) for military purposes. According to these orders, which are signed by the chief of Central Command Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, the width of the strips of land confiscated from the villages will range from 68 to 490 meters. The entire length of the (primary and secondary) fence that will surround the nine villages in the enclave - 32.2 kilometers.
Meanwhile, some of the residents of Budrus continue to sneak into Israel on foot, to make a living, mainly in construction. Others, who have lost their jobs in Israel in recent years, have found various jobs in the Ramallah area. But if they are closed within an enclave, they are liable to lose these places of work. Palestinian employers cannot withstand the frequent incidents of lateness caused by the blocks and the checkpoints.
"Come to live in Ramallah, or leave the job," they are told. Grocery store owners are feeling the difference. People come in infrequently, buy on credit, they buy only what is essential. It's hard to imagine what else will happen when the large olive grove is crushed beneath the teeth of the bulldozers or is swallowed up on the other side of the fence, and when it won't be possible to work in Israel at all any longer.
3. Chicago Tribune
February 6, 2004
What does Sharon's latest settlement move mean for Israel?
By Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's announcement that he plans to remove virtually all Israeli settlers from the occupied Gaza Strip has caused a shock wave in Israel.
Has some sudden epiphany convinced Sharon that the settlements are the key obstacle to peace and that Israel's future is jeopardized by the continued attempt to incorporate occupied Palestinian territories into a greater Israel?
Many Israelis, especially in the military, have long felt that the Gaza settlements are pointless, and a massive drain on national resources for no serious purpose. The small Gaza settlements are purely symbolic, in stark contrast to the massive settlements on the West Bank, which have literally reshaped the landscape and are designed also to transform its demographic and political realities, making Israel's control permanent.
While Sharon talks about removing settlements in Gaza, he is continuing to build them all over the West Bank, because he has no intention of permitting a real Palestinian state to be constructed.
One of the main reasons President Bush's "road map" for peace failed was that Sharon reneged on promises that he would start removing new settlement "outposts." Instead, he made a show of removing a few small, uninhabited sites, while setting up many more new ones and expanding dozens of major settlements up and down the West Bank.
Since Sharon broke those promises, Israel has announced thousands of new settler housing units. It recently allocated $1 million for yet another Jewish-only road in the West Bank, this one to connect an outpost settlement to a school run by an extremist Israeli group the U.S. State Department has formally designated as a terrorist organization.
Sharon's announcement could simply be a ploy to offset scandals at home, and growing pressure on Israel abroad, by trying to create the impression that he is taking some far-reaching initiative without intending to actually do anything.
Within Israel, his proposal has divided the opposition.
The right now is split between those who see him as a traitor to the cause of settling all of "Eretz Yisrael," or the Land of Israel, and those who see him as a pragmatist who can make tough decisions. Some on the left mistrust him completely, while others, like Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, welcome his proposals.
Sharon's announcement has also drawn international attention away from the appalling separation barrier Israel is building in the West Bank.
Sharon probably does intend to remove the settlements from Gaza, although his strategic vision has only been hinted at.
His spokesman Raanan Gissin explained that "Sharon envisages territorial exchanges with the Palestinians as part of future permanent arrangements, under which Arab Israeli localities would pass under the sovereignty of the latter, while Jewish settlements [in the West Bank] would be integrated into
Israeli territory."
Sharon seems to be looking for a way to keep control of the West Bank--hence all the new settlements and the separation wall deep inside Palestinian territory--but maintain a Jewish majority among citizens of Israel.
Twenty percent of Israel's citizens are Arabs. Gissin is proposing to strip at least some of them of their citizenship and transfer their villages to a Palestinian mini-state within a greater Israel.
From what we can piece together from his actions and statements, Sharon's vision includes offloading to a faux Palestinian state the burden of Gaza, political responsibility for Palestinians in the West Bank, and a significant number of Israeli citizens of Arab origin as well.
Such an arrangement would closely resemble efforts by South Africa's apartheid rulers to maintain white rule and strip black citizens of their rights as South Africans by creating ostensibly independent states for them known as Bantustans.
