MCC Palestine Update #107
17 March 2005
The Persistence of Misplaced Optimism
With all of the hardships and tragedies facing the human experience today, it is quite normal for us to hold on to any glimmer of hope or optimism that comes our way. This is especially true here, under the umbrella of fear and death that casts a shadow over much of life in Palestine / Israel. Thus much has been said about the windows of opportunity and the growing optimism of “truces,” “peace processes,” and burgeoning “democracies.”
This sense of optimism rests easily in the calm homes of the Global North. But unfortunately, that optimism suffers a very short half-life here under occupation. One needs only attempt the short journey from Jerusalem to Bethlehem—a six-mile distance—to learn the misplaced nature of this optimism. For as soon as you make your way to Bethlehem, you must first face the main checkpoint guarding the entrance to the “little town,” where chances are you will notice lines of Palestinian men being detained on the side of the road for trying to get to their places of employment outside of Bethlehem.
But what is most striking is the “Wall.” Standing about thirty feet high, the “Separation” or “Apartheid” Wall has recently grown at a considerable pace around Bethlehem, now almost complete, imprisoning this Palestinian community here.
It is difficult to communicate just how impacting this sight is when entering Bethlehem, face-to-face with this monstrosity of concrete. “Disturbing” does not quite describe it. “Sad” also falls short. “Heart-breaking” is a little more appropriate, tying to capture all of the visceral responses to this visual trauma. It is against this Wall that any semblance of optimism for many in this land has been shattered
When the Wall is complete, the larger communities of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour will be completely cut off, an open-air prison, with only three points of entry / exit. (For more information and maps of these developments, please visit www.stopthewall.org/maps/857.shtml as well as www.humanitarianinfo.org/opt/docs/UN/Beth_Rep_Dec_04_EN.pdf.)
“Disengagement”? Sure. Occupation? Still!
The construction of this Wall is just one of the several finishing touches that are integral to the creation of a “Palestinian State” composed of segregated reservations on only about forty percent of the West Bank. Palestinians will be confined to these reservations, which will be rendered “contiguous” (per a recent comment by U.S. President George W. Bush; see Uri Averny’s commentary below) by a new network of tunnels accommodated to the equally absurd network of illegal “Jews-only” colonist roads for “outposts” and “settlements”—colonies all and illegal.
The unilateral “disengagement plan” to remove all Israeli settlers from Gaza continues to move forward. Yet the language of disengagement distracts the listener from other developments, like the plan to build 400 more new housing units for a burgeoning settlement right in Bethlehem, one purpose of which is to “resettle” those leaving Gaza in the West Bank, solidifying Israel’s control over this area. The fact that does not get media play is that despite this “disengagement,” Israel will continue to maintain absolute control over all of Gaza’s borders (land and sea) as well as its airspace, which means that Israel will be very much still holding the Gaza Strip under occupation.
Exploring Alternative Pressures
It is due to this misplaced optimism and the seemingly ineffective nature of political or legal mechanisms to find a justpeace for this land that a growing conversation about exploring economic pressure has developed. Shamai Leibowitz, an Israeli lawyer from Tel Aviv, points out that
"After years of failed political efforts by the Israeli and international human rights community aimed at ending the occupation, it is clear that new approaches must be implemented. It is time for American civic institutions to support a multi-tiered campaign of strategic, selective sanctions against Israel until the occupation ends. Since the Israeli government is flagrantly disobeying the ICJ decision, international law mandates the use of sanctions to force Israel to comply with UN resolutions and human rights treaties."
Read more about his thoughts in an article attached below. For more on Jewish voices calling for exploring economic pressures to end the occupation, please also visit MCC partner the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) at http://www.icahd.org/eng/news.asp?menu=5&submenu=1&item=218 or Jewish Voices for Peace at http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/pressRelease.jsp?press_release_KEY=47&t=press.dwt
Zochrot at Lifta
On February 25th, MCC partner organization the Zochrot Association visited the destroyed Palestinian village of Lifta. Situated on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Lifta was one of over 500 Palestinian villages destroyed by Israeli forces between 1947 and 1949, with its over 2,500 inhabitants numbered among the 700,000 to 900,00 Palestinians made refugees in what became known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe.” An Israeli organization, Zochrot (which means “Remember” in Hebrew) invited Palestinian refugees from Lifta to speak about their village and their experiences of dispossession to a gathering over 200 people and posted signs in Hebrew and in Arabic at various points in the village to mark where the mosque, the oil press, village spring, and the cemetery lay.
Today you can still see some of the old homes sitting on the valley floor of this picturesque location as you look down from Ben Gurion highway. But not for long. What does remain of the village is scheduled to be destroyed to make way for a new suburban neighborhood for Jerusalem. Almost sixty years after its destruction, Lifta is still being targeted in these further attempts to erase any sign of Palestinian existence prior to the Nakba.
You can find out more information about the Zochrot Association and their remembrance of Lifta by visiting www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=186 as well as www.electronicintifada.net/v2/article3652.shtml.
Lent in the “Holy Land”
As this Lenten season comes to an end, we cannot help but reflect with our Palestinian friends and neighbors on what it means to celebrate Easter in the midst of despair. The season of Lent always seems more appropriate than that of Easter. And yet, ours is an Easter faith. Here, it is a constant source of struggle to rediscover from where our hope comes from. Zoughbi Zoughbi, our good friend and partner at the Wi’am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center, has described it as moving along the Stations of the Cross. “We know that the end, the final station brings resurrection and the new life that conquers death. But we just do not know which station we are on right now.”
During this Easter season, would you reflect on the historical realities of this land and struggle as well with those who would seek to know how to proclaim the light and life of resurrection to those living under the darkness of oppression?
Peace to you all,
Timothy and Christi Seidel.
Peace Development Workers
Mennonite Central Committee - Palestine
Attachments:
· Shamai Leibowitz, “Israel: A Call for Divestment,” The Nation, 16 March 2005
· Ali Abunimah, “Is peace in Palestine about to break out?” The Electronic Intifada, 25 February 2005
· Uri Avnery, “Finger After Finger,” Gush-Shalom.org, 26 February 2005
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The Nation
Israel: A Call for Divestment
Shamai Leibowitz
16 March 2005
The assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has led to an explosion of "people power" in the streets of Beirut, in which hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens have called for an end to Syria's occupation of their land. These calls have been celebrated and echoed in other capitals, and nowhere more so than in Washington. However, there is another area in the Middle East where a struggle to end foreign occupation has brought the natives only death and destruction. For decades, Israel has crushed the 3.5 million Palestinians living under military domination, beating them into submission while taking away their civil rights and their land.
As an Israeli Jew committed to peace for Israel and our neighbors, I was shocked and disgusted by the recent terror attack in Tel Aviv, which took the lives of innocent Jews. Such acts of terror have made headlines and been rightfully condemned by the international community. However, deadly Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians have not received significant press attention in the West or led to appropriate, decisive international action. For decades the Israeli army, equipped with US arms and technology, has killed, maimed, beaten and tortured tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Evidently, in the eyes of the West the people power of Palestinians does not count.
From 1986 to 1991 I served in the Israeli army in the occupied territories. During this period I was shocked and disgusted at what my comrades and I were repeatedly ordered to do to Palestinian civilians. To crush the uprising for independence and statehood, we were ordered to brutalize them. In one of our army bases in the West Bank, there was a mysterious room. Every day we watched Palestinians being led into it. After a couple of days our commanders would lead the Palestinians out, black and blue from bruises and their faces swollen. They resembled sacks of potatoes more than human beings.
We later realized this room was a torture chamber. On some days, we could hear screams coming from the room. It was a sickening experience. However, we continued participating in the occupation because Israeli politicians persuaded us that we were in the midst of a "peace process." So effusive were they in their lectures on how Israel "only wants peace" that we were blinded from seeing the reality of how the state is brutally oppressing, subjugating and dehumanizing the Palestinian people.
As many Israelis realize today, when Israeli governments talked about the peace process during the Oslo period, they were pulling the wool over the world's eyes. Israel continued colonizing the West Bank and Gaza with its Jewish-only settlements and, at the same time, entrenching a cruel military regime over Palestinians. The same is true today with Ariel Sharon's "disengagement" plan, which is being marketed by Israeli propaganda as a "painful concession" toward peace. Many of us who live in Israel and visit or serve in the occupied territories recognize the truth: Israel is continuously intensifying its military rule in the West Bank while stealing more Palestinian land and building more illegal Jewish-only settlements.
For years, American taxpayer money has funded the occupation--the torture chambers, the military apparatus, the bulldozers used in house demolitions, the building of settlements and now the construction of the West Bank wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Americans should be held accountable for where their money is going.
After years of failed political efforts by the Israeli and international human rights community aimed at ending the occupation, it is clear that new approaches must be implemented. It is time for American civic institutions to support a multi-tiered campaign of strategic, selective sanctions against Israel until the occupation ends. Since the Israeli government is flagrantly disobeying the ICJ decision, international law mandates the use of sanctions to force Israel to comply with UN resolutions and human rights treaties.
The first step for American institutions is to engage in selective divestment--withdrawal of their investments from companies that are, directly or indirectly, funding the occupation. First and foremost, states, cities, universities, churches, unions, banks and pension funds should divest from Israel Bonds, which finance the occupation, and from any company that sells arms, ammunition or other military equipment to Israel. This should include companies like Caterpillar, which manufactures and sells the bulldozers that have flattened thousands of Palestinian homes, and General Dynamics, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon and other corporations, because these companies play an active role in enabling Israeli forces to engage in practices that violate international humanitarian law.
Second, the West should hold Israeli military personnel and political leaders personally accountable for human rights violations, including trial before international courts and bans on travel to other countries. This strategy has been implemented in other conflicts (Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and South Africa, for example), proving its deterrent value and effectiveness.
Prohibiting the sale of arms and military equipment to Israel is, in fact, called for by existing US law. According to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 USC §2304), "No security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights."
The current hypocritical American Administration is not enforcing this law with regard to Israel. It is, therefore, up to American civil society to uphold the law and prevent the sale of any military equipment to Israel by pressuring the government, filing complaints against companies that violate this law and withdrawing all investments from such companies.
The Presbyterian Church took a positive step in this direction when in July 2004 its General Assembly passed a resolution calling for selective divestment from companies that profit from the occupation. This past February the World Council of Churches, which brings together more than 340 churches worldwide, issued a similar resolution. While criticizing the severe human rights abuses inherent in the occupation and the construction of the illegal West Bank wall, these resolutions also affirm the right of the State of Israel to exist securely and peacefully, and they categorically reject the tragic cycle of indiscriminate violence perpetrated by both sides against innocent civilian populations.
Sanctions are a powerful and nonviolent means to insure that the Israeli government abides by international law and ends its appalling human rights violations in the occupied territories. Divestment resolutions are long overdue. We have witnessed the power of worldwide economic pressure in the collapse of the South African apartheid regime. If American civic institutions follow the same strategy, we could see the end of the Israeli occupation in our lifetime. Americans should stand up for human rights and justice, follow their own law and take the most productive step toward peace and security in the Middle East.
Shamai Leibowitz, an Israeli human rights attorney from Tel Aviv, is a reserve staff sergeant in the Israeli tank corps and a member of Courage to Refuse, an organization of Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied Palestinian territories. He is also a member of Gush Shalom, the largest peace NGO in Israel.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050328&s=leibowitz
Note: For more on Jewish voices calling for exploring economic pressures to end the occupation, please visit MCC partner the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) at http://www.icahd.org/eng/news.asp?menu=5&submenu=1&item=218 or Jewish Voices for Peace at http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/pressRelease.jsp?press_release_KEY=47&t=press.dwt
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The Electronic Intifada
Is peace in Palestine about to break out?
Ali Abunimah
25 February 2005
Are Israelis and Palestinians finally on the road to peace? A cursory glance at commentary in the US press would seem to suggest so. Since Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas announced a truce in early February at the Sharm al-Sheikh summit, many observers see a "window of opportunity" they are encouraging both sides to leap through.
Sharon has announced he is now coordinating with the Palestinians on his originally unilateral plan to pull Israeli troops and settlers out of Gaza and the Israeli cabinet voted to approve the "disengagement."
The New York Times editorial gushed about the disengagement that "it would be churlish to greet [Sharon's] historic decision with anything other than enthusiasm." (24 February). The Chicago Tribune praised Sharon's "impressive" perfomance and marveled as he "defies death threats and warnings of a civil war to move his nation toward the kind of actions that are imperative for a two-state solution and a lasting peace." (24 February).
Behind the photo opportunities and historic handshakes, however, the evidence on the ground is that Israel is taking advantage of the new mood not to build peace, but to build more settlements. Without an immediate halt in settlement construction, the possibility for a territorially contiguous, free Palestinian state alongside Israel will remain a distant mirage, no matter how many times President Bush talks about it, and the present easing of tension will be no more than a short respite from more horror to come.
Phase One of President Bush's Road Map peace plan says that both sides must immediately halt all violence against eachother, and Israel must freeze all construction of Jewish-only settlements on occupied Palestinian land. But Palestinians still watch helplessly as Israeli bulldozers chew up their farms and orchards. Palestinian Authority prime minister Ahmed Qureia complained that "Israel is throwing sand in our eyes by continuing with the settlement process" in the occupied West Bank.
At a press conference with foreign reporters on 15 February, Sharon confirmed that Israel intends to keep "Jewish population blocs" inside the West Bank. Last Spring, the Bush administration explicitly endorsed Israel's intention to do so. Israel's housing minister Yitzhak Herzog announced in mid-February that Israel would build a new settlement called "Gvaot" near the West Bank city of Bethlehem. Herzog also said that settlers set to be evacuated from Gaza would be free to move to other settlements in the West Bank. "I cannot prevent an individual who wants to use his compensation to buy a house in Gush Etzion from doing so," he said, referring to a growing settlement near Jerusalem. (Reuters, 15 February 2005)
Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper reported that Israel is forging ahead with plans to expand Ma'ale Adumim, the largest settlement in the West Bank, which lies between Jerusalem and Jericho and cuts the West Bank in two from north to south. If this expansion goes ahead, as it seems it will, it confirms that Israel intends there to be no possibility for a contiguous Palestinian state. ("Herzog's Greater Jerusalem," by Shahar Ilan, Haaretz, 16 February).
Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper revealed that according to the state land authority, Israel plans to build more than 6,000 new homes in settlements in the West Bank -- many in Ma'ale Adumim -- and that the government will also legitimize 120 unauthorixed settlement outposts. (BBC, 25 February 2005)
A recent study by Israel's Peace Now using aerial photography and field research found that "the main building effort in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank is now focused on the area between the Green Line [1967 border] and the separation fence, and it is aimed at turning the fence into Israel's permanent border." ("Quietly carrying on building," Ha'aretz, 8 January 2005). A confidential report by the Israeli attorney general that found that "almost every major ministry in the Israeli government assisted in the construction, expansion and maintenance of illegal settlement outposts." ("Israelis Act to Encircle East Jerusalem; Enclaves in Arab Areas, Illegal Building Projects Seen Intended to Consolidate Control," The Washington Post, 7 February 2005)
This evidence bolsters Palestinian claims that the separation wall -- ruled illegal last July by the International Court of Justice -- is not a temporary security measure as Israel argues, but a land grab carried out while world attention focuses on Gaza. The deception, however, is not Israel's alone, but requires the active participation of all those invested in the "peace process" as it is currently configured and who prefer to talk about the Gaza as if it were the only and most important thing happening.
