MCC Palestine Update #93
January 19, 2004
Over the past two weeks, the increasing physical isolation of the Palestinian people has been dramatically highlighted. First, Israel began replacing the makeshift wall of concrete blocks around Abu Dis near Jerusalem, over which Palestinians going to work, to visit family, to school, to hospital, had scrambled, with massive 9 meter tall concrete barricades. A curfew has been placed on the area within 40 meters of the new wall as construction work proceeds, confining people there to their homes. The early Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky talked about the need to encircle Israel with an "iron wall" against its neighbors: through concrete, barbed wire, electrified fences, and electronic sensors, this vision is becoming a reality.
For years now Israel has had the capacity to seal off the Gaza Strip, having built an electrified fence around it (and with the sea cutting it off from the other side). At its discretion it could cut off the flow of Palestinian workers to Israel, of Palestinians to Israeli hospitals for specialized treatment, of Palestinians wishing to travel through Egypt, of international visitors (aid workers, tourists, student groups) to Gaza. Since May 2003, it has become very difficult for internationals to enter Gaza. International aid workers "coordinate" their entry with the Israeli authorities, notifying them days in advance of their planned entry. Now, with the ongoing construction of the walls and fences, Israel is gaining the capacity it enjoys in Gaza in the West Bank, as it encircles Palestinian cities and creates reservations in which Palestinians are kept tightly sequestered. For now, aid workers, tourists, and other internationals can still usually make it into West Bank cities. On January 4, 2004, however, Israel announced a new regulation, handing out fliers to visitors arriving at Israel's borders, informing them that they could only enter areas under the Palestinian Authority's control (the extent of such control being purely nominal) with the prior written authorization of the Israeli military; no contact information was given for obtaining such authorization. For now, this new measure appears to be aimed by peace activists protesting the wall; the Israeli military has made it known that anyone approaching the wall is liable to arrest and deportation. International aid agencies such as MCC worry that the day will not be far off when the Israeli military authorities begin demanding prior coordination to enter Bethlehem, or Hebron?such coordination is practically essential already if one wants to enter Jenin.
In summary: Palestinians are not only being walled off by walls and fences, they are being isolated from international visitors by an Israeli government who would like to keep them out of sight and out of mind. Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, an MCC partner organization, put the matter bluntly following a visit to the towering wall being erected in Abu Dis: "It's hard to find words for such evil." MCC supports ICAHD in its work to educate Israelis about the humanitarian and political impact of the wall and the broader process of colonization. MCC also supports the work of the Palestinian Environmental NGO Network and the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem, two Palestinian organizations that gather information about the wall and seek to disseminate that information to the rest of the world. For current news about the wall and its impact, visit: http://www.stopthewall.org/. For an in-depth study of the wall, visit http://www.arij.org/.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Gideon Levy, suggests that "Israel's real friends will increase the pressure on the [Israeli] government" by criticizing the separation barrier. The second, by Ghada Ageel, a graduate student from the Gaza Strip, paints a moving, harrowing portrait of unarmed Palestinians, fed up with being blocked at a checkpoint for hours, who simply start walking towards the checkpoint, even as Israeli soldiers open fire. The final piece, by Lily Galili of Haaretz, examines the construction of the Abu Dis wall.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Cry, our beloved country
By Gideon Levy
Haaretz, January 11, 2004
Perhaps, after all, the world will save Israel from itself. Perhaps Israel's real friends will increase the pressure on the government. Perhaps they will understand that, even in Israel, external pressure is not always bad, because it may be the last chance to bring Israel back on the straight and narrow and make it a more just state.The last attempt is modest, at present, but bodes well. The UN, an institution not highly thought of in Israel, resolved to bring the separation fence to the International Court of Justice in The Hague (ICJ), another institution sneered at in this country. This has already aroused surprising nervousness in Jerusalem's government corridors. Where the outcry of the Palestinians and the protest of the extreme left failed, the UN succeeded. This is not bad news. Suddenly Jerusalem officials discovered the wrongs the fence was causing. After most of its construction was completed, incarcerating thousands of families in compounds without anyone caring, a feeling of discomfort arose in Jerusalem. Yosef Lapid even warned of turning Israel into South Africa in the eyes of the world.Good morning, justice minister, but your warning is too late. South Africa has been here for a long time already, and this is how most states of the world see it. Still, better late than never, only it's a pity the justice minister needed The Hague threat to understand that the fence his government built is an apartheid fence.Had he bothered