That ploy failed disastrously because the international community saw this deception for what it was, while the injustices it created on the ground led to ever more determined protest and resistance.
It appears that Sharon is hoping to pull the same trick and get away with it.
Ali Abunimah is a political analyst based in Chicago. Hussein Ibish is communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
February 13, 2004
“The Government of Israel does not believe that pilgrims and tourists have normal cause to visit Gaza.” That’s what an official from the Israeli Embassy in Great Britain told a Catholic priest who had called to inquire about troubling new Israeli regulations that were being handed to many international visitors upon their arrivals in Israel, informing them that entry into “Palestinian Authority” areas—Bethlehem, Gaza, Ramallah, Jericho—was forbidden without prior written authorisation. The Israeli official denied that the regulations applied say, to tourists and pilgrims wishing to visit the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, but only to Gaza. With the pattern of the past years having been one of increased restrictions on movement, and with the fences and walls Israel is erecting in the West Bank progressively giving it the capability it has in Gaza of enclosing entire populations, one can legitimately be sceptical that, in the future, entry to Bethlehem and Jericho, say, will not become difficult to impossible. For now, however, it’s abundantly clear that Israel plans to place severe limits on internationals wishing to enter the Gaza Strip. Diplomats, aid workers (including MCCers), UN staff usually can gain access, even if they have their stories of frustration. Others, however, will most likely be turned away.
On February 10, 2004, MCC workers accompanied a group of students and professors from Eastern Mennonite University, in the country as part of a cross-cultural semester in the Middle East. The group has been staying in the Bethlehem area (and thus in “Area A,” in violation of the regulations as spelled out in the recent travel warning), enjoying Palestinian hospitality, attending lectures, being immersed in the historical, social, religious, and political complexities of Palestine/Israel. The past several times EMU groups have been in the country, they have incorporated trips to Gaza, where they met with MCC mission partners.
This week the group was to have visited the local Catholic church and school in Gaza and children’s centers operated by the Culture and Free Thought Association in the refugee camps of the southern Gaza Strip. Despite the fact that I had been in repeated contact with the Israeli military officials at the Erez crossing point into the Gaza Strip, furnishing them weeks in advance with the passport information for each member of the group, the group was denied entry, simply told that authorisation had not been granted; over an hour of follow-up phone calls were in vain.
We at MCC are very disturbed by this denial of entry to the EMU group. We believe that Christians have very compelling reasons to visit the Gaza Strip (beyond enjoying the sea, which is lovely, the food, which is delicious, and visiting Byzantine, Crusader, Mamluke, and Ottoman-era churches, mosques, and baths). Christians should be allowed to visit the Gaza Strip in order to be in spiritual solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Christ who worship at Gaza’s Orthodox, Catholic, and Baptist churches. Christians should be allowed to visit the Gaza Strip as a show of support to Christian institutions such as the Near East Council of Churches and the Ahli Arabi Hospital. Christians should be allowed to visit non-Christian Organisations, such as the Culture and Free Thought Association, who join with Christian Organisations such as MCC to promote the development of healthy, thriving communities. [Persons of other faiths, of course, would have other valid reasons for wanting to visit Gaza.]
Any claims that restrictions on entry into the Gaza Strip are motivated by security are suspect at best. Israel tightly controls the Gaza Strip, with all passage in and out going through multiple passport controls, with baggage checks and metal detectors. Meanwhile, Israeli officials say, tourists and pilgrims can still go into Bethlehem (from which, for the time being, it is possible, with some determination, to exit without being subject to Israeli checks). It is hard to escape the conclusion that Israel’s primary motivation for keeping internationals out of the Gaza Strip is to reduce the number of people who witness Israeli policies of dispossession in practice. The Gaza Strip is constantly stereotyped: its people are terrorists, its cities and refugee camps are squalid, etc. Visits by tourists and pilgrims to the Strip are concrete ways of breaking down such inaccurate portrayals. The current Israeli government, however, appears much less intent on fostering bridge-building than on shoring up psychological, legal, and concrete walls that generate hate.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Amira Hass of Haaretz, critically dissects the claim made by Israeli National Security Advisor Giora Eiland that “The planners of the fence failed to predict its effects on innocent Palestinians.” The problem was not one of a failure of prediction, but rather a failure to care. The second, again by Hass, looks at life in the village of Budrus, west of Ramallah and only a few kilometres east of the “Green Line” between Israel and the West Bank; the separation wall, as Hass describes, will have a devastating effect on this community. In the final piece, US commentators Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibisih take a critical look at the rhetoric and the reality of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s proposed evacuation of Gaza Strip settlements.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Failed predictions, Haaretz, Feb. 11, 2004
By Amira Hass
"The planners of the fence failed to predict its effects on innocent Palestinians," National Security Advisor Giora Eiland told a high-level diplomatic-security forum in Germany this week (Haaretz, February 9). Like Eiland, other Israeli representatives are now trying to convince the western countries and the United States in particular that the route of the separation fence is a human, localized and almost chance error that can be corrected to minimize the damage.