There is a vast and growing gap between the Bush administration's peace rhetoric and what is happening on the ground. Lately it has been easier to ignore these contradictions because exhausted Israelis and Palestinians are ready to give anything a chance. But time is very short.
Post-"truce" talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority to handover the West Bank city of Jericho to Palestinian control quickly stalled over where to place Israeli roadblocks around the town. Israel refused Palestinian demands for free movement from Jericho to Ramallah. Many Palestinians feel that what is happening now is not a genuine quest for peace, but simply discussions between the jailor and the prisoner on easing prison conditions.
Meanwhile, in Ramallah, democratic "reform" Palestinian Authority-style continues. The recent wrangle over the approval of a Palestinian cabinet has been presented as a struggle between the Arafat old guard and young reformers grouped around Abbas. While Palestinian Authority prime minister Ahmed Qureia has forced by the Palestinian Legislative Council to bring a number of technocrats into the cabinet, but he also brought in Mohammed Dahlan, the Gaza strongman closely allied with Abbas. Dahlan, the Gaza security chief in the heyday of Oslo is implicated in massive corruption and human rights abuses in Gaza. Qureia himself was the subject of a Legislative Council investigation into allegations that his family cement business sold concrete to Israel to build the separation wall in the occupied West Bank. Despite the investigative committee's recommendations for action, nothing has been done. Rather than genuine reform, the tussle in Ramallah appears to be little more than a redivision of the spoils among top figures in Fatah, the movement that monopolizes power in the Palestinian Authority.
If Palestinians feel that Abbas' Palestinian Authority is receiving international aid and support only to act as a proxy police force on behalf of a deepening Israeli occupation, it will rapidly lose what legitimacy it has. Abbas' problem was well illustrated by one Palestinian police officer in Gaza who told the Associated Press, "I will never raise my weapons against the [Palestinian] fighters ... I can only ask them not to fire." No Palestinian leader can order Palestinians to engage in civil war on Israel's behalf. In recent municipal elections in the Gaza Strip, Hamas trounced Fatah, an indication that despite a campaign of assassination against their leaders by Israel, Islamist opposition groups remain the strongest force in some parts of the occupied territories.
Other noteworthy developments on the ground bode ill for Palestinians. Under Israeli and American pressure, scandal-plagued UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recently decided not to renew the term of Peter Hansen, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which employs thousands of Palestinian refugees and cares for the basic needs of millions. Hansen, a seasoned and widely-respected professional, had angered Israel by vigorously defending his agency and staff against false Israeli allegations that they were involved in armed activity. Hansen's departure will be a blow to Palestinians, and only the more so if he is replaced by the new breed of UN official that Annan's dismal reign has ushered in, who are self-interested politicians first and international civil servants a distant second.
The dynamic that exists looks ominously like the failed Oslo peace process during which Israel doubled the number of settlers on Palestinian land, and never let up on forced land confiscation and house demolitions, sustaining a cycle of violence which claimed thousands of innocent lives. Despite the continuing euphoria created by Sharon's theatrics, there is no evidence that Israel has any intention of seizing perhaps the last opportunity to save itself through the two-state solution. Neither is there any sign that its chief sponsor, the United States, has any intention of pressuring it to do so.
Ali Abunimah is a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3637.shtml
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Gush-Shalom.org
Finger After Finger
Uri Avnery
26 February 2005
Seven words uttered by President Bush in Brussels have not been paid the attention they deserve.
He called for the establishment of “a democratic Palestinian state with territorial contiguity” in the West Bank, and then added: “A state on scattered territories will not work.”
It is worthwhile to ponder these words. Who did he point the finger at? Why did he say this in Brussels, of all places?
Nobody warns of a danger without a reason. If Bush said what he said, it means that he believes that someone is causing this danger.
Just who might that be?
For years now I have been warning that this is the intention of Ariel Sharon, the basis of the whole settlement enterprise planned and set up by him. The lay-out of the settlements on the West Bank map is designed to cut the territory up from North to South and from West to East, in order to forestall any possibility of establishing a really viable and contiguous Palestinian state, a state like any other.
If the settlement blocs that have been created are annexed to Israel, the Palestinian territory will be sliced up into a number of enclaves – perhaps four, perhaps six. The Gaza Strip, an isolated ghetto by itself, will be another enclave. Each enclave will be surrounded by settlements and military installations, and all of them will be cut off from the world outside.
The American intelligence agencies are familiar with this picture, of course. They can see it with their satellites. But that did not deter President Bush from promising Sharon last year that Israeli “population centers” in the West Bank will be annexed to Israel. These “population centers” are the very same settlement blocs that were defined by the US in the past as “illegal” and “an obstacle to peace”. During the presidency of the first President Bush, the American administration even decided to deduct the costs of new settlement projects from the financial benefits accorded to Israel.
So why did the second Bush suddenly make a declaration whose practical meaning is that some of these settlement blocs must be dismantled? And why did he make it in Brussels?
It is clear that he wanted to gain favor with his European hosts. The European Union opposes the annexation of West Bank territory to Israel. Bush said what he said in order to reduce his differences with Europe.
So he said it. And what is happening on the ground in the meantime?
Last Sunday the Israeli government decided for the second time to implement the disengagement plan, a decision that was hailed by the media as “historic”. With all the hullabaloo, hardly any attention was paid to a second resolution adopted at the same meeting: to continue building the wall in the West Bank.
At first sight, that is a routine decision. After all, the government argues that this is nothing but a “security fence”. It does indeed have a certain security function, and Israeli public opinion accepts it as such. But by now, informed people must know that this wall is intended as the future border of Israel. Therefore, this week all government spokespersons took pains to stress that the new path of the wall cuts off only 7-8% of the West Bank.
The word “only” deserves attention. President Bill Clinton’s last peace plan spoke about the annexation of 3-4% of the West Bank to Israel, in return for the transfer of 1% of Israeli territory to the Palestinian state. Seven percent of the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany is much more than the whole state of Saxony. Seven percent of the territory of the United States of America is more than the whole giant state of Texas. (Imagine: Mexico conquers Texas, builds a wall between it and the rest of the US and fills it with Mexican settlements.)
But the percentage game is misleading. It is not only the size of the territory that is important, but also its location.
In this respect, the controversy between Israel and the US remains. It concerns mainly two places, where the path of the wall causes the dismemberment of the West Bank. If the wall is to include the settlement town of Ariel, it will send a finger deep into the West Bank. This finger will connect with a second one, coming from the opposite direction – the two fingers together will cut through the whole width of the West Bank south of Nablus. Another finger will extend from Jerusalem to the enlarged Ma’aleh Adumim settlement bloc, also cutting practically the full width of the West Bank.
The Americans do not yet agree. So Sharon is using one of his typical methods: in those two places he leaves a gap in the wall. He will build there in due course, after using a future opportunity to wrap President Bush – so to say – around his little finger.
But the percentage account is also wrong in another respect. Nowadays one speaks only about the wall that will separate the West Bank from Israel proper. Nobody is talking now of the “Eastern” wall.
It is no secret that Sharon plans to build this wall in order to complete the encirclement of the West Bank and cut it off from the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea shore. That is a big slice of territory, about 20% of the West Bank, and would cut the West Bank off from any contact with the world. Sharon knows that he cannot build this wall at the moment, because of the opposition of the US and the whole world. Also, there is no budget for it. Therefore, he is leaving it for the future.
The government decision does formally include the southern border of the West Bank, where the planned path of the wall runs almost completely along the Green Line. That looks really nice. But this, too, contains a trick: Sharon does not intend to build this part of the wall in the near future. He is postponing it for another time – and then he will propose a different path altogether, including a finger thrust deeply into Palestinian territory, so as to annex the South Hebron settlement bloc, up to Kiryat Arba.
By way of deception shalt thou build settlements.
In the meantime, Sharon is keeping himself occupied with building on the 7% of the territory that has been approved by the government decision. All this area between the wall and the Green Line – the territory already annexed in practice – is being filled with new settlements. Among others:
· A new town called Gevaoth that is to be built west of Bethlehem, in what is called the “Etzion Bloc”.
That is a mendacious name: the original Etzion Bloc consisted of a small group of settlements near the Green Line. It was occupied by the Arabs in the 1948 war and re-conquered by Israel in 1967, when the former settlements were also re-built. But then a whole new town (Efrata) was added to the East, and beyond that a number of new settlements, until the original few settlements had expanded into a massive settlement bloc almost surrounding Bethlehem. Now Sharon is going to fill it with even more settlers.
· A big new settlement called “North Tsufim” that is to be built north of Qalqilia. This, too, will reach the proportions of a town.
· Giant housing projects, that will be set up in order to connect the Ma’aleh Adumim bloc to Jerusalem, and just about reach the Jordan river.
Also in the Jerusalem Area, the new (Labor) Minister for Housing, Yitzhak Herzog, promises to build big housing projects from Har Homa to Ma’aleh Adumim, while another one is going to be built east of a-Ram. The aim is to cut Jerusalem off completely from the West Bank.
All this is happening while Israel and the world are waxing lyrical about the “disengagement” plan – which, in essence, is nothing but a plan to consolidate the Gaza strip as one of the enclaves in “a state of scattered territories”. (The Gaza Strip constitutes only 6% of the occupied territories.)
The Labor party is a full partner in this scheme.
As far as Sharon is concerned, the disengagement plan plays with the dismantling of some small settlements in a remote corner of the occupied territories for the fulfillment of his grand design to take over most of the West Bank.
Now President Bush has declared that he does not accept this design. His European hosts smiled politely. Perhaps they believed him, and then, maybe they did not.
http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/article345.html
Thursday, March 17
Thursday, February 24
MCC Palestine Update #106
MCC Palestine Update #106
24 February 2005
Dear Friends,
Greetings from MCC Palestine. We hope that this update finds all of you well. The past month has been a busy time for us here in the unit as well as a highly profiled time for Israel and Palestine, as you have probably heard recently the talk of “cease-fires” and “truces.” We appreciate the opportunity to share some thoughts from an on-the-ground perspective.
Balancing the Equation: Can Peace Precede Equality?
Many people have written to us regarding the recent summit at Sharm a-Sheikh between the new Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. News broadcasts are full of developments: the return of men who were held up in the siege of the Nativity Church in 2002 who had been exiled from the West Bank to Gaza, the bodies of Palestinians who had been killed released to their families, and even a “re-routing” of the Israeli Separation Barrier. Developments like these, mixed with the warm sunshine of the recent spring-like weather here, can fill one with a sense of the hopeful nature of change. New beginnings, new prospects, new ideas.
What people who are living here need to know, however, is what does this do to balance the equation? Any “peace process” must fundamentally ensure the equality of the parties involved in order for peace to be sustained. There is a major imbalance of power between Israel and Palestine. There is also a major imbalance of international support for Israel over Palestine. In order to see some of these realities in facts and figures, visit www.ifamericansknew.org
So at the risk of sounding like eternal pessimists or cynics, we know that reality is what is found on the other side of the equal sign.
Separation Barrier inside of 1967 Green Line + Re-routing of Separation Barrier =
Separation Barrier Remains on Palestinian Land, Separating it from the People.
Settlements Removed From Gaza + More Settlements Established in West Bank =
Illegal Israeli Settlements on Palestinian Territory.
“Democratic” Palestinian Elections + Israeli Occupation =
New Leader under Occupation.
And that is the bottom line-occupation still exists. An occupation that is harmful to the well being of Israelis and Palestinians alike and harmful to a just and sustainable peace. As a local Palestinian woman said well, “Palestinians need something in their hands-to feel it.” A balanced equation.
For more information and maps concerning land issues, visit the websites of these MCC partners: www.arij.org, www.stopthewall.org, www.icahd.org
Bridges Not Walls Campaign
This past fall, the MCC Washington D.C. office launched a letter writing campaign in response to the Separation or Apartheid Wall that is being built on Palestinian land. The campaign, which has extended through this month, has resulted in close to 2,000 letters being written to the President or other political representatives concerning the issue. We are thankful for the response of individuals and churches in exercising their democratic voices regarding this issue.
MCC Advocacy Delegation Visits Israel and Palestine
February 16-18, delegates from MCC Offices in Canada and the United States came to visit the MCC Palestine unit, to visit Palestinian and Israeli partners and to discuss the direction for advocacy in the coming months. It was an encouraging time for our partners to be heard and for us working here in Palestine to feel encouraged and supported by the presence of individuals working in the North America to come and see the realities of the situation here and to be committed to advocating for a just peace.
As always, we are thankful for all of the support of those who read these updates. We appreciate the opportunity to bring people closer to the situation here. Attached are two articles addressing some of the issues raised in this update as well as a Lent reflection from Palestine.
In peace,
Chris and Tim Seidel
MCC Peace Development Workers in Bethlehem
Attached:
Lent Reflection: “To Know Him in His Suffering” by Chris Seidel
Article: “There will be no Middle East peace without justice: At no point yesterday did anyone mention occupation” by Robert Fisk
Article: “Good morning to the Israeli left” by Gideon Levy
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To Know Him in His Suffering
By Chris Seidel, MCC Palestine
“He was despised and rejected-a man of sorrows, acquainted with bitterest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way when he went by. He was despised, and we did not care.” -Isaiah 53:3
The rubble from the homes was only two days old when we arrived. Seventeen families were forced to find housing elsewhere. Some of them were being put up in the Red Crescent Hotel where we were staying, the only hotel in Khan Younis, Gaza.
Children were sitting on the dirt piles where a house once stood, warming themselves by a fire. The adults were sitting together drinking some coffee. They welcomed us to see their home, a tour that was not exactly safe. Bullet holes and other signs of shelling permeated the house; no room had been left untouched.
Their neighbors beckoned us to come and see their bathroom where, just two hours before, a missile had come through the ceiling, barely sparing the life of their two-year-old daughter Ghada. I looked at Ghada. It was obvious that she had Down’s Syndrome. I wondered how she would ever process this traumatic experience.
Another man came up to us. His name was Moustafah Hejoo. He asked, “Have you heard of Baby Iman? She’s from my family.” Baby Iman Hejoo was just four-months-old when she was killed in May 2001 by a missile fired into her house, also wounding her mother and grandmother.
It’s difficult to know how to celebrate Christ’s victory over death- his resurrection- when people are suffering and dying around us. This passage in Isaiah not only depicts Christ’s suffering, but also his abandonment. When I read this passage in light of my experience in Gaza, Christ becomes all of the people I met there.
