MCC Palestine Update #92
January 4, 2004
What I took away from Christmas 2003 in Palestine was a feeling of hope about and thankfulness for the dynamism of the Palestinian churches. These are not emotions that one usually encounters in writings about the Palestinian churches. Many people have written in the past about the fragility on the Palestinian churches. Some highlight the impact of emigration on the churches, as Palestinian Christians, with their economic and cultural ties to the West, emigrate to Europe and North America in search of better economic opportunities and greater political stability for their families. Others such as Israeli government officials and Joshua Hammer in a recent book and article for Newsweek present Palestinian Christians as being oppressed and discriminated against by the majority Muslim population.
If you spend any significant amount of time with Palestinian Christians, you will quickly learn that claims of Palestinian Christians being persecuted by Palestinian Muslims are distortions of complicated realities. With the Palestinian Authority basically a tattered shell, lawlessness is on the rise in the occupied territories, and with it all types of conflicts: rent disputes, land disputes, family and clan disputes, disputes among Christian denominations, disputes between villagers and city-dwellers, refugees and non-refugees, and more. Palestinian Christian partners of MCC urge Western Christians to be skeptical of reports of Christians being persecuted. [An example: a relative of mine was listening to a Christian radio station this past month, and heard an American preacher, claiming to be reporting from Bethlehem, saying that the "Muslims" were not allowing Christians to go to Bethlehem; in reality, it was the Israeli authorities who were hindering Christians from the West Bank from getting to Bethlehem.] Claims of Christian persecution are a routine and easy method in which the occupying power seeks to divide and conquer. The complex reality of life in the occupied territories, including life for Palestinian Christians, can't be reduced to radio sound bites or catch phrases for magazine articles.
If Palestinian Christians are not oppressed, the ongoing emigration of Palestinian Christians (who emigrate at a similar rate to Muslims of the same economic class, but whose overall numbers are much harder hit) does present a worry to the churches. MCC will continue to walk with the Palestinian churches, as it has for over 50 years, as they seek to witness and minister in this difficult setting. This Christmas, however, I was not overwhelmed by a sense of worry by those around me but rather by joy and a vibrant spirit of dynamic presence.
My family and I celebrated Christmas this year in Zababdeh, a small village in the northern West Bank, the only population center in the north with a majority Christian population, where we had taught English for three years in the early 1990s. The local Catholic church, where we worshipped, was fuller than we had ever seen it, with at least 700 crowded inside during the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services and a couple hundred more outside. The impression we took from Zababdeh this Christmas was of a Christian community integrated into its surrounding society, dedicated to maintaining a vibrant Christian presence in the land. Examples that stood out for us included: the priest making a cell phone call during the Christmas Eve service so that two young Christian men from the village, currently in Israeli administrative detention, awaiting charges, could hear the congregation sing a hymn to the tune of Adeste Fideles; speaking with Awad, a friend in his mid-30s who now works for the public relations department of the current Palestinian Prime Minister, Ahmed Qureia; chatting with Reem, one of our former students, who now coordinates an emergency employment program in Muslim villages around Nablus for Save the Children; hearing Iyad, the vice-principal of the Catholic school where we once taught, describe how the school brings Muslim and Christian students together in friendship.
Keep the Palestinian churches in your prayers. As they struggle with dwindling numbers and as they seek to be faithful disciples under military occupation, Palestinian Christians ask for our prayers of encouragement. But remember also to give thanks for the energy and vibrancy within the Palestinian churches, churches that live out a minority witness to the God who became incarnate in this land.
Below you will find two pieces. In the first, from the London Review of Books, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe looks at what he calls the "prehistory" of the Geneva Initiative, explaining that it fails to provide a durable solution to Palestinian dispossession and to the plight of Palestinian refugees. In the second piece, from the on-line journal Bitter Lemons, Bir Zeit University political scientist Ali Jarbawi discusses Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for "unilateral separation" and examines how Palestinians might and should respond to these plans.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. The Geneva Bubble
Ilan Pappe on the prehistory of the latest proposals
London Review of Books, January 4, 2004
Even though we live in an age of intensive and intrusive media coverage, TV viewers in Israel were lucky to catch a glimpse of the meetings that produced the Geneva Accord. The clip we watched in November showed a group of well- known Israeli writers and peaceniks shouting at a group of not so well-known and rather cowed Palestinians, most of them officials of the Palestinian Authority.
Abba Eban once said that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and that, more or less, was what the Israelis were saying now. This was their last chance, the Palestinians were told: the current offer was the best and most generous Israelis have ever made them. It's a familiar scene. The various memoirs produced by the major players in the Oslo Accord suggest that much the same sort of thing was said there, while leaks from the Camp David summit in 2000 describe similar exchanges between Clinton, Barak and Arafat. In fact, the Israeli tone and attitude have barely changed since British despair led to the Palestine question being transferred to the UN at the end of the Second World War. The UN was a very young and inexperienced organisation in those days, and the people it appointed to find a solution to the conflict were at a loss where to begin or how to proceed. The Jewish Agency gladly filled the vacuum, exploiting Palestinian disarray and passivity to the full.
In May 1947, the Agency handed a plan, complete with a map, to the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), proposing the creation of a Jewish state over 80 per cent of Palestine - more or less Israel today without the Occupied Territories. In November 1947 the Committee reduced the Jewish state to 55 per cent of Palestine, and turned the plan into UN General Assembly Resolution 181.
Its rejection by Palestine surprised no one - the Palestinians had been opposed to partition since 1918. Zionist endorsement of it was a foregone conclusion, and in the eyes of the international policemen, that was a solid enough basis for peace in the Holy Land. Imposing the will of one side on the other was hardly the way to effect a reconciliation, and the resolution triggered violence on a scale unprecedented in the history of modern Palestine. If the Palestinians weren't happy with the Zionist idea of partition, it was time for unilateral action. The Jewish leadership turned to its May 1947 map, showing clearly which parts of Palestine were coveted as the future Jewish state. The problem was that within the desired 80 per cent, the Jews were a minority of 40 per cent (660,000 Jews and one million Palestinians). But the leaders of the Yishuv had foreseen this difficulty at the outset of the Zionist project in Palestine. The solution as they saw it was the enforced transfer of the indigenous population, so that a pure Jewish state could be established. On 10 March 1948, the Zionist leadership adopted the infamous Plan Dalet, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the areas regarded as the future Jewish state in Palestine.
Palestine was not divided, it was destroyed, and most of its people expelled.These were the events which triggered the conflict that has lasted ever since. The PLO emerged in the late 1950s as an embodiment of the Palestinian struggle for return, reconstruction and restitution. But the refugees were ignored by the international community and the regional Arab powers. Only Nasser seemed to adopt their cause, forcing the Arab League to express its concern. As the ill-fated Arab manoeuvres of June 1967 showed, this was not enough. In June 1967, the whole of Palestine became Israel; the new geopolitical reality demanded a renewed peace process. At first the UN took the initiative, but it was soon replaced by American peacemakers. The early architects of Pax Americana had some ideas of their own, but they were flatly rejected by the Israelis, and got nowhere. American brokering became a proxy for Israeli peace plans, which were based on three assumptions: that the 1948 ethnic cleansings would not be an issue; that negotiations would only concern the future of the areas Israel had occupied in 1967, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; and, third, that the fate of the Palestinian minority in Israel was not to be part of a comprehensive settlement. This meant that 80 per cent of Palestine and more than 50 per cent of Palestinians were to be excluded from the peacemaking process. The formula was accepted unconditionally by the US, and sold as the best possible offer to the rest of the world. For a while - until 1977 - the Israelis insisted on another precondition. They wanted to divide the West Bank with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. (The 'Jordanian option', as it was called, was later adopted by the Reagan Administration as its own peace plan.) When Likud came to power in 1977, the option dropped from view - the new Government was not interested in any kind of agreement or compromise - but it was revived in the days of the national unity government, 1984-87, until the Jordanians realised that the Israeli Government would not relinquish the entire West Bank even to them.
The Israeli occupation continued unhindered in the absence of a proper peace rocess. From its very first day - long before the suicide bombers - there were house demolitions, killings of innocent citizens, expulsions, closures and general harassment. The 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of the ever- expanding settler movement, which brought with it not only land expropriation but also further brutality. The Palestinians responded with a radical form of political Islam, which by the end of the first twenty years had become a force to reckon with. It was bolder in its resistance to the occupation than anything that had preceded it, but equally harsh in its attitude to internal rivals and the population at large. Neither movement, any more than the Likud Government before them, showed any interest in a diplomatic effort to resolve the conflict.
Frustration in the occupied areas intensified until, in December 1987, the local population rose up against the occupiers.In due course the violence ended and a new period of peacemaking began, very like the previous ones. On the Israeli side the team was extended to include academics as well as politicians. Once again, it was an Israeli endeavour seeking American approval. Once again, the Americans tried to put forward some ideas of their own: the Madrid process of 1991 was part of an American attempt to justify the first Gulf War. There were ideas in it with which the Palestinians could agree. But it was a long and cumbersome business and in the meantime a new Israeli initiative was developed.
This initiative had a novel component. For the first time, the Israelis were looking for Palestinian partners in the search for their kind of peace in Palestine. And they aimed at the top - the PLO leadership in Tunis. They were lured into the process by an Israeli promise, enshrined in Article 5, Clause 3 of the Oslo Accord, that after five years of catering for Israeli security needs, the main Palestinian demands would be put on the negotiating table in preparation for a final agreement. Meanwhile, the Palestinians would be allowed to play with independence. They were offered the opportunity to form a Palestinian Authority, decorated with the insignia of sovereignty, that could remain intact as long as it clamped down on any resistance movement against the Israelis. For that purpose, the PA employed five secret service organisations, which compounded the occupiers' abuses of human and civil rights with those of the indigenous Administration. Palestine's quasi-autonomy had little bearing on the occupation. In some areas it was directly enforced, in others indirectly. More Jewish settlers arrived, and harassment continued everywhere. When the Palestinian opposition retaliated with suicide attacks, the Israelis enriched the repertoire of collective punishment in such a way that support for the suicide bombers grew by the week.
Six years after the signing of Oslo, the 'peace camp' once more came to power in Israel, with Ehud Barak at its head. A year later he was facing electoral defeat, having been over ambitious in almost every field. Peace with the Palestinians seemed to be the only salvation. The Palestinians expected the promise made in Oslo to be the basis for the new negotiations. As they saw it, they had agreed to wait five years: it was time to discuss the problem of Jerusalem, the fate of the refugees and the future of the settlements. The Israelis once more devised the plan, enlisting even more academics and 'professional' experts. The fragmented Palestinian leadership was unable to come up with counterproposals without outside help, and sought advice in such unlikely places as the Adam Smith Institute in London. Not surprisingly, the Israeli plan alone was on the negotiating table at Camp David in the summer of2000.
Endorsed by the Americans, it offered withdrawal from most of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, leaving about 15 per cent of original Palestine for the Palestinians, in the form of discrete cantons bisected by highways, settlements army camps and walls. No capital in Jerusalem, no solution to the refugee problem and total abuse of the concept of statehood and independence. Even the fragile Arafat, who had hitherto seemed to be happy with the Salata (the perks of power), having never exercised Sulta (actual power), could not sign a document that made a mockery of every Palestinian demand. He was immediately depicted as a warmonger. Unarmed demonstrators showed their dismay in the autumn of 2000 and were shot by the Israeli Army. The Palestinian response was not late in coming: the resistance was militarised.
Three years into the second intifada, the peace effort resumed once more. The same formula was at work: an Israeli initiative catering to the Israeli public and Israeli needs disguised as a piece of honest brokering on the part of the Americans. Three initiatives appeared in 2003. The first has already won American support: the road map. At the end of that road, 10 per cent of Palestine will be divided into two huge prison camps - one in Gaza and the other in the West Bank - with no solution to the refugee problem and full Israeli control of Jerusalem. The initiators are still looking for a prospective Palestinian chief warden. Having lost Mahmoud Abbas, they are pinning their hopes on Ahmad Qurei. The second is the Ayalon-Nusseibeh proposal, based on a total Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories (apart from greater Jerusalem, which takes up about a third of the West Bank) in return for a Palestinian undertaking to relinquish the refugees' right of return. I suspect that Sari Nusseibeh, the president of al-Quds University and former PA representative in Jerusalem, is repeating a ploy he attempted in the first intifada, when he suggested the de jure annexation of the Occupied Territories to Israel, so as to show the Israelis that Israel could not include the West Bank and Gaza within its borders and still be at once Jewish and democratic. He now hopes to expose Israel's unwillingness to evict the settlements. The Ayalon-Nusseibeh plan has so far failed to impress the Israelis, but it did depress the refugee communities and I wonder whether it was worth it. Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000, lives in the former village of Ijzim, from which the Palestinian population was expelled in 1948.
And now we have the Geneva bubble: an impressive production both as a document and as a Hollywood-style ceremony. It will probably never become a reality, but it's worth taking a look at. Its basic features are described by David Grossman in the introduction to the Hebrew version. For the first time, there is full Palestinian recognition of the right of the Jewish people to a state in Israel and recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. The document offers practical and detailed solutions to the refugee problem; a problem that has caused all efforts until now to fail. There is also in the document a promise that the majority of the Jews living beyond the Green Line will remain in their homes and become part of the state of Israel. There is also a Palestinian commitment to demilitarise the Palestinian state and allow no foreign troops to be stationed in it. What catches the eye, not only in this preface but in the document as a whole, is that while the refugees' right of return is an obstacle that has to be removed if peace and reconciliation are to be achieved, the Jewishness of Israel - i.e. the Jewishness of the original state with the annexed blocks of settlements in the Occupied Territories and greater Jerusalem is not an obstacle at all. On the contrary, what is missing according to this logic is Palestinian recognition of the new greater Israel. And what is offered to encourage the Palestinians to recognise the state built on the land from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and that was taken from them in 1967? What is the generous offer the Israeli peaceniks loudly urged their counterparts on the Geneva campaign not to pass up? A mini-state, built on 15 per cent of what used to be Palestine, with a capital near Jerusalem and no army. On close reading, the authority and power vested in the aforementioned state bear little relation to any notion of statehood we might derive from global reality or political science textbooks. Far more important, the Geneva project would leave the refugees in exile. The small print says that the Palestinian refugees would be able to choose either to return to what's left of their former country or stay in their camps. As they will probably choose to wait until the international community fulfils its commitment to allow their unconditional return under Resolution 194, they will remain refugees while their compatriots in Israel continue to be second-class citizens in the remaining 85 per cent of Palestine.
There is no acknowledgment of the cause of this conflict, the 1948 ethnic cleansing; there is no process of truth and reconciliation that will make Israel accountable for what it did either in 1948 or afterwards. Under these circumstances, neither the Palestinians nor the Arab world at large will feel able to accept a Jewish state.
In a celebration in Tel Aviv, the architects of the Geneva Accord played over and over again a popular song called 'And Tel Aviv Will Be Geneva'. But Tel Aviv is not Geneva; it is built on the ruins of six Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948; and it shouldn't be Geneva: it should aspire to be Alexandria or Beirut, so that the Jews who invaded the Arab world by force could at last show a willingness to be part of the Middle East rather than remain an alien and alienated state within it.
18 December 2003
Ilan Pappe teaches political science at Haifa University and is chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies.
2. We will give you more of us
an interview with Ali Jarbawi from Bitter Lemons
Bitterlemons.org: What was your impression of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's "disengagement plan"?
Jarbawi:” Sharon was giving the Palestinians an ultimatum: "either you accept my roadmap with the 14 alterations injected by my government (and this is the maximum that you will get out of me) or we are going to unilaterally give you less than that. The choice is yours--if you opt for negotiations, I can give you more, but you should know (and this is a tacit understanding) that the most you will get even then is the most that is offered in 'my roadmap', which includes only the land inside the wall."
Bitterlemons.org: Why this proposal now?
Jarbawi:” First, I don't think that Sharon is changing his ideology, but practically, there are many things that he wants to take into account. He wants to please the American administration, but he also wants to use this time during which the American administration is entering an election campaign to push for his own interests. He also wants to send a message to Israeli society because he was criticized internally for having no plan. Third, he wants to kill the Geneva accord. I think that Sharon has reached the conclusion--and this might be the one item that he has changed his mind about--that after wanting all of "Eretz Israel" to become a Jewish state and advocating for a long time for the expulsion of Palestinians, their physical transfer is impossible. Now, instead of a practical transfer, he wants to implement the "legal transfer" of Palestinians. Legal transfer means that while we will live inside "Eretz Israel", we will not be part of the state of Israel, meaning we will not reach a situation of apartheid and Palestinians will no longer be able to opt for one state. Basically, he has in mind that part of the West Bank will be incorporated into the state of Israel. The wall is the marker; it is not a security barrier, but the border. Put the Palestinians in cantons and let them call that a state, but that state will not be sovereign, will not be independent. If Palestinians accept this through negotiations, then Sharon is ready to give it to them. If they do not, then he is going to remove the Israeli military presence from small areas and sit tight until Palestinians agree to return to his plan, which he will disguise under the roadmap. The second stage of the roadmap calls for a temporary state; this is the temporary state made permanent.”
Bitterlemons.org: Why did the meeting between prime ministers Sharon and Ahmed Qurei' never happen?