to go and see with his own eyes the thousands of school children waiting every morning, in all weather, for the IDF or Border Police jeep to arrive and open the gate for them on their way to school, the farmers cut off from their fields, the patients kept away from their clinics, the villages locked and bolted and the sight of a town behind barbed wire, he would not have needed the threat from The Hague to understand the injustice. After the settlements, the fence is the next punishment to be forced on the Palestinians. Israel, as usual, ignored it.South Africa was saved from itself and became a fair state, first and foremost because of international pressure exerted on its government. Had it not been for the economic sanctions and political isolation, perhaps apartheid would have lasted forever. Most of the fighters against apartheid saw the international pressure as a blessing and encouraged it. Regrettably, this applies to the Israeli occupation as well.The pressure on apartheid South Africa began with a decision of the same ICJ the fence has now been brought before. From there, it's a short step to imposing economic sanctions and other boycotts, until the regime collapses and justice is established in the battered country. This could be the narrative of events in our case too. Anyone who fears for Israel's moral image should not be afraid of this.Even without the wall, the Israeli occupation could be compared to South Africa's apartheid, even if the Israeli ideology is less despicable. Don't roads for Jews only, as most West Bank roads are today, justify the comparison? Aren't roadblocks distinguishing among people on the sole basis of origin racist?It is regrettable that the fence reached The Hague. It is a pity Israel did not understand by itself that everyone may build a fence for his defense, but only on his own territory, not his neighbor's. Those who were supposed to raise a hue and cry against the fence that imprisoned people and usurped their land, kept mum. Those whose job it was to preserve the state's moral image and prevent what the fence is causing to tens of thousands of innocent people, betrayed their duty.The media were not interested, the justice minister waited for The Hague, the attorney general gave everything the stamp of approval and the Supreme Court said not a word. Only the threat from The Hague managed to raise doubts.Now the fence track around a few imprisoned villages is being modified, in an attempt to correct a little of the evil. What happened? Didn't the IDF know before that Hirbat Jabara would be fenced in from all directions, that Azun would perish behind the fence and that some of Joyous' houses would be cut off from the village? Didn't they look at the maps? Didn't they read the reports? Or the world newspapers?It is sad that fear of the ICJ fell on this project of iniquity, rather than fear of the High Court of Justice in Jerusalem. Thus, The Hague was left as the last recourse for justice in Israel.The hope that international institutions will rescue Israel from its evil doing is very problematic. But when the institutions of law and justice of the state fail, there is no recourse but to turn to the international one. Just like it would have been better had the whites in South Africa understood themselves that their regime was based on evil, it would have been better if those in power in Israel understood finally that our occupation regime is based on terrible evil that should have ended a long time ago.When this does not happen, when 37 years go by and the occupation only becomes more brutal, when the Israeli consciousness is not being "seared" and does not internalize the enormity of the wickedness, there is no choice but to turn to the world for help. "Cry, the beloved country," wrote South African teacher Alan Paton in 1948 about his country's sick regime. The enlightened world cheered. But when the beloved country does not cry out itself, only curls inwardly in indifference, there is no choice but to turn to the world, so that it cries out instead.
2. At a checkpoint in Gaza, courage and fear
Ghada Ageel, International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
http://www.iht.com/articles/124836.html
ZAHRA, Gaza. Last month, I went to visit my cousin Muhammad Aqil Abu-Shmaleh at the European hospital. Muhammad had been wounded in October in an Israeli missile strike that killed two of its intended targets and a bystander. A piece of shrapnel had plunged into Muhammad's spinal cord and left him paralyzed. He had been at the wrong place at the wrong time.
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The life of my family has now been turned upside down as we fight for Muhammad's physical and psychological health. The one comfort we have is the outpouring of concern and support from our neighbors in Khan Yunis, from Israelis of good will, and from friends the world over.
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On our way home from visiting Muhammad, my husband Nasser, my 3-year-old son Tariq and I were stuck at the checkpoint between Khan Yunis and Gaza City for more than six hours. This should be a 40-minute trip.
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At 6:50 p.m., the Israeli soldiers finally allowed some cars to pass. After five minutes they closed the checkpoint again. The people stuck on the other side of the checkpoint became so angry that they left their taxis and started to walk, challenging the Israelis and their guns. I felt a mixture of shock that people in Gaza were confronting guns with their chests, pride that Palestinians could do such things, when it was all too possible that nonviolent resistance could result in their death, and fear of what would happen.