Standing in the midst of the suffering in Khan Younis, I felt the pain and confusion of knowing that the story was supposed to have a happy ending, but that ending was nowhere to be found on the streets of Gaza.
In Philippians 3:10-11 Paul declares, “As a result, I can really know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I can learn what it means to suffer with him, sharing in his death, so that, somehow, I can experience the resurrection from the dead!” What do we have if not the hope of Christ’s resurrection, love’s power over death? But by definition, resurrection is preceded by death. We cannot share the hope of Christ’s resurrection without first knowing him in his suffering and death.
Moustafah Hejoo, like others we met in Gaza, did not want us to give him a house, food, clothing or money. But he did ask us for something. He asked us to tell these stories to the people in America. He asked for a voice, so that we may know him in his suffering. Each time we share in the suffering of others then pound on the doors of justice, we are like the grieving disciples, running to find an empty tomb. We are refusing to allow the story to end with death.
Because he said that whatever we do to the “least of these” we do to him, I can take comfort that when I look into Ghada’s eyes, Christ is looking back at me and his heart is breaking with mine. I have to embrace the spirit of Gethsemane, to courageously hope against the hopelessness, that the final words will not be “death and forsakenness.”
Christ’s resurrection demands justice for all those who suffer. How do we know Christ in his suffering and his resurrection? How will our Easter celebration play out in the world we live in?
________________________________
The Independent
There will be no Middle East peace without justice: At no point yesterday did anyone mention occupation.
Robert Fisk
9 February 2005
So, the Palestinians will end their occupation of Israel. No more will Palestinian tanks smash their way into Haifa and Tel Aviv. No more will Palestinian F-18s bomb Israeli population centres. No more will Palestinian Apache helicopters carry out "targeted killings" - ie: murders - of Israeli military leaders.
The Palestinians have promised to end all "acts of violence" against Israelis while Israel has promised to end all "military activity" against Palestinians. So that’s it, then. Peace in our time.
A Martian - even a well-educated Martian - would have gathered that this was the message, supposing he dropped in on the fantasy world of Sharm el-Sheikh yesterday. The Palestinians had been committing "violence", the Israelis carrying out "innocent" operations. Palestinian "violence" or "terror and violence" - the latter a more popular phrase since it carried the stigma of 11 September 2001 - was now at an end. Mahmoud Abbas - who told a close Lebanese friend this year that he wore a suit and tie so that he would look "different" to Yasser Arafat - went along with all this. Just which people were occupying the homes of which other people remained a mystery.
Silver-haired and wisdom-burdened, Mahmoud Abbas looked the part. We had to forget that it was this same Abbas who wrote the Oslo Accords, who in 1,000 pages failed to use - even once - the word "occupation", and who talked not of Israeli "withdrawal" from Palestinian territory, but of "redeployment".
At no point yesterday did anyone mention occupation. Like sex, "occupation" had to be censored out of the historical narrative. As usual - as in Oslo - the real issues were put back to a later date. Refugees, the "right of return", East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital: let’s deal with them later.
Never before have we been in such need of the caustic voice of the late Edward Said. Settlements - Jewish colonies for Jews, and Jews only, on Arab land - were not, of course, discussed yesterday. Nor was East Jerusalem. Nor was the "right of return" of 1948 refugees. These are the "unrealistic dreams" that were referred to by the Israelis yesterday.
All this will be discussed "later" - as they were supposed to be in Abbas’s hopeless Oslo agreement. As long as you can postpone the real causes of war, that’s OK. "An end to violence," that has cost 4,000 deaths - it was all said yesterday, minus the all-important equation that two-thirds of these were Palestinian lives. Peace, peace, peace. It was like terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It was the sort of stuff you could buy off a supermarket shelf. If only.
At the end of the day the issues were these. Will the Israelis close down their massive settlements in the West Bank, including those which surround Jerusalem? No mention of this yesterday. Will they end the expansion of Jewish settlements - for Jews, and Jews only, across the Palestinian West Bank? No mention of this yesterday. Will they allow the Palestinians to have a capital in Arab East Jerusalem? No mention of this yesterday. Will the Palestinians truly end their "intifada" - including their murderous suicide bombings - as a result of these non-existent promises?
Like the Iraqi elections - which were also held under foreign occupation - the Israeli-Palestinian talks were historic because they were "historic". US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, "warned" Palestinians that they must "control violence" but there was, as usual, no request to "control" the violence of the Israeli army.
Because the sine qua non of the equation was that the Palestinians were guilty. That the Palestinians were the "violent" party - hence the admonition that the Palestinians must end "violence" while the Israelis would merely end "operations". The Palestinians, it seems, are generically violent. The Israelis generically law-abiding; the latter carry out "operations". Mahmoud Abbas went along with this nonsense.
It was all too clear in the reporting of yesterday’s events. What was on offer, said CNN, was "an end to all violence" - as if occupation and illegal colonisation was not a form of violence. The American Associated Press news agency talked gutlessly about "towns that, for now, continue to be under Israeli security control" - in other words, under Israeli occupation, although they would not tell their readers this.
So Mahmoud Abbas is going to be the Hamid Karzai of Palestine, his tie the equivalent of Karzai’s green gown, "our" new man in Palestine, the "tsunami" that has washed away the contamination of Yasser Arafat, whose grave Condoleezza Rice managed to avoid. But the tank-traps remain: East Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and the "right of return" of 1948 Palestinians to the homes they lost.
If we are going to clap our hands like the Sharm El-Sheikh "peacemakers" yesterday, we’d better realise that unless we are going to resolve these great issues of injustice now, this new act of "peacemaking" will prove to be as bloody as Oslo. Ask Mahmoud Abbas. He was the author of that first fatal agreement.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=609177
http://www.selvesandothers.org/article8380.html
http://www.robert-fisk.com
________________________________
Haaretz
Good morning to the Israeli left
Gideon Levy
13 February 2005
Good morning to the Israeli left. After an eternally long hibernation, we are starting to hear the sounds of its awakening. Only when the wind is once again blowing in its direction - and not because of anything it did - does the extra-parliamentary left dare to come out of the closet where it locked itself up more than four years ago.
Perhaps one should welcome these signs of awakening, but it is impossible not to hold it accountable for its lengthy, disgraceful and cowardly silence that abandoned the street to the right and the settlers. For more than four years Israel has been doing anything it wanted in the occupied areas, practically without any domestic criticism. It killed and demolished, uprooted and brutalized, and practically nobody protested. The world saw what was going on and shouted about it. But not us. When Israel desperately needed an alternative view, a clear sound of protest, practically nothing was heard, not a peep, except from a few small and brave organizations.
So it is difficult to forgive those who were silent, looked away and wrapped themselves in indifference, thus depicting Israel as monolithically supporting the government. The rustling noises that are beginning to be heard from the Zionist left are too late to clear it of its responsibility: With its silence until now it became a partner to all the government did during those damnable years. With the evaporation of the Labor Party and the fear and impotence that gripped the other bodies of the Zionist left, the only active element in society was the settlers. Thus the government managed to continue its brutal policies and the settlers nurtured their enterprise without disruption.
Now, under cover of a prime minister from the right, the left suddenly has remembered that it also has something to say, as a weak, pale echo of Ariel Sharon. The first to speak up, as usual, were the writers of the avant-garde, at the head of the camp. In a properly stylish advertisement a few days ago, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Meir Shalev, Agi Mishol and a few other elite writers called out for "a change in consciousness and feeling."
What change? What consciousness? They also called for a renewal of the political negotiations, a very daring move after the Sharm el-Sheikh summit, and proposed the government recognize the suffering of the Palestinian people, in exchange, of course, for their recognition of our suffering.
A group of filmmakers and musicians joined in that call, but with one difference. At least in the advertisement from Daniel Barenboim, Pinhas Zuckerman and Zubin Mehta, there is at least an admission that the occupation is the direct source of the suffering of the Palestinian people and there is a clear call in their ad for an end to it; the authors weren't ready to go that far.
It's hard to believe: After nearly 38 years of occupation and four years of intifada, the leading writers of the peace camp are still dividing the responsibility for what is happening symmetrically between the two sides: "In our eyes, each of the sides bears some of the responsibility for the injustice, the suffering and the tragic situation in which the two nations are trapped," they wrote with self-righteousness.
That "we're all guilty" approach is no less outrageous than the silence that went on and on and on. How does one break the silence of the peace camp? Attribute the same measure of responsibility to the occupier and occupied, the powerful and the weak. Call both the soldiers at the checkpoints and their subjects, whose lives are beneath the soldiers' feet, "to change consciousness and feeling" even before the checkpoint is lifted; preach to the assassin and the assassinated to fall into each other's arms; draw parallels between a nation whose economic, cultural, social and emotional lives were completely destroyed and a nation in which the vast majority of people can go on with their lives as if nothing has happened; a people that has been imprisoned and humiliated, versus a free people in their own sovereign state.
Even without counting casualties - three times as many on the Palestinian side - there is no room for comparison, not of the extent of the suffering nor of the measure of responsibility. Can't the writers see the decisive weight of responsibility that lies on the occupier's side for the creation of the injustice, or did they not summon up the courage to admit as much, lest it anger the readers?
Immediately after the authors awoke, Peace Now came out of its faint. In another two weeks, it has been said, it will be returning to the street and squares. "The Coalition of the Majority," the umbrella organization of the left and the protest groups (oxymoronic titles if ever there were) is to convene a mass demonstration. Why didn't they do it beforehand, in the dark years of assassinations and demolitions when the need was far more critical? The explanations and excuses are ridiculous: the desire to maintain as broad a common denominator as possible and the fear of failure.
But the silence was the greatest failure of all. It is impossible not to ask now where everyone was for the 346 children that Israel killed. What prevented them from protesting when 112 wanted men were assassinated without trial and another 521 innocent passersby were killed at the same time? The demolition of half of Rafah, the uprooting of olive trees in the West Bank, the erection of the wall, the apartheid roads for Jews only, the imprisonment of an entire nation behind checkpoints for years - none of it awakened most of the artists or the "coalition of the majority." They were silent. They were afraid. They were complicit.
The alternative voices, the voices of the protest movements and authors, have a vital role in society that goes far beyond merely what they say. They are supposed to pave the way and protect the pluralistic and democratic character of the state. But after four and a half years in which society spoke in one uniform voice, the disgraceful silence on the left, the camp that only awakens under the patronage of the prime minister, shows it is a cowardly, frightened camp.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/539390.html
Saturday, January 15
Lenten Reflection: Seeking an “acceptable” fast…
Lenten Reflection: Seeking an “Acceptable” Fast…
9 January 2005
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,
and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Isaiah 58.3b-7
It has been three days now since we returned from a visit to Gaza and I have been unable to stop thinking about it. Images of shelled neighborhoods and children playing in the rubble of their demolished homes continue to fill my mind. The sounds of nightly shelling and explosions that made sleep difficult continue to distract me. The faces of the people whose lives we entered only for a brief time and the stories of their dispossession and death they implored us to hear continue to consume me.
“Tell our story…Please, tell our story.”
We had the privilege of visiting several families living in the Khan Younis refugee camp with our friends from the Culture and Free Thought Association—a group that MCC partners with that works with children and women.
On the western edge of Khan Younis, we visited that area of the refugee camp where only days before seventeen families had been made homeless by the Israeli military’s incursion into the camps. Khan Younis is only one of the many refugee camps that the Israeli military invades on a regular basis, in response to claims of “terrorist” attacks on illegal settlements and military outposts in Gaza. People, mostly children, were wandering through the remnants of what was a large neighborhood and market area. A small group was sitting in front of one of the only homes that was left standing. When they saw us they immediately began to describe the events of the last few days. One man brought us into the home the group was sitting in front of where only two hours before we arrived, an Israeli missile crashed through the roof of the room where a two-year-old had been sleeping. She was not injured, nushkur Allah. We looked out the back door of the house to see the Israeli watchtower in the not-too-far distance, but not for too long as he feared more shooting if they saw us looking too intently in that direction.
“Tell our story—wait, just one more minute” he turned and said to the young woman from the Culture and Free Thought Association who was helping us with translation, and trying to move us along as shooting in the distance grew louder from the checkpoint where we had been only twenty minutes before. “Just one thing you must do for me, ” he said looking back at us, straight into our eyes, “Please, tell our story.”
Christ has died. Whence the resurrection?
I have been sitting here trying to write, trying to articulate some relevant reflection upon Palestinian experiences here for a Lenten audience. But after this experience in Gaza, any reflection upon Lent or any other religious ritual or season seems difficult to undertake. Maybe even a little trivial. Definitely irrelevant if it does not engage both myself and the reader in a critical reflection on “Christian praxis” when it comes to engaging the injustices here.
Lent is often seen as a time of somber reflection, of humility, of penance and repentance. Lent is often associated with self-denial, especially in the form of fasting. And the writer of Isaiah spoke strongly of the Lord’s requirements when the people of God participate in such rituals.
We are told that any fasting that only serves our self-interest and contributes to the oppression of the weak and the marginalized is not only what God does not want, but what God abhors. Only the fast that moves beyond empty, conscience-soothing ritual and steps into the action of working towards the liberation of all people from oppression—an oppression that we are often the beneficiaries of—is acceptable. Indeed, it is demanded.
All our beliefs will not absolve us of our sins.
“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me…And just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (Matthew 25.31-46).
So this Lenten season, we will fast and we will pray. But Gaza will still be under attack. Beit Lahiya’s children will continue to be slaughtered beyond recognition. The shelling will continue to deny Khan Younis her sleep.
During this season of Lent, if we cannot respond to their cries, if we cannot make them our own, if the starting point of any Lenten reflection is not “My God, my God, why have you forsaken them? Us?”—then all of our prayers, our fasts, our rituals are not only a nefarious exercise of veiled self-interest but an active participation in the crucifixion of the Christ we only know in the children, women, and men of Gaza.
Christ has died. Whence the resurrection?
Timothy Seidel
Co-Peace Development Worker
Mennonite Central Committee - Palestine
(For a Lenten reflection from a Palestinian perspective, please visit the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center at http://www.sabeel.org/.)
9 January 2005
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,
and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?
Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Isaiah 58.3b-7
It has been three days now since we returned from a visit to Gaza and I have been unable to stop thinking about it. Images of shelled neighborhoods and children playing in the rubble of their demolished homes continue to fill my mind. The sounds of nightly shelling and explosions that made sleep difficult continue to distract me. The faces of the people whose lives we entered only for a brief time and the stories of their dispossession and death they implored us to hear continue to consume me.
“Tell our story…Please, tell our story.”
We had the privilege of visiting several families living in the Khan Younis refugee camp with our friends from the Culture and Free Thought Association—a group that MCC partners with that works with children and women.