Jarbawi: From a Palestinian perspective, why should it happen? I don't understand why the Palestinian prime minister would go and meet with Sharon, especially after his speech. The Palestinian reaction to the speech was that we reject unilateral actions. A meeting with Sharon now means that we accept negotiations instead. The question is, on what basis? On his roadmap and the 14 qualifications? The greatest thing that Sharon gained from this ultimatum is that his roadmap will become legitimate and will become the maximum Palestinians can achieve.
Bitterlemons.org: In this situation, what can the Palestinian Authority do?
Jarbawi: I think that the best way to face Sharon's ultimatum is not to meet with him, but to offer him and Israel a Palestinian ultimatum in return. The Palestinian ultimatum would be: "We know that you want to squeeze us into cantons and thereby cheat us and the world of the two-state solution. We agree to a two-state solution--we have indicated this for a long time--but that two-state solution must be based on the 1967 borders, give and take minor exchanges. As such, we are giving you a few months (maybe six months) and as a measure of trust, we will offer you a Palestinian truce [during that time]. If, however, the wall continues to be built and the settlement expansion policy continues in these six months, then we will understand that you are closing the gates to a two-state solution. "If so, then we will accommodate you. In that case, we are going to close the two-state option forever, and from then on, we will pursue the establishment of just one state. Further, from then on, you will have to bear the consequences of your occupation. We will dissolve the Palestinian Authority and you won't have the Authority there to cripple with your actions, even as you blame it morning and night. Then you will have to deal with the Palestinian people, meeting us on equal terms 20 or 30 years from now when there is one vote for every person. "The meaning of all of this is that if you are afraid of the political effects of demography, then we are going to use it against you. Beware."
Bitterlemons.org: What are the dangers of this approach?
Jarbawi: Any plan should have its alternative built in, and this requires more discussion among Palestinians. We should tell Sharon that if he doesn't accept the two-state solution [in order] to separate from us, then we will give him more of us. To give Israel more of us means that we have to dissolve the Palestinian Authority. In order for the Palestinians to get a fully sovereign, independent state on the 1967 borders, Palestinians should use the only thing that Israel and Israelis are afraid of, i.e. the political effects of the demographic factor. Thus, the one-state solution is the medium for gaining the two-state solution. Now the question is, will the Authority dissolve itself? That is the question that remains to be answered.
-Published 22/12/2003 Bitterlemons.org
Ali Jarbawi is a professor of political science at Birzeit
University
Sunday, January 4
Wednesday, December 17
MCC Palestine Update #91
MCC Palestine Update #91
December 17, 2003
This past week I received a Christmas card from our friends at the Wi’am Center for Conflict Resolution in Bethlehem. The illustration on the card (produced by Wi’am) was poignant and striking. Shepherds, sheep, donkeys, even Mary and Joseph find themselves separated from the Christ child by barbed-wire fences. Mary is pictured trying to reach through the fence to touch her son. The rays of the Christmas star, however, do manage to pierce through the barbed wire, shining down on Jesus in his simple manger. This card well summarizes the reality of Bethlehem and many other West Bank cities this Christmas: encircled by electronic fences, concrete walls, barbed wire. If Mary and Joseph tried to travel today from Nazareth to Bethlehem on the route they would have taken 2,000 years ago, they would be lucky to reach Jenin: checkpoints, roadblocks, barbed wire would stand in their way.
The good news of Christmas, however, is that, despite the roadblocks, the checkpoints, the fences and walls that create a reality of “separation” (apartheid), God’s incarnation is a reality. God’s incarnation in the Christ child extends into the Body of Christ, the church: despite the walls of separation being erected, the church in the occupied territories continues to witness to a reality of reconciliation that is built with bridges instead of walls. Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders participated in this reality on Saturday, December 13, as they gathered in al-Ram north of Jerusalem to say NO to a future of walls that dispossess. The reality in the occupied territories this Advent is somber and grim, as Palestinians face being encircled and imprisoned by walls and fences. Yet hope can be found amidst this despair, as the church and Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders witness through word and deed to a future consisting of bridges of reconciliation instead of walls of dispossession, aggression and hatred.
Please pray this Advent and this Christmas-season for the witness of the Palestinian churches and for the work of organizations such as Wi’am, Sabeel, and the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions.
MCC Project Update:
On December 26, Israeli Jewish members of Zochrot will visit the Bethlehem area as guests of the Badil Resource Center for Refugee and Residency Rights. The day will be an opportunity for refugee communities to become acquainted with this new Israeli organization that is dedicated to working on durable solutions for Palestinian refugees. Please have this meeting in your prayers.
Below you will find three pieces of analysis, all from MCC partners. The first, by Ghassan Andoni of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement, looks at how the “separation wall” constitutes an act of aggression. MCC recently gave a grant to Rapprochement to assist with its media center (the International Middle East Media Center): visit its website, http://www.imemc.org/. The second piece is by Samia Khoury, a Palestinian Christian woman who serves on the board of MCC partner organization, the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center; Samia perceptively examines the reality behind what she calls “the Geneva hoopla.” The final item is a research bulletin from the Badil Resource Center for Refugee and Residency Rights; the bulletin examines how refugee participation in peace agreements addressing conflicts that have created refugees is essential to durable peace and reconciliation and discusses how Palestinian refugee voices have been excluded from political discussions concerning their future. This is the final update of 2003. Updates will resume in early January 2004.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Separation Wall, a Typical Mixture of Security and Aggression
Ghassan Andoni - IMEMC-Analysis, December 12, 2003
The UN General Assembly voted to demand for the International Court of Justice to give a legal advisory concerning the "separation wall". A resolution supported by 90 countries, opposed by 8, and around 60 countries abstained. It is still early to tell how significant this move can be. According to expert's expectations, it might take years for the court to conclude its work and issue an advisory. Therefore, it is likely that developments on the ground can take over any expected court decision. Israel faces a serious legal dilemma. To present a stand consistent with international law; it has to plea as an occupier power that "has the right to build fences and other types of constructions needed for security purpose". To plea as an occupation power contradicts the basic stand of all Israeli governments that defines the "territories" as disputed. Recognizing that Israel is an occupying power with certain rights stated in international law, would as well force Israel to recognize, as well, Jerusalem as an occupied territory. The story of the Separation wall is not different from that of settlements, closure, land grabs, settler's outposts, or by-passing roads. All were created for an alleged security reason, in few limited cases it was even possible to recognize that security need, but all of them were structured to serve an ideological or political purpose as well. In relation to the separation wall, every Israeli official stressed the need for the wall as pre-emptive to military attacks inside Israel, including suicide attacks. Yet, each of them avoided answering to why it needs to be built deep into the Palestinian territories and not on the green line. Even, the closest ally to Israel, namely the United States, could not but see another agenda in building the wall. Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei expressed even interest in sharing the coast of the wall if it is built on the green line, but rejected for it to be built even a millimeter inside the Palestinian occupied territories. It is very right for Palestinians to point to the intentions to grab more land, force discontinuity to the Palestinian areas, define borders unilaterally, and being used as a way to collectively punish Palestinians. Israel could do, based on pure security assessment, a fence on the green line, and deploy more forces around settlements to "protect" them until their issue is addressed politically, yet rejecting to be partner to a truce agreement and continuing with the construction of the wall based on settler's interests reflects the set of priorities of the current Israeli government. In relation to road blocks and military check posts, it is clear that within a conflict period, more security measures are needed by even an occupying authority, yet, how security figures could explain the security need behind blocking the road between two adjacent Palestinian villages is still standing for an explanation. Recently, even army and security heads started to publicly criticize the policies of the current government as being counter productive and making Israel more vulnerable than protected. Amazingly enough, while the current government expressed no intention to compromise on any level, it became very forwarding, at least verbally, on the issue of easing Palestinian living conditions. This issue was until recently presented as the most security related issue of all. Confusing security needs with aggression becomes self defeating to security legitimate needs. No wonder why almost all the world, including the United States, are questioning and doubting the Israeli intentions and demanding for Israel to stop the aggressive act of building the wall deep inside Palestinian occupied territories.
2. The Hoopla in Geneva
by Samia Khoury
(Monday December 15 2003)
"It seems that all those dignitaries were getting together to endorse the redundancy of the United Nations and its resolutions since the stipulations of this initiative if implemented are supposed to supersede all previous UN resolutions. So in reality Israel is being rewarded for its intransigence and for defying the United Nations."
For the last couple of months, we have been reading details of the Geneva Initiative, and listening to opinions for and against this initiative. So finally the signing of this document took place in Geneva. But why all the fanfare. Listening to the music and singing one would think we are really celebrating Palestinian independence. It is bad enough that we commemorate November 15 the day of the announcement of the declaration of independence as independence day, when in reality we are still under military occupation. So was the hoopla in Geneva another overture for another date to add to our long list of commemorations?
It would be naive to think that people who have been dispossessed for over half a century and living under military occupation for the last thirsty six years are not anxious to live in peace. But it would be just as naive to think that the signing of this "unofficial document" in Geneva is really a "breakthrough in peace negotiations"
One would think that the region has learnt enough lessons from the various peace initiatives since the Madrid conference, which was based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. Initiatives that have been doomed to failure, basically because those UN resolutions and all previous ones, including the right of return have been defied by Israel all along. So what was magic about this initiative to make its fate any different? Did the occasion really warrant a celebration? It seems that all those dignitaries were getting together to endorse the redundancy of the United Nations and its resolutions since the stipulations of this initiative if implemented are supposed to supersede all previous UN resolutions. So in reality Israel is being rewarded for its intransigence and for defying the United Nations.
To contemplate making compromises on the right of return requires a clear mandate from the Palestinian refugees themselves. Those who continue to live in refugee camps in the Arab countries, and those who have been dispersed all over the world are the only ones who are entitled to speak on behalf of the refugees. We have heard people say that we need to be pragmatic since many, or most of the refugees might not want to return. To start with that is not an accurate assumption. Moreoever there is a difference between one's basic right and one's choice of how to deal with that right. So if some of the refugees do not want to return, it should be by their own choice, and not because somebody has made a deal on their behalf to deprive them of that right.
Palestinians have a historical narrative that asserts their rights, and there is no way peace negotiations can move ahead without the recognition of those rights. Unfortunately, Israel refuses to recognize its responsibility for our dispossession and for creating the refugee problem. Yet the Palestinians are demanded to make more concessions to their rights. Simply because, strategically they are powerless, they do not have the privilege of choice. Does this mean it is acceptable to trample over the powerless. In this century when the law of the jungle has been replaced by the United Nations, it would seem an unacceptable justification for the Palestinians to forfeit their rights simply because they are powerless.
It is indeed very sad that Palestinians are helping Israel to nullify the right of return. "Come on" they say; "do you really believe this can work out?" Why not? Or is it because Israel is involved, and it has become the norm that no power challenges Israel for its violations of international law. No injustice can be acceptable. Even if it is the norm, it remains immoral and illegal. So why should the Palestinians succumb to this logic and forfeit their right, especially that justice is on their side.
The widow in (Luke 18:1-8) was powerless, but she kept taking her case to the judge who "neither feared God nor cared about men." Yet she was persistent in pleading for "justice against her adversary" until he came to the conclusion that he needs to grant her justice so that she will stop bothering him and eventually wear him out. I do not think as Palestinians we have bothered the world conscience enough. We are the ones who have been worn out, and victimized. And to add insult to injury we have been labeled "terrorists." It is high time we are granted justice against our adversary.
The partition scheme in 1948 never worked out because it lacked justice and was based on creating a Jewish State on the land that was meant to be for all its citizens. With the present inequity, how do we envisage that a much smaller percentage of Palestine surrounded by an Apartheid Wall would be acceptable and will guarantee a viable and comprehensive peace. At the same time, if Israel is to be an exclusively Jewish State, how can it survive as a democratic and Jewish State when over 20% of its citizens are non Jewish. In the long run Israel will have to face this dilemma. Will an apartheid Jewish state guarantee its peace and security?
I was hoping that those experienced diplomats involved in the Geneva Initiative would have come up with an innovative solution to respond to the needs of both people. Maybe they should have thought of the one state solution which could help Israel in solving its dilemma, and it would help the Palestinians in realizing their right of return.
The effort that was put in the details of the Geneva Initiative seems a very serious effort, but likewise a similar effort could have been put in finding an inclusive and just structure for a binational democratic state that can be the solution for a comprehensive and viable peace amongst all the people who are destined to share this Holy Land without barriers or walls.
3. Peace Agreements and Public Participation – Lessons Learned
BADIL Occasional Bulletin No. 15 December 2003
This Bulletin aims to provide a brief overview of issues related to Palestinian Refugee Rights
Peace agreements—provisions on rights, refugees and participation: The following is the final part of a three-part series analyzing provisions in recent peace agreements. It deals with public participation. Parts I and II dealt with provisions on human rights and refugees in these agreements.
Always talked about but never included
Since the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference, Palestinians have been talked about, argued over and decided for but rarely included in any peace process.
Peace agreements are usually the result of negotiations between or among political elites followed by international assistance to facilitate implementation. It is the general public, however, who provide the best guarantee for effective implementation of peace agreements.
Agreements entail more than an end to conflict. They also address important questions related to the fundamental principles governing inter-state relations, the relationship between a state and its citizens (including human rights protections), legislative, executive, and judicial powers, good governance, and the allocation of state resources.
Public participation is therefore essential. Including the public at an early stage is critical for determining its will, not only in relation to ending the conflict, but also in determining the shape of the final peace. Public participation strengthens democratic principles and structures, expands the range of solutions to complex issues, lends greater legitimacy to agreements, engenders broad public ownership of the agreement and contributes to its long-term durability.
Recent comparative study of peace processes in protracted conflicts suggests that “where a peace process enables broad-based participation and public debate, intensely conflictual issues can be reclaimed as the normal subjects of political dialogue, problem-solving and constructive action.” This creates an environment where antagonists can more effectively resolve root causes of the conflict and ultimately take steps towards reconciliation rather than just conflict management.*
The following bulletin provides a brief review of the role of the public in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiation process and an overview of public participation in comparative perspective.
Palestinian-Israeli Negotiations
The Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking process has provided few opportunities for public participation, whether representative, consultative or direct. Historically, the Palestinian people have been denied the basic right to participate in key decisions concerning the conflict in Palestine.
During the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, following the end of WWI, for example, the major powers ignored the wishes of the Palestinian people in the selection of the Mandatory power for Palestine. “[W]e do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.” For the major powers, the imposition of British rule in Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in the country was “of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
In 1947, the UN held consultations in the region concerning the future of the country, but then chose to ignore the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Palestinians who favored the established of a democratic state with equal rights for both Arabs and Jews rather than partition along ethno-national and religious lines. For the next several decades Palestinians and their leadership were largely excluded from successive peacemaking efforts.
It was not until the late 1980s that major international powers, most notably the United States, recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and as the designated interlocutor at the official level for peace negotiations. Peacemaking efforts, however, continued to exclude both consultative and direct forms of public participation.
Acceptance of the PLO as the body mandated to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinian people, however, came at a price. The PLO was required to forego the agenda set by the people themselves: liberation of their historic homeland and establishment of a democratic state. Palestinians were forced to accept UN Security Council Resolution
242 and the notion of ‘land for peace’ as the basis for a negotiated solution to the conflict.
The PLO had previously rejected Resolution 242 because it left Israel “many loopholes” for the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It also ignored “the right of the refugees to return to their homes.” The resolution also lacked a clear legal framework for ending the conflict. In addition, the notion of ‘land for peace’ always assumed that there was a mutual exchange between the parties when in reality there is and was an aysmetrical relationship with Palestinians having neither land (which Israel was to withdraw from) nor peace (which they were required to provide).
Nevertheless, and at an early stage, Palestinians attempted to create the space for their involvement in the peacemaking process through both consultative and direct forms of participation. In the early 1950s, for example, refugees organized committees to raise their demands before relevant UN bodies such as the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP). After meeting with refugees in Beirut, the Commission noted that it “was impressed by expressions of these spokesmen for the return of refugees to their homes to live there in peace with their neighbors.” The establishment of the PLO in 1964 constituted a new form of representative participation for the Palestinian people.
Exclusion gives rise to self-organization
Exclusion of refugees from the peacemaking process that began in Madrid in 1991 and continued in Oslo, combined with demands for better representation from their own leadership, gave rise to initiatives of political self-organization among refugee communities in the 1967 occupied West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, inside Israel, and in the diaspora. These initiatives were as much an expression of concern about the exclusion of specific rights and demands of refugees as they were about the popular demand for better representation and the democratization of the ‘Middle East Peace Process.’
A series of popular refugee conferences inside Israel followed by similar conferences across the West Bank, Gaza Strip, in 1995-1996 set out the basic principles, proposed structures, and mechanisms of a popular campaign for refugee rights. The campaign was to be a broad-based, non-sectarian, independent movement comprised of Palestinian popular organizations and initiatives (refugee and non-refugee) in the homeland and in the diaspora to pressure and lobby for the protection of Palestinian refugee rights and a durable solution based on UN resolutions and international law.
The proposed structures – popular refugee committees, popular conferences, elected refugee councils and a General Palestinian Refugee Conference held inside the historic homeland and in the diaspora each with an elected General Refugee Council – had the aim of providing a popular mechanism for the struggle for legitimate national rights, democracy, civil and human rights, not replacing the PLO. In effect, self-organization was a means to take back the space that had been usurped from the refugees, among others. It was a means to assert their right to have rights.