We have a new sentry to blame for what has gone wrong: the rather anonymous planners of the separation fence. Some sort of personal, individual limitation caused them to fail and not to predict the extent to which "the lives of innocent people would be affected" by the construction of the fortifications, which has destroyed and is destroying wells that are essential to agriculture, is uprooting tens of thousands of olive trees and other trees and is wiping out hundreds of greenhouses in which thousands of people have invested the savings of years.
One really does need special analytical powers to predict that caging thousands of people behind iron gates and stationing 19-year-old soldiers to open them, if they feel like it, two or three times a day - would have a deleterious affect on studies at schools and universities, sabotage medical treatment for cancer and kidney patients and split up families. After all, only especially creative minds could have guessed that it would be very hard for 260,000 people to maintain "a normal fabric of life" in the 81 enclaves of various sorts that the fence creates. Eighty-one enclaves that separate them from neighboring villages, from the provincial towns and from the rest of the West Bank, shutting them in behind barbed wire fences and guard towers and excavations and double fences and bureaucratic-military systems of permits to go in and out of the enclaves that are needed by garbage collectors and doctors, family members and teachers.
The truth is that what was hard to predict was the international shock at the fence. United States National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is not pleased (and not only the United nations General Assembly) and Western diplomats are saying things in inner conclaves, especially when it turns out that development projects that had been funded by their countries have been destroyed under the fence's bulldozers.
The European countries are opposed to holding the deliberations at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, but they too have reservations about the fence's route and the damage it causes. Television channels around the world are showing documentary films about the fence and its ills, and it isn't possible to keep repeating the chorus that the motives are anti-Semitic. If it were not for all this, it is doubtful that various representatives of the state - like the Prosecutor's Office and before that, military sources - would be hinting about a change in the route of the fence and admitting a failure to "predict" how bad the damage would be to the innocent. They simply did not care about the damage.
After all, the kinds of damage that the fence is causing are not new. The Israeli occupation regime has been testing them successfully for 37 years now, sometimes in the name of security and sometimes in the name of the Jewish people's right to preferential rights in this country.
Neither the Meridor committee nor the Oslo agreement did away with the Israeli habit of harming the Palestinians' rights to water, land, freedom of movement, earning a living and development.
By the second half of 2002 it was already possible to know that the route of the fence was far from the Green Line (pre-Six Day War border), that it creates enclaves and that it harms the "vegetable garden" of the Palestinian economy. But at that time it was hard to bring to the Israeli media - which evinced no interest in the matter at that stage - reports about the extent of the fence's damage to the civilian population. The data and the reports on massive confiscations and uprooting of trees that were published by various Palestinian Organisations were not read in Hebrew. B'Tselem published its first position paper in September, 2002, which warned of the implications of the route of the fence, including a mortal blow to Palestinian life. Who remembers?
By the middle of 2003 the planners of the route of the fence had full backing - from the political system, from the print and the electronic media, from the street and from key figures in the Israeli peace camp. The idea of the fence, without going into detail, offered people frightened by the suicide terror attacks a hope that their personal security was achievable with no connection to any political solution. It offered a refuge from the disturbing knowledge that Israel is evading an offer of a sustainable political, humane, rational solution that the Palestinians can accept.
