MCC Palestine Update #100
10 June 2004
New Faces, New Resources for Education and Advocacy
Welcoming New Faces, Goodbyes to Good Friends
This summer is an exciting time of transition in the MCC Palestine program. Ed Nyce, who has served as MCC's Peace Development Worker for the past five years, will complete his term in early August. Ed has contributed in multiple ways to MCC's efforts to communicate the voices of our Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilding partners: he will be greatly missed!
Timothy and Christi Seidel from Pennsylvania are arriving in late June to begin language study and start work as MCC's new Peace Development workers. Tim and Chris are graduates of Messiah College; Tim recently completed master's degrees in theology and international relations/conflict resolution, while Christi has been teaching first grade. We look forward to the energy and skills they are bringing to the position.
Alain Epp Weaver, Sonia Weaver, and their two children, meanwhile, are moving to Amman, Jordan, in early July to begin work as MCC representatives for Palestine-Jordan-Iraq. This move comes at the start of a regional administrative reconfiguration that will centralize many administrative and program planning functions. MCC's commitment to Palestine, however, will remain undiminished, however, as MCC has appointed Sriprakash Mayasandra to the new position of Jerusalem Representative. Sri is finishing up his work as Human Resources Coordinator at Ten Thousand Villages in Akron, Pa. and will come to Jerusalem in early August. He will help partners in gathering stories about the impact of MCC-assisted projects; oversee day-to-day administrative functions in the Jerusalem office; and serve as a team leader for MCC volunteers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We're excited to have Sri joining the team!
This administrative reconfiguration will allow MCC to commit greater volunteer and financial resources to Palestine. We anticipate that MCC's unit of volunteers will increase over the coming years, even as MCC's partnerships with organizations working for community development and a just peace are strengthened and deepened.
With our impending move to Jordan, this will be the final MCC Palestine Update that I send out. One hundred feels like a nice, even number. I hope that, at least sometimes, these updates have been useful sources of information. As Sri, Chris, and Tim get settled into Jerusalem and Bethlehem, they might well continue to send out updates and prayer requests. If you know of anyone who wants to be added to MCC's lists, feel free to send their e-mail address to us at optmcc@mennonitecc.ca.
New Resources from MCC
During the summer and fall of 2004, MCC is releasing several resources that look at the current situation in Palestine and highlight MCC's responses. These include:
*MCC has produced a video about the separation wall entitled "The Dividing Wall." A perfect resource for Christian education classes, for groups wishing to learn more about Israel/Palestine, for advocates for peace and justice. The video/DVD features regular Palestinians whose lives have been devastated by Israel's separation barriers and highlights the voices of Palestinians and Israelis who work for a future of bridges instead of walls. For information on how to purchase or borrow the video, contact Shirley Mast at sam@mail.mcc.org or write to mailbox@mail.mcc.org.
*The July 2004 issue of MCC's Peace Office Newsletter will focus on the separation wall that Israel is building in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The issue will include a map, articles by Dr. Jad Isaac of the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem, Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Samia Khoury (a board member at Sabeel), and more. For information about how to obtain a hard copy of this issue, e-mail Bob Herr (bh@mail.mcc.org) or Judy Zimmerman Herr (jzh@mail.mcc.org). The issue will also be available for download in pdf format from MCC's website at (http://www.mcc.org/respub/pon/index.html).
*The September/October issue of MCC's magazine, a Common Place, will highlight the Occupied Palestinian Territories as the "featured country." To subscribe for free to a Common Place, complete the subscription form at http://www.mcc.org/acp/subscribe.html or send a note to mailbox@mail.mcc.org asking to be added to the list.
Below you will find two pieces, both of which look at the ongoing demolition of homes in Rafah. Well over 11,000 Palestinians (most of them refugees to begin with) have lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers over the past four years. With the walls and fences continuing to go up in the West Bank and with the destruction of homes in Rafah, Khan Younis and elsewhere in the Gaza Strip, the 56-year-old story of Palestinian dispossession is sadly having several new chapters added to it. Keep the people of Palestine in your prayers, and remember in your petitions to God the work of Israelis and Palestinians who work for and dream of a future of bridges instead of walls, of justice and reconciliation instead of dispossession and domination.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. An old refrain that stabs at the heart
By Meron Benvenisti
May 20, 2004
The sights of Rafah are too difficult to bear - trails of refugees alongside carts laden with bedding and the meager contents of their homes; children dragging suitcases larger than themselves; women draped in black kneeling in mourning on piles of rubble. And in the memories of some of us, whose number if dwindling, arise similar scenes that have been a part of our lives, as a sort of refrain that stabs at the heart and gnaws at the conscience, time after time, for over half a century - the procession of refugees from Lod to Ramallah in the heat of July 1948; the convoys of banished residents of Yalu and Beit Nuba, Emmaus and Qalqilyah in June 1967; the refugees of Jericho climbing on the ruins of the Allenby Bridge after the Six-Day War.
And perhaps the most shocking of all, the grandfathers and fathers of the Rafah refugees, abandoning the houses in Yibna in which they were born, in fear of the approaching Israeli army on June 5, 1948. "At dawn," reported the AP correspondent, "it was possible to see the civilians fleeing from the town [Yibna] in the direction of the coast, without the intervention of the Israeli attackers."
Some 56 years have passed, and they are again fleeing in fear of the Israeli attackers.
And the attackers adopt the same tactics, spread rumors and fire warning shots; and when the residents flee out of fear, they claim that they are not responsible for the flight, but then destroy the homes, for "after all, they are empty and deserted."
Laundered language and sterile military terms camouflage a primitive desire for vengeance and uninhibited militancy. Slogans such as "combat heritage," "righteousness of our path" and "the most moral army in the world" immunize the soldiers and their commanders from having to contend with the humanitarian tragedy they are creating.
The political echelon, which is supposed to guide the army according to ethical criteria, reveals even crueler and more extreme tendencies that the commanders of the army. All they are interested in is the "image" of Israeland the condemnation of the "hostile media."
S. Yizhar has already said these harsh sentences about all of us: "To be deceived open-eyed, and to on the spot join the big, common throng of liars - composed of ignorance, expedient apathy, and simple unashamed selfishness - and to exchange one big truth for the clever shrug of the shoulder of a veteran criminal." He said this in May 1949, in reference to the incident at Khirbet Khiza'a, some of whose former residents live in one of the Rafah refugee camps.
The community of those seeking vengeance, and who crave "the appropriate response" will no doubt respond with anger and abuse: How can you show empathy for a bunch of base murderers, desert savages who are led by corrupt gang chieftains? But there is a sneaking suspicion that this too is "combat heritage" - exploitation of the murderousness of the Palestinians to "punish" them, uproot them from their homes, "bare" their fields and then "redeem" the abandoned land for the needs of Israelis. Generation after generation, we cause them to abandon their homes, settling in them, and afterward, when the opportunity arises, take over their sanctuaries as well, and drive them away from there.
Generation after generation, we feed the refugee consciousness, reconstruct the pain of displacement and expose another generation to the powerless rage of the displaced person. Afterward we face, frightened and threatened, the "return" - the life's hope of every refuges and a stain on the settler's conscience.
Something basic has gone awry here. If commanders, the sons of the fighters of 1948, send the grandchildren of the fighters for independence to "widen the route" - which means the expulsion of the grandchildren of the refugees of 1948 - on the pretext of existential threat, then there was something defective in the vision of the founding fathers.
If after a half-century their enterprise still faces existential threat, this can only mean that they condemned it to eternal enmity, and there is no community that can for years on end survive a violent war for its existence.
And if this is merely a pretext - and Operation Rainbow in Rafah was an instinctive reaction that evolved into second nature - we must reflect deeply and sadly on our own responsibility for the enterprise that at its start embodied so many exalted ideals.
Is there some "original sin" that lies at the foundation of the Zionist enterprise? Those who initiated the Rafah operation, and those who are executing it, should know that one of the outcomes of their actions will inevitably be the raising of questions about this heresy.
2. "I lost all my memories"
Ha'aretz, June 3, 2004
Twilight Zone / End of the Rainbow
By Gideon Levy
One of the 120 homes demolished by the IDF in the Brazil refugee camp belonged to architect Manal Awad. This was the third time since 1948 that her family has been left homeless - and the second time that Ariel Sharon was responsible.
Now all 19 people are crowded into a tiny two-and-a-half-room apartment belonging to one sister, on the edge of the destroyed area of their refugee camp. The curtain blowing in the breeze allows intermittent glimpses of the view from the window: mounds of rubble all the way to the end of the street. This is the Awad family: Mother, elderly aunt, son, daughters and their families. On Thursday, May 20, two bulldozers approached their home, threatening to raze it with the occupants still inside: Operation Rainbow. The 85-year-oldaunt barely managed to climb out. She says that in 1948, when she fled from her first home, and in 1972, when the IDF razed her home again, it was easier for her - she was still young then. One of the daughters, architect Manal Awad, says that it's not just stone walls that have been destroyed, but also memories - in the photographs and books that are lost forever. Her sisters tried to save the coffee table that she had designed, but couldn't. The table was crushed along with the other contents of the house. Among the wreckage, the only thing she could find was the new narghile she had bought for her brother in Tunisia.
The IDF did its work very thoroughly here: The houses and their contents were completely crushed. Here and there, some recognizable items can be seen - part of a dress, a smashed water boiler, the torn pages of a book. Entire houses have been wiped off the face of the earth, and now they are just mounds of dirt. The chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, said without batting an eye: "We know of 12 houses that were demolished since the start of the operation." Platoon commander Brigadier General Shmuel Zakkai corrected him the next day, saying the actual number was 56 houses.
But neither figure is correct. In the Brazil camp alone, according to Mustafa Ibrahim, an experienced investigator for the Palestinian civil rights commission, 120 houses were destroyed. Visiting the place, it's hard to count, but one sees that many dozens of houses were demolished, judging by the many mounds of rubble. All the talk about smuggling tunnels also appears less than credible. The Awad family's home, for example, is approximately 800 meters away from the Philadelphi corridor; there are no tunnels that long. This was demolition just for the sake of it, a punitive campaign of vengeance against innocents rendered homeless for the second and third times.
In Operation Defensive Shield, we destroyed the center of the Jenin refugee camp - 350 houses - but the destruction was dense and concentrated. There were battles there as well. In Operation Rainbow, we demolished houses in a scattered fashion, without a battle, so that the Brazil camp now looks like Sarajevo in 1993. It's hard to find the logic in the demolition campaign: A group of houses here and another one there, this house yes and that one no, seeming more the result of whim than any real planning. To the 120 houses in the Brazil camp that were thoroughly destroyed must be added a similar number of houses that were partially destroyed - not to mention the crushed cars, the roads and utility poles that were uprooted, or the Taha Hussein school, part of which has been reduced to rubble. The residents describe how the bulldozers approached from all sides; they were trapped inside their homes, and terrified. (One resident telephoned me then and told about his neighbor and the man's 12 children who were trapped in a house that was about to be demolished, begging for something to be done to save them.)