On the western edge of Khan Younis, we visited that area of the refugee camp where only days before seventeen families had been made homeless by the Israeli military’s incursion into the camps. Khan Younis is only one of the many refugee camps that the Israeli military invades on a regular basis, in response to claims of “terrorist” attacks on illegal settlements and military outposts in Gaza. People, mostly children, were wandering through the remnants of what was a large neighborhood and market area. A small group was sitting in front of one of the only homes that was left standing. When they saw us they immediately began to describe the events of the last few days. One man brought us into the home the group was sitting in front of where only two hours before we arrived, an Israeli missile crashed through the roof of the room where a two-year-old had been sleeping. She was not injured, nushkur Allah. We looked out the back door of the house to see the Israeli watchtower in the not-too-far distance, but not for too long as he feared more shooting if they saw us looking too intently in that direction.
“Tell our story—wait, just one more minute” he turned and said to the young woman from the Culture and Free Thought Association who was helping us with translation, and trying to move us along as shooting in the distance grew louder from the checkpoint where we had been only twenty minutes before. “Just one thing you must do for me, ” he said looking back at us, straight into our eyes, “Please, tell our story.”
Christ has died. Whence the resurrection?
I have been sitting here trying to write, trying to articulate some relevant reflection upon Palestinian experiences here for a Lenten audience. But after this experience in Gaza, any reflection upon Lent or any other religious ritual or season seems difficult to undertake. Maybe even a little trivial. Definitely irrelevant if it does not engage both myself and the reader in a critical reflection on “Christian praxis” when it comes to engaging the injustices here.
Lent is often seen as a time of somber reflection, of humility, of penance and repentance. Lent is often associated with self-denial, especially in the form of fasting. And the writer of Isaiah spoke strongly of the Lord’s requirements when the people of God participate in such rituals.
We are told that any fasting that only serves our self-interest and contributes to the oppression of the weak and the marginalized is not only what God does not want, but what God abhors. Only the fast that moves beyond empty, conscience-soothing ritual and steps into the action of working towards the liberation of all people from oppression—an oppression that we are often the beneficiaries of—is acceptable. Indeed, it is demanded.
All our beliefs will not absolve us of our sins.
“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me…And just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (Matthew 25.31-46).
So this Lenten season, we will fast and we will pray. But Gaza will still be under attack. Beit Lahiya’s children will continue to be slaughtered beyond recognition. The shelling will continue to deny Khan Younis her sleep.
During this season of Lent, if we cannot respond to their cries, if we cannot make them our own, if the starting point of any Lenten reflection is not “My God, my God, why have you forsaken them? Us?”—then all of our prayers, our fasts, our rituals are not only a nefarious exercise of veiled self-interest but an active participation in the crucifixion of the Christ we only know in the children, women, and men of Gaza.
Christ has died. Whence the resurrection?
Timothy Seidel
Co-Peace Development Worker
Mennonite Central Committee - Palestine
(For a Lenten reflection from a Palestinian perspective, please visit the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center at http://www.sabeel.org/.)
Wednesday, January 12
MCC Palestine Update #105
MCC Palestine Update #105
12 January 2005
A Visit to Gaza
On Tuesday, January 4, MCC workers Sri Mayasandra and Chris and Tim Seidel visited MCC partner the Culture and Free Thought Association (CFTA) of Khan Younis, Gaza. The last MCC visit to CFTA was in June, and the fall months saw heightened military activity throughout the Gaza strip creating very dangerous travel conditions throughout. But as was seen on this last visit, military activity is a part of life for Gaza Residents. Gunfire and shelling were heard throughout both the day and night hours the group’s visit.
Maysoon, a young female staff member from CFTA served as a tour guide for the MCC group, taking them around to various parts of Khan Younis to see the severe atrocities that people are forced to live with. The group saw piles of rubble from houses preceded by bulldozer tracks, holes from shelling that dotted almost every building in sight, and children playing in what was left trying desperately to have childhoods.
This heartbreaking setting makes the courageous work of CFTA even more outstanding and valuable. CFTA just expanded into a new office at the turn of this New Year and the staff was busy working throughout. The group was given a tour of the Bunat al Ghad (Builders of the Future) Teenager Centre where there are incredible resources being developed for the youth, such as a science lab, theater, library, resource center, computer lab and photography and media center.
The next day the group visited the Al Shroq Wal Amal (Sunrise and Hope) Children’s Centre as children were finishing their last final mid-terms before their January break. At this center as well, the group toured the art center, a computer lab funded by MCC, music class, and playroom. As children shared their stories of first-hand encounters with the violence around them (not the least of which was the shooting death of a classmate in school), it was apparent that beyond being a cultural, health and educational center, it was a mental and somewhat emotional escape from the situation to experiences that should be normative for young children.
Afterwards, the group visited families that living in the camp around the Children’s Centre. The needs of the families were apparent, such as home repair and employment. However, the families desired only to express their stories and thoughts and be heard by the group. All of the families were thankful that the group had come to visit them in their homes and sit and listen to them.
The process of the disengagement of Israeli settlements from Gaza is to happen throughout this year 2005. With the settler resistance to the disengagement and heightened security throughout the process, one can speculate that there will by much more unrest, injuries and killings in the coming year (including those of women and children). Many Palestinians express little hope in the disengagement plan, only stating that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will do what he wants and disengagement will serve as a license for more settlements to be strategically placed in the West Bank creating Bantustans and making access and travel virtually impossible for Palestinians. And with the cruel nature of occupation, suffering Palestinians have little hope for anything to turn out to be in their best interests or for long-term peace.
In the meantime, CFTA is working to relieve the suffering of women by creating job opportunities and helping them to access quality health care and their rights. The group is working to protect the children of Khan Younis and helping to prepare adolescents to structure their lives for the future. For more information about the activities and programs of the Culture and Free Thought Association in Khan Younis, visit their website at www.palnet.com/~cfta/
Elections in Palestine: A Time of “Renewed Hope” or “Democratizing the Occupation”?
This past Sunday saw the election of Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen, as president of the Palestinian Authority. The outcome and the elections themselves continue to garner international attention, especially after the visits of such foreign dignitaries as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former U.S presidential candidate Senator John Kerry. Many have asked if the recent elections here have brought with them a sense of “renewed hope” for the Palestinian people. And indeed if one were to look at what is being reported in the English-speaking media, one might walk away with this perception.
But facts on the ground here, such as continuous Israeli incursions into Gaza, more colonies or “settlements” that are expanding (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/524066.html)—as well as the sophisticated system of settler roads and checkpoints that effectively divide the West Bank up into separated bantustans, more of the Apartheid Wall built, more children killed (http://pchrgaza.org/files/W_report/English/2005/06-01-2005.htm), and the exclusion from this process of the majority of the Palestinian population living as refugees in the region, left literally out in the cold, speak to another reality.
Since the passing of Yasser Arafat, many have been looking through the lenses of optimism and with the language of “renewed hope.” The problem with this “patronizing optimism” as some have called it is that it effectively renders invisible these “facts on the ground” and the story of those left dead and dying. And Palestinians know this. Palestinians know that before "optimism" and "hope" can be discussed at a negotiations table, these realities on the ground have to be seriously addressed and justice dealt.
To move from one place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in Gaza, where Palestinians are met by shelling at checkpoints on a regular basis, and then to be greeted by gifts of holiday chocolates at the checkpoint going into Bethlehem speaks all too well to these facts on the ground that are covered over with great effort. The thought that such a gesture of “good will” will create a “bridge for peace” is functional only for those who require an Apartheid Wall to ensure that definition of peace.
Christmas and the New Year in the “Holy Land”
Nonetheless we continue to be amazed by the hope that some Palestinians continue to be energized by, especially by those that MCC partners with. Take this past Christmas for example. At an ecumenical Christmas celebration sponsored by one of our partners Sabeel (http://www.sabeel.org/), there were at least six different church traditions represented—Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic. And they all took their turn singing their own traditional Christmas carols. It was incredible to see such a display, such a modeling of an alternative reality in the midst of occupation.
As we enter into another new year, we feel compelled to ask: How we are also modeling an alternative reality in the midst of the injustices of this world? How can we talk about hope in a genuine and authentic manner? Especially after these recent heavy experiences in Gaza, the subjective demand that is placed on our shoulders feels most pressing. The heaviness of such an exercise lies in the fact that the one who critically reflects upon “Christian praxis” is faced with a decision.
Our efforts at commitment and service must seek to find relevance and meaning and in turn offer a voice to the voiceless by way of compassion—com-passion, a “suffering with.” This essential element of a commitment that recognizes, as the Latin American theologians Leonardo and Clodovis Boff have stated, that “we are only on the side of the poor when we struggle along side them” cannot be emphasized enough to us members of the Global North as the beneficiaries of such a death-dealing occupation as the one that Palestinians face on a daily basis.
May the new year bring hope and renewal for our engagement in this critical reflection on “Christian praxis” when it comes to dealing seriously with the injustices here and all over the world.
Peace to you all,
Christi and Timothy Seidel.
Peace Development Workers
Mennonite Central Committee - Palestine
________________________________
Ha’aretz
New year, old story: During operations last weekend in the Gaza Strip, the army demolished 14 Palestinian homes, injured 30 Palestinians and killed 10, including a mentally disabled youth. Ringing in 2005.
Gideon Levy
6 January 2005
A quiet weekend: The Israel Defense Forces managed to conduct two operations in Gaza during a four-day period starting last Thursday and continuing through this past Sunday. This is how the New Year's celebration there looked: 10 Palestinians killed, including two teenagers, one of whom was mentally disabled; 30 Palestinians injured, including a cameraman from Channel 10; and another 14 homes demolished. While Israel was collecting food contributions for Sri Lanka, residents of Khan Yunis sat on the sand near their destroyed homes, eating a paltry lunch. On Sunday, after the operations ended, five Qassam rockets hit Sderot and mortar shells were fired at the Erez industrial zone, seriously injuring a 25-year-old worker, Nissim Arbib.
Operation "Purple Iron" had not ended yet and "Autumn Wind" had not yet begun to blow, and suddenly "Purple Rain" poured down upon the Erez checkpoint. There was a faint boom and then a mortar shell fell near us, in the adjacent industrial zone. Shlomi Eldar, a reporter for Channel 10, was on his way to meet with the Palestinians who were firing the mortars from Rafah, and we were going to meet the victims of "Purple Iron" in Khan Yunis. "See you this evening," we said, but by the time evening came, Eldar had already brought his cameraman, Majdi al-Arbid, to the hospital in serious condition. An IDF sniper shot him from a range of 300 meters in Jabalya, despite the fact that he held a television camera in his hand - or perhaps because of this.
Eldar, an experienced and honest reporter, is convinced that the photographer did not pose a risk to the sniper, who saw the camera and nonetheless shot without warning, intending only to injure the cameraman. He was hit by a bullet in the groin, two steps away from Eldar. Long hours passed before Eldar and the Channel 10 team managed to persuade the IDF to allow the bleeding photographer, whose life was at risk, to be rushed to a hospital in Israel.
The IDF is investigating.
On the way out of Erez, near Beit Hanun, there is a tank and a bulldozer, digging up the only access road. It is hard to know whether this is the end of "Purple Iron" or the beginning of "Autumn Wind," which began and ended on Sunday. How are people supposed to enter and exit Erez now?
Munir's atonement
The motorcade of candidate Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is making its way through the streets of Gaza. Abu Mazen injured his finger the previous day when a bodyguard closed the door of his car on his hand. Another candidate, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, is delayed at the Erez checkpoint on his way to another election rally. Entry into the Gaza Strip is now only barely possible, via muddy paths. In the evening, dozens of tanks were already lurking in the dark groves on the side, making this route also fearfully dangerous.
Munir, a Palestinian taxi driver, quotes from the Yom Kippur kapparot (atonement) prayer he learned when he worked as a youth in the Tikva (Hope) market in Tel Aviv. In the Al-Amal (Hope) neighborhood of Khan Yunis, there is a lot of destruction from the previous night. "This is my exchange, my substitute, my atonement," Munir mumbles, waving an imaginary rooster above his head, a remnant of his happy childhood in the Tikva market.
The loudspeaker barks out: "Stop." The loudspeaker barks out: "Go." And again: "Stop." And again: "Go." The defense forces, which can see but cannot be seen, are amusing themselves with dozens of cars waiting at the Abu Huli checkpoint, on the only road spanning the Gaza Strip, near Kfar Darom, opposite the road to Gush Katif, below the road to Kissufim. A huge traffic jam. It is another one of the places where the occupation looks so frightfully ugly, with invisible soldiers and the hoarse loudspeaker. All of the drivers hurry to roll down their windows in submission, to make sure they hear the soldier's command. Sometimes, the road is completely blocked for days and there is no passage between Khan Yunis and Gaza City, or between Rafah and Jabalya.
A. calls from Cairo: He has been stuck there since the Rafah crossing was closed. No one knows how long the crossing will remain closed.
"You were a son of the camp," says the voice on a different loudspeaker, at the mourners' tent for one of the Palestinians killed in the Khan Yunis camp. Nothing compares with the bleakness of this camp. Barefoot children tramp around in the mud. Water leaks through the asbestos roofs of the shacks. Hundreds of men sit on the ground idly, day after day, year after year. The well-tailored image of the leftist candidate, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, which peers down from the election posters, seems disconnected from reality.
In the nearby Al-Amal neighborhood, life had been more hopeful. Some of the more successful residents of the camp moved into reasonable-looking apartment houses. But the nearby settlements of Neveh Dekalim and Ganei Tal put an end to their Palestinian neighbors' hopes of finally living in human conditions. During the night, the bulldozers had come and destroyed a group of buildings under construction. Only a pile of rubble remains now in an empty lot, next to a wide strip of sand that was cleared during a previous operation. From every window, one sees the Jewish settlements or, more precisely, the terrifying guard towers that surround them. From here, the disengagement looks further away and more long-awaited than ever.
No one talks about the disengagement in Khan Yunis, nor about the upcoming Palestinian elections. On Sunday, everyone was busy assessing the damages of the latest operation of killing and destruction - "Purple Iron" - which ended during the night. Hundreds of stunned residents are poking in the sand, a familiar sight.
An apartment-bunker
The Sabahi family's three-story apartment building is home to 30 people. Soldiers took over the building for operational purposes. Last Wednesday night, the residents of the building were ordered via loudspeaker to vacate their apartments. On Sunday morning, we entered the building with one of the residents, Osama Sabahi, to see what the soldiers left behind. Sabahi, a pharmacist, was devastated by what he saw: His spacious apartment on the top floor was destroyed beyond recognition. The soldiers had made giant holes in the walls, using these as lookout posts and firing positions. The furniture was upended, clothes were scattered and the sights we encountered in the bathroom are unfit to print. Sabahi says that NIS 600 that he kept in the dresser were gone. (The IDF Spokesman's Office: "We are not familiar with this claim.") But why did the soldiers take the blue flour jar from the kitchen to the children's room? No one knows. Boxes of Tnuva chocolate milk were scattered everywhere. What would the soldiers think if someone did this to their homes?