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I had good cause for concern. Israeli soldiers started to shoot toward the people. It was very close and absolutely terrifying. I have lived with war, violence and occupation for all of my 33 years, but will never become accustomed to the horror and the fear.
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Adding to my fear was the presence of our son. Close by, a young man was shot in the back of his leg. Incredibly, the people continued to walk. Friends of the youth put him in our car.
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The youngster was bleeding and crying and his sobs mixed with those of my child. There is a powerful instinct, which I believe all mothers have, to protect children at any cost. But there, at that time, I felt totally powerless. Yet I was not completely immobilized. I started to shout at people to open the way for our car to move. At the same time I punched the numbers I know all too well for the hospital to send an ambulance.
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After 15 minutes of shouting and maneuvering, we got the youth into an ambulance. I discovered I had lost my voice from screaming.
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My family's refugee camp, Khan Yunis, was recently attacked twice in one week by Israeli forces. Dozens of homes were demolished, like the hundreds of others in Gaza and the West Bank that have been reduced to rubble over the past three years. Many families came to my parents' home to take shelter. It may be 2003, but in my mind we have traveled back to 1948 when my parents and hundreds of thousands of our people fled their homes.
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What more does Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government want of us? What benefit is gained by the Israeli Army keeping civilians waiting for hours at checkpoints? How can Israel's leaders justify driving us from our homes 55 years ago and then setting their sights and bulldozers on our refugee camps?
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How can it be conscionable for good people anywhere that Palestinians are forced to flee from place to place, never to return home?
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Having seen my cousin lying in a hospital bed and a teenager bleeding profusely in the back of our family car with my 3-year-old looking on, I realize that there is no place to run and no place to hide in Gaza. My son was not physically harmed, but how can a 3-year-old process what my mind can scarcely comprehend? His psychological processing consists of running around the house, cocking his finger like a gun and shouting, "Tah, tah, tah" to imitate the sound of the Israeli bullets so recently fired in his direction.
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When Nasser and I married we thought a just peace was a real possibility. We thought we would be able to offer our children safety and a hopeful future. I went so far as to study Hebrew in Israel. But our hopes for the future of our family and our people have not been met.
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The occupation continues because Sharon's government continues to think it can have both quiet and occupation. It cannot.
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When you see people walk unarmed into gunfire to reach their destination you realize that they are striving for something more than a physical destination. This is what I believe can be best expressed as the very human desire for freedom. No power and no force can enter our hearts and extinguish it.
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That day of Palestinian freedom will be sped up considerably if such spontaneous, nonviolent displays of principle and courage receive more coverage in the United States and elsewhere. We need no U.S. Army to fight for us. We ask only for a commitment to evenhandedness.
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We have suffered long enough.
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The writer, a doctoral student at Exeter University, Britain, lives in Gaza.
3. Wailing wall
By Lily Galili
Ha'aretz, January 16, 2004
With great speed, the original low, irrelevant wall is being replaced in East Jerusalem with a new structure that resembles some vast mythological dragon. All around are people who thought they'd already seen everything during the occupation, watching the scene in disbelief
If Jesus had been born 2,000 years later, he would have had a hard time bringing about the famous miracle of Bethany, in which he bid Lazarus - who had died four days earlier and was buried in a cave, wrapped in shrouds - to "come forth." This conjecture is not based on new information about changes in Jesus' skills, but on the height and impact of the wall that is now being built in the town of Azzariyeh, next to Jerusalem, the Bethany of the New Testament, whose Arabic name derives from the name of Lazarus. The local Palestinians, showing surprising humor in view of the massive barrier that is being erected in front of their homes, joke that the wall would have made it impossible for even Jesus to get to the place. And even if Jesus would have found passage problematic, it's easy to understand how flesh-and-blood Palestinians feel in the face of the "obstacle" that is being built in front of their eyes - a concrete wall, 8 meters high, made of slabs that are connected to one another. There are