This past Sunday, long after the end of the operation, as a bonus, we demolished another 23 houses in the adjacent Block J, in another nameless, forgotten operation which doubtless is of tremendous security importance.
Manal Awad sits in her modest office in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, tearlessly mourning her demolished home. She is the director of the Women's Mental Health Center in Gaza. She is 30 years old, dressed in an elegant sport jacket and speaks fluent English. She was in her office when the bulldozers arrived at the family's home, where her mother and aunt and sisters were. They had sent her brother out of the house before the bulldozers came, thinking that if it was only women left there, they'd be safe.
"I'll never forget that day. My sister called and told me there was a tank next to the house. I told her not to dare peek out the window. We're experienced - in Tel al-Sultan, they shot at anyone who peeked out of the window. On the radio I heard that they were starting to raze houses with people still inside. We were afraid that this time it would be especially bad, but in our worst dreams we never imagined that our home would be destroyed.
"I tried to reassure my sister, but when I called back she told me that the bulldozers were right in front of the house. I told her: You have to get out of the house immediately. She said the guest room was already collapsing. They were afraid to go out because there was a bulldozer in front and another one in back, as well as tanks. My mother took a hammer and tried to break through the wall to get to the neighbors. My sister brought a ladder for them to climb out. My 85-year-old aunt, who walks with difficulty, managed to climb the first couple of rungs, but then she stopped and said she couldn't go on. She said that in 1948, she could run away, but not now. My mother and sisters pushed her up, the neighbor pulled from the other side and she finally got over, I don't know how.
"It was the first time in my life that I ever heard my mother cry like that. She's a strong and sensitive woman, but she never cried that way. Not even when my father died 23 years ago and she was left alone with six daughters and a son and an elderly aunt. She fought for us all her life and now I felt that she needed my support and I wasn't by her side. I was helpless. It wasn't easy to hear her crying on the telephone. She said to me: `I won't leave the house.' Those were the last words I heard from her. My sister said: `Now it's the end. We're running away.' I didn't know what happened to them, whether or not they were alive. I only got the good news an hour later - they had reached the neighbors. They thought that the bulldozers would stop and not demolish the neighbors' house, too, but that also turned out to be wrong. My mother was so angry and shouted against Sharon and against Bush while the bulldozers were pursuing them to the neighbors' house. It was also demolished. My sister came out of the neighbors' house waving a white flag. I tried to picture the layout of the street, to think where they could have run to, with the tanks there. I was afraid for their lives. All of those images keep coming back to my mind.
"In 1948, the family fled from our village near Ramle to a cave. In 1972, Sharon demolished our house in the Shabura camp, when I was a baby. Now this is the third house. My mother is a strong woman, but now she's broken. It's the end for her. She always dreamed about the first house that they fled from, but she was attached to the house in the camp. Now it's all meaningless. Her life was for nothing. She hoped that our fate would be different. Peace. Maybe not peace, but at least a better life.
"I wasn't with them, but I felt what they felt. I lost all my memories there. A house isn't just walls. I can buy new furniture, a new refrigerator. But that's not it. The photographs with the family history - every one holds a memory for me. Photographs of our loved ones and our joys and our sorrows - all destroyed. We also had a book collection. It wasn't so big, but it meant a lot to us. Each one had his favorite books. Nothing is left. The house is destroyed. Life is destroyed. Thirty years of life was wiped out.
"When I was finally able to go to Rafah on the weekend, a friend offered to accompany me. I told her there was no need, that I was strong, but she warned me that I'd be in shock when I got there. She was right. Nothing was left of the whole street. We live in the old part of Brazil, and we always said that if they did demolitions, we'd just hear the noise, but that they'd never come close to us, because we're far from the border. But for some reason they started with our house. I'm sorry that I'm just talking about myself ... I hoped so much that I'd be able to save something.
"A week has passed and I have the feeling that it's just going to get harder and harder. I thought I'd recover. It was a simple refugees' house, but on the inside it was beautiful to me. I've been all over the world and seen some amazing houses, but I always missed that one."
Here is where the family home stood. A pile of rocks. Manal's mother, Shukrin, emerges from the ruins - a small woman in black - and here is Manal's brother, too. And here is the Mansour family's house, and the house of the Hassan family and the Hamad family. Nothing is left. The elderly aunt, Aliya, sits on the floor of the apartment that is their temporary refuge, staring at the carpet, her expression masked. Manal took her to see a doctor in Gaza; he said that her spine had not been injured during the escape with the ladder.
Aliya vividly remembers the first escape, from Abu Shusha, and the second escape from the Shabura camp, when Sharon came "to widen the corridor." It's the same now. Aliya tells about their first days in a cave after fleeing Abu Shusha, and how they trekked from there first to Yavneh and then to Gaza. Her niece Shukrin adds some details. They> speak softly, the signs of the most recent trauma still very apparent. It happened twice in the month of May - May 1948 and May 2004. Only in 1972 did it happen in December.
Yusuf, the husband of one of the sisters in whose home they've taken shelter, chuckles: He hasn't yet counted how many people are now living in his tiny house. "Like sardines, but at least everyone's together." This morning, when a Palestinian bulldozer came to clear away the rubble opposite his house, his daughter burst into tears. She thought the Israelis had come back to demolish some more.
We go outside to wander along the long pile of rubble. There is destruction on both sides of the sandy road. By one pile that used to be a house, children are still scavenging for pieces of metal to load onto a donkey cart. The apartment of Yusuf Bahlul (who once worked for Sonol in Gaza), on the top floor of an apartment building overlooking this refugee camp, took a direct hit from a shell and is also ruined and covered in soot. Everyone here speaks Hebrew, from the years when they used to work in Israel.
A small television table stands alone in a living room whose walls have all collapsed. In the Brazil camp, an old woman tries to push a crushed water heater. Her strength is gone. A post-disaster calm prevails. The Philadelphi corridor is visible at the bottom of the street, and every so often a menacing Israeli tank passes by. The stench of burst sewage pipes pervades the air as children display their latest finds from the rubble.
Thursday, June 10
Monday, April 5
MCC Palestine Update #99
MCC Palestine Update #99
April 5, 2004
[Go to the "Palestine Diary" section of the MCC website for a series of seven diary-style reflections by MCC workers Ed Nyce, Molly Graver, Bob Herr, and Alain Epp Weaver-http://www.mcc.org/palestinediary/]
As Holy Week begins, there are no shortage of possible topics to address in this brief missive: the assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin; the heightened security inside Israel as people brace for a response by Hamas; Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's renewed threats to "remove" Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat "from the historical arena"; Sharon's own legal troubles, that may yet threaten the future of his government; the ongoing demolition of homes in the occupied territories, particularly the Gaza Strip; Israeli attempts-which seem to be enjoying partial success-to obtain at least tacit US support for its "disengagement" plan (best understood as a unilateral, de facto annexation of large swathes of West Bank land and as a solidification of control over settlements built on that land and over West Bank land and water resources). All of these topics, and more, would easily warrant multiple essays. But instead I'll just mention one news item, one that has received scant attention in the world's press. This past week various United Nations agencies announced that, given ongoing Israeli restrictions and limitations at the Karni crossing point into the Gaza Strip, the UN agencies were suspending food aid operations to Palestinians. With the Palestinian economy in tatters, thanks to over 40 months of Israeli closures, checkpoints, and restrictions on movement, all resulting in poverty and unemployment rates running at least at 60% (using the most conservative of economic measurements), hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have found themselves dependent on external food aid. For months, UN agencies, donor governments, and international aid agencies have grappled with two questions: first, by helping to prevent the Palestinian economy from total collapse, are these food aid efforts in effect assisting Israel in maintaining the occupation-i.e., allowing it to control the occupied territories while absolving itself of any responsibility (which as an occupying power it should bear) for the welfare of civilians in the occupied territories? Second, at what point would ongoing Israeli obstacles to free humanitarian operation? The UN agencies have clearly decided that, with new restrictions at entry points into the Gaza Strip, the obstacles to humanitarian operations have become too great. I personally share many of the reservations about food aid listed by its critics: that it fosters dependency; that it can compromise the dignity and honor of its recipients; that, in the occupied territories, it unwittingly aids Israel in having the occupation without any of its consequences. That said, the well-being of hundreds of thousands of Gazans has now been made more tenuous, thanks to ongoing Israeli obstacles to humanitarian assistance. This Holy Week, pray that none might go hungry in the occupied territories; pray also that restrictions on ordinary Palestinian movement will be lifted, a move that, World Bank and other economists observe, would go a very long way in addressing poverty and unemployment among Palestinians.
Below you will find four pieces. In the first, MCC worker Ed Nyce reflects on the death of a neighbor this past week. In the second, Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy goes on a tour of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israeli troops in 1948, organized by MCC's Israeli partner organization, Zochrot. Israeli academic Avi Shlaim, based at Oxford, then looks at the "road map" to continued conflict that has been charted by current Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Finally, Gideon Levy takes a sobering look at what he calls "a sudden concern for the Palestinian child."
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Here We Go Again, Reflection by Ed Nyce, April 2, 2004
Today, Friday, April 2, one of Abu Nasser's sons was killed near Rachel's Tomb.
Several of you know Abu Nasser, who has a small food shop below the apartment where I live. A few others know the location. And the rest of you I included in this email either because you know the culture and situation, or I just wanted to tell you.
The first word regarding what may have happened is that the son, 16 years old, was throwing stones toward soldiers. If so, he was probably part of a group. It is not out of the realm of possibility.
Abu Nasser has welcomed me from the beginning. He does not know English. He likes to say that he gives me Arabic lessons and I return the favor with English lessons. He is knowingly exaggerating.
He and Abu Fuad, who used to have a shop across the street, would regularly invite passersby to join them for Arabic coffee. Times are tough enough now that the coffee doesn't show up like it once did – at least that (the tough $ times) is my interpretation. The shop often has very little merchandise, and I mean very little, and Abu Nasser is one who's been hit hard by the economics of the intifada. It's not that he had lost a lot during the intifada, because by the time it started in 2000, he already didn't have a lot. But still he has less than before. And after today, he has indeed lost a lot.
I don't see Abu Nasser everyday, but today I saw him three times before this happened, two of the times for extended periods.
First was when I went outside to try to put the front bumper of the Subaru back where it is supposed to be. When I went for an early morning walk, I didn't notice anything strange, but a little later, looking out the window, there was the rubber bumper hanging down perpendicular to its usual position. Zoughbi Zoughbi, my landlord and director of Wi'am, a peacemaking organization with whom MCC partners, called to confirm our meeting today, and I mentioned the bumper to him.