Osama Sabahi's aunt, Maryam, lives on the first floor. She is about 60 years old and is mentally ill. When they evacuated the building, they left her behind. The pharmacist says that the soldiers took her up to the third floor and left her there for two days before allowing the Red Crescent to evacuate her.
The tiny playground below, the only one in the area, is partly destroyed. It was built several months ago and this is the second time the IDF has damaged it during the war against the Qassam. The entrance to the Sabahi's home is also completely destroyed. Piles of stones and the remains of the iron gate block the entrance to the home that was transformed into a military post. Osama says that he is afraid to bring his family back there. There is no electricity and no water, and his small children are liable to fall through the holes in the walls, three stories above ground. Even before the latest operation, the apartment looked like a bunker: The windows facing Ganei Tal were filled with bricks about four years ago to protect against Israeli snipers. It is not recommended to peek out from these windows - the wall of the building is full of holes and an Israeli flag flutters in the wind on the tower across the way. The plant nurseries of Ganei Tal look like a shimmering sea from the window.
A table was prepared down below. Neighbors spread trays of rice, yogurt and eggs on the sand - the first meal for the new homeless. There are also humanitarian efforts under way here, in the Al-Amal (Hope) neighborhood of Khan Yunis, in the backyard of Ganei Tal and Neveh Dekalim.
The IDF Spokesman's Office: "Before the entry of an IDF force into an inhabited Palestinian building, which is only done for operational purposes, the soldiers are instructed to avoid harming the residents and damaging property. Nonetheless, buildings may suffer damage - only in accordance with operational needs. In addition, the residents of the homes are given the opportunity to collect items of value from the home before the soldiers enter. It should be noted that the forces have operational documentation of the activities in the homes."
A new memorial poster
The new memorial poster displays an unusual-looking face. This shack on the alley of sand and mud in the Khan Yunis camp is the home of the last shaheed (martyr) from last weekend's operations, Ahmed Tuman. Afflicted with Down Syndrome, he was 17 when he died. His mother and sister, dressed in black, enter the meager guest room. Only their sad eyes are visible through their veils. An asbestos roof over our heads, the wind whimpers and the rain pounds. The mother, Sabha, and the sister, Ibtisam, speak about Ahmed: He studied at a special education school run by the Red Crescent and he loved to go to weddings, to dance, to sing and to do impersonations. He specialized in imitating Yasser Arafat and Sheikh Yassin, but was also not afraid to imitate residents of the camp - he was a local Yatzpan (a popular Israeli comedian). He especially liked posters of "martyrs." On the day of his death, he still managed to hang up a poster of the last member of Iz al-Din al-Qassam (Hamas military wing) to be killed. Here it is on the wall, pasted with brown tape, alongside the new poster - on which he himself appears.
Last Thursday, his father locked Ahmed in his room before going to the market. The father was concerned that his mentally disabled son would venture out into the street. They always locked Ahmed in when the IDF was in the streets, but when the father returned from the market and opened the door, Ahmed managed to get around him and run outside. It was 9:30 in the morning and Ahmed made his way toward his sister's home in the nearby Al-Amal neighborhood. She pleaded with him to return home and Ahmed told her that he was not afraid and went back out into the street.
He went down the street leading to the main road, where tanks and snipers awaited him. Perhaps he began fleeing when he noticed them. Perhaps he provoked them. Perhaps they shot at him for no special reason - the street was empty and no one witnessed the shooting. They sprayed his body with bullets from a distance of about 30 meters, shooting from the welfare ministry building where the snipers were positioned or from the tank deployed alongside it. Here is the hospital's death report: A bullet to the head, a bullet in the heart, a bullet in the ribs, many pieces of shrapnel in the right leg, shrapnel in the hip. He remained sprawled in the street, bleeding, for an hour before his body was taken away.
The IDF Spokesman's Office does not think that Tuman died: "On Thursday, December 30, while IDF forces in the Khan Yunis area operated against the launching of mortars and Qassam rockets, a Palestinian approached an IDF force. The force fired warning shots according to regulations and when [the Palestinian] did not halt, shots were fired at his legs and he went away." On the other hand, it appears that the spokesman's office may believe that Tuman, who suffered from a serious mental disability, was involved in planting explosives. According to the IDF statement: "It should be noted that during the operation, the IDF hit a number of Palestinians involved in planting explosives against IDF forces."
In response to the delay in evacuating Ahmed, the office says: "We do not know of any incident in which the IDF delayed or prevented an ambulance from accessing and treating the injured."
Ahmed's cousin, Hadil, who is paralyzed, somehow manages to stretch out her hand and wave Ahmed's memorial poster, as if to say - "Look what my cousin did." The two cousins shared a special love for each other. H., Ahmed's older brother, is afraid. He has worked for the past year and a half in the fields of the Ganei Tal settlement, growing spices. His wages are NIS 48 per day, more than his co-workers who started later and earn only NIS 35. H. is now worried that his employers will not accept him back at work because his mentally disabled brother was killed by the soldiers. He told his employers that his mother was hospitalized.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/524035.html
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The Electronic Intifada
Yet another historic day
Ali Abunimah
9 January 2005
Once again, the media and the international peace process industry have declared that it is an "historic day" for the Palestinian people. The occasion this time is the election of Mahmoud Abbas as head of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied territories. Yet most of these Palestinian people, for whom this day has been declared historic, do not live in the occupied territories; the majority of Palestinians live in diaspora or as refugees outside their homeland, a direct result of the ethnic cleansing which created Israel in 1947-48, and of the occupation of the remainder of Palestine in 1967.
For Palestinians in the diaspora, such historic days feel like everyone is having a party that is supposed to be in your honor, except that no one invited you, or perhaps it is like watching a television movie of your life that bears little resemblance to reality. The feeling I have now is exactly what I felt on that other big historic day, September 13, 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed in Washington by a beaming Yasir Arafat and the recalcitrant Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, under the beatific gaze of President Bill Clinton. I feel a mixture of exasperation, hopelessness and determination.
For days now, I have done hours of talk radio about the elections, trying to explain as best as I can why replacing Yasser Arafat with Mahmoud Abbas will not lead to peace, why Palestinians aren't ecstatic, how the Israeli occupation makes democracy impossible. But for the most part, the script has been written and Palestinians are only called upon to read their lines. So the TV and newspapers are full of happy Palestinian voters who debate only whether Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) or Mustafa Barghouti is right for them. Herds of international observers are on hand to certify that a few irregularities notwithstanding, this was a model election of which Palestinians can be proud.
U.S. Senator John Sununu, who was part of the US observer delegation read from the official script: "It's a democratic election in the Arab world, and that in itself is somewhat historic," the New York Times quoted him as saying. Sununu added that the Palestinian leadership will now have "a new level of credibility to talk to the Israelis and impose reform and reorganization of the security forces, so there's a reason to be optimistic."
The reports I heard directly from associates on the ground only add to the disconnect between what Palestinians are experiencing and how the story is being told. EI's Arjan El-Fassed, an accredited election monitor posted in Gaza reported shortly before polls were scheduled to close that in the Shaaf area of Gaza City, a little more than 1,000 of 20,000 registered voters had voted -- a turnout of about seven percent. Chaos had broken out, he said, after Palestinian election officials had changed the rules at the last minute to allow voters to vote at any polling station in a desperate bid to raise the turnout and perhaps to open the possibility of a person casting multiple votes. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights immediately announced it was appealing what it called an illegal decision.
EI's Maureen Murphy, monitoring the elections in the Hebron area with the Al-Haq human rights organization reported that many people who turned out to vote did so despite feeling resigned to the fact that whoever wins will have no power to improve their lives or change the reality Israel has imposed on them.
In the ghost-written screenplay that the Palestinians are being forced to act out, the election is "good news." This means that any information that interferes with this agreed narrative — that we are at the cusp of a new era of peace, democracy and reform — has to be carefully filtered out.
As I sift through the deluge of election news, I find I am still unable to stop thinking about the murder by the Israeli army of seven Palestinian children in Gaza, literally blown to pieces by a tank shell on 4 January. This was barely reported in the US media. National Public Radio, supposedly the paragon of in-depth and nuanced reporting, actually covered up the story, reporting only that Mahmoud Abbas had called Israel the "Zionist Enemy" without mentioning the killing of the children at all, even though Abbas had made his statement in direct response to the atrocity.
A few days earlier, I had emailed a New York Times reporter to ask why in a lengthy article about the election campaign, the news that the Israeli army had killed nine Palestinians in a single day, including two children and a man living with Down's Syndrome, had been mentioned only in the final paragraph. I pointed out that whenever the victims are Israelis, his newspaper gives their deaths great prominence, and asked whether we should therefore understand that Palestinian lives are viewed as less valuable. The reporter wrote back: "Your point is very well taken ... the problem is more with the nature of daily stories than with differential humanity, but I will bear your good letter in mind. No life is worth less than any other." At first I felt satisfied by this answer, but the more I thought about it, the angrier I became.
Actually differential humanity is precisely the issue. The entire "peace process" and the discourse about Palestine today is structured around the absolutely inverted claim that Israelis are the principal victims of violence and Palestinians the principal perpetrators and aggressors.
So it would appear that in the mind of this reporter, and many others, the daily killing of Palestinians is not newsworthy because it is routine. Whereas in any period where the killing of Israelis was routine, it was that very fact which made the story newsworthy. It is the claim that the killing of Israelis is routine or threatens to become routine which is used to justify and provide context for all of Israel's actions, from assasinations to the mass demolition of homes in Gaza's Jabaliya and Rafah refugee camps to the construction of the apartheid wall inside the occupied West Bank.
In order to maintain this fiction, other crucial facts must be routinely screened from public view. While the peace process scriptwriters insist that Mahmoud Abbas can bring peace where Arafat failed, the Israelis at least know better.
The day before the election, Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper published a lengthy report by Aluf Benn headlined "Quietly carrying on building," about how Israel's settler colonies are growing apace across the West Bank. Israel is drawing up construction plans in over 120 settlements across the occupied West Bank with the full approval and knowledge of incoming US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Benn says. According to an Israeli government source quoted in the article, "If the U.S. recognizes your claim that the [settlement] blocs will remain yours forever, why should it make a fuss when you build on your own property?" Ha'aretzadded that according to Peace Now, an Israeli group that meticulously documents settlement activity, "the main building effort in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank is now focused on the area between the Green Line [1967 border] and the separation fence [apartheid wall], and it is aimed at turning the fence into Israel's permanent border."
So in the long-running Palestine soap opera, Abbas, the understudy who has been hired to replace the deceased lead actor Arafat, is being offered the choice of two roles by the Israeli-American scriptwriters. He can play the obedient native administrator of a defeated people who gets to wear a suit and call himself president of a fictional state, or he can don Arafat's kaffiyeh and assume the role of the Palestinians' unreformed "terrorist" leader. If he chooses the former role, he may get the political equivalent of an Oscar -- the Nobel Peace Prize.
But like in all soap operas, repetiveness and increasingly absurd plot twists eventually wear out even the most faithful audience. And when this episode is over, the Palestinian people will still be there, steadfastly, patiently, determined to regain their usurped rights and see justice done, come what may.
Ali Abunimah is a founder of The Electronic Intifada.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3499.shtml
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The Electronic Intifada
Slave Sovereignty: Palestinian Presidential Elections Under Occupation
Omar Barghouti
7 January 2005
Many Palestinians are boasting that they will soon enjoy, again, the most free and democratic elections in the entire Arab World. The only problem is that electing a Palestinian president while still under the boot of the occupier is an oxymoron. Sovereignty and occupation are mutually exclusive. The world, including many well-informed readers, seem to think that the Palestinian people is actually practicing the ultimate form of sovereignty by freely choosing its own president. This is easily extrapolated in the heads of many to mean that Palestinians are in a way free. So what's all this talk about occupation? Notice, for example, how little media attention is given now to the almost daily killings of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli occupation forces. Of course, the only thing that matters is who is running; who is not; what Mahmoud Abbas might have intended to say; or what Marwan Barghouti could have done only if... Bulldozing houses in Rafah, expanding colonies in Hebron and killing innocent children in Beit Lahya is simply a bore, a peripheral story, an ordinary occurrence in the midst of an election extraordinaire. There are several things wrong in this picture.
First, some facts. This Sunday, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will be electing the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), not the president of the Palestinian people. The former is an organ created according to the 1993 Oslo agreements between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the government of Israel, according to which the PA will do little more than run the educational, health, municipal and taxation services. In addition, it will do its very best to provide security for Israel, mainly by clamping down on the armed resistance factions.
Israel and the United States helped create the PA specifically to control the occupied territories, -- while maintaining the foundations of occupation, of course -- and eventually to sign some "peace" treaty that would exonerate Israel from its legal and moral obligations to allow the repatriation and compensation of the Palestinian refugees, to comprehensively withdraw its entire colonial apparatus from the West Bank and Gaza -- not just by removing its army but also its Jewish colonies, illegal under international law -- and to end its system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens.
Ironically, the PA at best represents a minority of the Palestinian people, those in the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip. The majority of Palestinians, refugees and Palestinian citizens of Israel, are not represented by the PA. Here's where the real paradox lies: how can an entity that represents no more than one third of the people of Palestine be expected to meaningfully and legally sign away the rights of the remaining two thirds? Easy. Redefine the Palestinians to preclude those unwanted two-thirds. Since Oslo, the mainstream media in the west, and puppet Arab media as well, have done just that. They have used the term Palestinian exclusively to mean those resident in the occupied West Bank and Gaza alone. Problem solved!
Well, not quite. Those two-thirds cannot be easily written out of history and out of the identity of Palestine. They are increasingly becoming well-organized, politically active and they have developed their own channels of expression, if not yet their own frames of representation. Plus, many Palestinians in the occupied territories are themselves refugees who yearn to return to Haifa, Jaffa, Lydda, Majdal and Acre, all in what is now Israel. In all semi-accurate public opinion polls, the number one issue of political interest for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has consistently remained the right of return for the refugees. So it seems that the PA project may not after all yield the expected returns on the Israeli-American investment.
Given this picture, shouldn't any form of sovereignty, albeit limited, help Palestinians declare their independence of Israel? But that's precisely the problem. The Palestinians are not free; they should not be giving the world the impression that they are. They are a nation under a very real and brutal occupation that is committing crimes with utter impunity and passe colonial arrogance. They should remind the world in every occasion that the only just and enduring solution to the conflict in the region can be attained by ending Israel's oppression -- in all three forms mentioned above -- not by changing the Palestinians' perception of it. They should struggle to revive the moribund structures of the PLO, the only organization that ever represented all Palestinians. All three components of the Palestinian people urgently need a single, democratically elected body to represent their interests and to shoulder the responsibility for their fate. This task is well beyond the ability, the job description or the best intentions of the PA.