The military plan to build elevated bridges and sunken roads between the enclaves is a bone thrown to international public opinion and another vain solution offered to the Israelis that diverts attention from the essence. The planners of the route that harms the Palestinians are doing this on behalf of the state of Israel, which almost unhindered has built in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip a regime of Jewish superiority that inevitably violates the rights of the Palestinian individual and collective. Key parts of Israeli society have become blind to the damage, and the occupation regime is as much taken for granted as the sunrise in the east.
2. The village against the fence, Haaretz, Feb. 11, 2004
By Amira Hass
A serious-looking black dog, whose eyes looked almost hollow, freely crossed the naked strip of land west of the villages of Qibiya and Budrus, which stretches from the village of Rantis, about five
kilometers to the north.
A young resident of Qibiya guiding the visitors among the olive groves and fruit orchards of his village, up to the route of the fence, hastened to cross the ditch that has already been dug on both sides of the route, and to disappear among the trees. It was soon clear why – an Israeli security vehicle was approaching from the north toward those walking on the exposed strip, as soon as it detected them.
The vehicle stopped and two men got out. One, the shorter and older, carrying a rifle, was from Kfar Yonah; the second was from a Bedouin community in the Galilee. The one with the rifle angrily demanded that the visitors who came on foot leave immediately, or he would call the police so they would explain, if you insist, that this is a closed military area, even if he had no papers to prove it. His friend, who served in the army for seven years and was discharged half a year ago, calmed things down before they heated up.
The one with the rifle asserted that the presence of cameras encourages people to come and demonstrate, and that's how the waves of riots begin. "Isn't it you, by your work, who are causing the waves of rioting?" he asked, and the question wasn't quite understood. What are you talking about, we are doing our work, explained the younger man. And of course I support the fence, so I won't explode with my family in a restaurant.
The "riots" the two were talking about are a series of demonstrations against the fence that have been held by the residents of Budrus for about a month. "We decided that unlike other places until now, where international peace activists conducted the battle against the fence and the Palestinians supported them, we, the residents of Budrus, would wage our own battle."
Those are the words of Ayad Murar, 42, a veteran Fatah activist, who with his brother Naim was among the founders of the popular committee in the village "for the struggle against the apartheid wall." The popular committee, he says, emphasized to the people that the battle against the bulldozers and the many soldiers and police who protect them must be conducted without violence.
Curfew and arrests
All residents answered the call to demonstrate - young and old, men and women. What began as a strike along the route of the fence reached a climax on December 30. Somebody saw a bulldozer approaching the olive grove. The speaker in the mosque quickly announced it, and everyone who was in the village ran westward, toward the grove.
School children ran out of the classrooms, books in hand. Tear gas, rubber bullets and blows did not stop the villagers, who dispersed and returned to stand or to sit in front of the soldiers and the police, on the ground. Eyewitnesses say that the female students sat in front of the many soldiers, who retreated to their jeeps. The appearance of several television cameras helped.
During the following days, the Israel Defense Forces imposed a curfew on the village in order to prevent the residents from going out to demonstrate. Mainly young men violated the curfew and walked to the olive grove, to prevent the bulldozers from doing their work. Up to this week, the bulldozers have not returned to work - after they already uprooted about 60 olive trees. The people of Budrus attribute this to their stubbornness and determination.
A few days after this demonstration, the IDF arrested Naim Murar. He was released on January 11, but didn't manage to be home for more than three days when the army came again to arrest him and his brother Ayad. The military prosecutor demanded that they be placed under administrative detention.
In the military court at the Ofer army base, the judge, Major Adrian Agassi, decided to release Ayad. "I found it proper to intervene in the decision of the military commander," ruled Agassi in his decision. "After all, we cannot allow the military commander to use his authority to order the administrative detention of a person only because of this activity [against the fence]. In my opinion, this is a mistaken decision that did not stem from clear security considerations."
But the judge decided to approve the decision of the military commander to place Naim Murar under administrative detention. As is customary in administrative detention, only the judge was allowed to peruse the classified documents given to him by members of the Shin Bet security services, and according to these documents, "the intelligence material attributes to him activity in support of terror, in the context of the Tanzim organization."