When we went out to look at it, Abu Nasser's shop was open. He said that some kids knocked the bumper down last night. Yet I hadn't seen it that way this morning. In any event, Zoughbi briefly went back inside or somewhere, and Abu Nasser showed me his shop. There was a large increase in merchandise quantity! He sold a dunam (1/4 acre) of land out near Tuqu' and invested it in more products. I congratulated him (though wasn't sure if the selling of the land was happy), and then Zoughbi and I left for the office.
I got a ride back around 10:30 or so from the garage in Beit Sahour, where I left the car, and went into Abu Nasser's shop. A sheikh whom I see walking at times, and he and I exchange waves and sometimes verbal greetings, started asking something I didn't quite get, but it seemed like it had to do with whether I was Muslim or whether I wanted to talk about it. In any event, Abu Nasser right away started saying, "No, no, no," told him I'm his friend, and a few other very helpful things. So then the sheikh's questions were more along the line of whether I'm married. Dialogue would have been fine, but so was the intervention. After he left for the Friday prayers, to which Abu Nasser would soon also go, I again expressed my joy that he had a fuller shop, and bought 32 shekels (roughly $7.11) worth of items, plus received a shekel's (maybe a shekel and a half) worth for free - his insistence.
Later, I saw Abu Nasser very briefly when I left to get the car (and when I returned).
In late afternoon, I went over to the home of some other friends. Abdullah, the youngest of six children, turns 8 today. It's a family I enjoy being with a lot, and feel really at ease there.
While there, someone noticed the written news flash on the television screen that Abu Nasser's son was killed near Rachel's Tomb. The spelling of the name, which I could make out (Arabic) only because it stayed for a long time on the screen, was actually Nassar (Nas SAAR) rather than Nasser (NAS ser), and those in the room were discussing that and weren't quite sure at first which name was accurate. However, the rest of the family names lined up, and already the word was going around outside, the kids said, that it was a son of his.
I am not quite sure yet which son it is. I know most of them, and one of several could be exactly 16, so we'll see.
I head out on my own at times, and some things I do with others. Visiting the family tomorrow, a cultural expression of grief, I plan to do with Zoughbi and others who go as a group. Usually, at least a small group shows up rather than an individual on these calls. Sometime tomorrow we'll do that.
So there was still a cake for Abdullah, though now with the news we didn't sing, but did anyway go on and have a good time. There would never be any cakes if we waited for good news. One boy turned 8, one boy died at 16. And, it seems, that's life.
"Ba'en Allah," Abu Nasser will probably say tomorrow - "God will help us." Just today we were talking about life, about none of us knowing what will happen in the next year (I said that), or the next hour (he said that). Really, we were. "Allah kariim," says Abu Nasser frequently - "God is generous."
Please pray for Abu Nasser and family.
2. Twilight zone / Social studies lesson
By Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz, April 1, 2004
A holiday excursion to the hidden side of the Land of Israel - the ruins of lost villages in the Galilee - led by a guide from Hurfish.
Look at this prickly pear plant. It's covering a mound of stones. This mound of stones was once a house, or a shed, or a sheep pen, or a school, or a stone fence. Once - until 56 years ago, a generation and a half ago - not that long ago. The cactus separated the houses and one lot from another, a living fence that is now also the only monument to the life that once was here. Take a look at the grove of pines around the prickly pear as well. Beneath it there was once a village. All of its 405 houses were destroyed in one day in 1948 and its 2,350 inhabitants scattered all over. No one ever told us about this. The pines were planted right afterward by the Jewish National Fund, to which we contributed in our childhood, every Friday, in order to cover the ruins, to cover the possibility of return and maybe also a little of the shame and the guilt.Then they put up a sign: "South Africa Forest. Parking. In Memory of Hans Riesenfeld, Rhodesia, Zimbabwe." Did the Riesenfelds know? A peculiar coincidence - the South Africa Forest, the Rhodesia parking area atop the ruins of Lubiya, of whose existence not a trace is left, not even a small sign. But here was a village whose sons are now scattered throughout the world and who carry the memories with them. For the information of our hikers and the philanthropists from Zimbabwe.A Russian couple spreads out their picnic meal on the wooden table: sandwiches, vegetables, cold cuts, vodka. Not far from them, by another JNF picnic table, stands Mahmoud Issa, the son of refugees and a Danish citizen, and spreads out an aerial photo of his parents' village produced by the Israel Mapping Center. The date of the photo: January 26, 1945. Three years before their tragedy, six years before he was born, outside the village. House, paths and vegetation. Issa made a Danish film about his village, with English subtitles. He also published a book in Danish, soon to be published in an English translation, and perhaps also in Hebrew. His brothers and sisters are spread out in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Denmark.Deep in the grove, one can find a single wall that survived from the village, as well as a stone archway that covered a cavern used to store crops. The dozens of wells that belonged to the village (Issa says there were more than 400) are surrounded by barbed wire. They are wrecked and full of garbage left behind by hikers in the South Africa Forest who must have thought that the JNF had dug big trash cans in the ground. How were they to know that these were freshwater wells?The two Russian immigrants are immersed in their meal near a large group of hikers standing around the next table, on which Issa has spread out the aerial photo. Two busloads of people from Nazareth - several dozen Jews and Arabs, and a number of foreign visitors, too - on a holiday outing sponsored by the Emil Toma Center, Va'ad Ha'akurim and the Zochrot Foundation - to the Galilee that is normally hidden from view, on the eve of Passover - the holiday of freedom - and of Land Day.Tour guide Nimr Nimr from Hurfish is glad to see that so many Jews have come on the trip. "For so many years, they were fed the slander that the Palestinians left of their own accord," he says. To the right is the grave of Izzadin al-Kassam, in Balad al-Sheikh, now the town of Nesher. And now, to the right, Daliat al-Carmel and Isfiya. "The Israelis argue that the Arabs will never receive all the rights they deserve as long as they do not serve in the IDF. The Druze in Isfiya and in Daliat al-Carmel serve in the IDF and they don't get their rights," Nimr explains to the group on the bus.There were once 27 villages in the Tiberias area; 25 of them were destroyed. Nimr pronounces the names slowly and with emphasis, as in a memorial ceremony: Al-Dalhamiya, Abu Shusha, Hittin, Kafr Sabt, Lubiya, Al-Majdal. The list is long. In Safsaf, there was a massacre, near the well, that frightened the residents of all the neighboring villages. ("52 men were tied together with a rope, put into a pit and shot ... Ten were killed ... three incidents of rape ... a 14-year-old girl ... another four killed, a woman and her baby ... another 11 killed." - from Israel Galili's testimony as it appears in Benny Morris' "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem").In Kafr Kana, many had been killed in battles by 1948. A memorial monument lists the names of the 26 casualties. To the left was Tzapuriya, a village of 5,000 inhabitants. To the right, an Arab neighborhood of Nazareth. Nazareth Illit, built on Arab lands, looms before us - 40,000 residents on 40,000 dunams; 120,000 residents in Nazareth and environs, on 7,000 dunams.Another tour guide gets on the bus. His name is Jamal Arafat and he is from the village of Mashhad. First stop, Sejera. Soldiers pass through the yellow iron gate of Ilaniya on their way to their base. In Sejera, Jews and Arabs lived together, with just a narrow valley separating the neighboring communities. Arafat says that relations between them were "idyllic."The pioneer David Green was here in the early part of the previous century and wrote: "Here I found the Land of Israel that I dreamed about. Nature, the people, the work - Everything here was different, more `Eretz-Yisraeli,' almost as I'd dreamed of it when I was still back in Plonsk ..." (David Ben-Gurion, Memoirs, Vol. I). His enthusiasm apparently faded, because before long, Ben-Gurion left his work in Sejera. A half-century later, on July 15, 1948, Sejera fell. The only thing left is the well, and it is completely fenced in. The cacti on the hillsides are the only witnesses.Kafr Sabt to the left, Sde Ilan, and this is Via Maris, the Sea Road. In front of the entrance to the house, the remnants of the khan on the main road and a guard post opposite it. Here the erasers of history were negligent in their work, and entire walls of the lovely building still remain.One young man on the tour, Imad Hourani from Haifa, says his family originally comes from Kfar Hittin and now lives mostly in Ilabun. He looks through the photos of documents and maps from his parents' lost village, and at the old stamps affixed to the contracts. His father, Mohammed Hourani, a contractor, refused to build the family a new house until 1970. That's when Egyptian president Nasser died, and with him, the father's hope of returning to his land. His father told him that after 22 people were killed in Ilabun, the residents of Hittin were so frightened that they evacuated all the men from the village. Only the women, children and old people were left. When the Jews came, they, too, were expelled - over the border, to Lebanon.The Golani junction. There's a memorial monument before the junction, the Golani museum, another Golani monument - we are in the land of monuments and selective memory. Here, too, Saladin defeated the Crusaders. Each year, on the anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe), Hourani takes his two children, now aged 10 and 11, to see the ruins of Kfar Hittin."We go to remember. It's your Independence Day and our Nakba. We sit under the trees and try to bring only traditional food - labaneh and za'atar. We don't barbecue - so it won't look like we're celebrating." Here is the village well, as indicated on his old map. "I'm continuing what my father asked, so we don't forget."On Menachem Begin Boulevard near Tiberias, you turn left to Kfar Hittim. Before the entrance to Kfar Zeitim, you turn left again, onto a dirt road that leads up to the remnants of the village. Mustafa Dahabra was seven years old and Amin Sa'ada was 17 on the day they were forced to flee the village. Now they are two withered old men in baseball caps - one wears his facing forward, the other, facing back. Dahabra leans on his cane. Two Israeli air force helicopters are up in the sky. The two old men make their way through the bushes to the mosque.A thick iron fence surrounds the ruin, but the two old men know where to find a hole in it. When Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister a decade ago, they say they were promised a budget of NIS 300,000 from the state and given permission to restore the mosque. Rabin's murder cut off their hope as well. A few years ago, they tried to sneak in some sacks of cement in order to begin restoring the ruined building; someone threw the cement straight into the pool of water that was in front of the mosque and sealed it forever.Dahabra etches the outline of the pool in the sand with his cane. Now there is no pool and no restoration. Heavy iron bars have been placed over the entrance to the mosque and the staircase leading to its minaret is also blocked. Strawberries and figs grow in the shaded yard. There aren't many places as lovely as the yard of Kfar Hittin's ruined mosque."What did we ask for?," asks Dahabra. "We told Rabin's deputy that if they let us come back, we won't throw out the Jews. We'll live together. He said to me: `Don't talk to me about that.' Why not? I'm an Israeli citizen."Dahabra, who now lives in Dir Hana, comes here several times a year. His friend, Sa'ada: "All we asked was to be able to come here once in a while to pray. Not every day. I have 170 dunams here and I'm an `absentee' owner - but I'm here. How is this possible?"At 70, his memories are still vivid: "It was a black day ... We walked from here to Marar and from there to Dir Hana ... We didn't go to the Arab countries because we had sheep. For a week before we left I didn't go to school because we knew there was a war. People left and I left, too, it was group after group, my father and mother and brothers and sisters. We didn't take anything, because my father said that we'd come back."We want to live together with the Jews, just let us clean up the mosque. If I live in one room and a Jew lives upstairs, I'll invite him down to have coffee every day. `We lost everything,' my father said."Another young man on the tour, Wadi'a Awada, says that his great-grandfather built this mosque. His son attends high school in Kafr Kana. "They make them visit Kiryat Shmona. It serves my interest to live together, but first of all I have to know myself before I know the other. When I stand here in front of the minaret I remember that and it hurts - that my son should go to Kiryat Shmona instead of coming here. And one isn't allowed to come here. It's the right of every person to know himself. It's part of the diagnosis that we first get to know ourselves, because otherwise we won't heal. I don't want my son to come here so he'll want to subvert the state. Israel is a fact and it has its weapons and we're content to be its citizens. But you can't bluff with people and you also can't take everything."This is the other country: Kabri is Al-Kabri, Kfar Hittim is Hittin, Batzat is Basah, Migdal Haemek is Majdal, Manot is Manw'ad. A beautiful, lush part of the country that always has a light side and a dark side. Some want to cause things to be forgotten, to erase any trace, and some want to remember and perpetuate and perhaps even return. Here is the Shlomi industrial zone. A Protestant church and an Orthodox church across from the Zoglobek factory, a mosque across from Matak Metal Industries, a boarded-up school across from a high-tech glass-paneled building.Just to make sure, someone went to the trouble of sealing up the two churches with bricks, and surrounding the half-ruined mosque with barbed wire, which is in turn surrounded by some iron bars, rusty heat panels, garbage carts, large slats and old street signs.Whoever did this obviously went to considerable effort to block access to what's left of this mosque. A stone sign in front of the mosque, whose minaret has toppled, reads: "This mosque was built by a group of blessed men in the year 1153 of the hejira of the Prophet Mohammed." We are now in the year 1426 of the hejira.