Ten years after Oslo, the PA's political function seems to have become restricted to acting as an accessory to colonial rule, allowing Israel to maintain its oppression, while appearing to the world as engaged in some peace process. Since Oslo, the formerly closed doors have opened to Israel: in Europe, Africa, Asia and even in the middle of the Arab World. The once formidable Arab boycott of Israel has all but collapsed, allowing Israeli businesses to reap massive profits, boosting the Israeli economy to record growth rates, just before the second intifada broke out. In fact, the only peace that this Oslo process has achieved is the deadly silence of the oppressed while the oppressors go on with their regular business.
A presidential election under these circumstances can only help Israel cover up its speeding colonization of what remains of Palestine, while the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza are busy celebrating their superior "democracy."
When the slaves are distracted with "free" elections of their deputy jailers, the masters can only rejoice.
Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political analyst.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3490.shtml
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Ha’aretz
Two types of disasters
Gideon Levy
2 January 2005
What would have happened, heaven forbid, if the tsunami had struck the coast of the Gaza Strip? It's a safe guess that Israel would have gone out of its way to proffer aid. Aid delegations would have left immediately for Gaza via the Erez checkpoint. Physicians, medicines and blankets would have made their way to Jabalya refugee camp and military correspondents would have reported from there with pride about the humanitarian operation mounted by the Israel Defense Forces. Every Palestinian child pulled from the ruins would have received deeply felt coverage in the media, hotels in Tel Aviv would have competed in making offers of shelter to those left homeless by the disaster and Channel 2 would have organized a marathon to raise funds for the new refugees.
Even if people are born equal, they are not equal in their death. It's important where they died and under what circumstances. The world has already pledged billions for the regions in Southeast Asia that were ravaged, conglomerates and individuals in Europe and the United States have mobilized to donate and dozens of countries are sending aid, among them Israel, albeit with its usual grandstanding. When it comes to natural disasters, the world - and Israel, too - shows far greater generosity and alacrity than it does in cases of man-made disasters.
When a tourist region is hit, attention is all the more intense. Anyone watching television in the West might think the tsunami struck Sweden or Switzerland. The majority of the survivors seen on the small screen look like Europeans. Here, we sometimes get the impression that this is an Israeli calamity. "The worst of all" was the banner headline on Friday in the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth, which reported the identification of the bodies of two Israelis.
In the past few years, 3 million people have died in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire), according to the International Rescue Community aid agency, but the world has barely lifted a finger. Few of them died in battles; they were killed by hunger and disease that spread in the wake of a war that began in 1998, as a revolt against President Laurent-Desire Kabila. Hardly anything has been written about the millions who have perished and no protest demonstrations have been held. Israel did not send aid and most countries of the world have averted their eyes from the horror.
Four years earlier, in 1994, about 1 million Tutsis were slaughtered in Rwanda. Not only did the international community do nothing to aid the victims, it got out of the region as fast as it could. The massacre had hardly begun when all the United Nations forces were removed from Rwanda, leaving the civilian population helpless. A few years before that, about 2 million people were killed during the 18-year war in Sudan. A million died in the Biafra conflict of the 1960s. In the past two years, some 50,000 people, by conservative estimate, have been killed in Darfur, in western Sudan, and 2 million have been uprooted from their homes.
All these casualties had the misfortune of being born in Africa and getting caught up in violent conflicts. They were born in the most forgotten place and died in circumstances for which the world least likes to mobilize aid. If they had been born elsewhere, or had found themselves in a natural disaster, their lot would have been slightly better. When the earth shook a year ago in Iran, the enemy of the international community, the international community nevertheless rushed to the country's aid. Some 20,000 people were killed in the Iranian city of Bam and no fewer than 22 countries sent assistance, including the United States, which dispatched rescue teams to its declared enemy. Even Israel offered to help. Two years earlier, the international community sent impressive immediate aid to the victims of an earthquake in the Indian state of Gujarat, where 20,000 people died. Even Pakistan sent tents and blankets. The IDF dubbed its aid operation to India "Hand Outstretched." Less than a year earlier, an international air convoy reached Madagascar, where a cyclone left 1,500 people dead. Last August, the United States pledged to send $210 million to Bangladesh, where 1,350 people were killed in floods, and Britain promised 10 million pounds. In all these natural disasters the world should and could have done far more, but it still did a great deal more than is the case with millions of people who were killed in wars, and as a result of them, in Africa.
Fewer people died in all the earthquakes that struck the world in the 20th century than in one remote war in Biafra, and far fewer than the number in another disregarded war in Congo. Whereas no one could have prevented the tsunami in Asia or the earthquake in Iran, wars can be prevented or stopped. But countries do not like to get involved in other people's wars. It is not just a matter of aid that was not delivered, but of sheer attention. The difference attests to self-righteousness and a double moral standard: The attack on the Twin Towers in Manhattan, in which 2,750 people were killed, shaped history; but few have heard of the war in Congo, where more than 3 million people have died. If it were not for the 10 or so missing Israelis in the tsunami disaster, we would have forgotten about it already. When hundreds are killed in Gaza and tens of thousands of innocent people are left homeless because of what we have done, we turn away. If they had been victims of a natural disaster, we would have already been there to help.
12 January 2005
A Visit to Gaza
On Tuesday, January 4, MCC workers Sri Mayasandra and Chris and Tim Seidel visited MCC partner the Culture and Free Thought Association (CFTA) of Khan Younis, Gaza. The last MCC visit to CFTA was in June, and the fall months saw heightened military activity throughout the Gaza strip creating very dangerous travel conditions throughout. But as was seen on this last visit, military activity is a part of life for Gaza Residents. Gunfire and shelling were heard throughout both the day and night hours the group’s visit.
Maysoon, a young female staff member from CFTA served as a tour guide for the MCC group, taking them around to various parts of Khan Younis to see the severe atrocities that people are forced to live with. The group saw piles of rubble from houses preceded by bulldozer tracks, holes from shelling that dotted almost every building in sight, and children playing in what was left trying desperately to have childhoods.
This heartbreaking setting makes the courageous work of CFTA even more outstanding and valuable. CFTA just expanded into a new office at the turn of this New Year and the staff was busy working throughout. The group was given a tour of the Bunat al Ghad (Builders of the Future) Teenager Centre where there are incredible resources being developed for the youth, such as a science lab, theater, library, resource center, computer lab and photography and media center.
The next day the group visited the Al Shroq Wal Amal (Sunrise and Hope) Children’s Centre as children were finishing their last final mid-terms before their January break. At this center as well, the group toured the art center, a computer lab funded by MCC, music class, and playroom. As children shared their stories of first-hand encounters with the violence around them (not the least of which was the shooting death of a classmate in school), it was apparent that beyond being a cultural, health and educational center, it was a mental and somewhat emotional escape from the situation to experiences that should be normative for young children.
Afterwards, the group visited families that living in the camp around the Children’s Centre. The needs of the families were apparent, such as home repair and employment. However, the families desired only to express their stories and thoughts and be heard by the group. All of the families were thankful that the group had come to visit them in their homes and sit and listen to them.
The process of the disengagement of Israeli settlements from Gaza is to happen throughout this year 2005. With the settler resistance to the disengagement and heightened security throughout the process, one can speculate that there will by much more unrest, injuries and killings in the coming year (including those of women and children). Many Palestinians express little hope in the disengagement plan, only stating that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will do what he wants and disengagement will serve as a license for more settlements to be strategically placed in the West Bank creating Bantustans and making access and travel virtually impossible for Palestinians. And with the cruel nature of occupation, suffering Palestinians have little hope for anything to turn out to be in their best interests or for long-term peace.
In the meantime, CFTA is working to relieve the suffering of women by creating job opportunities and helping them to access quality health care and their rights. The group is working to protect the children of Khan Younis and helping to prepare adolescents to structure their lives for the future. For more information about the activities and programs of the Culture and Free Thought Association in Khan Younis, visit their website at www.palnet.com/~cfta/
Elections in Palestine: A Time of “Renewed Hope” or “Democratizing the Occupation”?
This past Sunday saw the election of Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen, as president of the Palestinian Authority. The outcome and the elections themselves continue to garner international attention, especially after the visits of such foreign dignitaries as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former U.S presidential candidate Senator John Kerry. Many have asked if the recent elections here have brought with them a sense of “renewed hope” for the Palestinian people. And indeed if one were to look at what is being reported in the English-speaking media, one might walk away with this perception.
But facts on the ground here, such as continuous Israeli incursions into Gaza, more colonies or “settlements” that are expanding (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/524066.html)—as well as the sophisticated system of settler roads and checkpoints that effectively divide the West Bank up into separated bantustans, more of the Apartheid Wall built, more children killed (http://pchrgaza.org/files/W_report/English/2005/06-01-2005.htm), and the exclusion from this process of the majority of the Palestinian population living as refugees in the region, left literally out in the cold, speak to another reality.
Since the passing of Yasser Arafat, many have been looking through the lenses of optimism and with the language of “renewed hope.” The problem with this “patronizing optimism” as some have called it is that it effectively renders invisible these “facts on the ground” and the story of those left dead and dying. And Palestinians know this. Palestinians know that before "optimism" and "hope" can be discussed at a negotiations table, these realities on the ground have to be seriously addressed and justice dealt.
To move from one place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in Gaza, where Palestinians are met by shelling at checkpoints on a regular basis, and then to be greeted by gifts of holiday chocolates at the checkpoint going into Bethlehem speaks all too well to these facts on the ground that are covered over with great effort. The thought that such a gesture of “good will” will create a “bridge for peace” is functional only for those who require an Apartheid Wall to ensure that definition of peace.
Christmas and the New Year in the “Holy Land”
Nonetheless we continue to be amazed by the hope that some Palestinians continue to be energized by, especially by those that MCC partners with. Take this past Christmas for example. At an ecumenical Christmas celebration sponsored by one of our partners Sabeel (http://www.sabeel.org/), there were at least six different church traditions represented—Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic. And they all took their turn singing their own traditional Christmas carols. It was incredible to see such a display, such a modeling of an alternative reality in the midst of occupation.
As we enter into another new year, we feel compelled to ask: How we are also modeling an alternative reality in the midst of the injustices of this world? How can we talk about hope in a genuine and authentic manner? Especially after these recent heavy experiences in Gaza, the subjective demand that is placed on our shoulders feels most pressing. The heaviness of such an exercise lies in the fact that the one who critically reflects upon “Christian praxis” is faced with a decision.
Our efforts at commitment and service must seek to find relevance and meaning and in turn offer a voice to the voiceless by way of compassion—com-passion, a “suffering with.” This essential element of a commitment that recognizes, as the Latin American theologians Leonardo and Clodovis Boff have stated, that “we are only on the side of the poor when we struggle along side them” cannot be emphasized enough to us members of the Global North as the beneficiaries of such a death-dealing occupation as the one that Palestinians face on a daily basis.
May the new year bring hope and renewal for our engagement in this critical reflection on “Christian praxis” when it comes to dealing seriously with the injustices here and all over the world.
Peace to you all,
Christi and Timothy Seidel.
Peace Development Workers
Mennonite Central Committee - Palestine
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Ha’aretz
New year, old story: During operations last weekend in the Gaza Strip, the army demolished 14 Palestinian homes, injured 30 Palestinians and killed 10, including a mentally disabled youth. Ringing in 2005.
Gideon Levy
6 January 2005
A quiet weekend: The Israel Defense Forces managed to conduct two operations in Gaza during a four-day period starting last Thursday and continuing through this past Sunday. This is how the New Year's celebration there looked: 10 Palestinians killed, including two teenagers, one of whom was mentally disabled; 30 Palestinians injured, including a cameraman from Channel 10; and another 14 homes demolished. While Israel was collecting food contributions for Sri Lanka, residents of Khan Yunis sat on the sand near their destroyed homes, eating a paltry lunch. On Sunday, after the operations ended, five Qassam rockets hit Sderot and mortar shells were fired at the Erez industrial zone, seriously injuring a 25-year-old worker, Nissim Arbib.
Operation "Purple Iron" had not ended yet and "Autumn Wind" had not yet begun to blow, and suddenly "Purple Rain" poured down upon the Erez checkpoint. There was a faint boom and then a mortar shell fell near us, in the adjacent industrial zone. Shlomi Eldar, a reporter for Channel 10, was on his way to meet with the Palestinians who were firing the mortars from Rafah, and we were going to meet the victims of "Purple Iron" in Khan Yunis. "See you this evening," we said, but by the time evening came, Eldar had already brought his cameraman, Majdi al-Arbid, to the hospital in serious condition. An IDF sniper shot him from a range of 300 meters in Jabalya, despite the fact that he held a television camera in his hand - or perhaps because of this.
Eldar, an experienced and honest reporter, is convinced that the photographer did not pose a risk to the sniper, who saw the camera and nonetheless shot without warning, intending only to injure the cameraman. He was hit by a bullet in the groin, two steps away from Eldar. Long hours passed before Eldar and the Channel 10 team managed to persuade the IDF to allow the bleeding photographer, whose life was at risk, to be rushed to a hospital in Israel.
The IDF is investigating.
On the way out of Erez, near Beit Hanun, there is a tank and a bulldozer, digging up the only access road. It is hard to know whether this is the end of "Purple Iron" or the beginning of "Autumn Wind," which began and ended on Sunday. How are people supposed to enter and exit Erez now?
Munir's atonement
The motorcade of candidate Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is making its way through the streets of Gaza. Abu Mazen injured his finger the previous day when a bodyguard closed the door of his car on his hand. Another candidate, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, is delayed at the Erez checkpoint on his way to another election rally. Entry into the Gaza Strip is now only barely possible, via muddy paths. In the evening, dozens of tanks were already lurking in the dark groves on the side, making this route also fearfully dangerous.
Munir, a Palestinian taxi driver, quotes from the Yom Kippur kapparot (atonement) prayer he learned when he worked as a youth in the Tikva (Hope) market in Tel Aviv. In the Al-Amal (Hope) neighborhood of Khan Yunis, there is a lot of destruction from the previous night. "This is my exchange, my substitute, my atonement," Munir mumbles, waving an imaginary rooster above his head, a remnant of his happy childhood in the Tikva market.
The loudspeaker barks out: "Stop." The loudspeaker barks out: "Go." And again: "Stop." And again: "Go." The defense forces, which can see but cannot be seen, are amusing themselves with dozens of cars waiting at the Abu Huli checkpoint, on the only road spanning the Gaza Strip, near Kfar Darom, opposite the road to Gush Katif, below the road to Kissufim. A huge traffic jam. It is another one of the places where the occupation looks so frightfully ugly, with invisible soldiers and the hoarse loudspeaker. All of the drivers hurry to roll down their windows in submission, to make sure they hear the soldier's command. Sometimes, the road is completely blocked for days and there is no passage between Khan Yunis and Gaza City, or between Rafah and Jabalya.
A. calls from Cairo: He has been stuck there since the Rafah crossing was closed. No one knows how long the crossing will remain closed.