many objections to the Israeli use of the word "obstacle," as though it were a euphemism to avoid the open use of the word "wall." In fact, though, "obstacle" is an extraordinarily accurate word in this case. A wall is just a wall, but this threatening concrete monster is rapidly becoming a true obstacle in every sphere of life.According to a study by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which is based in East Jerusalem, the wall in this area will disrupt not only the mobility of the Palestinians, but also their access to education and health services, and sources of livelihood - all basic, existential needs that the Fourth Geneva Convention is intended to protect and ensure. The opposition of OCHA to the fence is not all-inclusive; it is based on the route of the fence and its infringement of these basic human rights. Up to their nosesOn Monday of this week four heads were looking out of a window on the second floor of a residential building in the town of Abu Dis, which abuts on the Old City of Jerusalem to the east. They watched with astonishment as the slabs of the wall were connected to one another, each new piece bringing the wall closer to the very tip of their nose, like some sort of looming mythological dragon. The heads belong to four students who attend Al-Quds University, three of them studying nursing, the fourth, political science. All four are from the West Bank, two from the Tul Karm area, the other two from Hebron. Like young people everywhere, they sought not only higher education, but also independence away from home in the big city; and, like other Muslims, they wanted to be close to the mosque in Jerusalem. Instead, they got the fence in their face, two meters from the entrance to their house. It started off as a low fence, 2.5 meters tall. Even then, when it was first to be built, three months ago, it was a visual blight, but that, it turns out, wasn't the end. Many photographs documented local residents, including elderly people and children, climbing over that nascent version of the wall. This week it grew taller. In the meantime the four are imprisoned in their residence, without electricity - which was cut off because of the construction - and subjected to ear-splitting noise. They can't even leave their apartment, because of the roadblocks that have been set up everywhere in order to protect the wall. "I have already missed an important exam in English because of this," says Mohammed Lutfi Huseen, who was born in Kuwait, where his father teaches English, and returned here alone three years ago. "This is not what I dreamed about," he adds with an embarrassed smile.Now Huseen is watching as the ineffective low wall is being transformed into a high wall. The forklifts, the bulldozers, the generator that was brought in so the work could continue at night - they are all back. With a speed uncharacteristic of Israel the irrelevant wall is being uprooted and replaced with the new structure. All around are people who thought they had already seen everything in the course of the occupation, and are watching the scene in disbelief. "They have killed my business," says Hassan Ekermawi, who has a grocery store in the gas station that has now become a construction site. "Before this, people used to come to buy from Abu Dis, from Azzariyeh, from the eastern part of Sawahra. It's all one unit of Jerusalem, you know. Now no one comes." The grocery store will, in fact, remain on the Jerusalem side, but the customers will be on the other side, behind the wall. "Do you know what the strangest thing about this story is?" he asks and replies himself, "that we, the Jerusalem Palestinians, are paying for this whole project with our taxes, with the cut in my father's old-age pension. I am not talking about politics now, I am talking about life." About 10 meters away, on the other side of the road along which the wall is being built, all the stores are closed. It's hard to avoid wondering who decided that the Jerusalem shop owner on the right side of the road is so much friendlier to Israel than his colleague on the left side, which will now become "territories." Now six 14-year-old students arrive at the area of the wall. They are making their way from their school in Jerusalem to their homes in Azzariyeh. They all have Jerusalem residence cards, but they live in the territories. They know that this is probably the last time they will be able to do this route on foot, to jump over the low wall and get home safely. At the speed with which the work is being carried out, with an incentive of NIS 500 for night work per worker, it's likely that their route will be blocked by a high wall within a day or two.They are asked what they think will happen. "Our parents will try to rent houses in East Jerusalem," they say. This, too, is part of the weird logic in this story. The implicit intention of the route chosen for the fence - which can be summed up by saying that Israel will get as much land as possible and the Palestinians as little as possible - doesn't always work in reality. According to OCHA, about 15 percent of the 11,000 residents of Abu Dis and about a quarter of the 16,000 residents of Azzariyeh have Jerusalem ID cards. Some of them, those who can afford to pay the rocketing prices of the apartments in East Jerusalem, where demand has soared due to the wall, are moving to the other side. Defeated logicIf the wall has any demographic logic, it is defeated by events on the ground. One of the speakers in a symposium about the wall that was held this week