Nevertheless, international actors and national leaders have been reluctant to create space for public participation in the peacemaking process. Camp David I and II, the secret Oslo negotiations, the subsequent talks over interim arrangements, and the most recent Road Map, all failed to provide scope for public participation. Representative participation was further weakened when part of the PLO political infrastructure resettled in Gaza under the terms of Oslo as the Palestinian Authority, only responsible for Palestinians in the occupied territories, and the exclusion of Palestinians outside these territories from elections for the newly established legislative council.
Moreover, these negotiations and related agreements shifted from an agenda articulated by civil society to one that was subject to political pressures. This is particularly evident in relation to the issue of Palestinian refugees. Refugees were more often than not considered as objects of humanitarian assistance rather than individuals with rights and as legitimate actors in the peacemaking process. “The refugees themselves were assessed, surveyed, quantified, classified, tested, and their living standards, housing conditions, economic and social interests became the objects of study. The refugees themselves were nowhere to be found.”** Moreover, as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, has observed, the exclusion of refugees has effectively de-historicised the conflict, which no longer has an origin, and thus no longer the necessary means and mechanisms to resolve it.
More recent unofficial initiatives, including the Nusseibeh-Ayalon plan and the Geneva understandings also fail to incorporate room for effective public participation. While these initiatives may be considered as a form of quasi-civil society peacemaking they are, in the final analysis, understandings drafted between political elites. Both present the public with, in effect, a fait accompli, a take it or leave deal, much like the one former President Clinton and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to Palestinians at Camp David in July 2000. Subsequent attempts to garner popular support for these initiatives are just that, and not a serious effort to bring the public into the peacemaking process in a way that allows they themselves to shape the contours of peace.
These initiatives stand in contrast to other attempts to bring the public into the peacemaking process. In September 2000, for example, an all-Party British Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry came to the region to ask refugees how they envisioned a solution to their plight. Hearings were held in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The hearings, which were later transcribed and published, constituted a form of participation through open consultation. They allowed refugees to define the parameters of a solution and elicited many creative options.
Public Participation in Comparative Perspective
There are various forms of participation can take: the public may be represented in negotiations by political parties and/or other organized sectors of civil society. Consultative mechanisms may be established to allow the public to voice its concerns, demands, and visions for a durable peace. Individuals may also directly participate in peacemaking, providing the opportunity to both formulate and implement agreements to resolve the conflict.
Experience shows that mechanisms for public participation in peace processes do not just materialize. People have to make them happen. Nevertheless, there are many useful examples of public involvement in peacemaking processes around the world*.
In Mali during the mid-1990s, well-respected local figures organized more than 50 community meetings in areas of the country where reconciliation was most difficult. The number of participants ranged from several hundred to more than 1,000. Village elders, religious and community leaders took responsibility for negotiating local arrangements to control arms, reintegrate displaced people and fighters and other sensitive issues. These local attempts at public peacemaking, supported by Norwegian Church Aid, followed the collapse of a government initiative to involve different sectors of Mali society in the process. Conclusions of the local meetings were eventually funneled into a broader, consolidated process.
The Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) attempted to provide an opening for some 27 organized groups, including political parties, trade unions and religious institutions, to negotiate a political settlement and lay the foundations for a new constitution. Delegates were chosen through a proportional representation list system and those selected were split into working groups around thematic issues with a rotating chair. Each group was assigned a resource person who researched and advised participants on best practices elsewhere in the world. Due to escalating violence and disagreements on the transitional process CODESA was eventually disbanded. But many of the ideas that had emerged were later included in subsequent multi-party negotiations. The public was also brought into the process over the new constitution through community-level consultation meetings held across the country. People could also contribute their ideas in written submissions dropped off at collection boxes in public locations.
In Northern Ireland, non-sectarian activists, many from the non-governmental sector, established a public forum known as Initiative 92. Its aim was to allow the general public to discuss central issues of the conflict that were otherwise raised in public discourse only by militants. Public hearings, organized by a seven-member commission chaired by an outside facilitator, were held across the country. The hearings were transcribed and published as a book which became the basis for follow-up activities aimed at stimulating public debate about the conflict and frameworks for peace.
The Guatemalan peace process also provided a significant degree of latitude for public participation. In the late 1980s the National Reconciliation Commission, comprised of representatives of 12 political parties, the government, the army and the Roman Catholic Church, organized a Grand National Dialogue. Nearly 50 different sectoral interest groups, including unions, business associations, and cooperatives participated with thematic commissions focusing on key issues of the conflict.
These talks contributed to the development of a general framework agreement. An elected assembly, which included representatives of 10 different social sectors, indigenous people and women, was subsequently authorized to draft papers on seven major issues to be resolved through the ongoing negotiations. However, the assembly began to lose influence as civil society leaders assumed new political positions and as talks assumed an increasingly bi-partisan format between the government and rebel forces.
Guatemalan refugees, moreover, organized themselves into commissions (Comisiones Permanentes) under which refugee leaders directly negotiated the terms of their return. These included public guarantee of their security; assurance of the right to return to lands; the right to organize and freely associate; guarantee that they would be subject to civilian and not military authority; and, the right to return under supervision of international observers. Refugee women subsequently organized themselves around their common objective to return to Guatemala and negotiate adequate conditions for themselves and their families. As several commentators have observed, refugees in Guatemala did not wait for peace, they helped forge it. Broad public participation also contributed to the democratization of institutionalized systems of exclusion.
In both Mozambique and Papua-New Guinea, grassroots initiatives including the involvement of church and women’s groups played an innovative role in developing and implementing peace agreements as well as in helping to consolidate the peace.
Public inclusion facilitates implementation
Political negotiators are often reluctant to open up the space for public involvement in the peacemaking process. Comparative experience, however, suggests that public participation, whether representative, consultative or direct, facilitates implementation of agreements and strengthens the durability of a negotiated peace.
A peacemaking process that fails to provide for public participation may exacerbate public mistrust and undermine the legitimacy of the agreement. Consultation on the contents of an agreement after it has been negotiated and signed is likely to be of only limited value because it is difficult to incorporate substantive input into the agreement at that stage. Peace agreements negotiated without adequate public participation may in fact be a trigger for further disagreements rather than reconciliation.
Public participation also provides a safeguard against a process that merely “recycles old power to re-legitimise it through new structures.” International involvement in the peacemaking process should strengthen and compliment initiatives for public participation rather than displace local ownership of the process or shift the agenda away from the priorities articulated by civil society.
*****
For a list of Principles to Guide Policy and Practice on public participation in peacemaking visit Conciliation Resources: http://www.c-r.org/pubs/occ_papers/PP_policy.shtml
* Catherine Barnes. Owning the Process: Mechanisms for Political Participation of the Public in Peacemaking. Joint Analysis Workshop Report, Conciliation Resources, 2002.
** Karma Nabulsi. Popular Sovereignty, Collective Rights, Participation and Crafting Durable Solutiosn for Palestinian Refugees. BADIL Working Paper No. 4, April 2003.
December 17, 2003
This past week I received a Christmas card from our friends at the Wi’am Center for Conflict Resolution in Bethlehem. The illustration on the card (produced by Wi’am) was poignant and striking. Shepherds, sheep, donkeys, even Mary and Joseph find themselves separated from the Christ child by barbed-wire fences. Mary is pictured trying to reach through the fence to touch her son. The rays of the Christmas star, however, do manage to pierce through the barbed wire, shining down on Jesus in his simple manger. This card well summarizes the reality of Bethlehem and many other West Bank cities this Christmas: encircled by electronic fences, concrete walls, barbed wire. If Mary and Joseph tried to travel today from Nazareth to Bethlehem on the route they would have taken 2,000 years ago, they would be lucky to reach Jenin: checkpoints, roadblocks, barbed wire would stand in their way.
The good news of Christmas, however, is that, despite the roadblocks, the checkpoints, the fences and walls that create a reality of “separation” (apartheid), God’s incarnation is a reality. God’s incarnation in the Christ child extends into the Body of Christ, the church: despite the walls of separation being erected, the church in the occupied territories continues to witness to a reality of reconciliation that is built with bridges instead of walls. Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders participated in this reality on Saturday, December 13, as they gathered in al-Ram north of Jerusalem to say NO to a future of walls that dispossess. The reality in the occupied territories this Advent is somber and grim, as Palestinians face being encircled and imprisoned by walls and fences. Yet hope can be found amidst this despair, as the church and Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders witness through word and deed to a future consisting of bridges of reconciliation instead of walls of dispossession, aggression and hatred.
Please pray this Advent and this Christmas-season for the witness of the Palestinian churches and for the work of organizations such as Wi’am, Sabeel, and the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions.
MCC Project Update:
On December 26, Israeli Jewish members of Zochrot will visit the Bethlehem area as guests of the Badil Resource Center for Refugee and Residency Rights. The day will be an opportunity for refugee communities to become acquainted with this new Israeli organization that is dedicated to working on durable solutions for Palestinian refugees. Please have this meeting in your prayers.
Below you will find three pieces of analysis, all from MCC partners. The first, by Ghassan Andoni of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement, looks at how the “separation wall” constitutes an act of aggression. MCC recently gave a grant to Rapprochement to assist with its media center (the International Middle East Media Center): visit its website, http://www.imemc.org/. The second piece is by Samia Khoury, a Palestinian Christian woman who serves on the board of MCC partner organization, the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center; Samia perceptively examines the reality behind what she calls “the Geneva hoopla.” The final item is a research bulletin from the Badil Resource Center for Refugee and Residency Rights; the bulletin examines how refugee participation in peace agreements addressing conflicts that have created refugees is essential to durable peace and reconciliation and discusses how Palestinian refugee voices have been excluded from political discussions concerning their future. This is the final update of 2003. Updates will resume in early January 2004.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Separation Wall, a Typical Mixture of Security and Aggression
Ghassan Andoni - IMEMC-Analysis, December 12, 2003
The UN General Assembly voted to demand for the International Court of Justice to give a legal advisory concerning the "separation wall". A resolution supported by 90 countries, opposed by 8, and around 60 countries abstained. It is still early to tell how significant this move can be. According to expert's expectations, it might take years for the court to conclude its work and issue an advisory. Therefore, it is likely that developments on the ground can take over any expected court decision. Israel faces a serious legal dilemma. To present a stand consistent with international law; it has to plea as an occupier power that "has the right to build fences and other types of constructions needed for security purpose". To plea as an occupation power contradicts the basic stand of all Israeli governments that defines the "territories" as disputed. Recognizing that Israel is an occupying power with certain rights stated in international law, would as well force Israel to recognize, as well, Jerusalem as an occupied territory. The story of the Separation wall is not different from that of settlements, closure, land grabs, settler's outposts, or by-passing roads. All were created for an alleged security reason, in few limited cases it was even possible to recognize that security need, but all of them were structured to serve an ideological or political purpose as well. In relation to the separation wall, every Israeli official stressed the need for the wall as pre-emptive to military attacks inside Israel, including suicide attacks. Yet, each of them avoided answering to why it needs to be built deep into the Palestinian territories and not on the green line. Even, the closest ally to Israel, namely the United States, could not but see another agenda in building the wall. Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei expressed even interest in sharing the coast of the wall if it is built on the green line, but rejected for it to be built even a millimeter inside the Palestinian occupied territories. It is very right for Palestinians to point to the intentions to grab more land, force discontinuity to the Palestinian areas, define borders unilaterally, and being used as a way to collectively punish Palestinians. Israel could do, based on pure security assessment, a fence on the green line, and deploy more forces around settlements to "protect" them until their issue is addressed politically, yet rejecting to be partner to a truce agreement and continuing with the construction of the wall based on settler's interests reflects the set of priorities of the current Israeli government. In relation to road blocks and military check posts, it is clear that within a conflict period, more security measures are needed by even an occupying authority, yet, how security figures could explain the security need behind blocking the road between two adjacent Palestinian villages is still standing for an explanation. Recently, even army and security heads started to publicly criticize the policies of the current government as being counter productive and making Israel more vulnerable than protected. Amazingly enough, while the current government expressed no intention to compromise on any level, it became very forwarding, at least verbally, on the issue of easing Palestinian living conditions. This issue was until recently presented as the most security related issue of all. Confusing security needs with aggression becomes self defeating to security legitimate needs. No wonder why almost all the world, including the United States, are questioning and doubting the Israeli intentions and demanding for Israel to stop the aggressive act of building the wall deep inside Palestinian occupied territories.
2. The Hoopla in Geneva
by Samia Khoury
(Monday December 15 2003)
"It seems that all those dignitaries were getting together to endorse the redundancy of the United Nations and its resolutions since the stipulations of this initiative if implemented are supposed to supersede all previous UN resolutions. So in reality Israel is being rewarded for its intransigence and for defying the United Nations."
For the last couple of months, we have been reading details of the Geneva Initiative, and listening to opinions for and against this initiative. So finally the signing of this document took place in Geneva. But why all the fanfare. Listening to the music and singing one would think we are really celebrating Palestinian independence. It is bad enough that we commemorate November 15 the day of the announcement of the declaration of independence as independence day, when in reality we are still under military occupation. So was the hoopla in Geneva another overture for another date to add to our long list of commemorations?
It would be naive to think that people who have been dispossessed for over half a century and living under military occupation for the last thirsty six years are not anxious to live in peace. But it would be just as naive to think that the signing of this "unofficial document" in Geneva is really a "breakthrough in peace negotiations"
One would think that the region has learnt enough lessons from the various peace initiatives since the Madrid conference, which was based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. Initiatives that have been doomed to failure, basically because those UN resolutions and all previous ones, including the right of return have been defied by Israel all along. So what was magic about this initiative to make its fate any different? Did the occasion really warrant a celebration? It seems that all those dignitaries were getting together to endorse the redundancy of the United Nations and its resolutions since the stipulations of this initiative if implemented are supposed to supersede all previous UN resolutions. So in reality Israel is being rewarded for its intransigence and for defying the United Nations.
To contemplate making compromises on the right of return requires a clear mandate from the Palestinian refugees themselves. Those who continue to live in refugee camps in the Arab countries, and those who have been dispersed all over the world are the only ones who are entitled to speak on behalf of the refugees. We have heard people say that we need to be pragmatic since many, or most of the refugees might not want to return. To start with that is not an accurate assumption. Moreoever there is a difference between one's basic right and one's choice of how to deal with that right. So if some of the refugees do not want to return, it should be by their own choice, and not because somebody has made a deal on their behalf to deprive them of that right.
Palestinians have a historical narrative that asserts their rights, and there is no way peace negotiations can move ahead without the recognition of those rights. Unfortunately, Israel refuses to recognize its responsibility for our dispossession and for creating the refugee problem. Yet the Palestinians are demanded to make more concessions to their rights. Simply because, strategically they are powerless, they do not have the privilege of choice. Does this mean it is acceptable to trample over the powerless. In this century when the law of the jungle has been replaced by the United Nations, it would seem an unacceptable justification for the Palestinians to forfeit their rights simply because they are powerless.
It is indeed very sad that Palestinians are helping Israel to nullify the right of return. "Come on" they say; "do you really believe this can work out?" Why not? Or is it because Israel is involved, and it has become the norm that no power challenges Israel for its violations of international law. No injustice can be acceptable. Even if it is the norm, it remains immoral and illegal. So why should the Palestinians succumb to this logic and forfeit their right, especially that justice is on their side.
The widow in (Luke 18:1-8) was powerless, but she kept taking her case to the judge who "neither feared God nor cared about men." Yet she was persistent in pleading for "justice against her adversary" until he came to the conclusion that he needs to grant her justice so that she will stop bothering him and eventually wear him out. I do not think as Palestinians we have bothered the world conscience enough. We are the ones who have been worn out, and victimized. And to add insult to injury we have been labeled "terrorists." It is high time we are granted justice against our adversary.
The partition scheme in 1948 never worked out because it lacked justice and was based on creating a Jewish State on the land that was meant to be for all its citizens. With the present inequity, how do we envisage that a much smaller percentage of Palestine surrounded by an Apartheid Wall would be acceptable and will guarantee a viable and comprehensive peace. At the same time, if Israel is to be an exclusively Jewish State, how can it survive as a democratic and Jewish State when over 20% of its citizens are non Jewish. In the long run Israel will have to face this dilemma. Will an apartheid Jewish state guarantee its peace and security?
I was hoping that those experienced diplomats involved in the Geneva Initiative would have come up with an innovative solution to respond to the needs of both people. Maybe they should have thought of the one state solution which could help Israel in solving its dilemma, and it would help the Palestinians in realizing their right of return.
The effort that was put in the details of the Geneva Initiative seems a very serious effort, but likewise a similar effort could have been put in finding an inclusive and just structure for a binational democratic state that can be the solution for a comprehensive and viable peace amongst all the people who are destined to share this Holy Land without barriers or walls.
3. Peace Agreements and Public Participation – Lessons Learned
BADIL Occasional Bulletin No. 15 December 2003
This Bulletin aims to provide a brief overview of issues related to Palestinian Refugee Rights
Peace agreements—provisions on rights, refugees and participation: The following is the final part of a three-part series analyzing provisions in recent peace agreements. It deals with public participation. Parts I and II dealt with provisions on human rights and refugees in these agreements.