"You were a son of the camp," says the voice on a different loudspeaker, at the mourners' tent for one of the Palestinians killed in the Khan Yunis camp. Nothing compares with the bleakness of this camp. Barefoot children tramp around in the mud. Water leaks through the asbestos roofs of the shacks. Hundreds of men sit on the ground idly, day after day, year after year. The well-tailored image of the leftist candidate, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, which peers down from the election posters, seems disconnected from reality.
In the nearby Al-Amal neighborhood, life had been more hopeful. Some of the more successful residents of the camp moved into reasonable-looking apartment houses. But the nearby settlements of Neveh Dekalim and Ganei Tal put an end to their Palestinian neighbors' hopes of finally living in human conditions. During the night, the bulldozers had come and destroyed a group of buildings under construction. Only a pile of rubble remains now in an empty lot, next to a wide strip of sand that was cleared during a previous operation. From every window, one sees the Jewish settlements or, more precisely, the terrifying guard towers that surround them. From here, the disengagement looks further away and more long-awaited than ever.
No one talks about the disengagement in Khan Yunis, nor about the upcoming Palestinian elections. On Sunday, everyone was busy assessing the damages of the latest operation of killing and destruction - "Purple Iron" - which ended during the night. Hundreds of stunned residents are poking in the sand, a familiar sight.
An apartment-bunker
The Sabahi family's three-story apartment building is home to 30 people. Soldiers took over the building for operational purposes. Last Wednesday night, the residents of the building were ordered via loudspeaker to vacate their apartments. On Sunday morning, we entered the building with one of the residents, Osama Sabahi, to see what the soldiers left behind. Sabahi, a pharmacist, was devastated by what he saw: His spacious apartment on the top floor was destroyed beyond recognition. The soldiers had made giant holes in the walls, using these as lookout posts and firing positions. The furniture was upended, clothes were scattered and the sights we encountered in the bathroom are unfit to print. Sabahi says that NIS 600 that he kept in the dresser were gone. (The IDF Spokesman's Office: "We are not familiar with this claim.") But why did the soldiers take the blue flour jar from the kitchen to the children's room? No one knows. Boxes of Tnuva chocolate milk were scattered everywhere. What would the soldiers think if someone did this to their homes?
Osama Sabahi's aunt, Maryam, lives on the first floor. She is about 60 years old and is mentally ill. When they evacuated the building, they left her behind. The pharmacist says that the soldiers took her up to the third floor and left her there for two days before allowing the Red Crescent to evacuate her.
The tiny playground below, the only one in the area, is partly destroyed. It was built several months ago and this is the second time the IDF has damaged it during the war against the Qassam. The entrance to the Sabahi's home is also completely destroyed. Piles of stones and the remains of the iron gate block the entrance to the home that was transformed into a military post. Osama says that he is afraid to bring his family back there. There is no electricity and no water, and his small children are liable to fall through the holes in the walls, three stories above ground. Even before the latest operation, the apartment looked like a bunker: The windows facing Ganei Tal were filled with bricks about four years ago to protect against Israeli snipers. It is not recommended to peek out from these windows - the wall of the building is full of holes and an Israeli flag flutters in the wind on the tower across the way. The plant nurseries of Ganei Tal look like a shimmering sea from the window.
A table was prepared down below. Neighbors spread trays of rice, yogurt and eggs on the sand - the first meal for the new homeless. There are also humanitarian efforts under way here, in the Al-Amal (Hope) neighborhood of Khan Yunis, in the backyard of Ganei Tal and Neveh Dekalim.
The IDF Spokesman's Office: "Before the entry of an IDF force into an inhabited Palestinian building, which is only done for operational purposes, the soldiers are instructed to avoid harming the residents and damaging property. Nonetheless, buildings may suffer damage - only in accordance with operational needs. In addition, the residents of the homes are given the opportunity to collect items of value from the home before the soldiers enter. It should be noted that the forces have operational documentation of the activities in the homes."
A new memorial poster
The new memorial poster displays an unusual-looking face. This shack on the alley of sand and mud in the Khan Yunis camp is the home of the last shaheed (martyr) from last weekend's operations, Ahmed Tuman. Afflicted with Down Syndrome, he was 17 when he died. His mother and sister, dressed in black, enter the meager guest room. Only their sad eyes are visible through their veils. An asbestos roof over our heads, the wind whimpers and the rain pounds. The mother, Sabha, and the sister, Ibtisam, speak about Ahmed: He studied at a special education school run by the Red Crescent and he loved to go to weddings, to dance, to sing and to do impersonations. He specialized in imitating Yasser Arafat and Sheikh Yassin, but was also not afraid to imitate residents of the camp - he was a local Yatzpan (a popular Israeli comedian). He especially liked posters of "martyrs." On the day of his death, he still managed to hang up a poster of the last member of Iz al-Din al-Qassam (Hamas military wing) to be killed. Here it is on the wall, pasted with brown tape, alongside the new poster - on which he himself appears.
Last Thursday, his father locked Ahmed in his room before going to the market. The father was concerned that his mentally disabled son would venture out into the street. They always locked Ahmed in when the IDF was in the streets, but when the father returned from the market and opened the door, Ahmed managed to get around him and run outside. It was 9:30 in the morning and Ahmed made his way toward his sister's home in the nearby Al-Amal neighborhood. She pleaded with him to return home and Ahmed told her that he was not afraid and went back out into the street.
He went down the street leading to the main road, where tanks and snipers awaited him. Perhaps he began fleeing when he noticed them. Perhaps he provoked them. Perhaps they shot at him for no special reason - the street was empty and no one witnessed the shooting. They sprayed his body with bullets from a distance of about 30 meters, shooting from the welfare ministry building where the snipers were positioned or from the tank deployed alongside it. Here is the hospital's death report: A bullet to the head, a bullet in the heart, a bullet in the ribs, many pieces of shrapnel in the right leg, shrapnel in the hip. He remained sprawled in the street, bleeding, for an hour before his body was taken away.
The IDF Spokesman's Office does not think that Tuman died: "On Thursday, December 30, while IDF forces in the Khan Yunis area operated against the launching of mortars and Qassam rockets, a Palestinian approached an IDF force. The force fired warning shots according to regulations and when [the Palestinian] did not halt, shots were fired at his legs and he went away." On the other hand, it appears that the spokesman's office may believe that Tuman, who suffered from a serious mental disability, was involved in planting explosives. According to the IDF statement: "It should be noted that during the operation, the IDF hit a number of Palestinians involved in planting explosives against IDF forces."
In response to the delay in evacuating Ahmed, the office says: "We do not know of any incident in which the IDF delayed or prevented an ambulance from accessing and treating the injured."
Ahmed's cousin, Hadil, who is paralyzed, somehow manages to stretch out her hand and wave Ahmed's memorial poster, as if to say - "Look what my cousin did." The two cousins shared a special love for each other. H., Ahmed's older brother, is afraid. He has worked for the past year and a half in the fields of the Ganei Tal settlement, growing spices. His wages are NIS 48 per day, more than his co-workers who started later and earn only NIS 35. H. is now worried that his employers will not accept him back at work because his mentally disabled brother was killed by the soldiers. He told his employers that his mother was hospitalized.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/524035.html
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The Electronic Intifada
Yet another historic day
Ali Abunimah
9 January 2005
Once again, the media and the international peace process industry have declared that it is an "historic day" for the Palestinian people. The occasion this time is the election of Mahmoud Abbas as head of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied territories. Yet most of these Palestinian people, for whom this day has been declared historic, do not live in the occupied territories; the majority of Palestinians live in diaspora or as refugees outside their homeland, a direct result of the ethnic cleansing which created Israel in 1947-48, and of the occupation of the remainder of Palestine in 1967.
For Palestinians in the diaspora, such historic days feel like everyone is having a party that is supposed to be in your honor, except that no one invited you, or perhaps it is like watching a television movie of your life that bears little resemblance to reality. The feeling I have now is exactly what I felt on that other big historic day, September 13, 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed in Washington by a beaming Yasir Arafat and the recalcitrant Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, under the beatific gaze of President Bill Clinton. I feel a mixture of exasperation, hopelessness and determination.
For days now, I have done hours of talk radio about the elections, trying to explain as best as I can why replacing Yasser Arafat with Mahmoud Abbas will not lead to peace, why Palestinians aren't ecstatic, how the Israeli occupation makes democracy impossible. But for the most part, the script has been written and Palestinians are only called upon to read their lines. So the TV and newspapers are full of happy Palestinian voters who debate only whether Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) or Mustafa Barghouti is right for them. Herds of international observers are on hand to certify that a few irregularities notwithstanding, this was a model election of which Palestinians can be proud.
U.S. Senator John Sununu, who was part of the US observer delegation read from the official script: "It's a democratic election in the Arab world, and that in itself is somewhat historic," the New York Times quoted him as saying. Sununu added that the Palestinian leadership will now have "a new level of credibility to talk to the Israelis and impose reform and reorganization of the security forces, so there's a reason to be optimistic."
The reports I heard directly from associates on the ground only add to the disconnect between what Palestinians are experiencing and how the story is being told. EI's Arjan El-Fassed, an accredited election monitor posted in Gaza reported shortly before polls were scheduled to close that in the Shaaf area of Gaza City, a little more than 1,000 of 20,000 registered voters had voted -- a turnout of about seven percent. Chaos had broken out, he said, after Palestinian election officials had changed the rules at the last minute to allow voters to vote at any polling station in a desperate bid to raise the turnout and perhaps to open the possibility of a person casting multiple votes. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights immediately announced it was appealing what it called an illegal decision.
EI's Maureen Murphy, monitoring the elections in the Hebron area with the Al-Haq human rights organization reported that many people who turned out to vote did so despite feeling resigned to the fact that whoever wins will have no power to improve their lives or change the reality Israel has imposed on them.
In the ghost-written screenplay that the Palestinians are being forced to act out, the election is "good news." This means that any information that interferes with this agreed narrative — that we are at the cusp of a new era of peace, democracy and reform — has to be carefully filtered out.
As I sift through the deluge of election news, I find I am still unable to stop thinking about the murder by the Israeli army of seven Palestinian children in Gaza, literally blown to pieces by a tank shell on 4 January. This was barely reported in the US media. National Public Radio, supposedly the paragon of in-depth and nuanced reporting, actually covered up the story, reporting only that Mahmoud Abbas had called Israel the "Zionist Enemy" without mentioning the killing of the children at all, even though Abbas had made his statement in direct response to the atrocity.
A few days earlier, I had emailed a New York Times reporter to ask why in a lengthy article about the election campaign, the news that the Israeli army had killed nine Palestinians in a single day, including two children and a man living with Down's Syndrome, had been mentioned only in the final paragraph. I pointed out that whenever the victims are Israelis, his newspaper gives their deaths great prominence, and asked whether we should therefore understand that Palestinian lives are viewed as less valuable. The reporter wrote back: "Your point is very well taken ... the problem is more with the nature of daily stories than with differential humanity, but I will bear your good letter in mind. No life is worth less than any other." At first I felt satisfied by this answer, but the more I thought about it, the angrier I became.
Actually differential humanity is precisely the issue. The entire "peace process" and the discourse about Palestine today is structured around the absolutely inverted claim that Israelis are the principal victims of violence and Palestinians the principal perpetrators and aggressors.
So it would appear that in the mind of this reporter, and many others, the daily killing of Palestinians is not newsworthy because it is routine. Whereas in any period where the killing of Israelis was routine, it was that very fact which made the story newsworthy. It is the claim that the killing of Israelis is routine or threatens to become routine which is used to justify and provide context for all of Israel's actions, from assasinations to the mass demolition of homes in Gaza's Jabaliya and Rafah refugee camps to the construction of the apartheid wall inside the occupied West Bank.
In order to maintain this fiction, other crucial facts must be routinely screened from public view. While the peace process scriptwriters insist that Mahmoud Abbas can bring peace where Arafat failed, the Israelis at least know better.
The day before the election, Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper published a lengthy report by Aluf Benn headlined "Quietly carrying on building," about how Israel's settler colonies are growing apace across the West Bank. Israel is drawing up construction plans in over 120 settlements across the occupied West Bank with the full approval and knowledge of incoming US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Benn says. According to an Israeli government source quoted in the article, "If the U.S. recognizes your claim that the [settlement] blocs will remain yours forever, why should it make a fuss when you build on your own property?" Ha'aretzadded that according to Peace Now, an Israeli group that meticulously documents settlement activity, "the main building effort in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank is now focused on the area between the Green Line [1967 border] and the separation fence [apartheid wall], and it is aimed at turning the fence into Israel's permanent border."
So in the long-running Palestine soap opera, Abbas, the understudy who has been hired to replace the deceased lead actor Arafat, is being offered the choice of two roles by the Israeli-American scriptwriters. He can play the obedient native administrator of a defeated people who gets to wear a suit and call himself president of a fictional state, or he can don Arafat's kaffiyeh and assume the role of the Palestinians' unreformed "terrorist" leader. If he chooses the former role, he may get the political equivalent of an Oscar -- the Nobel Peace Prize.
But like in all soap operas, repetiveness and increasingly absurd plot twists eventually wear out even the most faithful audience. And when this episode is over, the Palestinian people will still be there, steadfastly, patiently, determined to regain their usurped rights and see justice done, come what may.
Ali Abunimah is a founder of The Electronic Intifada.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3499.shtml
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The Electronic Intifada
Slave Sovereignty: Palestinian Presidential Elections Under Occupation
Omar Barghouti
7 January 2005
Many Palestinians are boasting that they will soon enjoy, again, the most free and democratic elections in the entire Arab World. The only problem is that electing a Palestinian president while still under the boot of the occupier is an oxymoron. Sovereignty and occupation are mutually exclusive. The world, including many well-informed readers, seem to think that the Palestinian people is actually practicing the ultimate form of sovereignty by freely choosing its own president. This is easily extrapolated in the heads of many to mean that Palestinians are in a way free. So what's all this talk about occupation? Notice, for example, how little media attention is given now to the almost daily killings of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli occupation forces. Of course, the only thing that matters is who is running; who is not; what Mahmoud Abbas might have intended to say; or what Marwan Barghouti could have done only if... Bulldozing houses in Rafah, expanding colonies in Hebron and killing innocent children in Beit Lahya is simply a bore, a peripheral story, an ordinary occurrence in the midst of an election extraordinaire. There are several things wrong in this picture.
First, some facts. This Sunday, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will be electing the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), not the president of the Palestinian people. The former is an organ created according to the 1993 Oslo agreements between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the government of Israel, according to which the PA will do little more than run the educational, health, municipal and taxation services. In addition, it will do its very best to provide security for Israel, mainly by clamping down on the armed resistance factions.
Israel and the United States helped create the PA specifically to control the occupied territories, -- while maintaining the foundations of occupation, of course -- and eventually to sign some "peace" treaty that would exonerate Israel from its legal and moral obligations to allow the repatriation and compensation of the Palestinian refugees, to comprehensively withdraw its entire colonial apparatus from the West Bank and Gaza -- not just by removing its army but also its Jewish colonies, illegal under international law -- and to end its system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens.