3. Road map is forgotten at dead end for negotiation
Avi Shlaim
Sunday March 28, 2004
The Observer
Avi Shlaim says that the Prime Minister's violent pursuit of a Greater
Israel has lengthened a relentless dance of death
Israel's assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, marked an extraordinarily dangerous escalation in the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. There could hardly be a more dramatic demonstration of the disparity in military power between the two parties to this conflict. The trouble is that there is no military solution and there are only losers in this dance of death.
Both the official Israeli justification for the killing of Yassin and the Hamas response were entirely predictable. Ariel Sharon described it as part of the war on terror and called Yassin the 'first and foremost leader of the Palestinian terrorist murderers'. He compared him to Osama bin Laden and congratulated the Israeli security forces on their success. Hamas leaders overflowed with fury, seeing the killing as an attack on Islam. They vowed to take revenge and escalate the armed struggle until they achieve independence. Israel, they said, had opened the gates of hell. Secular Palestinian leaders denounced the attack as dangerous, crazy and cowardly and suspected that the motive was to create chaos in Palestinian society and bring about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority.
One thing was clear: with this single act of violence, Israel killed any prospect of a revival of the Middle East peace process. The road map, launched with so much fanfare a year ago, is now dead. All of Tony Blair's efforts in prodding and persuading a reluctant George Bush to adopt this plan for a two-state solution by 2005 appear to have been in vain. No Arab leader can be expected even to talk about peace with Israel, given its callous disregard for both Muslim sensitivities and international legality.
The assassination is likely to strengthen rather than weaken Hamas. In the wretched Gaza refugee camps, recruitment of suicide bombers has never been much of a problem. With Yassin turned into a martyr, more desperate young people will rally behind the Islamic banner. Political support for Hamas is also likely to grow at the expense of its secular rival, Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. Yassin's spartan lifestyle commanded universal respect. His honesty and that of his colleagues stood in marked contrast to the endemic corruption in parts of Fatah.
Yassin's removal will almost certainly tilt the internal balance within Hamas in favour of the more radical military wing. The political wing, headed by the organisation's new leader, Dr Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was much more pragmatic than is commonly realised in the West. It observed several ceasefires scuppered by Israel. While approving suicide bombings as the only weapon available to their movement, its leaders leaned increasingly towards de facto acceptance of Israel within its 1967 borders. Israel's action, however, is bound to reinforce the argument of the hardliners that the Jewish state only understands force, and can only be dislodged from the occupied territories by force.
All this could have been predicted, so why did Israel embark on such a high-risk strategy? To answer this, you have to delve into the personality and policies of Israel's Prime Minister, a right-wing extremist who abhors negotiations and compromise and imposes his will by brute force. He is a proponent of Greater Israel and the champion of violent solutions. The Palestinians pose the main challenge to his vision of Greater Israel, so he has always advocated the use of military force to crush them.
By destroying the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Sharon hoped to break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The war was a disaster, but Sharon doggedly persisted in his objective of denying the Palestinians any independent political existence in Palestine. Evidence for this is ably presented by the sociologist Baruch Kimmerling in Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War against the Palestinians.
Equally dogged Palestinian resistance since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada persuaded Sharon that the dream of Greater Israel had to be modified, if not abandoned. His new strategy rests on two main planks. One is the building of the wall on the West Bank that would prepare the way for the de facto annexation of roughly half its territory to Israel. The other, announced in January, involves unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Few Israelis want to hang on to Gaza, where there are 1.2 million Arabs and 7,500 Israeli settlers, who control 25 per cent of the territory and 40 per cent of the arable land. Sharon knows that the occupation cannot be sustained in the long term, so he wants to cut his losses to consolidate occupation of half of the West Bank. This plan amounts to an attempt to redraw the map of Israel-Palestine unilaterally without negotiating with the Palestinian Authority, without complying with any external diktats, and without following any international roadmaps.
Yet although Sharon's plan is fixated exclusively on Israeli interests, it has met opposition inside his cabinet from the pro-settler, ultra-right-wing parties and from the aggressively hawkish Minister of Defence, Shaul Mofaz. The General Staff is worried that Hamas would turn Gaza into a launchpad for attacks on Israel, leaving it with a powerful enemy on its southern border. Therefore it wants to break Hamas before the withdrawal.
The decision to execute Yassin has to be seen in this light. Some Ministers and the director of the internal security service opposed the proposal on the grounds that it was illegal and would only increase the violence, but the majority voted in favour.
It transpired that the cabinet decided to eliminate not just Yassin but the entire Hamas leadership in response to the double suicide bombing in the port of Ashdod. This means that Israel will strike at Hamas leaders whenever opportunities present themselves, not only in retaliation. Israeli strikes will be followed, inevitably and inexorably, by Palestinian retaliation with suicide bombs. This is a recipe for violence and bloodshed without any hope. Sharon has truly opened the gates of hell.
· Avi Shlaim is a British Academy Research Professor at St Antony's College, Oxford, and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.
4. A sudden concern for the Palestinian child
By Gideon Levy
Haaretz, March 28, 2004
Suddenly, Israelis are worried about the bitter fate of a Palestinian child. To judge by the public shock over Hussam Bilal Abdu, who was caught wearing an explosives belt at the Hawara checkpoint, it would seem that nothing of a humane nature is foreign to us, even when it pertains to an enemy and his children. But this is an infuriating show of concern. The fate of a Palestinian child only touches us when it suits us, when it serves our purposes and when our hands are not involved.The hundreds of children who have been killed, the thousands who have been crippled, and the hundreds of thousands who live under conditions of siege and poverty, and are exposed every day to violence and humiliation - all this has failed to move the Israeli public. Just the child with the belt.Why weren't we shocked by the killing of Christine Sa'ada, who was shot dead in an IDF ambush while traveling in a car with her parents in Bethlehem, exactly a year ago today? Why was there no public outcry following the killing of Jamil and Ahmed Abu Aziz, two brothers who were riding their bicycles in Jenin in broad daylight when a tank fired a shell at them? How is their killing, which was documented on video, less cruel? Why didn't we show pictures of Basil and Abir Abu Samra, who were killed together with their mother in their vineyard near Nablus, just as we displayed pictures of Hussam Abdu? Why have we never discussed the killing of children at the entrance to the Qalandiyah refugee camp, where a child is killed by Border Police or IDF fire every few weeks? Why is a putting an explosives belt on a child more shocking than firing a shell at him?The harshest expressions are being uttered here, with much clucking of the tongue: "crossing the red line," "the pinnacle of cruelty," "a satanic act." And, in truth, it's impossible to understand such cruelty toward an innocent child who was cynically sent to his death. But Israelis have no moral right to criticize the Palestinians for their cruelty toward children; we are no less cruel.Sending a child to his death with an explosives belt is indeed a satanic action, but the shocked public reaction is tainted with hypocrisy and double standards. The cheap attempt to win points on the international public relations front from the picture of the child is ridiculous: the world knows that Israel's hands are not clean, that they are stained with the blood of children.From September 29, 2000 through February 29, 2004, IDF soldiers killed 486 children and teenagers, 255 of them under the age of 15, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG). This appalling figure should have long ago troubled the sleep of every decent Israeli and aroused a public protest. There can be no justification for the killing of children on such a large scale. The contention that the IDF does not intend to kill children has long ago lost its foundation. The real question is what is the IDF doing to prevent the killing of children. The answer - very little, if anything. When it drops bombs and missiles on population centers, such as during the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and when it sends tanks into residential neighborhoods, it cannot argue that it does not intend to kill children. There are many children living in the Darj neighborhood in Gaza City, where Mohammed Shehadeh lived. Whoever decided to toss a one-ton bomb there knew this very well. That is, he knowingly decided to kill children. No excuse can be made to relieve him of the responsibility for killing them.However, we're not only responsible for the deaths of Palestinian children. We're also responsible for their lives. Most of the Israelis who were shocked at the sight of Hussam Abdu have no idea, and are not at all interested in knowing, about the conditions in which the next generation of Palestinians is growing up. More than 25 percent of the children, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), suffer from chronic malnutrition. They live in a backward environmental - without community centers, computers, extracurricular activities, sports facilities, or playgrounds. No less serious are the traumatic incidents every Palestinian child is witness to. These children see their parents being humiliated and are exposed to violence and horror every day. Their nights are plagued with nightmares and their days are empty and depressing.Every brutal house search in the middle of the night and every contact with soldiers is a source of trauma. There is no Palestinian child who has not seen a house destroyed, an assassination operation, severe harassment or violence. They live in constant fear - that any moment soldiers will come, the tanks will enter and crush, the bulldozer will come and destroy, and the helicopter will fire a missile. Their fears are left untreated, just as their health and physical development are left unattended. As an occupier, we bear the responsibility for all of this.There is no need for incitement to instill hatred in these children. The daily sights they are exposed to constitute the greatest incitement. You don't need to promise too much to a child with this kind of life to make him want to commit suicide. Why shouldn't he want to? Because of his present life? Because of the future that awaits him? It's hard to know what motivated the child Hussam Abdu to put on an explosives belt. Virgins? The NIS 100 promised to his mother? But instead of being shocked by those who dispatched him, it would be better for us to focus on our responsibility for the conditions of his life. Whoever is truly concerned over the fate of Palestinian children should not only take interest when explosives belts are attached to their bodies.These children deserve a different fate. They deserve not to grow up among the rubble of their homes as children and be killed as teenagers - whether from a Palestinian explosives belt or from the bullet of an Israeli sniper. Both of these are cruel to exactly the same extent.