at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute was Terry Bulata, principal of the New Generation School in Abu Dis. She has a Jerusalem ID card, though her husband has a "territories" card. "If the idea was to make life hard for us with the wall, so that we will leave, that is not about to happen," she says. "We have learned the lesson of 1948: We are not going anywhere."Nor is Ibrahim Qiresh going anywhere, though he could if he wants. Twelve years ago he moved with his wife and their 9 children from Wadi Joz in East Jerusalem to Azzariyeh, where prices were cheaper. He built his home on a steep hill in the town, which is a suburb of Jerusalem, and then rebuilt it after it was demolished by order of the municipality. A finely wrought window adorning the facade of the house is the professional pride of Qiresh, a metalworker who counts many Israelis, including artists, among his friends. In the past month a 9-meter-high wall has arisen in front of Qiresh's house, cutting him off from the lovely view of the slopes of the Mount of Olives. In his workshop, where he also has a large dovecote - he raises the birds for pleasure, explaining, "I can't bring myself to slaughter them for food" - he says that until now his life was pretty orderly, even if by moving he lost his entitlement to National Insurance Institute child allowances and to Kupat Holim health maintenance organization services for himself. An Israeli friend helped him obtain private health insurance, as though he were a foreign resident. "It's as though I am living abroad," he guffaws. Still, the Jerusalem residency card afforded him a certain mobility, and clients would come from Tel Aviv to order special window frames. In the course of the intifada, with its prolonged closures and curfews, he lost his livelihood, and now his life is about to be ruined, too. Even now, with the wall only in the construction stage, the Jerusalem card, which was once an asset, has become a liability. Whenever he arrives at a checkpoint, or tries to get home on foot via the Mount of Olives in order to bypass checkpoints, he is told, "Go back to Jerusalem." "I don't know what is going to happen now, with the wall," he says. "I live in Palestine, but the police keep sending me back to Jerusalem. But I can't go back to Jerusalem. I tried, but even the simplest apartment there costs at least $500 a month. I haven't got that. When the wall is completely finished, I will close the workshop. We will be in a prison. What can we do. When God brings a person into the world, he calculates his life." Devastating effectsHowever, other elements are also intervening in that calculation. While we were conversing, a curfew was suddenly imposed on Azzariyeh. According to the official version, there was a "serious security problem"; according to the Palestinian version, the curfew was intended to help get the wall built faster. Within minutes, the town, once a favored shopping area for Jerusalem's Jews, too, becomes a ghost town. The gates of the shops are slammed shut, people disappear into their homes. From the area next to the high wall, Border Policemen in a Jeep can be seen shooing pedestrians from the bottom of the Mount of Olives toward Azzariyeh. One of them was a young mother who was holding an infant newly born at Makassed Hospital on the Mount of Olives; another was an elderly woman who was returning home from an examination after open-heart surgery. She could barely trudge through the muddy ground, and was assisted by men who saw her plight.But even life as an extreme sport will change once the wall is in place. The residents of Azzariyeh will be cut off not only from their natural attachment to Jerusalem, but also from the hospital that serves them. "Maybe we will die," a women from Azzariyeh says with bizarre merriment as she walks home from a visit to her brother, who has undergone a serious operation at Makassed. But even the right to transit by foot, which is still possible, is ultimately not going to help 10-year-old Abdullah Iyyad. He was born with broken bones in his legs. When he was a year old, his family used all its resources to spend four years in Philadelphia, where there is a children's hospital that specializes in surgery of this kind. The family returned to Azzariyeh 5 years ago. Abdullah, wheelchair-ridden, was sent to a special school, which is also a treatment center, on the Mount of Olives. Before the wall - people here divide their lives into "before" and "after" - Adnan Iyyad, Abdullah's father, brought his son to a taxi that waited every morning by the gas station at the entrance to Azzariyeh, lifted him out of the wheelchair and placed him in the cab, which had yellow (Israeli) license plates. Within three minutes the boy was in school. Now it's a different story. The road from the gas station is blocked and the taxi has to take a long roundabout route via the Ma'aleh Adumim road to the Mount of Olives. Instead of NIS 15, the cost of the trip before, Abdullah's father now has to pay NIS 80 every day to get his son to school. He himself can't drive the boy, because he doesn't have an entry permit for Jerusalem. Because of the steep expenses, the family doesn't have the money to pay for Abdullah's physiotherapy, which costs NIS 30 per treatment, or for gas to heat the house. The wall and the innumerable checkpoints have also had a devastating effect on the livelihood of Adnan Iyyad: Residents of Jerusalem no longer bring him their television sets to repair. The new route is also taking a toll on Abdullah's schooling. Every