Always talked about but never included
Since the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference, Palestinians have been talked about, argued over and decided for but rarely included in any peace process.
Peace agreements are usually the result of negotiations between or among political elites followed by international assistance to facilitate implementation. It is the general public, however, who provide the best guarantee for effective implementation of peace agreements.
Agreements entail more than an end to conflict. They also address important questions related to the fundamental principles governing inter-state relations, the relationship between a state and its citizens (including human rights protections), legislative, executive, and judicial powers, good governance, and the allocation of state resources.
Public participation is therefore essential. Including the public at an early stage is critical for determining its will, not only in relation to ending the conflict, but also in determining the shape of the final peace. Public participation strengthens democratic principles and structures, expands the range of solutions to complex issues, lends greater legitimacy to agreements, engenders broad public ownership of the agreement and contributes to its long-term durability.
Recent comparative study of peace processes in protracted conflicts suggests that “where a peace process enables broad-based participation and public debate, intensely conflictual issues can be reclaimed as the normal subjects of political dialogue, problem-solving and constructive action.” This creates an environment where antagonists can more effectively resolve root causes of the conflict and ultimately take steps towards reconciliation rather than just conflict management.*
The following bulletin provides a brief review of the role of the public in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiation process and an overview of public participation in comparative perspective.
Palestinian-Israeli Negotiations
The Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking process has provided few opportunities for public participation, whether representative, consultative or direct. Historically, the Palestinian people have been denied the basic right to participate in key decisions concerning the conflict in Palestine.
During the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, following the end of WWI, for example, the major powers ignored the wishes of the Palestinian people in the selection of the Mandatory power for Palestine. “[W]e do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.” For the major powers, the imposition of British rule in Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in the country was “of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
In 1947, the UN held consultations in the region concerning the future of the country, but then chose to ignore the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Palestinians who favored the established of a democratic state with equal rights for both Arabs and Jews rather than partition along ethno-national and religious lines. For the next several decades Palestinians and their leadership were largely excluded from successive peacemaking efforts.
It was not until the late 1980s that major international powers, most notably the United States, recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and as the designated interlocutor at the official level for peace negotiations. Peacemaking efforts, however, continued to exclude both consultative and direct forms of public participation.
Acceptance of the PLO as the body mandated to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinian people, however, came at a price. The PLO was required to forego the agenda set by the people themselves: liberation of their historic homeland and establishment of a democratic state. Palestinians were forced to accept UN Security Council Resolution
242 and the notion of ‘land for peace’ as the basis for a negotiated solution to the conflict.
The PLO had previously rejected Resolution 242 because it left Israel “many loopholes” for the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It also ignored “the right of the refugees to return to their homes.” The resolution also lacked a clear legal framework for ending the conflict. In addition, the notion of ‘land for peace’ always assumed that there was a mutual exchange between the parties when in reality there is and was an aysmetrical relationship with Palestinians having neither land (which Israel was to withdraw from) nor peace (which they were required to provide).
Nevertheless, and at an early stage, Palestinians attempted to create the space for their involvement in the peacemaking process through both consultative and direct forms of participation. In the early 1950s, for example, refugees organized committees to raise their demands before relevant UN bodies such as the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP). After meeting with refugees in Beirut, the Commission noted that it “was impressed by expressions of these spokesmen for the return of refugees to their homes to live there in peace with their neighbors.” The establishment of the PLO in 1964 constituted a new form of representative participation for the Palestinian people.
Exclusion gives rise to self-organization
Exclusion of refugees from the peacemaking process that began in Madrid in 1991 and continued in Oslo, combined with demands for better representation from their own leadership, gave rise to initiatives of political self-organization among refugee communities in the 1967 occupied West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, inside Israel, and in the diaspora. These initiatives were as much an expression of concern about the exclusion of specific rights and demands of refugees as they were about the popular demand for better representation and the democratization of the ‘Middle East Peace Process.’
A series of popular refugee conferences inside Israel followed by similar conferences across the West Bank, Gaza Strip, in 1995-1996 set out the basic principles, proposed structures, and mechanisms of a popular campaign for refugee rights. The campaign was to be a broad-based, non-sectarian, independent movement comprised of Palestinian popular organizations and initiatives (refugee and non-refugee) in the homeland and in the diaspora to pressure and lobby for the protection of Palestinian refugee rights and a durable solution based on UN resolutions and international law.
The proposed structures – popular refugee committees, popular conferences, elected refugee councils and a General Palestinian Refugee Conference held inside the historic homeland and in the diaspora each with an elected General Refugee Council – had the aim of providing a popular mechanism for the struggle for legitimate national rights, democracy, civil and human rights, not replacing the PLO. In effect, self-organization was a means to take back the space that had been usurped from the refugees, among others. It was a means to assert their right to have rights.
Nevertheless, international actors and national leaders have been reluctant to create space for public participation in the peacemaking process. Camp David I and II, the secret Oslo negotiations, the subsequent talks over interim arrangements, and the most recent Road Map, all failed to provide scope for public participation. Representative participation was further weakened when part of the PLO political infrastructure resettled in Gaza under the terms of Oslo as the Palestinian Authority, only responsible for Palestinians in the occupied territories, and the exclusion of Palestinians outside these territories from elections for the newly established legislative council.
Moreover, these negotiations and related agreements shifted from an agenda articulated by civil society to one that was subject to political pressures. This is particularly evident in relation to the issue of Palestinian refugees. Refugees were more often than not considered as objects of humanitarian assistance rather than individuals with rights and as legitimate actors in the peacemaking process. “The refugees themselves were assessed, surveyed, quantified, classified, tested, and their living standards, housing conditions, economic and social interests became the objects of study. The refugees themselves were nowhere to be found.”** Moreover, as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, has observed, the exclusion of refugees has effectively de-historicised the conflict, which no longer has an origin, and thus no longer the necessary means and mechanisms to resolve it.
More recent unofficial initiatives, including the Nusseibeh-Ayalon plan and the Geneva understandings also fail to incorporate room for effective public participation. While these initiatives may be considered as a form of quasi-civil society peacemaking they are, in the final analysis, understandings drafted between political elites. Both present the public with, in effect, a fait accompli, a take it or leave deal, much like the one former President Clinton and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to Palestinians at Camp David in July 2000. Subsequent attempts to garner popular support for these initiatives are just that, and not a serious effort to bring the public into the peacemaking process in a way that allows they themselves to shape the contours of peace.
These initiatives stand in contrast to other attempts to bring the public into the peacemaking process. In September 2000, for example, an all-Party British Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry came to the region to ask refugees how they envisioned a solution to their plight. Hearings were held in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The hearings, which were later transcribed and published, constituted a form of participation through open consultation. They allowed refugees to define the parameters of a solution and elicited many creative options.
Public Participation in Comparative Perspective
There are various forms of participation can take: the public may be represented in negotiations by political parties and/or other organized sectors of civil society. Consultative mechanisms may be established to allow the public to voice its concerns, demands, and visions for a durable peace. Individuals may also directly participate in peacemaking, providing the opportunity to both formulate and implement agreements to resolve the conflict.
Experience shows that mechanisms for public participation in peace processes do not just materialize. People have to make them happen. Nevertheless, there are many useful examples of public involvement in peacemaking processes around the world*.
In Mali during the mid-1990s, well-respected local figures organized more than 50 community meetings in areas of the country where reconciliation was most difficult. The number of participants ranged from several hundred to more than 1,000. Village elders, religious and community leaders took responsibility for negotiating local arrangements to control arms, reintegrate displaced people and fighters and other sensitive issues. These local attempts at public peacemaking, supported by Norwegian Church Aid, followed the collapse of a government initiative to involve different sectors of Mali society in the process. Conclusions of the local meetings were eventually funneled into a broader, consolidated process.
The Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) attempted to provide an opening for some 27 organized groups, including political parties, trade unions and religious institutions, to negotiate a political settlement and lay the foundations for a new constitution. Delegates were chosen through a proportional representation list system and those selected were split into working groups around thematic issues with a rotating chair. Each group was assigned a resource person who researched and advised participants on best practices elsewhere in the world. Due to escalating violence and disagreements on the transitional process CODESA was eventually disbanded. But many of the ideas that had emerged were later included in subsequent multi-party negotiations. The public was also brought into the process over the new constitution through community-level consultation meetings held across the country. People could also contribute their ideas in written submissions dropped off at collection boxes in public locations.
In Northern Ireland, non-sectarian activists, many from the non-governmental sector, established a public forum known as Initiative 92. Its aim was to allow the general public to discuss central issues of the conflict that were otherwise raised in public discourse only by militants. Public hearings, organized by a seven-member commission chaired by an outside facilitator, were held across the country. The hearings were transcribed and published as a book which became the basis for follow-up activities aimed at stimulating public debate about the conflict and frameworks for peace.
The Guatemalan peace process also provided a significant degree of latitude for public participation. In the late 1980s the National Reconciliation Commission, comprised of representatives of 12 political parties, the government, the army and the Roman Catholic Church, organized a Grand National Dialogue. Nearly 50 different sectoral interest groups, including unions, business associations, and cooperatives participated with thematic commissions focusing on key issues of the conflict.
These talks contributed to the development of a general framework agreement. An elected assembly, which included representatives of 10 different social sectors, indigenous people and women, was subsequently authorized to draft papers on seven major issues to be resolved through the ongoing negotiations. However, the assembly began to lose influence as civil society leaders assumed new political positions and as talks assumed an increasingly bi-partisan format between the government and rebel forces.
Guatemalan refugees, moreover, organized themselves into commissions (Comisiones Permanentes) under which refugee leaders directly negotiated the terms of their return. These included public guarantee of their security; assurance of the right to return to lands; the right to organize and freely associate; guarantee that they would be subject to civilian and not military authority; and, the right to return under supervision of international observers. Refugee women subsequently organized themselves around their common objective to return to Guatemala and negotiate adequate conditions for themselves and their families. As several commentators have observed, refugees in Guatemala did not wait for peace, they helped forge it. Broad public participation also contributed to the democratization of institutionalized systems of exclusion.
In both Mozambique and Papua-New Guinea, grassroots initiatives including the involvement of church and women’s groups played an innovative role in developing and implementing peace agreements as well as in helping to consolidate the peace.
Public inclusion facilitates implementation
Political negotiators are often reluctant to open up the space for public involvement in the peacemaking process. Comparative experience, however, suggests that public participation, whether representative, consultative or direct, facilitates implementation of agreements and strengthens the durability of a negotiated peace.
A peacemaking process that fails to provide for public participation may exacerbate public mistrust and undermine the legitimacy of the agreement. Consultation on the contents of an agreement after it has been negotiated and signed is likely to be of only limited value because it is difficult to incorporate substantive input into the agreement at that stage. Peace agreements negotiated without adequate public participation may in fact be a trigger for further disagreements rather than reconciliation.
Public participation also provides a safeguard against a process that merely “recycles old power to re-legitimise it through new structures.” International involvement in the peacemaking process should strengthen and compliment initiatives for public participation rather than displace local ownership of the process or shift the agenda away from the priorities articulated by civil society.
*****
For a list of Principles to Guide Policy and Practice on public participation in peacemaking visit Conciliation Resources: http://www.c-r.org/pubs/occ_papers/PP_policy.shtml
* Catherine Barnes. Owning the Process: Mechanisms for Political Participation of the Public in Peacemaking. Joint Analysis Workshop Report, Conciliation Resources, 2002.
** Karma Nabulsi. Popular Sovereignty, Collective Rights, Participation and Crafting Durable Solutiosn for Palestinian Refugees. BADIL Working Paper No. 4, April 2003.
Tuesday, December 9
MCC Palestine Update #90
MCC Palestine Update #90
December 9, 2003
Prepare the way of the Lord! proclaimed John the Baptist from the hills of the Judean desert running down from the MCC office in East Jerusalem towards the Jordan Valley. John called on his listeners to repent, to turn around, and to prepare for a new reality. In Palestine/Israel this Advent season, Palestinians (Christian and Muslim) and Israeli Jews are worn out and exhausted by the current reality of violence, economic upheaval, and occupation. They await a new reality.
Mennonite Central Committee in Palestine works alongside churches and church insitutions that believe that the good news of Jesus Christ, the incarnation of God's nonviolent love, helps to turn people away from commitments to violence towards commitments to nonviolence. MCC also works with Israeli and Palestinian groups dedicated to helping turn people away from occupation and violent resistance against it and towards a future of peace and reconciliation built on foundations of justice. The Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center equips the local Palestinian churches with resources to proclaim the coming of the Lord. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions prepares the way of the Lord by bringing Palestinians and Israelis toegether to rebuild Palestinian homes unjustly destroyed. As we on the MCC Palestine team prepare our hearts this Advent for the Lord's coming, we give thanks for the faithful witness of the Palestinian churches and of Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders who, through their words and deeds, are making ready a way for Christ's coming.
MCC project update:
The Women's Training Program of the East Jerusalem YMCA began a training course for women in al-Jadawel area between Beit Jala and the Aida refugee camp. Your prayers for the training, which builds women's skills in livestock management, domestic gardening, conservation of natural resources, and dealing with finances, are solicited.
Mennonite Church USA has created a bulletin insert for congregational use this Advent, soliciting prayers for peace for the people of Bethlehem. You can access this worship resource at http://peace.mennolink.org/resources/bethlehem.pdf/.
Below you will find two pieces. The first, by Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy, examines what he describes as "an amazing combination of utter indifference and astonishing ignorance" among Israelis concerning the new realtieis being created by the "security fence"/"apartheid barrier." In the second, Haaretz journalist Danny Rubinstein takes a trip to Zububa village in the northern West Bank to see the impact of the barrier on that town.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Trying to hide the dark backyard
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, December 7, 2003
How many Israelis have actually seen the separation fence? How many have given any thought to its significance? Every foreign visitor interested in what is happening in the region makes visiting the fence a priority and world media constantly point their cameras at it - half a dozen foreign documentaries have already been shot along it. But most Israelis have never seen it. This ambitious strategic project that is going to make fundamental changes to the lnd, the landscape and relations between the peples, is passing through us with an amazing comination of utter indifference and astonishing ignorance.
Since the start of the settlement enterprise, which also took place with eyes deliberately closed in national blindness, there has not been a venture that with such speed created a new reality without any real discussion of its significance. Even environmental activists haven't piped up about how it is ripping up the landscape.
Just like the settlements, the project was started by the Labor Party while the Likud gave it the proper momentum, and just like the settlements, it will be a tragedy to be suffered for generations to come. Another year or in five, and the truth about the damage it caused will become evident, and then, just as with the settlements, it will be too late. After the settlements fulfilled their destructive purposes and capabilities, the separation fence is the next fateful obstacle Israel is putting up on the path to reconciliation with the Palestinians.
When its construction is completed, the two-state solution will be even further removed and practically impossible. The settlements and the fence are complementary and supplementary, together they form a victorious proposition - that with them in place it will never be possible to reach an equitable peace.
There's no doubt the people want a fence. The polls show that most Israelis are convinced that separation from the Palestinian people is a magic formula for eliminating terror and that the fence is the guarantee of it. Together with other mendacious myths, Ehud Barak is also largely responsible for that, by turning the separation concept into a vision. But Barak's mantra of "us here and them there" quickly turned into "them there and us here and also over there."
Palestinians are corralled into ghettos beyond the fence and Israelis remain on both sides. The result being carved into the hills and dales of the land separate not only Israelis and Palestinians, but also Palestinians from Palestinians. The vision of separation espoused by Barak, Haim Ramon and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer has turned into a vision of apartheid.
The first outrageous aspect of this is the harm down to the tens of thousands of Palestinian families after they went through all the tribulations of the occupation - closures, land grabs, house demolitions, humiliations, checkpoints and the settlers in their midst. Now they are being torn form their fields, work places and schools, from their families and the centers of their life, living behind a fence.
"Good fences make good neighbors?" No they don't, not when the fence goes through the neighbor's backyard, over his land, and displaces the neighbors from their own land. That makes for bad neighbors. Some 75,000 Palestinians who find themselves in fenced-in enclaves, some 100,000 residents of the northern Jerusalem neighborhoods cut off from the city and the thousands of farmers already displaced from their land, are the next reservoir of hatred and despair and the new infrastructure of terror.
Israel wanted a security fence as a response to terror? It could have been so simple. It should have put it up on the Green Line, without any deviations. Israel wants separation from the Palestinians? It's so simple - it should evacuate the settlements.
Indeed, the fence does not signal good tidings for the future of relations between the nations. Instead of seeking to establish two open civil societies, living side by side in cooperation, as is desirable and possible, a wall is going up. However, even if it is sad to think that Israel converted its expressed desire for peace and conciliation into separation, if the fence had gone up on the Green Line it would have been impossible to complain about a nation trying to defend itself, and despite the serious problems that fence would have created, it would have been possible to live with it. But the fence is being built in a large part of Palestinian territory. On that route, nobody can accept the argument that the fence is apolitical. Like other occupation measures - especially the settlements and checkpoints - the fence is being justified by security rationales that only provide cover for their real purpose. That is, smashing the last chance for an agreed upon arrangement between the sides.