April 5, 2004
[Go to the "Palestine Diary" section of the MCC website for a series of seven diary-style reflections by MCC workers Ed Nyce, Molly Graver, Bob Herr, and Alain Epp Weaver-http://www.mcc.org/palestinediary/]
As Holy Week begins, there are no shortage of possible topics to address in this brief missive: the assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin; the heightened security inside Israel as people brace for a response by Hamas; Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's renewed threats to "remove" Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat "from the historical arena"; Sharon's own legal troubles, that may yet threaten the future of his government; the ongoing demolition of homes in the occupied territories, particularly the Gaza Strip; Israeli attempts-which seem to be enjoying partial success-to obtain at least tacit US support for its "disengagement" plan (best understood as a unilateral, de facto annexation of large swathes of West Bank land and as a solidification of control over settlements built on that land and over West Bank land and water resources). All of these topics, and more, would easily warrant multiple essays. But instead I'll just mention one news item, one that has received scant attention in the world's press. This past week various United Nations agencies announced that, given ongoing Israeli restrictions and limitations at the Karni crossing point into the Gaza Strip, the UN agencies were suspending food aid operations to Palestinians. With the Palestinian economy in tatters, thanks to over 40 months of Israeli closures, checkpoints, and restrictions on movement, all resulting in poverty and unemployment rates running at least at 60% (using the most conservative of economic measurements), hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have found themselves dependent on external food aid. For months, UN agencies, donor governments, and international aid agencies have grappled with two questions: first, by helping to prevent the Palestinian economy from total collapse, are these food aid efforts in effect assisting Israel in maintaining the occupation-i.e., allowing it to control the occupied territories while absolving itself of any responsibility (which as an occupying power it should bear) for the welfare of civilians in the occupied territories? Second, at what point would ongoing Israeli obstacles to free humanitarian operation? The UN agencies have clearly decided that, with new restrictions at entry points into the Gaza Strip, the obstacles to humanitarian operations have become too great. I personally share many of the reservations about food aid listed by its critics: that it fosters dependency; that it can compromise the dignity and honor of its recipients; that, in the occupied territories, it unwittingly aids Israel in having the occupation without any of its consequences. That said, the well-being of hundreds of thousands of Gazans has now been made more tenuous, thanks to ongoing Israeli obstacles to humanitarian assistance. This Holy Week, pray that none might go hungry in the occupied territories; pray also that restrictions on ordinary Palestinian movement will be lifted, a move that, World Bank and other economists observe, would go a very long way in addressing poverty and unemployment among Palestinians.
Below you will find four pieces. In the first, MCC worker Ed Nyce reflects on the death of a neighbor this past week. In the second, Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy goes on a tour of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israeli troops in 1948, organized by MCC's Israeli partner organization, Zochrot. Israeli academic Avi Shlaim, based at Oxford, then looks at the "road map" to continued conflict that has been charted by current Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Finally, Gideon Levy takes a sobering look at what he calls "a sudden concern for the Palestinian child."
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Here We Go Again, Reflection by Ed Nyce, April 2, 2004
Today, Friday, April 2, one of Abu Nasser's sons was killed near Rachel's Tomb.
Several of you know Abu Nasser, who has a small food shop below the apartment where I live. A few others know the location. And the rest of you I included in this email either because you know the culture and situation, or I just wanted to tell you.
The first word regarding what may have happened is that the son, 16 years old, was throwing stones toward soldiers. If so, he was probably part of a group. It is not out of the realm of possibility.
Abu Nasser has welcomed me from the beginning. He does not know English. He likes to say that he gives me Arabic lessons and I return the favor with English lessons. He is knowingly exaggerating.
He and Abu Fuad, who used to have a shop across the street, would regularly invite passersby to join them for Arabic coffee. Times are tough enough now that the coffee doesn't show up like it once did – at least that (the tough $ times) is my interpretation. The shop often has very little merchandise, and I mean very little, and Abu Nasser is one who's been hit hard by the economics of the intifada. It's not that he had lost a lot during the intifada, because by the time it started in 2000, he already didn't have a lot. But still he has less than before. And after today, he has indeed lost a lot.
I don't see Abu Nasser everyday, but today I saw him three times before this happened, two of the times for extended periods.
First was when I went outside to try to put the front bumper of the Subaru back where it is supposed to be. When I went for an early morning walk, I didn't notice anything strange, but a little later, looking out the window, there was the rubber bumper hanging down perpendicular to its usual position. Zoughbi Zoughbi, my landlord and director of Wi'am, a peacemaking organization with whom MCC partners, called to confirm our meeting today, and I mentioned the bumper to him.
When we went out to look at it, Abu Nasser's shop was open. He said that some kids knocked the bumper down last night. Yet I hadn't seen it that way this morning. In any event, Zoughbi briefly went back inside or somewhere, and Abu Nasser showed me his shop. There was a large increase in merchandise quantity! He sold a dunam (1/4 acre) of land out near Tuqu' and invested it in more products. I congratulated him (though wasn't sure if the selling of the land was happy), and then Zoughbi and I left for the office.
I got a ride back around 10:30 or so from the garage in Beit Sahour, where I left the car, and went into Abu Nasser's shop. A sheikh whom I see walking at times, and he and I exchange waves and sometimes verbal greetings, started asking something I didn't quite get, but it seemed like it had to do with whether I was Muslim or whether I wanted to talk about it. In any event, Abu Nasser right away started saying, "No, no, no," told him I'm his friend, and a few other very helpful things. So then the sheikh's questions were more along the line of whether I'm married. Dialogue would have been fine, but so was the intervention. After he left for the Friday prayers, to which Abu Nasser would soon also go, I again expressed my joy that he had a fuller shop, and bought 32 shekels (roughly $7.11) worth of items, plus received a shekel's (maybe a shekel and a half) worth for free - his insistence.
Later, I saw Abu Nasser very briefly when I left to get the car (and when I returned).
In late afternoon, I went over to the home of some other friends. Abdullah, the youngest of six children, turns 8 today. It's a family I enjoy being with a lot, and feel really at ease there.
While there, someone noticed the written news flash on the television screen that Abu Nasser's son was killed near Rachel's Tomb. The spelling of the name, which I could make out (Arabic) only because it stayed for a long time on the screen, was actually Nassar (Nas SAAR) rather than Nasser (NAS ser), and those in the room were discussing that and weren't quite sure at first which name was accurate. However, the rest of the family names lined up, and already the word was going around outside, the kids said, that it was a son of his.
I am not quite sure yet which son it is. I know most of them, and one of several could be exactly 16, so we'll see.
I head out on my own at times, and some things I do with others. Visiting the family tomorrow, a cultural expression of grief, I plan to do with Zoughbi and others who go as a group. Usually, at least a small group shows up rather than an individual on these calls. Sometime tomorrow we'll do that.
So there was still a cake for Abdullah, though now with the news we didn't sing, but did anyway go on and have a good time. There would never be any cakes if we waited for good news. One boy turned 8, one boy died at 16. And, it seems, that's life.
"Ba'en Allah," Abu Nasser will probably say tomorrow - "God will help us." Just today we were talking about life, about none of us knowing what will happen in the next year (I said that), or the next hour (he said that). Really, we were. "Allah kariim," says Abu Nasser frequently - "God is generous."
Please pray for Abu Nasser and family.
2. Twilight zone / Social studies lesson
By Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz, April 1, 2004
A holiday excursion to the hidden side of the Land of Israel - the ruins of lost villages in the Galilee - led by a guide from Hurfish.