But in Budrus people are convinced that the second detention of Naim Murar - like that of eight other activists against the fence - is an attempt to dismantle the opposition in the village. From Budrus' threatened olive grove sounds of firing can be heard - sounds of training exercises. They come from the Adam military base, which is a few dozen meters to the west, 20-30 meters west of the Green Line.
In Budrus they believe that because of this army base, which is a few dozen meters from the Green Line, the route of the fence was pushed straight into the beautiful olive grove that they have been nurturing for decades. Budrus lost most of its lands in 1948 - many thousands of dunams, some count up to 20,000, remained on the western side of the Green Line.
Some land remained in the demilitarized zone, which both Israeli and Jordanian forces were forbidden to enter. Since 1967, say the villagers, the demilitarized zone has become Israeli, and they weren't allowed to return to work their land there as well.
The route that is planned according to the map of the Israeli security services looks as though it is right on the Green Line. But in reality, all the difference lies in several dozen meters east of the Green Line. Now, of the 5,000 dunams that remain to the approximately 1,400 residents of Budrus, they estimate that they will lose about one fifth.
Some of this land is being confiscated for the fence itself, part of the area of the village will remain behind the fence - between the fence and the Green Line. The villagers estimate that 3,000 olive trees, which cover an area of about 5,000 dunams, will be lost under the teeth of the bulldozers or will be trapped in areas where entry is forbidden.
They figure that the "fence" - namely, two ditches that will be dug on both sides of it, and the two barbed wire fences, and the electronic fence with the sensors, and the patrol roads between them, and the watchtowers - will almost touch some of the most western houses in the village, including the school.
Imprisoned enclave
The occupation and preparation of the land here, west of Kibiya and Budrus, are being carried out in the context of the second stage of the building of the security fence. According to the plan, and as long as it has not been decided or proved otherwise, in the context of this stage two Palestinian enclaves will be created west of Ramallah.
These are two out of 81 Palestinian enclaves that have been created and will be created all along the fence, which are discussed in the report by B'Tselem. Some will be between the fence and the Green Line, some in small "loops" created by the fence, and some will be the result of "secondary obstacles," as the army puts it.
Budrus is one of the nine Palestinian villages that will find themselves in an enclave with an area of 53.2 square kilometers. These villages include Luban al Gharabiyeh, Rantis, Shuqba, Qibiya, Shabtin, Budrus,
Midya, Na'lin and Dir Kadis. The village of Midiya will be surrounded on all sides by the separation fence, as in a loop.
According to the map of the Israeli security services, one could have concluded immediately that an enclave would be created here. The routes of the western and eastern fences are the same color, as though there is no difference between them.
Military spokesman did in fact explain to members of the support unit of the Palestinian negotiating division that the eastern fence would not be similar to the western one, and would apparently be composed of what is called a "secondary obstacle" (a system of ditches and barbed wire fences) and an eastern gate on the roads to Ramallah and the villages surrounding it - which would be locked and blocked off only in case of security alerts. But in any case, this promise does not reassure the village residents, who know that they are losing thousands of dunams of their land.
In the past three years they have already had a taste of checkpoints that prevented their access to the neighboring villages or to the district center, Ramallah. And even if the gate or the gates in the eastern, "secondary" fence are open most of the time - in Rantis, Budrus and the other villages they point to the maps and to the new political geography that is being created before their eyes.
The two small Palestinian enclaves that are being created west of Ramallah leave two large settlement blocs outside of them, which cut deep into the Palestinian territory and are joined within Israel itself,
until one can no longer see that there was a Green Line.
"That's why we are fighting against this fence," says Ayad Murar from his home, talking about this new geography. "It is part of our struggle for a peaceful solution to the conflict - the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel."
Between November and December 2003, military orders began to be posted in the Rantis, Budrus and other villages, regarding the "temporary" seizure of land (until December 2005) for military purposes. According to these orders, which are signed by the chief of Central Command Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, the width of the strips of land confiscated from the villages will range from 68 to 490 meters. The entire length of the (primary and secondary) fence that will surround the nine villages in the enclave - 32.2 kilometers.