The fence therefore means the precise opposite of its declared purpose. It is a fence for the perpetuation of conflict. It won't separate the peoples, but perpetuate the pathological connection between the two peoples, the connection between the occupier and the occupied, blocking any chance for the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.
The fence's construction is heading into its last stretch, from the "Jerusalem envelope" to the "Hebron envelope" and the route in the north, and horrifyingly, "the eastern fence." Soon Israel will find itself behind walls, trying to hide from the horrific reality of its own dark backyard, where it conducts a brutal, ruthless regime of occupation.
As sophisticated as the fence might be and as high as it might go, it will not manage to hide anything. Beyond it, the occupation will continue in all its fury, and Israel's chance of becoming a just society will recede ever further and further away - until it disappears.
2. The tortuous route to Zabuba: The villages along the way are all suffering from the closure. The fence, the walls and the collective punishments have turned everything topsy-turvy
Danny Rubinstein
Haaretz, December 7, 2003
Zabuba is a relatively small West Bank village with a mere 2,000 inhabitants. It is located in the Jenin region and can be reached by traveling north on the Wadi Ara (Iron Valley) highway and turning right at the Megiddo junction. After Kibbutz Givat Oz and the Israeli-Arab villages of Zalfa and Salem, there is an Israel Defense Forces facility alongside the big iron gates that close off the road east to Zabuba. The houses of the village lie beyond the separation fence, which, at this point, more or less runs along the 1967 border.Mohammed Issa Obeidi, head of Zabuba's agricultural association, who is better known as Abu el-Abed, last weekend invited guests to see what the fence has done to his village. But a jeep carrying border policemen, who arrived at the gates, announced it is absolutely forbidden for Israelis to cross over into the Palestinian territories. Abu el-Abed, who was standing a few hundred meters away, said via his mobile phone that it would probably be possible to cross at the Tura roadblock. To do so, it would be necessary to drive south on the Wadi Ara highway and turn in the direction of Katzir and Harish. There the fence goes into the West Bank to effectively annex the settlements of Shaked and Hinanit to Israel and the roadblock at that point allows limited access for Israelis into the West Bank. Most of those who want to cross are Israeli Arabs who have family in the villages on the other side, and the remainder are settlers who wish to reach far-off settlements that do not have bypass roads.Crossing at these roadblocks requires special caution. Cars have to approach the roadblock at a slow speed and must be waved forward by the soldiers. All the vehicles, therefore, stop several dozen meters from the crossing point, waiting for the soldiers to call them forward when they have examined the previous vehicle. It is a long wait. In the past, there have been many attacks at the roadblocks and the soldiers are suspicious of any movement that is contrary to orders. If a car approaches the roadblock without being waved forward by a soldier, it could come under fire. Every month, Palestinians are killed in this way at roadblocks and two lost their lives in the past month while trying to bypass the crossing point. The soldiers propose, and sometimes demand, that the Jews traveling to the settlements wait until there is a convoy that can be accompanied by the IDF, but if one insists, they usually let one go.After crossing, we stopped at the entrance to a small village on the main road, where the owner of a grocery store warned us not to attempt to reach Zabuba through the hills in a regular car. He said the vehicle could get stuck but that it was not dangerous from other points of view. We therefore traveled in a Volkswagen van, passing a tiny point known as Hirbet el-Turam, where the large village of Yabed used to dump its garbage. The spot cannot be missed since there is a pall of smoke there, although an order from the Israeli authorities forbids the Palestinians from bringing their waste matter there now. According to the van's driver, Israeli garbage trucks, accompanied by IDF troops, come every few days to unload garbage from the settlements, as well as from inside the Green Line. "We are good enough to collect your garbage," he explains.It is a 20-kilometer ride to Zabuba along tortuous roads. Last Saturday, it took an hour and a half. Many of the village roads were covered with pits, and in some places, the soldiers had placed piles of rocks. Olive and almond orchards lined the dry river banks and the paths through the fields we passed. From time to time, we had to stop to let yellow minibuses pass. With a little imagination, you could think you were in the Sahara on an adventure ride, except there were no sportsmen enjoying the fun but simply regular passengers, including women, children and elderly people. This is how one travels in the West Bank these past two years or so.What strikes one in Zabuba, as in many places in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, is that all the older men speak fluent Hebrew. Abu el-Abed, like his friend the council head Mohammed Yussef Jarradat, worked for years in Israel and had many Jewish friends and acquaintances. Zabuba lies close to the main road, about four kilometers from the Megiddo junction, from where there is easy access to Afula in the east, Hadera in the southwest and Haifa in the northwest. In fact, all the men in the village had worked in Israel, most of them in construction or some other manual labor. The younger men know less Hebrew. The 25-30 age group, for example, has hardly visited or worked in Israel and therefore knows little Hebrew. In the first years of closures after the Oslo Accords, most of the villagers still worked for Jewish employers, even though they did not have the necessary papers. Their number diminished over the years, however. Now that the fence is in place, no one works in Israel any more and all of them are unemployed.The only solution is for the villagers to try to live off agriculture. The village used to have almost 14,000 dunams of fertile land at the southern tip of the Jezreel Valley. According to the Arab lexicon, "Our land, Palestine," written by Mustafa Dabbagh, most of the village's lands belong to the Christian el-Moutran family from Lebanon. They lost their lands in 1948 since most of them fell inside Israel and the Ta'anach region villages were set up there. The home of the effendi, Najib el-Moutran, still stands in the center of the village, a little palace. It was recently refurbished with the help of a Jerusalem Christian fund and now houses the village council and a computer room for youngsters.A large banner hangs from the wall of the council chamber: "Stop the cancer - the racist separation fence." Some 200 dunams belonging to 95 Zabuba families were confiscated for the construction of the fence. On most of these lands were olive groves that had been the main source of income for the families over the past few years. Prior to that, large tracts of land had been taken over by the IDF for military purposes, such as the setting up of the nearby roadblock and facility. Today all the villagers have left is some 500 dunams and some of these are across the border and a special permit is required to reach them.The fence has effectively shut off Zabuba since the eastern access to Jenin or the southern access to Nablus are fraught with numerous difficulties. Those few villagers who have permits to work in Israel have problems getting through the various roadblocks. They first have to pass through the one at Arrabe, which opens only at 6 A.M., and then get to Jenin and the Jalemeh roadblock, so that they arrive in Afula only at about 10 A.M. "No one wants workers who arrive at 10," the council head says. There is no clinic in Zabuba, for example, and it is extremely complicated to get to a doctor in Jenin. Two villagers who recently made a pilgrimage to Mecca say the road from Zabuba to the bridge in Jericho took them 16 hours, almost as long as the 1,200 kilometers from Jericho to Saudi Arabia.The road back to the Tura crossing point, through the mountains, is equally tortuous. The villages en route are all suffering from the closure. The fence, the walls and the collective punishments imposed on the Palestinian population may have lessened the number of bombings inside Israel but they have turned everything topsy-turvy inside the territories. The entire population, according to the Nablus economist Hisham Awarthani, "is busy night and day trying to survive and dreaming of revenge." Indeed, the impression one gets from a visit to Zabuba is that no one cares about the Geneva Accord or Abu Ala's new government and all that interests them is the degradation they are undergoing and the desire to inflict similar pain on the Israelis.
December 9, 2003
Prepare the way of the Lord! proclaimed John the Baptist from the hills of the Judean desert running down from the MCC office in East Jerusalem towards the Jordan Valley. John called on his listeners to repent, to turn around, and to prepare for a new reality. In Palestine/Israel this Advent season, Palestinians (Christian and Muslim) and Israeli Jews are worn out and exhausted by the current reality of violence, economic upheaval, and occupation. They await a new reality.
Mennonite Central Committee in Palestine works alongside churches and church insitutions that believe that the good news of Jesus Christ, the incarnation of God's nonviolent love, helps to turn people away from commitments to violence towards commitments to nonviolence. MCC also works with Israeli and Palestinian groups dedicated to helping turn people away from occupation and violent resistance against it and towards a future of peace and reconciliation built on foundations of justice. The Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center equips the local Palestinian churches with resources to proclaim the coming of the Lord. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions prepares the way of the Lord by bringing Palestinians and Israelis toegether to rebuild Palestinian homes unjustly destroyed. As we on the MCC Palestine team prepare our hearts this Advent for the Lord's coming, we give thanks for the faithful witness of the Palestinian churches and of Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders who, through their words and deeds, are making ready a way for Christ's coming.
MCC project update:
The Women's Training Program of the East Jerusalem YMCA began a training course for women in al-Jadawel area between Beit Jala and the Aida refugee camp. Your prayers for the training, which builds women's skills in livestock management, domestic gardening, conservation of natural resources, and dealing with finances, are solicited.
Mennonite Church USA has created a bulletin insert for congregational use this Advent, soliciting prayers for peace for the people of Bethlehem. You can access this worship resource at http://peace.mennolink.org/resources/bethlehem.pdf/.
Below you will find two pieces. The first, by Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy, examines what he describes as "an amazing combination of utter indifference and astonishing ignorance" among Israelis concerning the new realtieis being created by the "security fence"/"apartheid barrier." In the second, Haaretz journalist Danny Rubinstein takes a trip to Zububa village in the northern West Bank to see the impact of the barrier on that town.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Trying to hide the dark backyard
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, December 7, 2003
How many Israelis have actually seen the separation fence? How many have given any thought to its significance? Every foreign visitor interested in what is happening in the region makes visiting the fence a priority and world media constantly point their cameras at it - half a dozen foreign documentaries have already been shot along it. But most Israelis have never seen it. This ambitious strategic project that is going to make fundamental changes to the lnd, the landscape and relations between the peples, is passing through us with an amazing comination of utter indifference and astonishing ignorance.
Since the start of the settlement enterprise, which also took place with eyes deliberately closed in national blindness, there has not been a venture that with such speed created a new reality without any real discussion of its significance. Even environmental activists haven't piped up about how it is ripping up the landscape.
Just like the settlements, the project was started by the Labor Party while the Likud gave it the proper momentum, and just like the settlements, it will be a tragedy to be suffered for generations to come. Another year or in five, and the truth about the damage it caused will become evident, and then, just as with the settlements, it will be too late. After the settlements fulfilled their destructive purposes and capabilities, the separation fence is the next fateful obstacle Israel is putting up on the path to reconciliation with the Palestinians.
When its construction is completed, the two-state solution will be even further removed and practically impossible. The settlements and the fence are complementary and supplementary, together they form a victorious proposition - that with them in place it will never be possible to reach an equitable peace.
There's no doubt the people want a fence. The polls show that most Israelis are convinced that separation from the Palestinian people is a magic formula for eliminating terror and that the fence is the guarantee of it. Together with other mendacious myths, Ehud Barak is also largely responsible for that, by turning the separation concept into a vision. But Barak's mantra of "us here and them there" quickly turned into "them there and us here and also over there."
Palestinians are corralled into ghettos beyond the fence and Israelis remain on both sides. The result being carved into the hills and dales of the land separate not only Israelis and Palestinians, but also Palestinians from Palestinians. The vision of separation espoused by Barak, Haim Ramon and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer has turned into a vision of apartheid.
The first outrageous aspect of this is the harm down to the tens of thousands of Palestinian families after they went through all the tribulations of the occupation - closures, land grabs, house demolitions, humiliations, checkpoints and the settlers in their midst. Now they are being torn form their fields, work places and schools, from their families and the centers of their life, living behind a fence.
"Good fences make good neighbors?" No they don't, not when the fence goes through the neighbor's backyard, over his land, and displaces the neighbors from their own land. That makes for bad neighbors. Some 75,000 Palestinians who find themselves in fenced-in enclaves, some 100,000 residents of the northern Jerusalem neighborhoods cut off from the city and the thousands of farmers already displaced from their land, are the next reservoir of hatred and despair and the new infrastructure of terror.
Israel wanted a security fence as a response to terror? It could have been so simple. It should have put it up on the Green Line, without any deviations. Israel wants separation from the Palestinians? It's so simple - it should evacuate the settlements.
Indeed, the fence does not signal good tidings for the future of relations between the nations. Instead of seeking to establish two open civil societies, living side by side in cooperation, as is desirable and possible, a wall is going up. However, even if it is sad to think that Israel converted its expressed desire for peace and conciliation into separation, if the fence had gone up on the Green Line it would have been impossible to complain about a nation trying to defend itself, and despite the serious problems that fence would have created, it would have been possible to live with it. But the fence is being built in a large part of Palestinian territory. On that route, nobody can accept the argument that the fence is apolitical. Like other occupation measures - especially the settlements and checkpoints - the fence is being justified by security rationales that only provide cover for their real purpose. That is, smashing the last chance for an agreed upon arrangement between the sides.
The fence therefore means the precise opposite of its declared purpose. It is a fence for the perpetuation of conflict. It won't separate the peoples, but perpetuate the pathological connection between the two peoples, the connection between the occupier and the occupied, blocking any chance for the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.
The fence's construction is heading into its last stretch, from the "Jerusalem envelope" to the "Hebron envelope" and the route in the north, and horrifyingly, "the eastern fence." Soon Israel will find itself behind walls, trying to hide from the horrific reality of its own dark backyard, where it conducts a brutal, ruthless regime of occupation.
As sophisticated as the fence might be and as high as it might go, it will not manage to hide anything. Beyond it, the occupation will continue in all its fury, and Israel's chance of becoming a just society will recede ever further and further away - until it disappears.
2. The tortuous route to Zabuba: The villages along the way are all suffering from the closure. The fence, the walls and the collective punishments have turned everything topsy-turvy
Danny Rubinstein
Haaretz, December 7, 2003
Zabuba is a relatively small West Bank village with a mere 2,000 inhabitants. It is located in the Jenin region and can be reached by traveling north on the Wadi Ara (Iron Valley) highway and turning right at the Megiddo junction. After Kibbutz Givat Oz and the Israeli-Arab villages of Zalfa and Salem, there is an Israel Defense Forces facility alongside the big iron gates that close off the road east to Zabuba. The houses of the village lie beyond the separation fence, which, at this point, more or less runs along the 1967 border.Mohammed Issa Obeidi, head of Zabuba's agricultural association, who is better known as Abu el-Abed, last weekend invited guests to see what the fence has done to his village. But a jeep carrying border policemen, who arrived at the gates, announced it is absolutely forbidden for Israelis to cross over into the Palestinian territories. Abu el-Abed, who was standing a few hundred meters away, said via his mobile phone that it would probably be possible to cross at the Tura roadblock. To do so, it would be necessary to drive south on the Wadi Ara highway and turn in the direction of Katzir and Harish. There the fence goes into the West Bank to effectively annex the settlements of Shaked and Hinanit to Israel and the roadblock at that point allows limited access for Israelis into the West Bank. Most of those who want to cross are Israeli Arabs who have family in the villages on the other side, and the remainder are settlers who wish to reach far-off settlements that do not have bypass roads.Crossing at these roadblocks requires special caution. Cars have to approach the roadblock at a slow speed and must be waved forward by the soldiers. All the vehicles, therefore, stop several dozen meters from the crossing point, waiting for the soldiers to call them forward when they have examined the previous vehicle. It is a long wait. In the past, there have been many attacks at the roadblocks and the soldiers are suspicious of any movement that is contrary to orders. If a car approaches the roadblock without being waved forward by a soldier, it could come under fire. Every month, Palestinians are killed in this way at roadblocks and two lost their lives in the past month while trying to bypass the crossing point. The soldiers propose, and sometimes demand, that the Jews traveling to the settlements wait until there is a convoy that can be accompanied by the IDF, but if one insists, they usually let one go.After crossing, we stopped at the entrance to a small village on the main road, where the owner of a grocery store warned us not to attempt to reach Zabuba through the hills in a regular car. He said the vehicle could get stuck but that it was not dangerous from other points of view. We therefore traveled in a Volkswagen van, passing a tiny point known as Hirbet el-Turam, where the large village of Yabed used to dump its garbage. The spot cannot be missed since there is a pall of smoke there, although an order from the Israeli authorities forbids the Palestinians from bringing their waste matter there now. According to the van's driver, Israeli garbage trucks, accompanied by IDF troops, come every few days to unload garbage from the settlements, as well as from inside the Green Line. "We are good enough to collect your garbage," he explains.It is a 20-kilometer ride to Zabuba along tortuous roads. Last Saturday, it took an hour and a half. Many of the village roads were covered with pits, and in some places, the soldiers had placed piles of rocks. Olive and almond orchards lined the dry river banks and the paths through the fields we passed. From time to time, we had to stop to let yellow minibuses pass. With a little imagination, you could think you were in the Sahara on an adventure ride, except there were no sportsmen enjoying the fun but simply regular passengers, including women, children and elderly people. This is how one travels in the West Bank these past two years or so.What strikes one in Zabuba, as in many places in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, is that all the older men speak fluent Hebrew. Abu el-Abed, like his friend the council head Mohammed Yussef Jarradat, worked for years in Israel and had many Jewish friends and acquaintances. Zabuba lies close to the main road, about four kilometers from the Megiddo junction, from where there is easy access to Afula in the east, Hadera in the southwest and Haifa in the northwest. In fact, all the men in the village had worked in Israel, most of them in construction or some other manual labor. The younger men know less Hebrew. The 25-30 age group, for example, has hardly visited or worked in Israel and therefore knows little Hebrew. In the first years of closures after the Oslo Accords, most of the villagers still worked for Jewish employers, even though they did not have the necessary papers. Their number diminished over the years, however. Now that the fence is in place, no one works in Israel any more and all of them are unemployed.The only solution is for the villagers to try to live off agriculture. The village used to have almost 14,000 dunams of fertile land at the southern tip of the Jezreel Valley. According to the Arab lexicon, "Our land, Palestine," written by Mustafa Dabbagh, most of the village's lands belong to the Christian el-Moutran family from Lebanon. They lost their lands in 1948 since most of them fell inside Israel and the Ta'anach region villages were set up there. The home of the effendi, Najib el-Moutran, still stands in the center of the village, a little palace. It was recently refurbished with the help of a Jerusalem Christian fund and now houses the village council and a computer room for youngsters.A large banner hangs from the wall of the council chamber: "Stop the cancer - the racist separation fence." Some 200 dunams belonging to 95 Zabuba families were confiscated for the construction of the fence. On most of these lands were olive groves that had been the main source of income for the families over the past few years. Prior to that, large tracts of land had been taken over by the IDF for military purposes, such as the setting up of the nearby roadblock and facility. Today all the villagers have left is some 500 dunams and some of these are across the border and a special permit is required to reach them.The fence has effectively shut off Zabuba since the eastern access to Jenin or the southern access to Nablus are fraught with numerous difficulties. Those few villagers who have permits to work in Israel have problems getting through the various roadblocks. They first have to pass through the one at Arrabe, which opens only at 6 A.M., and then get to Jenin and the Jalemeh roadblock, so that they arrive in Afula only at about 10 A.M. "No one wants workers who arrive at 10," the council head says. There is no clinic in Zabuba, for example, and it is extremely complicated to get to a doctor in Jenin. Two villagers who recently made a pilgrimage to Mecca say the road from Zabuba to the bridge in Jericho took them 16 hours, almost as long as the 1,200 kilometers from Jericho to Saudi Arabia.The road back to the Tura crossing point, through the mountains, is equally tortuous. The villages en route are all suffering from the closure. The fence, the walls and the collective punishments imposed on the Palestinian population may have lessened the number of bombings inside Israel but they have turned everything topsy-turvy inside the territories. The entire population, according to the Nablus economist Hisham Awarthani, "is busy night and day trying to survive and dreaming of revenge." Indeed, the impression one gets from a visit to Zabuba is that no one cares about the Geneva Accord or Abu Ala's new government and all that interests them is the degradation they are undergoing and the desire to inflict similar pain on the Israelis.