Look at this prickly pear plant. It's covering a mound of stones. This mound of stones was once a house, or a shed, or a sheep pen, or a school, or a stone fence. Once - until 56 years ago, a generation and a half ago - not that long ago. The cactus separated the houses and one lot from another, a living fence that is now also the only monument to the life that once was here. Take a look at the grove of pines around the prickly pear as well. Beneath it there was once a village. All of its 405 houses were destroyed in one day in 1948 and its 2,350 inhabitants scattered all over. No one ever told us about this. The pines were planted right afterward by the Jewish National Fund, to which we contributed in our childhood, every Friday, in order to cover the ruins, to cover the possibility of return and maybe also a little of the shame and the guilt.Then they put up a sign: "South Africa Forest. Parking. In Memory of Hans Riesenfeld, Rhodesia, Zimbabwe." Did the Riesenfelds know? A peculiar coincidence - the South Africa Forest, the Rhodesia parking area atop the ruins of Lubiya, of whose existence not a trace is left, not even a small sign. But here was a village whose sons are now scattered throughout the world and who carry the memories with them. For the information of our hikers and the philanthropists from Zimbabwe.A Russian couple spreads out their picnic meal on the wooden table: sandwiches, vegetables, cold cuts, vodka. Not far from them, by another JNF picnic table, stands Mahmoud Issa, the son of refugees and a Danish citizen, and spreads out an aerial photo of his parents' village produced by the Israel Mapping Center. The date of the photo: January 26, 1945. Three years before their tragedy, six years before he was born, outside the village. House, paths and vegetation. Issa made a Danish film about his village, with English subtitles. He also published a book in Danish, soon to be published in an English translation, and perhaps also in Hebrew. His brothers and sisters are spread out in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Denmark.Deep in the grove, one can find a single wall that survived from the village, as well as a stone archway that covered a cavern used to store crops. The dozens of wells that belonged to the village (Issa says there were more than 400) are surrounded by barbed wire. They are wrecked and full of garbage left behind by hikers in the South Africa Forest who must have thought that the JNF had dug big trash cans in the ground. How were they to know that these were freshwater wells?The two Russian immigrants are immersed in their meal near a large group of hikers standing around the next table, on which Issa has spread out the aerial photo. Two busloads of people from Nazareth - several dozen Jews and Arabs, and a number of foreign visitors, too - on a holiday outing sponsored by the Emil Toma Center, Va'ad Ha'akurim and the Zochrot Foundation - to the Galilee that is normally hidden from view, on the eve of Passover - the holiday of freedom - and of Land Day.Tour guide Nimr Nimr from Hurfish is glad to see that so many Jews have come on the trip. "For so many years, they were fed the slander that the Palestinians left of their own accord," he says. To the right is the grave of Izzadin al-Kassam, in Balad al-Sheikh, now the town of Nesher. And now, to the right, Daliat al-Carmel and Isfiya. "The Israelis argue that the Arabs will never receive all the rights they deserve as long as they do not serve in the IDF. The Druze in Isfiya and in Daliat al-Carmel serve in the IDF and they don't get their rights," Nimr explains to the group on the bus.There were once 27 villages in the Tiberias area; 25 of them were destroyed. Nimr pronounces the names slowly and with emphasis, as in a memorial ceremony: Al-Dalhamiya, Abu Shusha, Hittin, Kafr Sabt, Lubiya, Al-Majdal. The list is long. In Safsaf, there was a massacre, near the well, that frightened the residents of all the neighboring villages. ("52 men were tied together with a rope, put into a pit and shot ... Ten were killed ... three incidents of rape ... a 14-year-old girl ... another four killed, a woman and her baby ... another 11 killed." - from Israel Galili's testimony as it appears in Benny Morris' "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem").In Kafr Kana, many had been killed in battles by 1948. A memorial monument lists the names of the 26 casualties. To the left was Tzapuriya, a village of 5,000 inhabitants. To the right, an Arab neighborhood of Nazareth. Nazareth Illit, built on Arab lands, looms before us - 40,000 residents on 40,000 dunams; 120,000 residents in Nazareth and environs, on 7,000 dunams.Another tour guide gets on the bus. His name is Jamal Arafat and he is from the village of Mashhad. First stop, Sejera. Soldiers pass through the yellow iron gate of Ilaniya on their way to their base. In Sejera, Jews and Arabs lived together, with just a narrow valley separating the neighboring communities. Arafat says that relations between them were "idyllic."The pioneer David Green was here in the early part of the previous century and wrote: "Here I found the Land of Israel that I dreamed about. Nature, the people, the work - Everything here was different, more `Eretz-Yisraeli,' almost as I'd dreamed of it when I was still back in Plonsk ..." (David Ben-Gurion, Memoirs, Vol. I). His enthusiasm apparently faded, because before long, Ben-Gurion left his work in Sejera. A half-century later, on July 15, 1948, Sejera fell. The only thing left is the well, and it is completely fenced in. The cacti on the hillsides are the only witnesses.Kafr Sabt to the left, Sde Ilan, and this is Via Maris, the Sea Road. In front of the entrance to the house, the remnants of the khan on the main road and a guard post opposite it. Here the erasers of history were negligent in their work, and entire walls of the lovely building still remain.One young man on the tour, Imad Hourani from Haifa, says his family originally comes from Kfar Hittin and now lives mostly in Ilabun. He looks through the photos of documents and maps from his parents' lost village, and at the old stamps affixed to the contracts. His father, Mohammed Hourani, a contractor, refused to build the family a new house until 1970. That's when Egyptian president Nasser died, and with him, the father's hope of returning to his land. His father told him that after 22 people were killed in Ilabun, the residents of Hittin were so frightened that they evacuated all the men from the village. Only the women, children and old people were left. When the Jews came, they, too, were expelled - over the border, to Lebanon.The Golani junction. There's a memorial monument before the junction, the Golani museum, another Golani monument - we are in the land of monuments and selective memory. Here, too, Saladin defeated the Crusaders. Each year, on the anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe), Hourani takes his two children, now aged 10 and 11, to see the ruins of Kfar Hittin."We go to remember. It's your Independence Day and our Nakba. We sit under the trees and try to bring only traditional food - labaneh and za'atar. We don't barbecue - so it won't look like we're celebrating." Here is the village well, as indicated on his old map. "I'm continuing what my father asked, so we don't forget."On Menachem Begin Boulevard near Tiberias, you turn left to Kfar Hittim. Before the entrance to Kfar Zeitim, you turn left again, onto a dirt road that leads up to the remnants of the village. Mustafa Dahabra was seven years old and Amin Sa'ada was 17 on the day they were forced to flee the village. Now they are two withered old men in baseball caps - one wears his facing forward, the other, facing back. Dahabra leans on his cane. Two Israeli air force helicopters are up in the sky. The two old men make their way through the bushes to the mosque.A thick iron fence surrounds the ruin, but the two old men know where to find a hole in it. When Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister a decade ago, they say they were promised a budget of NIS 300,000 from the state and given permission to restore the mosque. Rabin's murder cut off their hope as well. A few years ago, they tried to sneak in some sacks of cement in order to begin restoring the ruined building; someone threw the cement straight into the pool of water that was in front of the mosque and sealed it forever.Dahabra etches the outline of the pool in the sand with his cane. Now there is no pool and no restoration. Heavy iron bars have been placed over the entrance to the mosque and the staircase leading to its minaret is also blocked. Strawberries and figs grow in the shaded yard. There aren't many places as lovely as the yard of Kfar Hittin's ruined mosque."What did we ask for?," asks Dahabra. "We told Rabin's deputy that if they let us come back, we won't throw out the Jews. We'll live together. He said to me: `Don't talk to me about that.' Why not? I'm an Israeli citizen."Dahabra, who now lives in Dir Hana, comes here several times a year. His friend, Sa'ada: "All we asked was to be able to come here once in a while to pray. Not every day. I have 170 dunams here and I'm an `absentee' owner - but I'm here. How is this possible?"At 70, his memories are still vivid: "It was a black day ... We walked from here to Marar and from there to Dir Hana ... We didn't go to the Arab countries because we had sheep. For a week before we left I didn't go to school because we knew there was a war. People left and I left, too, it was group after group, my father and mother and brothers and sisters. We didn't take anything, because my father said that we'd come back."We want to live together with the Jews, just let us clean up the mosque. If I live in one room and a Jew lives upstairs, I'll invite him down to have coffee every day. `We lost everything,' my father said."Another young man on the tour, Wadi'a Awada, says that his great-grandfather built this mosque. His son attends high school in Kafr Kana. "They make them visit Kiryat Shmona. It serves my interest to live together, but first of all I have to know myself before I know the other. When I stand here in front of the minaret I remember that and it hurts - that my son should go to Kiryat Shmona instead of coming here. And one isn't allowed to come here. It's the right of every person to know himself. It's part of the diagnosis that we first get to know ourselves, because otherwise we won't heal. I don't want my son to come here so he'll want to subvert the state. Israel is a fact and it has its weapons and we're content to be its citizens. But you can't bluff with people and you also can't take everything."This is the other country: Kabri is Al-Kabri, Kfar Hittim is Hittin, Batzat is Basah, Migdal Haemek is Majdal, Manot is Manw'ad. A beautiful, lush part of the country that always has a light side and a dark side. Some want to cause things to be forgotten, to erase any trace, and some want to remember and perpetuate and perhaps even return. Here is the Shlomi industrial zone. A Protestant church and an Orthodox church across from the Zoglobek factory, a mosque across from Matak Metal Industries, a boarded-up school across from a high-tech glass-paneled building.Just to make sure, someone went to the trouble of sealing up the two churches with bricks, and surrounding the half-ruined mosque with barbed wire, which is in turn surrounded by some iron bars, rusty heat panels, garbage carts, large slats and old street signs.Whoever did this obviously went to considerable effort to block access to what's left of this mosque. A stone sign in front of the mosque, whose minaret has toppled, reads: "This mosque was built by a group of blessed men in the year 1153 of the hejira of the Prophet Mohammed." We are now in the year 1426 of the hejira.
3. Road map is forgotten at dead end for negotiation
Avi Shlaim
Sunday March 28, 2004
The Observer
Avi Shlaim says that the Prime Minister's violent pursuit of a Greater
Israel has lengthened a relentless dance of death
Israel's assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, marked an extraordinarily dangerous escalation in the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. There could hardly be a more dramatic demonstration of the disparity in military power between the two parties to this conflict. The trouble is that there is no military solution and there are only losers in this dance of death.
Both the official Israeli justification for the killing of Yassin and the Hamas response were entirely predictable. Ariel Sharon described it as part of the war on terror and called Yassin the 'first and foremost leader of the Palestinian terrorist murderers'. He compared him to Osama bin Laden and congratulated the Israeli security forces on their success. Hamas leaders overflowed with fury, seeing the killing as an attack on Islam. They vowed to take revenge and escalate the armed struggle until they achieve independence. Israel, they said, had opened the gates of hell. Secular Palestinian leaders denounced the attack as dangerous, crazy and cowardly and suspected that the motive was to create chaos in Palestinian society and bring about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority.
One thing was clear: with this single act of violence, Israel killed any prospect of a revival of the Middle East peace process. The road map, launched with so much fanfare a year ago, is now dead. All of Tony Blair's efforts in prodding and persuading a reluctant George Bush to adopt this plan for a two-state solution by 2005 appear to have been in vain. No Arab leader can be expected even to talk about peace with Israel, given its callous disregard for both Muslim sensitivities and international legality.
The assassination is likely to strengthen rather than weaken Hamas. In the wretched Gaza refugee camps, recruitment of suicide bombers has never been much of a problem. With Yassin turned into a martyr, more desperate young people will rally behind the Islamic banner. Political support for Hamas is also likely to grow at the expense of its secular rival, Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. Yassin's spartan lifestyle commanded universal respect. His honesty and that of his colleagues stood in marked contrast to the endemic corruption in parts of Fatah.
Yassin's removal will almost certainly tilt the internal balance within Hamas in favour of the more radical military wing. The political wing, headed by the organisation's new leader, Dr Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was much more pragmatic than is commonly realised in the West. It observed several ceasefires scuppered by Israel. While approving suicide bombings as the only weapon available to their movement, its leaders leaned increasingly towards de facto acceptance of Israel within its 1967 borders. Israel's action, however, is bound to reinforce the argument of the hardliners that the Jewish state only understands force, and can only be dislodged from the occupied territories by force.
All this could have been predicted, so why did Israel embark on such a high-risk strategy? To answer this, you have to delve into the personality and policies of Israel's Prime Minister, a right-wing extremist who abhors negotiations and compromise and imposes his will by brute force. He is a proponent of Greater Israel and the champion of violent solutions. The Palestinians pose the main challenge to his vision of Greater Israel, so he has always advocated the use of military force to crush them.
By destroying the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Sharon hoped to break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The war was a disaster, but Sharon doggedly persisted in his objective of denying the Palestinians any independent political existence in Palestine. Evidence for this is ably presented by the sociologist Baruch Kimmerling in Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War against the Palestinians.
Equally dogged Palestinian resistance since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada persuaded Sharon that the dream of Greater Israel had to be modified, if not abandoned. His new strategy rests on two main planks. One is the building of the wall on the West Bank that would prepare the way for the de facto annexation of roughly half its territory to Israel. The other, announced in January, involves unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Few Israelis want to hang on to Gaza, where there are 1.2 million Arabs and 7,500 Israeli settlers, who control 25 per cent of the territory and 40 per cent of the arable land. Sharon knows that the occupation cannot be sustained in the long term, so he wants to cut his losses to consolidate occupation of half of the West Bank. This plan amounts to an attempt to redraw the map of Israel-Palestine unilaterally without negotiating with the Palestinian Authority, without complying with any external diktats, and without following any international roadmaps.