morning the cab is stuck in traffic jams at the checkpoint, as they wait for the residents of Ma'aleh Adumim - a city east of Jerusalem, in the West Bank - to make their way to work safely. Nearly every day he is late for his first lesson. Taking the approach that everything is relative, Adnan says he envies healthy people who until now could climb over the low fence. After all, it's impossible to lift a wheelchair weighing 75 kilograms over the fence. Until now there was a small gate in the low fence and he was able to carry his son through it, if the soldiers let him. Now the gate is being sealed with concrete and the Iyyad family has a new problem. Like everyone else, they are unable to imagine what life will be like after Azzariyeh is completely sealed off by the wall. Something of that emerging reality can be seen at the "Container Checkpoint." In the West Bank, Ibrahim Halsa's kiosk (which functions in a container) is at least as famous as the Ha'oman 17 nightclub in West Jerusalem. The reason is that the checkpoint between the Jerusalem village of Sawahra and the twisting road that leads to Bethlehem and effectively connects the northern and southern sections of the West Bank, is named after this kiosk, which is no more than an old hut in which Halsa has sold sweets, Coca-Cola and shoe polish for the past 12 years. Until not long ago, it was situated at the bend in the road and was easily accessible to customers. When the permanent checkpoint was established, Halsa was told to move his kiosk to a different road, where passing cars can't possibly stop, so his already meager income was wiped out. Halsa thus joined the growing number of the poor in the West Bank, where unemployment is rampant and which is being abandoned by international aid organizations that are fed up with the unending occupation. After arguing among themselves, the representatives of these organizations reached the conclusion that responsibility lies with the occupier and that by assisting the residents, they were effectively underwriting the occupation. Sawahra is an integral part of the bloc of villages that includes Azzariyeh and Abu Dis, meaning the "territories," but it is also an integral part of Sawahra, which is in Jerusalem, meaning Israel. Now the wall, which is already under construction here, will divide the two parts of Sawahra, and the entire bloc that will remain in the territories is supposed to shift its urban affinity from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. It sounds simple, but it involves the uprooting of a whole fabric of life. For example, instead of being able to walk four kilometers to Makassed Hospital, those on the West Bank side will have to make a trip of 18 kilometers along a winding trail that is known in Arabic as the "Valley of Fire." The checkpoint, which brought about endless traffic jams even before the fence sealed the area hermetically, seems to have no logic. If the intention of the fence in the Jerusalem area is to cut off the city from the West Bank, why stick a checkpoint in the heart of what has now become a central road that links the north of the West Bank to the south? "There is a security event," a grim-faced Border Policeman says, explaining the long line of cars backed up at the place. An ambulance that had tried to make its way through the narrow space on the side was stuck in that traffic jam this week. The driver simply gave up and stopped along the shoulder. In the ambulance was a 7-year-old boy suffering from brain cancer, who was on his way home to a village near Hebron after receiving chemotherapy in Jordan. The boy's father, Faiz Aidah, a graduate of Abu Dis University and a social worker by profession, stepped out of the ambulance. The chilling calm with which he accepted the situation - the result of a cruel process of adjustment - was harder to take than any outburst of hysteria would have been. Every 20 days he makes this journey with his son, "and it's the same situation every time," he says. Afterward he would explain that it's nevertheless easier to get to Jordan for treatment than to Hadassah University Hospital on nearby Mount Scopus, which entails a route studded with no end of checkpoints. "The fence around Jerusalem in the east is not separating Israelis from Palestinians, but is separating 200,000 Palestinians, who will remain in Israel, from 82,500 Palestinians outside the fence," was how Colonel (ret.) Shaul Arieli, who was involved in the Geneva Accord, summed up the situation in the symposium held at the Van Leer Institute. "The political consideration overcame the security consideration."The situation was summed up less neatly by Ayoub Saadi Abu Saad, a 25-year-old construction worker, who arrived breathing heavily after a panicky run. In the morning, when he crossed the open field between Azzariyeh and Jerusalem on his way to work, as he does every morning, he ran into Border Policeman, who told him, "Palestinian, go to Palestine." So he ran. In a few days even that route will be impossible. "They are closing us in like birds in a cage," he says. "Now all they have to do is cover it with a net and we won't be able to fly, either." Then he bursts out laughing, pleased with his metaphor - though a lot less pleased with the situation.
Monday, January 19
Sunday, January 4
MCC Palestine Update #92
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
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
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.
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