Thursday, November 27
MCC Palestine Update #89
MCC Palestine Update #89
November 27, 2003
This past week my family and I had two good friends as guests for five days: our former landlady from Zababdeh, the northern West Bank village where we once taught English, and her three-year-old daughter. Our friend had come to Jerusalem to check in on her ten-year-old son, who lives as a boarding student with nuns in a Jerusalem convent and had fallen ill. Getting into Jerusalem, however, was no simple matter. Our friend and her daughter left Zababdeh at 2 am, setting out for a five hour drive to the Qalandia checkpoint in northern Jerusalem. The drive took them and their fellow passengers through multiple back roads and in and out of olive fields. Once in Qalandia, her journey was not yet over. She took another taxi all around Jerusalem, down to Abu Dis to the south of the city. There, she and her 3-year-old faced an 7 to 8 foot obstacle made of concrete blocks. Like hundreds of Palestinians do everyday, our friend and her daughter found a place in the wall made of concrete blocks where they could find footholds. Once on top, our friend lowered her daughter down. As they were climbing over, our friend's daughter kept telling her to hurry. "The soldiers will come!" the daughter said: the entire trip down in the car, the daughter had been talking to her mother about her fear of the soldiers. The soldiers, fortunately, did not come, and our friend (who, as you have probably guessed) did not have a permit to be in Jerusalem, made it to the convent where she could see her sick son. Our friend and her children made it back to Zababdeh earlier this week.
As my family and I celebrate U.S. Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, we'll be giving thanks for the love that pushes mothers, fathers, and grandparents every day to cross through and find difficult ways around military roadblocks in order to care for their sick children; we'll be giving thanks for the faithful institutions of the Palestinian churches that minister to all children, Christian and Muslim alike; we'll be giving thanks for the witness of those young Israeli men who refuse to participate in the daily rituals of humiliation and control at checkpoints in the occupied territories; and we'll be giving thanks for Palestinian and Israeli peacemakers who work for a shared future of justice, peace, and reconciliation.
Below you will find three pieces. In the first, Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy summarizes the memoirs of Staff Sgt. Liran Ron Furer, a young Israeli man in his mid-20s who has written an account of his three years of military service in the Gaza Strip. Furer's accout of his actions at the checkpoints where he worked are troubling, haunting, and give a disturbing insight into how the occupation and its military roadblocks and checkpoints are dehumanizing not only Palestinians but Israelis as well. The second piece, by MCC's partner organization on Palestinian refugee issues, Badil, examines how human rights standards, including those that address refugees, will have to be incorporated into any lasting peace agreement, any agreement, that is, that seeks to be "conflict resolution" rather than "conflict management." In the final piece, Haaretz journalist Danny Rubinstein examines what he calls the "strangulation fence" and its effect on Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Twilight Zone: ‘I punched an Arab in the face’
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, 21 November 2003
Staff Sergeant (res.) Liran Ron Furer cannot just routinely get on with his life anymore. He is haunted by images from his three years of military service in Gaza and the thought that this could be a syndrome afflicting everyone who serves at checkpoints gives him no respite. On the verge of completing his studies in the design program at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, he decided to drop everything and devote all his time to the book he wanted to write. The major publishers he brought it to declined to publish it. The publisher that finally accepted it (Gevanim) says that the Steimatzky bookstore chain refuses to distribute it. But Furer is determined to bring his book to the public's attention. "You can adopt the most hard-line political positions, but no parent would agree to his son becoming a thief, a criminal or a violent person," says Furer. "The problem is that it's never presented this way. The boy himself doesn't portray himself this way to his family when he returns from the territories. On the contrary - he is received as a hero, as someone who is doing the important work of being a soldier. No one can be indifferent to the fact that there are many families in which, in a certain sense, there are already two generations of criminals. The father went through it and now the son is going through it and no one talks about it around the dinner table." Furer is certain that what happened to him is not at all unique. Here he was - a creative, sensitive graduate of the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, who became an animal at the checkpoint, a violent sadist who beat up Palestinians because they didn't show him the proper courtesy, who shot out tires of cars because their owners were playing the radio too loud, who abused a retarded teenage boy lying handcuffed on the floor of the Jeep, just because he had to take his anger out somehow. "Checkpoint Syndrome" (also the title of his book), gradually transforms every soldier into an animal, he maintains, regardless of whatever values he brings with him from home. No one can escape its taint. In a place where nearly everything is permissible and violence is perceived as normative behavior, each soldier tests his own limits of violence impulsiveness on his victims - the Palestinians. His book is not easy reading. Written in terse, fierce prose, in the blunt and coarse language of soldiers, he reconstructs scenes from the years in which he served in Gaza (1996-1999), years that, one must remember, were relatively quiet. He describes how he and his comrades forced some Palestinians to sing "Elinor" - "It was really something to see these Arabs singing a Zohar Argov song, like in a movie"; the emotions the Palestinians aroused in him - "Sometimes these Arabs really disgust me, especially those that try to toady up to us - the older ones, who come to the checkpoint with this smile on their faces"; the reactions they spurred - "If they really annoy us, we find away to keep them stuck at the checkpoint for a few hours. They lose a whole day of work because of it sometimes, but that's the only way they learn." He described how they would order children to clean the checkpoint before inspection time; how a soldier named Shahar invented a game: "He checks someone's identity card, and instead of handing it back to him, just tosses it in the air. He got a kick out of seeing the Arab have to get out of his car to pick up his identity card ... It's a game for him and he can pass a whole shift this way"; how they humiliated a dwarf who came to the checkpoint every day on his wagon: "They forced him to have his picture taken on the horse, hit him and degraded him for a good half hour and let him go only when cars arrived at the checkpoint. The poor guy, he really didn't deserve it"; how they had a souvenir picture taken with bloodied, bound Arabs whom they'd beaten up; how Shahar pissed on the head of an Arab because the man had the nerve to smile at a soldier; how Dado forced an Arab to stand on four legs and bark like a dog; and how they stole prayer beads and cigarettes - "Miro wanted them to give him their cigarettes, the Arabs didn't want to give so Miro broke someone's hand, and Boaz slashed their tires." Chilling confession The most chilling of all the personal confessions: "I ran toward them and punched an Arab right in the face. I'd never punched anyone that way. He collapsed on the road. The officers said that we had to search him for his papers. We pulled his hands behind his back and I bound them with plastic handcuffs. Then we blindfolded him so he wouldn't see what was in the Jeep. I picked him up from the road. Blood was trickling from his lip onto his chin. I led him up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his knees banged against the trunk and he landed inside. We sat in the back, stepping on the Arab ... Our Arab lay there pretty quietly, just crying softly to himself. His face was right on my flak jacket and he was bleeding and making a kind of puddle of blood and saliva, and it disgusted and angered me, so I grabbed him by the hair and turned his head to the side. He cried out loud and to get him to stop, we stepped harder and harder on his back. That quieted him down for a while and then he started up again. We concluded that he was either retarded or crazy. "The company commander informed us over the radio that we had to bring him to the base. `Good work, tigers,' he said, teasing us. All the other soldiers were waiting there to see what we'd caught. When we came in with the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly. We put the Arab next to the guard. He didn't stop crying and someone who understood Arabic said that his hands were hurting from the handcuffs. One of the soldiers went up to him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him really hard in the ass and he flew forward just as I'd expected. They shouted that I was a totally crazy, and they laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a 16-year-old mentally retarded boy." In his sister's rooftop Tel Aviv apartment, where he is living now, Furer, 26, comes across as a thoughtful, intelligent young man. He grew up in Givatayim, after his parents immigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Before Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, his mother was a right-wing activist, but he says that their home was not political. He wanted to be in a combat unit in the army, and served in two elite infantry units. He did his entire army service in the Gaza Strip. After the army, he traveled to India, like so many others. "Now I was free. The crazy energies of Goa and the chakras opened my mind ... You stuck me in this stinking Gaza and before that you brainwashed me with your rifles and your marches, you turned me into a dishrag that didn't think anymore," he wrote from Goa. But it was only afterward, when he was studying at Bezalel, that the experiences from his army service really began to affect him. "I came to realize that there was an unchanging pattern here," he says. "It was the same in the first intifada, in the period that I was serving, which was quiet, and in the second intifada. It's become a permanent reality. I started to feel very uncomfortable with the fact that such a loaded subject was hardly mentioned at all in public. People listened to the victim and they listened to the politicians, but this voice that says: I did this, we did things that were wrong - crimes, actually - that's a voice I didn't hear. The reason it wasn't being heard was a combination of repression - just as I repressed it and ignored it - and of deep feelings of guilt. "As soon as you get away from army service, the political and media reality around you is not ready to hear this voice. I remember that I was surprised that no soldier had gone public with this yet. It all somehow dissolved in the debate about the legitimacy of settlement in the territories, about the occupation - for or against - and nothing connected to the routine of maintaining the occupation appeared in the media or in art." Not an individual caseFurer is out to prove that this is a syndrome and not a collection of isolated, individual cases. That's why he deleted a lot of personal details from the original manuscript, in order to underscore the general nature of what he describes. "During my army service, I believed that I was atypical, because I came from a background of art and creativity. I was considered a moderate soldier - but I fell into the same trap that most soldiers fall into. I was carried away by the possibility of acting in the most primal and impulsive manner, without fear of punishment and without oversight. You're tense about it at first, but as you get more comfortable at the checkpoint over time, the behavior becomes more natural. People gradually test the limits of their behavior toward the Palestinians. It gradually becomes coarser and coarser. "The more confident I became with the situation, as soon as we reached the conclusion - each one at his own stage - that we are the rulers, we are the strong ones, and when we felt our power, each one started to stretch the limits more and more, in accordance with his personality. As soon as serving at the checkpoint became routine, all kinds of deviant behavior became normal. It started with `souvenir collecting': We'd confiscate prayer beads and then it was cigarettes and it didn't stop. It became normative behavior. "After that came the power games. We got the message from above that we were to project seriousness and deterrence to the Arabs. Physical violence also became normative. We felt free to punish any Palestinian who didn't follow the `proper code of behavior' at the checkpoint. Anyone we thought wasn't polite enough to us or tried to act smart - was severely punished. It was deliberate harassment on the most trivial pretexts. "During my army service, there wasn't a single incident that made us understand, or made our commanders interfere. No one talked about what was permitted and what was not. It was all a matter of routine. In retrospect, the biggest source of guilt feelings for me didn't happen at the checkpoint, but by the Gush Katif fence, when we caught the retarded boy. I demonstrated the most extreme behavior. It was a chance for me to catch one - the closest thing to catching a terrorist, a chance to vent all the pressure and impulses that had built up in all of us. To lash out the way we wanted to. We were used to giving slaps, to handcuffing, to a little kicking, a little beating, and here was a situation in which it was justified to let go entirely. Also, the officer who was with us was himself very violent. We gave the kid a real beating and as soon as we got to the post, I remember having a great feeling of pride, that I'd been treated like someone strong. They said, `What a nut you are, how crazy you are,' which was basically like saying, `How strong you are.' "At the checkpoint, young people have the chance to be masters and using force and violence becomes legitimate - and this is a much more basic impulse than the political views or values that you bring from home. As soon as using force is given legitimacy, and even rewarded, the tendency is to take it as far as it can go, to exploit it much as possible. To satisfy these impulses beyond what the situation requires. Today, I'd call it sadistic impulses ... "We weren't criminals or especially violent people. We were a group of good boys, a relatively `high-quality' group, and for all of us - and we still talk about this sometimes - the checkpoint became a place to test our personal limits. How tough, how callous, how crazy we could be - and we thought of that in the positive sense. Something about the situation - being in a godforsaken place, far from home, far from oversight - made it justified ... The line of what is forbidden was never precisely drawn. No one was ever punished and they just let us continue. "Today, I feel confident saying that even the most senior ranks - the brigade commander, the battalion commander - are aware of the power that soldiers have in this situation and what they do with it. How could a commander not be aware of it when the more crazy and tough his soldiers are, the quieter his sector is? The more complex picture of the long-term effects of this violent behavior is something you only become conscious of when you get away from the checkpoint. "Today it's clear to me that that boy whose father we humiliated for the flimsiest of reasons will grow up to hate anyone who represents what was done to his father. I definitely have an understanding of their motives now. We are cruelty, we are power. I'm sure that their response is affected by elements related to their society - a disregard for human life and a readiness to sacrifice lives - but the basic desire to resist, the hatred itself, the fear - I feel are completely justified and legitimate, even if it's risky to say so. "It's impossible to be in such an emotional state and to go back home on leave and detach yourself from it. I was very insensitive to the feelings of my girlfriend at the time. I was an animal, even when I was on leave. It also sticks with you after your service. I saw the remnants of the syndrome in India - something about being in the Third World, among dark-skinned people, brings out the worst of the `ugly Israeli,' which is as Israeli as it gets. Or the way you react to a smile: When Palestinians would smile at me at the checkpoint, I got tense and construed it as defiance, as chutzpah. When someone smiled at me in India, I immediately went on the defensive. "I was an average soldier," he says. "I was the joker of the group. Now I see that I was often the one to take the lead in violent situations. I often was the one who gave the slap. I'm the one who came up with all kinds of ideas like letting the air out of tires. It sounds twisted now, but we really admired anyone who could beat up some guy who supposedly had it coming. The officer we admired most was the officer who fired his weapon at every opportunity. Out of everyone I've spoken to, I've been left with the most guilt feelings ... A friend from the army read the book and said that I'm right, that we did bad things, but we were kids. And he said that it's a shame that I took it too hard."
2. Conflict Management or Conflict Resolution
BADIL Occasional Bulletin No. 13November 2003
This Bulletin aims to provide a brief overview of issues related to Palestinian Refugee Rights
Peace agreements--provisions on rights, refugees and participation: This analysis of human rights provisions is the first of a 3-part series on recent agreements. Part Two examines how they deal with refugees and Part Three is on public participation in formulating agreements.
Conflicts are unique and so are the mechanisms set up to resolve them. But in most cases, human rights are considered an important element for conflict resolution.
What makes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its resolution particularly unique is the virtual absence, in any peace proposals to date, of human rights regulations or provision for the establishment of human rights institutions. This implies that the two parties have yet to agree on the underlying root causes of the conflict and how they should go about resolving the conflict.
Peace agreements, like national constitutions, replace “the arbitrary use of power with its legal regulation through checks and balances.”* Thus human rights are a key element in a successful agreement, providing a common framework to regulate relations between former antagonists, mediate future disputes and reconcile past injustices.
Many agreements include provisions for new human rights institutions to monitor respect for human rights, educate the general public, hold accountable persons who have violated the human rights of others and investigate and recommend remedies for past violations.
The following is a summary of the role of human rights and the Palestinian-Israeli negotiation process; a comparative overview of human rights provisos in other peace agreements; and observations on recent peacemaking experience.