Yet although Sharon's plan is fixated exclusively on Israeli interests, it has met opposition inside his cabinet from the pro-settler, ultra-right-wing parties and from the aggressively hawkish Minister of Defence, Shaul Mofaz. The General Staff is worried that Hamas would turn Gaza into a launchpad for attacks on Israel, leaving it with a powerful enemy on its southern border. Therefore it wants to break Hamas before the withdrawal.
The decision to execute Yassin has to be seen in this light. Some Ministers and the director of the internal security service opposed the proposal on the grounds that it was illegal and would only increase the violence, but the majority voted in favour.
It transpired that the cabinet decided to eliminate not just Yassin but the entire Hamas leadership in response to the double suicide bombing in the port of Ashdod. This means that Israel will strike at Hamas leaders whenever opportunities present themselves, not only in retaliation. Israeli strikes will be followed, inevitably and inexorably, by Palestinian retaliation with suicide bombs. This is a recipe for violence and bloodshed without any hope. Sharon has truly opened the gates of hell.
· Avi Shlaim is a British Academy Research Professor at St Antony's College, Oxford, and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.
4. A sudden concern for the Palestinian child
By Gideon Levy
Haaretz, March 28, 2004
Suddenly, Israelis are worried about the bitter fate of a Palestinian child. To judge by the public shock over Hussam Bilal Abdu, who was caught wearing an explosives belt at the Hawara checkpoint, it would seem that nothing of a humane nature is foreign to us, even when it pertains to an enemy and his children. But this is an infuriating show of concern. The fate of a Palestinian child only touches us when it suits us, when it serves our purposes and when our hands are not involved.The hundreds of children who have been killed, the thousands who have been crippled, and the hundreds of thousands who live under conditions of siege and poverty, and are exposed every day to violence and humiliation - all this has failed to move the Israeli public. Just the child with the belt.Why weren't we shocked by the killing of Christine Sa'ada, who was shot dead in an IDF ambush while traveling in a car with her parents in Bethlehem, exactly a year ago today? Why was there no public outcry following the killing of Jamil and Ahmed Abu Aziz, two brothers who were riding their bicycles in Jenin in broad daylight when a tank fired a shell at them? How is their killing, which was documented on video, less cruel? Why didn't we show pictures of Basil and Abir Abu Samra, who were killed together with their mother in their vineyard near Nablus, just as we displayed pictures of Hussam Abdu? Why have we never discussed the killing of children at the entrance to the Qalandiyah refugee camp, where a child is killed by Border Police or IDF fire every few weeks? Why is a putting an explosives belt on a child more shocking than firing a shell at him?The harshest expressions are being uttered here, with much clucking of the tongue: "crossing the red line," "the pinnacle of cruelty," "a satanic act." And, in truth, it's impossible to understand such cruelty toward an innocent child who was cynically sent to his death. But Israelis have no moral right to criticize the Palestinians for their cruelty toward children; we are no less cruel.Sending a child to his death with an explosives belt is indeed a satanic action, but the shocked public reaction is tainted with hypocrisy and double standards. The cheap attempt to win points on the international public relations front from the picture of the child is ridiculous: the world knows that Israel's hands are not clean, that they are stained with the blood of children.From September 29, 2000 through February 29, 2004, IDF soldiers killed 486 children and teenagers, 255 of them under the age of 15, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG). This appalling figure should have long ago troubled the sleep of every decent Israeli and aroused a public protest. There can be no justification for the killing of children on such a large scale. The contention that the IDF does not intend to kill children has long ago lost its foundation. The real question is what is the IDF doing to prevent the killing of children. The answer - very little, if anything. When it drops bombs and missiles on population centers, such as during the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and when it sends tanks into residential neighborhoods, it cannot argue that it does not intend to kill children. There are many children living in the Darj neighborhood in Gaza City, where Mohammed Shehadeh lived. Whoever decided to toss a one-ton bomb there knew this very well. That is, he knowingly decided to kill children. No excuse can be made to relieve him of the responsibility for killing them.However, we're not only responsible for the deaths of Palestinian children. We're also responsible for their lives. Most of the Israelis who were shocked at the sight of Hussam Abdu have no idea, and are not at all interested in knowing, about the conditions in which the next generation of Palestinians is growing up. More than 25 percent of the children, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), suffer from chronic malnutrition. They live in a backward environmental - without community centers, computers, extracurricular activities, sports facilities, or playgrounds. No less serious are the traumatic incidents every Palestinian child is witness to. These children see their parents being humiliated and are exposed to violence and horror every day. Their nights are plagued with nightmares and their days are empty and depressing.Every brutal house search in the middle of the night and every contact with soldiers is a source of trauma. There is no Palestinian child who has not seen a house destroyed, an assassination operation, severe harassment or violence. They live in constant fear - that any moment soldiers will come, the tanks will enter and crush, the bulldozer will come and destroy, and the helicopter will fire a missile. Their fears are left untreated, just as their health and physical development are left unattended. As an occupier, we bear the responsibility for all of this.There is no need for incitement to instill hatred in these children. The daily sights they are exposed to constitute the greatest incitement. You don't need to promise too much to a child with this kind of life to make him want to commit suicide. Why shouldn't he want to? Because of his present life? Because of the future that awaits him? It's hard to know what motivated the child Hussam Abdu to put on an explosives belt. Virgins? The NIS 100 promised to his mother? But instead of being shocked by those who dispatched him, it would be better for us to focus on our responsibility for the conditions of his life. Whoever is truly concerned over the fate of Palestinian children should not only take interest when explosives belts are attached to their bodies.These children deserve a different fate. They deserve not to grow up among the rubble of their homes as children and be killed as teenagers - whether from a Palestinian explosives belt or from the bullet of an Israeli sniper. Both of these are cruel to exactly the same extent.
Thursday, March 25
MCC Palestine Update #98
MCC Palestine Update #98
March 25, 2004
[Note: the text below is the first of eight entries in a “Palestine Diary” on MCC’s website that will run over a two week period. Other entries will be written by MCC workers Ed Nyce (Bethlehem), Bob Herr (MCC Peace Office) and Molly Graver (MCC UN Office). You can access the Palestine Diary at http://www.mcc.org/palestinediary/]
Sometimes it pays to get an early start. On Monday morning, March 22, I left the house with Sam and Kate a little after 7 am, with them heading to school and me to visit the northern West Bank village of Zababdeh, where MCC's Global Family program provides support for the local Catholic school. If we'd left a half hour later, we'd have been stuck at home most of the morning. As news of Israel's extra-judicial killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin began to spread, demonstrators started coming out onto the streets in our neighborhood on the Mount of Olives. They were met by Israeli police, who eventually dispersed them with tear gas. Many roads in East Jerusalem, including in our neighborhood, were closed down.
While part of me wondered about the wisdom of travelling in the northern West Bank on the day of Sheikh Yassin's assassination, I also did not want the efforts I had made to coordinate passage to go wasted. As travel restrictions on Palestinians have become increasingly tight, international aid organizations such as MCC must coordinate with the Israeli military if we wish to enter the Gaza Strip or parts of the West Bank, such as the Jenin district, where Zababdeh is located. Any worries I had about driving through angry crowds of protestors proved unfounded. Apart from a few burning tires in the road on the way up and a march in Tubas on the way back, the villages I passed through were relatively quiet, with most stores keeping their doors open. When I get back home later in the day, however, I discover that East Jerusalem has completely shut down.
"We weren't sure that you would come!" said Father Aktham, parish priest and headmaster of the Latin Patriarchate School in Zababdeh as I drove up to the church. "We dismissed school after students finished their mid-term exams, because the Palestinian Authority has declared three days of mourning. But there are still students around the school. Let's go talk to them!" MCC's Global Family program provides scholarships to Christian students who otherwise would not be able to afford tuition at this Christian school. Joleen Daibes, a ninth grade girl with four siblings, is a case in point. Joleen's father has been out of work for three years now. The checkpoints, closures and curfews imposed by the Israeli military on West Bank villages such as Zababdeh have resulted in unemployment and poverty levels running well over fifty percent. Father Aktham does a quick calculation, and reports that less than one fourth of the school's budget is covered by tuition payments: fewer and fewer families in Zababdeh find that they can pay the full annual tuition of US$400. Joleen, a star English student and center for the school's girls' basketball team, and her three sisters and one brother, couldn't afford the school without scholarship assistance.
"It's a difficult challenge to preach the Gospel of peace and reconciliation in Palestine today," confesses Father Aktham, as an orderly procession of Muslims and Christians (mostly youth) winds its way through Zababdeh protesting Sheikh Yassin's assassination, a killing that claimed seven other lives. "At the church and at the school, we teach that we can hate what the Israelis are doing, we can hate occupation and dispossession, we can hate killing, but we don't hate Israelis. We're called to teach for a future of peace." If this future seemed farther than ever today in Palestine/Israel, I nevertheless end the day buoyed by Father Aktham's words, rejoicing in the continued Christian witness in this land to the Gospel of peace, justice, and reconciliation.
Below you will find three pieces, all regarding the extra-judicial killing of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin (and the "collateral damage" of seven other persons killed). The first is from Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, while the second and third come from Al-Haq and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, the leading Palestinian human rights organizations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, respectively.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Another red line is crossed
By Amira Hass
Haaretz, March 24, 2004
There are four or five people in Gaza who now make up what is known as Hamas leadership. The liquidation of each one of them would ensure greater security, say government, IDF and Shin Bet officials. The liquidation of each one of them, says experience, also justifies the killing of people around him, including aides, bodyguards, relatives, neighbors, children, fellow worshipers. Based on the order to assassinate Ahmed Yassin only after he left the mosque, one may understand that the IDF is convinced it is making an effort to minimise collateral damage. Based on these calculations, the fact that seven men who did not deserve death were killed along with Yassin is evidently no great tragedy. Therefore, if we have five leaders deserving of death, then another 35, or 30, or maybe 48 or even 61 deaths, if you throw in the Islamic Jihad targets, too, evidently is no great tragedy either.
Between each of these targeted assassinations, there are also bound to be botched attempts. Several more people will be killed in these attempts "by mistake." How many? Will it be 14, or 22, including three children? The IDF Spokesman will underscore the danger posed by a deserving-of-death terrorist who managed to slip away, and will itemise the list of terrorist attacks he planned, executed, and will execute. And we'll forget about the wounded baby or the worker who was heading home from the market and was killed (not to mention the people killed at protest demonstrations).