Ironically, the PA at best represents a minority of the Palestinian people, those in the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip. The majority of Palestinians, refugees and Palestinian citizens of Israel, are not represented by the PA. Here's where the real paradox lies: how can an entity that represents no more than one third of the people of Palestine be expected to meaningfully and legally sign away the rights of the remaining two thirds? Easy. Redefine the Palestinians to preclude those unwanted two-thirds. Since Oslo, the mainstream media in the west, and puppet Arab media as well, have done just that. They have used the term Palestinian exclusively to mean those resident in the occupied West Bank and Gaza alone. Problem solved!
Well, not quite. Those two-thirds cannot be easily written out of history and out of the identity of Palestine. They are increasingly becoming well-organized, politically active and they have developed their own channels of expression, if not yet their own frames of representation. Plus, many Palestinians in the occupied territories are themselves refugees who yearn to return to Haifa, Jaffa, Lydda, Majdal and Acre, all in what is now Israel. In all semi-accurate public opinion polls, the number one issue of political interest for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has consistently remained the right of return for the refugees. So it seems that the PA project may not after all yield the expected returns on the Israeli-American investment.
Given this picture, shouldn't any form of sovereignty, albeit limited, help Palestinians declare their independence of Israel? But that's precisely the problem. The Palestinians are not free; they should not be giving the world the impression that they are. They are a nation under a very real and brutal occupation that is committing crimes with utter impunity and passe colonial arrogance. They should remind the world in every occasion that the only just and enduring solution to the conflict in the region can be attained by ending Israel's oppression -- in all three forms mentioned above -- not by changing the Palestinians' perception of it. They should struggle to revive the moribund structures of the PLO, the only organization that ever represented all Palestinians. All three components of the Palestinian people urgently need a single, democratically elected body to represent their interests and to shoulder the responsibility for their fate. This task is well beyond the ability, the job description or the best intentions of the PA.
Ten years after Oslo, the PA's political function seems to have become restricted to acting as an accessory to colonial rule, allowing Israel to maintain its oppression, while appearing to the world as engaged in some peace process. Since Oslo, the formerly closed doors have opened to Israel: in Europe, Africa, Asia and even in the middle of the Arab World. The once formidable Arab boycott of Israel has all but collapsed, allowing Israeli businesses to reap massive profits, boosting the Israeli economy to record growth rates, just before the second intifada broke out. In fact, the only peace that this Oslo process has achieved is the deadly silence of the oppressed while the oppressors go on with their regular business.
A presidential election under these circumstances can only help Israel cover up its speeding colonization of what remains of Palestine, while the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza are busy celebrating their superior "democracy."
When the slaves are distracted with "free" elections of their deputy jailers, the masters can only rejoice.
Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political analyst.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3490.shtml
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Ha’aretz
Two types of disasters
Gideon Levy
2 January 2005
What would have happened, heaven forbid, if the tsunami had struck the coast of the Gaza Strip? It's a safe guess that Israel would have gone out of its way to proffer aid. Aid delegations would have left immediately for Gaza via the Erez checkpoint. Physicians, medicines and blankets would have made their way to Jabalya refugee camp and military correspondents would have reported from there with pride about the humanitarian operation mounted by the Israel Defense Forces. Every Palestinian child pulled from the ruins would have received deeply felt coverage in the media, hotels in Tel Aviv would have competed in making offers of shelter to those left homeless by the disaster and Channel 2 would have organized a marathon to raise funds for the new refugees.
Even if people are born equal, they are not equal in their death. It's important where they died and under what circumstances. The world has already pledged billions for the regions in Southeast Asia that were ravaged, conglomerates and individuals in Europe and the United States have mobilized to donate and dozens of countries are sending aid, among them Israel, albeit with its usual grandstanding. When it comes to natural disasters, the world - and Israel, too - shows far greater generosity and alacrity than it does in cases of man-made disasters.
When a tourist region is hit, attention is all the more intense. Anyone watching television in the West might think the tsunami struck Sweden or Switzerland. The majority of the survivors seen on the small screen look like Europeans. Here, we sometimes get the impression that this is an Israeli calamity. "The worst of all" was the banner headline on Friday in the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth, which reported the identification of the bodies of two Israelis.
In the past few years, 3 million people have died in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire), according to the International Rescue Community aid agency, but the world has barely lifted a finger. Few of them died in battles; they were killed by hunger and disease that spread in the wake of a war that began in 1998, as a revolt against President Laurent-Desire Kabila. Hardly anything has been written about the millions who have perished and no protest demonstrations have been held. Israel did not send aid and most countries of the world have averted their eyes from the horror.
Four years earlier, in 1994, about 1 million Tutsis were slaughtered in Rwanda. Not only did the international community do nothing to aid the victims, it got out of the region as fast as it could. The massacre had hardly begun when all the United Nations forces were removed from Rwanda, leaving the civilian population helpless. A few years before that, about 2 million people were killed during the 18-year war in Sudan. A million died in the Biafra conflict of the 1960s. In the past two years, some 50,000 people, by conservative estimate, have been killed in Darfur, in western Sudan, and 2 million have been uprooted from their homes.
All these casualties had the misfortune of being born in Africa and getting caught up in violent conflicts. They were born in the most forgotten place and died in circumstances for which the world least likes to mobilize aid. If they had been born elsewhere, or had found themselves in a natural disaster, their lot would have been slightly better. When the earth shook a year ago in Iran, the enemy of the international community, the international community nevertheless rushed to the country's aid. Some 20,000 people were killed in the Iranian city of Bam and no fewer than 22 countries sent assistance, including the United States, which dispatched rescue teams to its declared enemy. Even Israel offered to help. Two years earlier, the international community sent impressive immediate aid to the victims of an earthquake in the Indian state of Gujarat, where 20,000 people died. Even Pakistan sent tents and blankets. The IDF dubbed its aid operation to India "Hand Outstretched." Less than a year earlier, an international air convoy reached Madagascar, where a cyclone left 1,500 people dead. Last August, the United States pledged to send $210 million to Bangladesh, where 1,350 people were killed in floods, and Britain promised 10 million pounds. In all these natural disasters the world should and could have done far more, but it still did a great deal more than is the case with millions of people who were killed in wars, and as a result of them, in Africa.
Fewer people died in all the earthquakes that struck the world in the 20th century than in one remote war in Biafra, and far fewer than the number in another disregarded war in Congo. Whereas no one could have prevented the tsunami in Asia or the earthquake in Iran, wars can be prevented or stopped. But countries do not like to get involved in other people's wars. It is not just a matter of aid that was not delivered, but of sheer attention. The difference attests to self-righteousness and a double moral standard: The attack on the Twin Towers in Manhattan, in which 2,750 people were killed, shaped history; but few have heard of the war in Congo, where more than 3 million people have died. If it were not for the 10 or so missing Israelis in the tsunami disaster, we would have forgotten about it already. When hundreds are killed in Gaza and tens of thousands of innocent people are left homeless because of what we have done, we turn away. If they had been victims of a natural disaster, we would have already been there to help.
Wednesday, December 22
Advent Reflection: The Defiant Spirit of Christmas
Advent Reflection: The Defiant Spirit of Christmas
22 December 2004
Dear Friends,
Seasons Greetings from MCC Palestine. The following is a Christmas message from one of our partner organizations, the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. It offers a powerful reflection from a Palestinian Christian perspective, from a voice that we in North America often do not hear. We hope that the voices of these Palestinian sisters and brothers that are so often dismissed, silenced, and dehumanized speak loudly to you this Advent season, providing both a meaning and a challenge for your own celebration of the incarnational presence of "God with us" this Christmas.
Peace to you this Advent season.
________________________________
SABEEL’S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE 2004
The Defiant Spirit of Christmas
On behalf of Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center– Board and Staff – I would like to send to all of our friends, local and international, our sincere Christmas greetings. I would also like to express our heartfelt gratitude for all the support that our friends give us.
May the Joy, Peace, and Love of Christmas
Remain with You
Throughout the New Year
Some of our people ask how can we celebrate Christmas
with all the closures and checkpoints,
with all the injustice and oppression,
with all the violations of human rights,
with the presence of a wall that separates families and friends,
and a multitude of hardships that the occupation imposes to make people’s lives miserable,
how can we speak of love, peace and joy when most of our people and millions of others around the world do not experience liberty and peace?
The questions are legitimate. Yet Christmas and New Year must be a time of renewal, of hope and anticipation, of determination and zeal to work for a better world where people can experience these essential qualities of life. Therefore, wherever empire exists and the powers that be are in control through domination, there is a greater responsibility for all of us to take a stand against all that dehumanizes people and to work for their liberation.
The Christmas story is a story of a liberating God who comes to join an oppressed people in the work of liberation. God’s message through the angels is a message of defiance. In spite of the presence of empire, human arrogance, and oppression, God is announcing peace and goodwill. This is God’s agenda. Glory belongs to God and not to the emperor nor to the powers. Once that is genuinely acknowledged, peace is not far away.
It is in the midst of the Roman occupation that the Incarnation took place;
it is in spite of the occupation that Mary and Joseph found joy and love in the birth of Jesus;
it is in spite of the occupation and in the midst of economic hardships that the shepherds came to visit a family of modest means and discovered great joy and peace;
it is in spite of the occupation that the Magi came to offer their gifts to the child.
We celebrate in the midst of the occupation and in spite of it. Through our celebration
we defy the occupation;
we defy the injustice;
we defy the oppressors;
we defy the powers.
They do not possess the last word,
they can build high walls, but they cannot take away our hope,
they can put us in jail, but they cannot take away our joy,
they can prevent us from visiting family, but they cannot take away our love,
they can stop us at checkpoints and impose all kinds of restrictions, but they cannot take away our pursuit of freedom and liberation,
they can prevent us from going to Bethlehem, but they cannot prevent the spirit of Bethlehem from reaching us,
they can treat us as nonhumans, but they cannot crush our spirit nor can they take away our God-given human worth and dignity,
they can act with hate and disgust but, by the grace of God, we can always refuse to stoop to the level of hate and maintain our love of God and neighbor that includes them.
Therefore Christmas makes us defiant.
We defy the evildoers because we believe in the goodness which they are capable of doing,
we defy hate because we believe in the power of love and forgiveness,
we defy despair because we believe in life and hope,
we defy violence and terror - both state and individual - because we believe in the power of peace and nonviolence,
we defy war and the occupation of other people’s lands because we believe in the power of peaceful methods based on international law and legitimacy,
we defy and challenge those who humiliate and degrade others because we believe in the dignity of every human being.
The Incarnation took place when God took on our humanity, when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This happened in Palestine under Roman occupation. Then as now and in spite of all the hardships, we celebrate Christ’s birth, Emmanuel, God with us, giving us hope, joy, peace, and love.
We are defiant. We are full of hope. We will continue to work for peace through justice.
Glory to God in the Highest and on Earth Peace
Naim Ateek
Sabeel, Jerusalem
December 14, 2004
www.sabeel.org
__
22 December 2004
Dear Friends,
Seasons Greetings from MCC Palestine. The following is a Christmas message from one of our partner organizations, the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. It offers a powerful reflection from a Palestinian Christian perspective, from a voice that we in North America often do not hear. We hope that the voices of these Palestinian sisters and brothers that are so often dismissed, silenced, and dehumanized speak loudly to you this Advent season, providing both a meaning and a challenge for your own celebration of the incarnational presence of "God with us" this Christmas.
Peace to you this Advent season.
________________________________
SABEEL’S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE 2004
The Defiant Spirit of Christmas
On behalf of Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center– Board and Staff – I would like to send to all of our friends, local and international, our sincere Christmas greetings. I would also like to express our heartfelt gratitude for all the support that our friends give us.
May the Joy, Peace, and Love of Christmas
Remain with You
Throughout the New Year
Some of our people ask how can we celebrate Christmas
with all the closures and checkpoints,
with all the injustice and oppression,
with all the violations of human rights,
with the presence of a wall that separates families and friends,
and a multitude of hardships that the occupation imposes to make people’s lives miserable,
how can we speak of love, peace and joy when most of our people and millions of others around the world do not experience liberty and peace?
The questions are legitimate. Yet Christmas and New Year must be a time of renewal, of hope and anticipation, of determination and zeal to work for a better world where people can experience these essential qualities of life. Therefore, wherever empire exists and the powers that be are in control through domination, there is a greater responsibility for all of us to take a stand against all that dehumanizes people and to work for their liberation.
The Christmas story is a story of a liberating God who comes to join an oppressed people in the work of liberation. God’s message through the angels is a message of defiance. In spite of the presence of empire, human arrogance, and oppression, God is announcing peace and goodwill. This is God’s agenda. Glory belongs to God and not to the emperor nor to the powers. Once that is genuinely acknowledged, peace is not far away.
It is in the midst of the Roman occupation that the Incarnation took place;
it is in spite of the occupation that Mary and Joseph found joy and love in the birth of Jesus;
it is in spite of the occupation and in the midst of economic hardships that the shepherds came to visit a family of modest means and discovered great joy and peace;
it is in spite of the occupation that the Magi came to offer their gifts to the child.
We celebrate in the midst of the occupation and in spite of it. Through our celebration
we defy the occupation;
we defy the injustice;
we defy the oppressors;
we defy the powers.
They do not possess the last word,
they can build high walls, but they cannot take away our hope,
they can put us in jail, but they cannot take away our joy,
they can prevent us from visiting family, but they cannot take away our love,
they can stop us at checkpoints and impose all kinds of restrictions, but they cannot take away our pursuit of freedom and liberation,
they can prevent us from going to Bethlehem, but they cannot prevent the spirit of Bethlehem from reaching us,
they can treat us as nonhumans, but they cannot crush our spirit nor can they take away our God-given human worth and dignity,
they can act with hate and disgust but, by the grace of God, we can always refuse to stoop to the level of hate and maintain our love of God and neighbor that includes them.
Therefore Christmas makes us defiant.
We defy the evildoers because we believe in the goodness which they are capable of doing,
we defy hate because we believe in the power of love and forgiveness,
we defy despair because we believe in life and hope,
we defy violence and terror - both state and individual - because we believe in the power of peace and nonviolence,
we defy war and the occupation of other people’s lands because we believe in the power of peaceful methods based on international law and legitimacy,
we defy and challenge those who humiliate and degrade others because we believe in the dignity of every human being.
The Incarnation took place when God took on our humanity, when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This happened in Palestine under Roman occupation. Then as now and in spite of all the hardships, we celebrate Christ’s birth, Emmanuel, God with us, giving us hope, joy, peace, and love.
We are defiant. We are full of hope. We will continue to work for peace through justice.
Glory to God in the Highest and on Earth Peace
Naim Ateek
Sabeel, Jerusalem
December 14, 2004
www.sabeel.org
__
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