Missing from the start
Human rights have been marginal to the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking process that began in Madrid more than a decade ago. The Madrid-Oslo process focused primarily on security and the transfer of certain powers to a limited self-governing authority in 1967 occupied Palestine.
According to the initial framework agreement (1993 Declaration of Principles) Israel and the PLO agreed to recognize “mutual legitimate and political rights” in order to “achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed political process.” There is no mention of international law or the UN Charter as the basic framework for negotiations and future relations between the two.
Subsequent interim agreements include only limited references to human rights. They are first mentioned in the 1994 Gaza-Jericho agreement (Article XIV; Annex I,
Article VIII) in regard to the exercise of “powers and responsibilities” under the agreement. Annex III, Article II also stipulates that the parties to the agreement shall
ensure that persons transferred for criminal investigation will be treated in accordance with accepted human rights norms. The 1995 Interim Agreement (Article XIX; Annex I, Article XI(7), Article 11(7)(h)(1)) and the 1998 Wye River Memorandum (Article II(4)) include similar provisions.
While the agreements include numerous references delineating agreed-upon “rights” of both parties the only reference in the agreements to “legal rights” concerns “Government and Absentee property” that was “acquired” by Israelis in the occupied territories (Interim Agreement, Annex III, Appendix I, Article 16(3) and Article 22(3). Palestinians are obliged under the agreement to respect these rights.
Common to all these agreements is the absence of specific references to internationally accepted human rights norms. None establish human rights institutions to monitor and investigate human rights violations. Moreover, both the Interim agreement (Article XI(1), Annex I) and the Wye River Memorandum (Article II(4)) suggest that internationally accepted norms are subject to the agreement rather than vice versa.
Recent unofficial initiatives on the outlines of a final status agreement follow a similar approach, omitting rights altogether (e.g. Nusseibeh-Ayalon and the Geneva understandings). The latter actually states that where the agreement and the UN Charter conflict, the agreement itself overrides the UN Charter Article 2 (6).
The absence of human rights and international law, in general, from past agreements and current initiatives can be explained in part by looking at some historical background.
Focus on security: Since 1967, peacemaking has largely focused on security based on the political notion of ‘land for peace’ under which Israel would return some conquered land in the occupied territories for a lasting peace agreement. This incorrectly implies a symmetrical relationship between the parties and that Palestinians have peace and only need land. Human rights norms are secondary and their inclusion has been undermined or even cast aside when they interfere with Israel’s security considerations.
Unwillingness to recognize certain rights: Recognition of certain rights such as refugees’ right to return to their homes of origin could lead, in Israel’s view, to unacceptable political outcomes. Human rights interfere with its arbitrary exercise of power.
Unresolved and conflicting narratives/views on the conflict itself: Human rights and international law have played a fundamental role in the Palestinian view of the conflict. Their proposals during pre-Oslo talks in Washington, for example, include key references to international law. Israel disagrees fundamentally, hence the absence of human rights.
Key role of human rights in other agreements
Human rights are a key element in peace agreements, playing a particularly important regulatory role in ethno-national conflicts. Agreements in Bosnia, Kosovo, Burundi, and Rwanda, for example, contain particularly detailed human rights provisions. In general, they delineate applicable norms; provide for legal, including constitutional, reform to incorporate greater recognition of human rights principles; and establish institutions to monitor, investigate and adjudicate future and past human rights violations.
The peace agreements in Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo, Burundi, Cambodia, East Timor, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda all have specific reference to applicable international human rights conventions and most delineate specific human rights. A list of 14 international human rights instruments to be applied in Bosnia Herzegovina is even annexed to the 1995 Dayton Agreements.
Provisions for constitutional reform to strengthen recognition of human rights norms are also included. The constitution attached to the 1999 Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo, for example, states that the rights and freedoms set forth in the European Convention for the Protection of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms and its Protocols shall apply directly in Kosovo and have priority over all other law. Similar provisions for constitutional reform are found in Bosnia and Cambodia.
Education is also an important component of peacebuilding. The 2000 Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi, for example, calls for a major educational and awareness program for peace, unity and reconciliation. In Cambodia, the UN transition administration was required to develop and implement educational programs to promote respect for and understanding of human rights. In Sierra Leone, the parties pledged to promote human rights education through schools, media, police, military and the religious community.
Mechanisms to monitor respect for human rights, investigate and provide remedies for future human rights violations also feature in some agreements. The 1994 Protocol of Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Rwanda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front on the Rule of Law establishes an independent National Commission on Human Rights to investigate human rights violations and use the findings to sensitize and educate the public on human rights and bring legal proceedings where necessary.
Similar commissions are provided for in the Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Burundi, Bosnia, and Kosovo agreements. Remedies for victims of human rights violations include compensation.
Some establish independent mechanisms to investigate and prosecute individuals found responsible for past grave human rights violations. The Burundi agreement, for example, asks the UN Security Council to establish an international criminal tribunal to try and punish those responsible for acts of genocide, war crimes and other crimes against humanity. The Comprehensive Agreement on Human Rights in Guatemala (1994) establishes a Commission to clarify past violations and issue recommendations to encourage peace and national harmony. Agreements in Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda establish similar mechanisms for transitional justice.
Finally, many agreements also include provisions to commemorate the victims of human rights violations. The Arusha agreement (Burundi) calls for a national monument in memory of all victims of genocide, war crimes and other crimes against humanity and a national day of remembrance. The Guatemala agreement requires measures to preserve the memory of the victims to foster a culture of mutual respect and observance of human rights and to strengthen the democratic process.
Human rights, the common framework
Human rights are sine qua non for a peace agreement. Human rights provisions may not provide ironclad guarantees that violations will not recur, but they provide a common framework to regulate relations between former antagonists, resolve future disputes, rehabilitate victims of past violations, and ensure that no individual or party is above the law and can act with impunity.
As numerous human rights organizations have observed, recent experience around the world has shown the legitimacy and sustainability of political processes are strengthened, not weakened, by the inclusion of human rights standards. Disregarding human rights, or subordinating these rights to political considerations, can only undermine the prospects of achieving durable peace and security.
The inability of the international community to effectively monitor and enforce human rights in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the lack of political support to ensure codification of such principles and the establishment of corresponding human rights mechanisms in peace agreements between Israel and the PLO has led to a situation where the peacemaking process continues to be governed by the arbitrary use of power.
A deeper problem
The virtual absence of human rights from Palestinian-Israeli peace agreements and current political initiatives also points to a deeper problem. Comparative experience
suggests that human rights provisions in peace agreements stem from agreement between the parties about the function and role of human rights and, therefore, an agreement about the nature of the conflict itself and related remedies.
The absence of human rights in existing agreements and recent initiatives thus implies that the parties have yet to agree on the underlying root causes of their conflict. Such agreements and initiatives can, at best, provide for conflict management, but cannot be seen as resolving all outstanding claims between Israel and the Palestinians or providing just and durable solutions for Palestinians and Israelis alike.
Past experience, community involvement and the rule of law are three major components of any peace and reconciliation plan, according to BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. BADIL promotes research into these areas, encourages Palestinian community participation in formulating peace agreements and organizes fact-finding visits to areas repairing the damage of conflict such as South Africa and Bosnia-Herzogovina.
***
* Christine Bell, Peace Agreements and Human Rights, 2000
3. A strangulation fence
Danny Rubinstein
Haaretz, 24 November 2003
Despite all the criticism of the separation fence both in Israel and abroad, a majority of the Israeli public is still enthusiastic about it (83 percent support it, as opposed to 12 percent who are against it, according to the Peace Index of October, 2003, as published in Haaretz on November 4). This enthusiasm clearly has a security background, but also a political background. Everyone who wants to arrive at the solution of two states for two peoples supports separation between the two entities - and if separation, then why not a fence?
A certain enthusiasm for separation between the two peoples has prevailed in Israel ever since the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967. Moshe Dayan, who laid down the lines of Israeli policy in the territories after the Six Day War, favored maximum possible integration between Israel and the territories - but he too called again and again for "not getting into the Palestinians." That is, to minimize as much as possible a permanent Israeli presence in heavily populated areas and not to fly the Israeli flag in every corner of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. He wanted the Arabs in the territories to manage their civil affairs themselves. "My father didn't come to Degania and Nahalal in order to run the education system in Nablus or the orchards in Gaza," he once said.
Yitzhak Rabin's electioneering slogan "Get Gaza out of Tel Aviv" was one of the reasons for his success in the 1992 elections - and another call for separation formulated as "We here and they there" was among one of Ehud Barak's popular statements.
The bloody clashes and the terror attacks of the Al Aqsa Intifada of course brought the Israeli support for separation and the construction of the fence to a peak. Among the supporters of the fence in Israel are hawks and doves, centrists, leftists and rightists. In short, nearly everyone.
Among the Palestinian public, the picture is different. Their main sources of employment are in Israel, and they also want free access to the centers of commerce, medical services and recreational sites in Israel. But the official Palestinian position cannot be opposed in principle to the fence; they oppose only any deviation of the separation wall from the Green Line (the pre-June 1967 border). Palestinian spokespersons have frequently stated: Israel is entitled to build as many fences and walls as it wants - but only inside its own territories and not in the Palestinian territories.
The Palestine Liberation Organization steering committee, which convened at Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's headquarters at the end of last week, decided that the Palestinians will apply to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to file a suit against the construction of the fence. In Jerusalem, the head of the Islamic courts Sheikh Rajib Bayyud al Tamimi (whom Arafat appointed about a year ago), announced the launching of a public struggle against the fence in the city, as its aim is to "strengthen the Judaization of Jerusalem."
The deviations of the fence from the old 1967 border into the territories are not a marginal issue in the affair. They are the main issue. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his government ministers, who support the fence, are exploiting the large public support that there is in Israel for ideas of separation in order to build fences and walls. However, more than these stand between Israelis and Palestinians - they are creating, in a large part of the West Bank, a reality of siege and distress in which the Palestinians cannot live. It sometimes seems that most of the Israeli public that so yearns for separation and security does not realize that in fact a wall of strangulation is being built in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
November 27, 2003
This past week my family and I had two good friends as guests for five days: our former landlady from Zababdeh, the northern West Bank village where we once taught English, and her three-year-old daughter. Our friend had come to Jerusalem to check in on her ten-year-old son, who lives as a boarding student with nuns in a Jerusalem convent and had fallen ill. Getting into Jerusalem, however, was no simple matter. Our friend and her daughter left Zababdeh at 2 am, setting out for a five hour drive to the Qalandia checkpoint in northern Jerusalem. The drive took them and their fellow passengers through multiple back roads and in and out of olive fields. Once in Qalandia, her journey was not yet over. She took another taxi all around Jerusalem, down to Abu Dis to the south of the city. There, she and her 3-year-old faced an 7 to 8 foot obstacle made of concrete blocks. Like hundreds of Palestinians do everyday, our friend and her daughter found a place in the wall made of concrete blocks where they could find footholds. Once on top, our friend lowered her daughter down. As they were climbing over, our friend's daughter kept telling her to hurry. "The soldiers will come!" the daughter said: the entire trip down in the car, the daughter had been talking to her mother about her fear of the soldiers. The soldiers, fortunately, did not come, and our friend (who, as you have probably guessed) did not have a permit to be in Jerusalem, made it to the convent where she could see her sick son. Our friend and her children made it back to Zababdeh earlier this week.
As my family and I celebrate U.S. Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, we'll be giving thanks for the love that pushes mothers, fathers, and grandparents every day to cross through and find difficult ways around military roadblocks in order to care for their sick children; we'll be giving thanks for the faithful institutions of the Palestinian churches that minister to all children, Christian and Muslim alike; we'll be giving thanks for the witness of those young Israeli men who refuse to participate in the daily rituals of humiliation and control at checkpoints in the occupied territories; and we'll be giving thanks for Palestinian and Israeli peacemakers who work for a shared future of justice, peace, and reconciliation.
Below you will find three pieces. In the first, Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy summarizes the memoirs of Staff Sgt. Liran Ron Furer, a young Israeli man in his mid-20s who has written an account of his three years of military service in the Gaza Strip. Furer's accout of his actions at the checkpoints where he worked are troubling, haunting, and give a disturbing insight into how the occupation and its military roadblocks and checkpoints are dehumanizing not only Palestinians but Israelis as well. The second piece, by MCC's partner organization on Palestinian refugee issues, Badil, examines how human rights standards, including those that address refugees, will have to be incorporated into any lasting peace agreement, any agreement, that is, that seeks to be "conflict resolution" rather than "conflict management." In the final piece, Haaretz journalist Danny Rubinstein examines what he calls the "strangulation fence" and its effect on Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Twilight Zone: ‘I punched an Arab in the face’
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, 21 November 2003
Staff Sergeant (res.) Liran Ron Furer cannot just routinely get on with his life anymore. He is haunted by images from his three years of military service in Gaza and the thought that this could be a syndrome afflicting everyone who serves at checkpoints gives him no respite. On the verge of completing his studies in the design program at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, he decided to drop everything and devote all his time to the book he wanted to write. The major publishers he brought it to declined to publish it. The publisher that finally accepted it (Gevanim) says that the Steimatzky bookstore chain refuses to distribute it. But Furer is determined to bring his book to the public's attention. "You can adopt the most hard-line political positions, but no parent would agree to his son becoming a thief, a criminal or a violent person," says Furer. "The problem is that it's never presented this way. The boy himself doesn't portray himself this way to his family when he returns from the territories. On the contrary - he is received as a hero, as someone who is doing the important work of being a soldier. No one can be indifferent to the fact that there are many families in which, in a certain sense, there are already two generations of criminals. The father went through it and now the son is going through it and no one talks about it around the dinner table." Furer is certain that what happened to him is not at all unique. Here he was - a creative, sensitive graduate of the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, who became an animal at the checkpoint, a violent sadist who beat up Palestinians because they didn't show him the proper courtesy, who shot out tires of cars because their owners were playing the radio too loud, who abused a retarded teenage boy lying handcuffed on the floor of the Jeep, just because he had to take his anger out somehow. "Checkpoint Syndrome" (also the title of his book), gradually transforms every soldier into an animal, he maintains, regardless of whatever values he brings with him from home. No one can escape its taint. In a place where nearly everything is permissible and violence is perceived as normative behavior, each soldier tests his own limits of violence impulsiveness on his victims - the Palestinians. His book is not easy reading. Written in terse, fierce prose, in the blunt and coarse language of soldiers, he reconstructs scenes from the years in which he served in Gaza (1996-1999), years that, one must remember, were relatively quiet. He describes how he and his comrades forced some Palestinians to sing "Elinor" - "It was really something to see these Arabs singing a Zohar Argov song, like in a movie"; the emotions the Palestinians aroused in him - "Sometimes these Arabs really disgust me, especially those that try to toady up to us - the older ones, who come to the checkpoint with this smile on their faces"; the reactions they spurred - "If they really annoy us, we find away to keep them stuck at the checkpoint for a few hours. They lose a whole day of work because of it sometimes, but that's the only way they learn." He described how they would order children to clean the checkpoint before inspection time; how a soldier named Shahar invented a game: "He checks someone's identity card, and instead of handing it back to him, just tosses it in the air. He got a kick out of seeing the Arab have to get out of his car to pick up his identity card ... It's a game for him and he can pass a whole shift this way"; how they humiliated a dwarf who came to the checkpoint every day on his wagon: "They forced him to have his picture taken on the horse, hit him and degraded him for a good half hour and let him go only when cars arrived at the checkpoint. The poor guy, he really didn't deserve it"; how they had a souvenir picture taken with bloodied, bound Arabs whom they'd beaten up; how Shahar pissed on the head of an Arab because the man had the nerve to smile at a soldier; how Dado forced an Arab to stand on four legs and bark like a dog; and how they stole prayer beads and cigarettes - "Miro wanted them to give him their cigarettes, the Arabs didn't want to give so Miro broke someone's hand, and Boaz slashed their tires." Chilling confession The most chilling of all the personal confessions: "I ran toward them and punched an Arab right in the face. I'd never punched anyone that way. He collapsed on the road. The officers said that we had to search him for his papers. We pulled his hands behind his back and I bound them with plastic handcuffs. Then we blindfolded him so he wouldn't see what was in the Jeep. I picked him up from the road. Blood was trickling from his lip onto his chin. I led him up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his knees banged against the trunk and he landed inside. We sat in the back, stepping on the Arab ... Our Arab lay there pretty quietly, just crying softly to himself. His face was right on my flak jacket and he was bleeding and making a kind of puddle of blood and saliva, and it disgusted and angered me, so I grabbed him by the hair and turned his head to the side. He cried out loud and to get him to stop, we stepped harder and harder on his back. That quieted him down for a while and then he started up again. We concluded that he was either retarded or crazy. "The company commander informed us over the radio that we had to bring him to the base. `Good work, tigers,' he said, teasing us. All the other soldiers were waiting there to see what we'd caught. When we came in with the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly. We put the Arab next to the guard. He didn't stop crying and someone who understood Arabic said that his hands were hurting from the handcuffs. One of the soldiers went up to him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him really hard in the ass and he flew forward just as I'd expected. They shouted that I was a totally crazy, and they laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a 16-year-old mentally retarded boy." In his sister's rooftop Tel Aviv apartment, where he is living now, Furer, 26, comes across as a thoughtful, intelligent young man. He grew up in Givatayim, after his parents immigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Before Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, his mother was a right-wing activist, but he