Meanwhile, some of the residents of Budrus continue to sneak into Israel on foot, to make a living, mainly in construction. Others, who have lost their jobs in Israel in recent years, have found various jobs in the Ramallah area. But if they are closed within an enclave, they are liable to lose these places of work. Palestinian employers cannot withstand the frequent incidents of lateness caused by the blocks and the checkpoints.
"Come to live in Ramallah, or leave the job," they are told. Grocery store owners are feeling the difference. People come in infrequently, buy on credit, they buy only what is essential. It's hard to imagine what else will happen when the large olive grove is crushed beneath the teeth of the bulldozers or is swallowed up on the other side of the fence, and when it won't be possible to work in Israel at all any longer.
3. Chicago Tribune
February 6, 2004
What does Sharon's latest settlement move mean for Israel?
By Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's announcement that he plans to remove virtually all Israeli settlers from the occupied Gaza Strip has caused a shock wave in Israel.
Has some sudden epiphany convinced Sharon that the settlements are the key obstacle to peace and that Israel's future is jeopardized by the continued attempt to incorporate occupied Palestinian territories into a greater Israel?
Many Israelis, especially in the military, have long felt that the Gaza settlements are pointless, and a massive drain on national resources for no serious purpose. The small Gaza settlements are purely symbolic, in stark contrast to the massive settlements on the West Bank, which have literally reshaped the landscape and are designed also to transform its demographic and political realities, making Israel's control permanent.
While Sharon talks about removing settlements in Gaza, he is continuing to build them all over the West Bank, because he has no intention of permitting a real Palestinian state to be constructed.
One of the main reasons President Bush's "road map" for peace failed was that Sharon reneged on promises that he would start removing new settlement "outposts." Instead, he made a show of removing a few small, uninhabited sites, while setting up many more new ones and expanding dozens of major settlements up and down the West Bank.
Since Sharon broke those promises, Israel has announced thousands of new settler housing units. It recently allocated $1 million for yet another Jewish-only road in the West Bank, this one to connect an outpost settlement to a school run by an extremist Israeli group the U.S. State Department has formally designated as a terrorist organization.
Sharon's announcement could simply be a ploy to offset scandals at home, and growing pressure on Israel abroad, by trying to create the impression that he is taking some far-reaching initiative without intending to actually do anything.
Within Israel, his proposal has divided the opposition.
The right now is split between those who see him as a traitor to the cause of settling all of "Eretz Yisrael," or the Land of Israel, and those who see him as a pragmatist who can make tough decisions. Some on the left mistrust him completely, while others, like Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, welcome his proposals.
Sharon's announcement has also drawn international attention away from the appalling separation barrier Israel is building in the West Bank.
Sharon probably does intend to remove the settlements from Gaza, although his strategic vision has only been hinted at.
His spokesman Raanan Gissin explained that "Sharon envisages territorial exchanges with the Palestinians as part of future permanent arrangements, under which Arab Israeli localities would pass under the sovereignty of the latter, while Jewish settlements [in the West Bank] would be integrated into
Israeli territory."
Sharon seems to be looking for a way to keep control of the West Bank--hence all the new settlements and the separation wall deep inside Palestinian territory--but maintain a Jewish majority among citizens of Israel.
Twenty percent of Israel's citizens are Arabs. Gissin is proposing to strip at least some of them of their citizenship and transfer their villages to a Palestinian mini-state within a greater Israel.
From what we can piece together from his actions and statements, Sharon's vision includes offloading to a faux Palestinian state the burden of Gaza, political responsibility for Palestinians in the West Bank, and a significant number of Israeli citizens of Arab origin as well.
Such an arrangement would closely resemble efforts by South Africa's apartheid rulers to maintain white rule and strip black citizens of their rights as South Africans by creating ostensibly independent states for them known as Bantustans.
That ploy failed disastrously because the international community saw this deception for what it was, while the injustices it created on the ground led to ever more determined protest and resistance.
It appears that Sharon is hoping to pull the same trick and get away with it.
Ali Abunimah is a political analyst based in Chicago. Hussein Ibish is communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