says that their home was not political. He wanted to be in a combat unit in the army, and served in two elite infantry units. He did his entire army service in the Gaza Strip. After the army, he traveled to India, like so many others. "Now I was free. The crazy energies of Goa and the chakras opened my mind ... You stuck me in this stinking Gaza and before that you brainwashed me with your rifles and your marches, you turned me into a dishrag that didn't think anymore," he wrote from Goa. But it was only afterward, when he was studying at Bezalel, that the experiences from his army service really began to affect him. "I came to realize that there was an unchanging pattern here," he says. "It was the same in the first intifada, in the period that I was serving, which was quiet, and in the second intifada. It's become a permanent reality. I started to feel very uncomfortable with the fact that such a loaded subject was hardly mentioned at all in public. People listened to the victim and they listened to the politicians, but this voice that says: I did this, we did things that were wrong - crimes, actually - that's a voice I didn't hear. The reason it wasn't being heard was a combination of repression - just as I repressed it and ignored it - and of deep feelings of guilt. "As soon as you get away from army service, the political and media reality around you is not ready to hear this voice. I remember that I was surprised that no soldier had gone public with this yet. It all somehow dissolved in the debate about the legitimacy of settlement in the territories, about the occupation - for or against - and nothing connected to the routine of maintaining the occupation appeared in the media or in art." Not an individual caseFurer is out to prove that this is a syndrome and not a collection of isolated, individual cases. That's why he deleted a lot of personal details from the original manuscript, in order to underscore the general nature of what he describes. "During my army service, I believed that I was atypical, because I came from a background of art and creativity. I was considered a moderate soldier - but I fell into the same trap that most soldiers fall into. I was carried away by the possibility of acting in the most primal and impulsive manner, without fear of punishment and without oversight. You're tense about it at first, but as you get more comfortable at the checkpoint over time, the behavior becomes more natural. People gradually test the limits of their behavior toward the Palestinians. It gradually becomes coarser and coarser. "The more confident I became with the situation, as soon as we reached the conclusion - each one at his own stage - that we are the rulers, we are the strong ones, and when we felt our power, each one started to stretch the limits more and more, in accordance with his personality. As soon as serving at the checkpoint became routine, all kinds of deviant behavior became normal. It started with `souvenir collecting': We'd confiscate prayer beads and then it was cigarettes and it didn't stop. It became normative behavior. "After that came the power games. We got the message from above that we were to project seriousness and deterrence to the Arabs. Physical violence also became normative. We felt free to punish any Palestinian who didn't follow the `proper code of behavior' at the checkpoint. Anyone we thought wasn't polite enough to us or tried to act smart - was severely punished. It was deliberate harassment on the most trivial pretexts. "During my army service, there wasn't a single incident that made us understand, or made our commanders interfere. No one talked about what was permitted and what was not. It was all a matter of routine. In retrospect, the biggest source of guilt feelings for me didn't happen at the checkpoint, but by the Gush Katif fence, when we caught the retarded boy. I demonstrated the most extreme behavior. It was a chance for me to catch one - the closest thing to catching a terrorist, a chance to vent all the pressure and impulses that had built up in all of us. To lash out the way we wanted to. We were used to giving slaps, to handcuffing, to a little kicking, a little beating, and here was a situation in which it was justified to let go entirely. Also, the officer who was with us was himself very violent. We gave the kid a real beating and as soon as we got to the post, I remember having a great feeling of pride, that I'd been treated like someone strong. They said, `What a nut you are, how crazy you are,' which was basically like saying, `How strong you are.' "At the checkpoint, young people have the chance to be masters and using force and violence becomes legitimate - and this is a much more basic impulse than the political views or values that you bring from home. As soon as using force is given legitimacy, and even rewarded, the tendency is to take it as far as it can go, to exploit it much as possible. To satisfy these impulses beyond what the situation requires. Today, I'd call it sadistic impulses ... "We weren't criminals or especially violent people. We were a group of good boys, a relatively `high-quality' group, and for all of us - and we still talk about this sometimes - the checkpoint became a place to test our personal limits. How tough, how callous, how crazy we could be - and we thought of that in the positive sense. Something about the situation - being in a godforsaken place, far from home, far from oversight - made it justified ... The line of what is forbidden was never precisely drawn. No one was ever punished and they just let us continue. "Today, I feel confident saying that even the most senior ranks - the brigade commander, the battalion commander - are aware of the power that soldiers have in this situation and what they do with it. How could a commander not be aware of it when the more crazy and tough his soldiers are, the quieter his sector is? The more complex picture of the long-term effects of this violent behavior is something you only become conscious of when you get away from the checkpoint. "Today it's clear to me that that boy whose father we humiliated for the flimsiest of reasons will grow up to hate anyone who represents what was done to his father. I definitely have an understanding of their motives now. We are cruelty, we are power. I'm sure that their response is affected by elements related to their society - a disregard for human life and a readiness to sacrifice lives - but the basic desire to resist, the hatred itself, the fear - I feel are completely justified and legitimate, even if it's risky to say so. "It's impossible to be in such an emotional state and to go back home on leave and detach yourself from it. I was very insensitive to the feelings of my girlfriend at the time. I was an animal, even when I was on leave. It also sticks with you after your service. I saw the remnants of the syndrome in India - something about being in the Third World, among dark-skinned people, brings out the worst of the `ugly Israeli,' which is as Israeli as it gets. Or the way you react to a smile: When Palestinians would smile at me at the checkpoint, I got tense and construed it as defiance, as chutzpah. When someone smiled at me in India, I immediately went on the defensive. "I was an average soldier," he says. "I was the joker of the group. Now I see that I was often the one to take the lead in violent situations. I often was the one who gave the slap. I'm the one who came up with all kinds of ideas like letting the air out of tires. It sounds twisted now, but we really admired anyone who could beat up some guy who supposedly had it coming. The officer we admired most was the officer who fired his weapon at every opportunity. Out of everyone I've spoken to, I've been left with the most guilt feelings ... A friend from the army read the book and said that I'm right, that we did bad things, but we were kids. And he said that it's a shame that I took it too hard."
2. Conflict Management or Conflict Resolution
BADIL Occasional Bulletin No. 13November 2003
This Bulletin aims to provide a brief overview of issues related to Palestinian Refugee Rights
Peace agreements--provisions on rights, refugees and participation: This analysis of human rights provisions is the first of a 3-part series on recent agreements. Part Two examines how they deal with refugees and Part Three is on public participation in formulating agreements.
Conflicts are unique and so are the mechanisms set up to resolve them. But in most cases, human rights are considered an important element for conflict resolution.
What makes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its resolution particularly unique is the virtual absence, in any peace proposals to date, of human rights regulations or provision for the establishment of human rights institutions. This implies that the two parties have yet to agree on the underlying root causes of the conflict and how they should go about resolving the conflict.
Peace agreements, like national constitutions, replace “the arbitrary use of power with its legal regulation through checks and balances.”* Thus human rights are a key element in a successful agreement, providing a common framework to regulate relations between former antagonists, mediate future disputes and reconcile past injustices.
Many agreements include provisions for new human rights institutions to monitor respect for human rights, educate the general public, hold accountable persons who have violated the human rights of others and investigate and recommend remedies for past violations.
The following is a summary of the role of human rights and the Palestinian-Israeli negotiation process; a comparative overview of human rights provisos in other peace agreements; and observations on recent peacemaking experience.
Missing from the start
Human rights have been marginal to the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking process that began in Madrid more than a decade ago. The Madrid-Oslo process focused primarily on security and the transfer of certain powers to a limited self-governing authority in 1967 occupied Palestine.
According to the initial framework agreement (1993 Declaration of Principles) Israel and the PLO agreed to recognize “mutual legitimate and political rights” in order to “achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed political process.” There is no mention of international law or the UN Charter as the basic framework for negotiations and future relations between the two.
Subsequent interim agreements include only limited references to human rights. They are first mentioned in the 1994 Gaza-Jericho agreement (Article XIV; Annex I,
Article VIII) in regard to the exercise of “powers and responsibilities” under the agreement. Annex III, Article II also stipulates that the parties to the agreement shall
ensure that persons transferred for criminal investigation will be treated in accordance with accepted human rights norms. The 1995 Interim Agreement (Article XIX; Annex I, Article XI(7), Article 11(7)(h)(1)) and the 1998 Wye River Memorandum (Article II(4)) include similar provisions.
While the agreements include numerous references delineating agreed-upon “rights” of both parties the only reference in the agreements to “legal rights” concerns “Government and Absentee property” that was “acquired” by Israelis in the occupied territories (Interim Agreement, Annex III, Appendix I, Article 16(3) and Article 22(3). Palestinians are obliged under the agreement to respect these rights.
Common to all these agreements is the absence of specific references to internationally accepted human rights norms. None establish human rights institutions to monitor and investigate human rights violations. Moreover, both the Interim agreement (Article XI(1), Annex I) and the Wye River Memorandum (Article II(4)) suggest that internationally accepted norms are subject to the agreement rather than vice versa.
Recent unofficial initiatives on the outlines of a final status agreement follow a similar approach, omitting rights altogether (e.g. Nusseibeh-Ayalon and the Geneva understandings). The latter actually states that where the agreement and the UN Charter conflict, the agreement itself overrides the UN Charter Article 2 (6).
The absence of human rights and international law, in general, from past agreements and current initiatives can be explained in part by looking at some historical background.
Focus on security: Since 1967, peacemaking has largely focused on security based on the political notion of ‘land for peace’ under which Israel would return some conquered land in the occupied territories for a lasting peace agreement. This incorrectly implies a symmetrical relationship between the parties and that Palestinians have peace and only need land. Human rights norms are secondary and their inclusion has been undermined or even cast aside when they interfere with Israel’s security considerations.
Unwillingness to recognize certain rights: Recognition of certain rights such as refugees’ right to return to their homes of origin could lead, in Israel’s view, to unacceptable political outcomes. Human rights interfere with its arbitrary exercise of power.
Unresolved and conflicting narratives/views on the conflict itself: Human rights and international law have played a fundamental role in the Palestinian view of the conflict. Their proposals during pre-Oslo talks in Washington, for example, include key references to international law. Israel disagrees fundamentally, hence the absence of human rights.
Key role of human rights in other agreements
Human rights are a key element in peace agreements, playing a particularly important regulatory role in ethno-national conflicts. Agreements in Bosnia, Kosovo, Burundi, and Rwanda, for example, contain particularly detailed human rights provisions. In general, they delineate applicable norms; provide for legal, including constitutional, reform to incorporate greater recognition of human rights principles; and establish institutions to monitor, investigate and adjudicate future and past human rights violations.
The peace agreements in Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo, Burundi, Cambodia, East Timor, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda all have specific reference to applicable international human rights conventions and most delineate specific human rights. A list of 14 international human rights instruments to be applied in Bosnia Herzegovina is even annexed to the 1995 Dayton Agreements.
Provisions for constitutional reform to strengthen recognition of human rights norms are also included. The constitution attached to the 1999 Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo, for example, states that the rights and freedoms set forth in the European Convention for the Protection of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms and its Protocols shall apply directly in Kosovo and have priority over all other law. Similar provisions for constitutional reform are found in Bosnia and Cambodia.
Education is also an important component of peacebuilding. The 2000 Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi, for example, calls for a major educational and awareness program for peace, unity and reconciliation. In Cambodia, the UN transition administration was required to develop and implement educational programs to promote respect for and understanding of human rights. In Sierra Leone, the parties pledged to promote human rights education through schools, media, police, military and the religious community.
Mechanisms to monitor respect for human rights, investigate and provide remedies for future human rights violations also feature in some agreements. The 1994 Protocol of Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Rwanda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front on the Rule of Law establishes an independent National Commission on Human Rights to investigate human rights violations and use the findings to sensitize and educate the public on human rights and bring legal proceedings where necessary.
Similar commissions are provided for in the Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Burundi, Bosnia, and Kosovo agreements. Remedies for victims of human rights violations include compensation.
Some establish independent mechanisms to investigate and prosecute individuals found responsible for past grave human rights violations. The Burundi agreement, for example, asks the UN Security Council to establish an international criminal tribunal to try and punish those responsible for acts of genocide, war crimes and other crimes against humanity. The Comprehensive Agreement on Human Rights in Guatemala (1994) establishes a Commission to clarify past violations and issue recommendations to encourage peace and national harmony. Agreements in Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda establish similar mechanisms for transitional justice.
Finally, many agreements also include provisions to commemorate the victims of human rights violations. The Arusha agreement (Burundi) calls for a national monument in memory of all victims of genocide, war crimes and other crimes against humanity and a national day of remembrance. The Guatemala agreement requires measures to preserve the memory of the victims to foster a culture of mutual respect and observance of human rights and to strengthen the democratic process.
Human rights, the common framework
Human rights are sine qua non for a peace agreement. Human rights provisions may not provide ironclad guarantees that violations will not recur, but they provide a common framework to regulate relations between former antagonists, resolve future disputes, rehabilitate victims of past violations, and ensure that no individual or party is above the law and can act with impunity.
As numerous human rights organizations have observed, recent experience around the world has shown the legitimacy and sustainability of political processes are strengthened, not weakened, by the inclusion of human rights standards. Disregarding human rights, or subordinating these rights to political considerations, can only undermine the prospects of achieving durable peace and security.
The inability of the international community to effectively monitor and enforce human rights in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the lack of political support to ensure codification of such principles and the establishment of corresponding human rights mechanisms in peace agreements between Israel and the PLO has led to a situation where the peacemaking process continues to be governed by the arbitrary use of power.
A deeper problem
The virtual absence of human rights from Palestinian-Israeli peace agreements and current political initiatives also points to a deeper problem. Comparative experience
suggests that human rights provisions in peace agreements stem from agreement between the parties about the function and role of human rights and, therefore, an agreement about the nature of the conflict itself and related remedies.
The absence of human rights in existing agreements and recent initiatives thus implies that the parties have yet to agree on the underlying root causes of their conflict. Such agreements and initiatives can, at best, provide for conflict management, but cannot be seen as resolving all outstanding claims between Israel and the Palestinians or providing just and durable solutions for Palestinians and Israelis alike.
Past experience, community involvement and the rule of law are three major components of any peace and reconciliation plan, according to BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. BADIL promotes research into these areas, encourages Palestinian community participation in formulating peace agreements and organizes fact-finding visits to areas repairing the damage of conflict such as South Africa and Bosnia-Herzogovina.
***
* Christine Bell, Peace Agreements and Human Rights, 2000
3. A strangulation fence
Danny Rubinstein
Haaretz, 24 November 2003
Despite all the criticism of the separation fence both in Israel and abroad, a majority of the Israeli public is still enthusiastic about it (83 percent support it, as opposed to 12 percent who are against it, according to the Peace Index of October, 2003, as published in Haaretz on November 4). This enthusiasm clearly has a security background, but also a political background. Everyone who wants to arrive at the solution of two states for two peoples supports separation between the two entities - and if separation, then why not a fence?
A certain enthusiasm for separation between the two peoples has prevailed in Israel ever since the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967. Moshe Dayan, who laid down the lines of Israeli policy in the territories after the Six Day War, favored maximum possible integration between Israel and the territories - but he too called again and again for "not getting into the Palestinians." That is, to minimize as much as possible a permanent Israeli presence in heavily populated areas and not to fly the Israeli flag in every corner of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. He wanted the Arabs in the territories to manage their civil affairs themselves. "My father didn't come to Degania and Nahalal in order to run the education system in Nablus or the orchards in Gaza," he once said.
Yitzhak Rabin's electioneering slogan "Get Gaza out of Tel Aviv" was one of the reasons for his success in the 1992 elections - and another call for separation formulated as "We here and they there" was among one of Ehud Barak's popular statements.
The bloody clashes and the terror attacks of the Al Aqsa Intifada of course brought the Israeli support for separation and the construction of the fence to a peak. Among the supporters of the fence in Israel are hawks and doves, centrists, leftists and rightists. In short, nearly everyone.
Among the Palestinian public, the picture is different. Their main sources of employment are in Israel, and they also want free access to the centers of commerce, medical services and recreational sites in Israel. But the official Palestinian position cannot be opposed in principle to the fence; they oppose only any deviation of the separation wall from the Green Line (the pre-June 1967 border). Palestinian spokespersons have frequently stated: Israel is entitled to build as many fences and walls as it wants - but only inside its own territories and not in the Palestinian territories.
The Palestine Liberation Organization steering committee, which convened at Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's headquarters at the end of last week, decided that the Palestinians will apply to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to file a suit against the construction of the fence. In Jerusalem, the head of the Islamic courts Sheikh Rajib Bayyud al Tamimi (whom Arafat appointed about a year ago), announced the launching of a public struggle against the fence in the city, as its aim is to "strengthen the Judaization of Jerusalem."
The deviations of the fence from the old 1967 border into the territories are not a marginal issue in the affair. They are the main issue. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his government ministers, who support the fence, are exploiting the large public support that there is in Israel for ideas of separation in order to build fences and walls. However, more than these stand between Israelis and Palestinians - they are creating, in a large part of the West Bank, a reality of siege and distress in which the Palestinians cannot live. It sometimes seems that most of the Israeli public that so yearns for separation and security does not realize that in fact a wall of strangulation is being built in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
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