You don't need intelligence reports to realize that as far as Hamas is concerned, Yassin's assassination can be considered a "mega-attack" that will elicit a response of commensurate magnitude. Almost certainly, they will not succeed at getting to a high-ranking Israeli, threats notwithstanding. Conceivably, their objective could be a particularly high number of Israeli civilian casualties, instead. Israeli intelligence efforts are now focusing on exposing attempts to avenge Yassin's blood. These intelligence efforts will generate a succession of new deserving-of-death terrorists. Ten men suspected of planning? Twenty worthy of targeted assassination? Just how many people around them is it permissible to kill or injure? Eighty? One hundred?
Sooner or later, the next reprisal terrorist attack will come. Eleven Israeli victims, or 19, dozens of wounded, harsh scenes from the hospital, suffering of the families - these will prove the murderousness of the Palestinians, who kill Jews simply for being Jews. And this terrorist attack, or the one after it, which we will not forget and not forgive, will make it okay to cross another red line. On Monday, they waited for Yassin to leave the mosque. Is the day far off when the helicopter crew obeys an order to launch a missile or bomb at the mosque itself? After which it will be explained: there were four deserving-of-death terrorists inside, each with four armed escorts, and, anyway, the imam there refers to Jews as monkeys and pigs.
And will the day arrive when an Israeli pilot fires a missile or bomb at a Palestinian mourning procession because marching in its two front rows are ranking members of Palestinian organizations, and right behind them are 30 armed masked men waving Kalashnikovs or Qassam launchers? Will that happen after or before the attack on a Jewish target abroad, which would take place after Hamas understands how hard it is, under conditions of a closure, to execute a local terrorist attack?
That is when the new Hamas leaders will sprout. The fact that the intelligence briefings have yet to include them does not mean they do not exist and are not prepared to take risks, be interviewed on television, and become targets of Israeli assassinations. Will this raise the number of those not-deserving-death in their environs that it is permissible to kill to, say, 100? In response to two Palestinian suicide bombings that will snuff out the lives of 30 Israelis, or 50, and another 45 attacks in preparation and three that were foiled, would the payment of 1,000 Palestinians killed be considered a suitable, logical, acceptable tax?
Israel's military and technological superiority is obvious to every Hamas activist in the Gaza Strip who swears to take revenge. The thousands who are prepared to commit suicide are well aware that they have nil (no real) chance of getting out of the Gaza Strip, and that most of them will be killed before managing to reach a nearby settlement. In Israel, military superiority was once presented as a precondition for any diplomatic settlement. But in effect it is the substitute that makes any diplomatic settlement superfluous.
Consciously or not, this superiority is hidden from the eyes of the average Israeli, who welcomes the assassination of Yassin, but is scared to death of the next terrorist attack. For many, this personal fear is translated into the deceptive sense that Israel itself faces existential threat. The Israeli government seemingly cultivates this fear of
existential threat. Therefore, this personal fear is an important factor in the ability of the Israeli military-intelligence-settlement elite, which is aware of its superiority, to cross another red line. It knows it has the backing of a majority of the Israeli public, which is convinced that this time, but really this time, the targeted assassination will bring us closer to a respite and to Palestinian surrender.
2. Al-Haq
22 March 2004
Press Release
For Immediate Release
Al-Haq condemns the Targeted Assassination of Skeikh Ahmed Yassin, and calls upon the International Community to immediately intervene to protect the Palestinian Civilian Population
Al-Haq condemns today’s killing of the political and spiritual leader of Hamas Sheikh Amed Yassin. In what Israeli Military spokesmen referred to as a targeted attack, Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at 67 year-old Sheikh Yassin as he returned from day-break morning prayers, and directly hit him in his wheelchair, 30-50 metres away from the mosque. Other than Yassin, the indiscriminate killing resulted in 7 more deaths and 20 injuries amongst Palestinian civilians, 5 of which are serious. The events of today took place at a time when no clashes were
reported in the Gaza Strip.
The recent attack on the life of Hamas_ leader Sheik Amed Yassin points
towards a serious escalation in the Israeli killing of Palestinian
political leaders during Israeli military attacks. Officially endorsed
by Israel_s government and military command structures at the highest
levels, Israeli Defence Minister Shaoul Mofaz vowed that Israel will
continue its policy of targeted assassinations as part of a campaign
against Hamas.
On 9 March 2004, following the most recent Israeli attack against the
Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps, Al-Haq had warned the international
community in its Action Alert of 9 March 2004, of the deteriorating
situation in the Gaza Strip and the grave consequences of the persisting
Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilian areas. Since Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon indicated his government_s intention to
unilaterally pull-out from the Gaza Strip in December 2003, tens of
Palestinian civilians have been victims of Israeli policy of targeted
assassinations throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
Israel_s practice of wilful killings and targeted assassinations of
Palestinian political leaders constitutes a grave breach of provisions
of humanitarian law. The assassination of Sheikh Yassin is in flagrant
violation of the right to life as stipulated in Article 23 of the Hague
Regulations and Common Article 3 to the Four Geneva Conventions Relative
to the Protection of Civilians in Times of War, both of which reflect
customary international law. The attack signals that Israel failed to
give utmost consideration to the civilian nature and status of
Palestinian residential areas, and therefore to cease all attacks on
them. Furthermore the heavy casualties amongst civilians following the
attack were the direct result of Israel_s excessive and disproportionate
use of force in the vicinity of a mosque, and which took place only
minutes following morning prayers. As an Occupying Power, Israel is
legally obliged to distinguish at all times between civilians and
combatants. The fact that Sheikh Yassin is one of the most prominent
Palestinian spiritual and political leaders shows that this practice is
used in part as a measure of collective punishment and/or intimidation
of the Palestinian civilian population, prohibited under Article 33 of
the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Wilful killings are a grave breach under Article 147 of the Fourth
Geneva Convention, and are war crimes for which there is mandatory
universal jurisdiction. It is high time that the High Contracting
Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention make a serious attempt to uphold
their obligation vis-Ã -vis the Palestinian civilian populations as
stipulated in Article 146 of the Convention that _[e]ach High
Contracting Party shall be under the obligation to search for persons
alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such
grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their
nationality, before its own courts._
The assassination of Sheikh Yassin also constitutes a blatant violation
of international human rights law. In its 2003 Concluding Observations,
the Human Rights Committee had expressed serious concern with _targeted
killings_ of those identified by Israel as suspected _terrorists_ in the
OPT, and deemed it to be an arbitrary denial of the right to life, and a
breach of Israel_s obligation under the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights.
It also confirms Al-Haq_s fears that the actions of the Israeli military
authorities _speak louder than words_ and that their official
proclamations regarding the intention to withdraw from the Gaza Strip
and evacuate existing Israeli settlements are mere rhetoric intended to
divert the attention of the international community from the systematic
violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which they
continue to commit against Palestinian civilians. As the upheaval in the
OPT provoked by the assassination confirms, such actions counter Israeli
claims that they seek to de-escalate the situation and that they are
working towards the achievement of peace and stability in the region.
Al-Haq views with grave concern the assassination of Sheikh Yassin and
others and calls upon:
1. the United Nations (UN) Security Council to convene an emergency
session to fulfil its legal obligations under the UN Charter to maintain
peace and security, in order to respond to the grave consequences of
Israeli deliberate methods of targeted assassinations against
Palestinians.
2. the International community through the UN General Assembly to
intervene with the Israeli authorities to ensure the protection of the
Palestinian civilian population in the OPT
3. the High Contracting Parties to put an end to the consistent
lack of full and fair investigations into ongoing violations committed
by the Israeli authorities by ensuring that their judicial authorities
open prosecution briefs on wilful killings in the Israeli occupied
territories, and to bring those responsible for such grave breaches to
justice.
3. PCHR
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights -Press Release
Ref: 51/2004 Date: 22 March 2004 Time: 08:30 GMT
Israeli Occupying Forces Assassinate Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
In an act of state terrorism, on Monday morning, 22 March 2004, Israeli
occupying forces assassinated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, 66, founder and
political leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), immediately
after he had left the mosque after finishing the dawn prayer. In
addition to Sheikh Yassin, 7 Palestinian civilians, including 3 of
Sheikh Yassin's bodyguards, were killed and 17 others injured, including
two of Sheikh Yassin's sons. This illegal and belligerent act is an
actual implementation of the Israeli authorities' threats to assassinate
Sheikh Yassin, which were recently articulated by Israeli political and
military officials. This is the second use of illegal and excessive
force of its kind committed by Israeli occupying forces against a top
figure in a Palestinian organization, as Israeli occupying forces
previously assassinated the Secretary General of the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine Abu 'Ali Mustafa in Ramallah on 27 August
2001.
According to preliminary investigations conducted by PCHR, at
approximately 05:20 on Monday morning, Israeli helicopter gunships
launched 3 missiles at Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, 66, an elderly disabled man,
after he had left the Islamic Association Mosque in the densely
populated al-Sabra neighborhood in the center of Gaza city, after the
dawn payer. Sheikh Yassin was traveling on his wheelchair accompanied
by 3 bodyguards, when one of the missiles directly hit Sheikh Yassin and
his bodyguards. The other two missiles exploded in the surrounding area
and killed 4 other civilians. In addition to those killed, 17 civilians
were injured, including Sheikh Yassin's two sons: 'Abdul Hamid, 33; and
'Abdul Ghani, 29. Four children were among those injured. 'Abdul Hamid
and 5 of the injured remain in serious condition. All of the casualties
were worshippers who had just left the mosque following the dawn prayer.
The other 7 victims killed were identified as:
1. Mo'men Ibrahim al-Yazouri, 28;
2. Rateb 'Abdul Rahman al-'Aloul, 35;
3. Khamis Mushtaha, 32;
4. Ameer Ahmed 'Abdul 'Aal, 25;
5. Rabi' 'Abdul Hai 'Abdul 'Aal, 18, a bodyguard of Sheikh Yassin;
6. Ayoub Ahmed 'Atallah, 26, a bodyguard of Sheikh Yassin;
7. Khalil 'Abdul Elah Abu Jayab, 30, a bodyguard of Sheikh Yassin.
Israeli media reported after the incident that Israeli official sources
announced that the assassination was approved by the Israeli government
and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon himself supervised the attack.
Sheikh Yassin had survived a previous assassination attempt on 6
September 2003, when Israeli warplanes attacked an apartment building in
which Sheikh Yassin and Isma'il Haniya, another leader of Hamas, were
present. The two leaders were lightly injured during that incident.
PCHR strongly condemns this illegal and excessive use of force, which
was committed in the context of the policy of extra-judicial
assassination officially adopted by the Israeli government, in violation
of international law and humanitarian law. PCHR believes that this
horrific act further proves that the Israeli government continues its
aggression contrary to its misleading claims of seeking peace. Such
actions signify that the Israeli government and Prime Minister Sharon
have decided to intentionally escalate tension in the whole region.
PCHR calls upon international community to immediately intervene to
prevent further deterioration in the region and provide protection for
the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who face
the destructive Israeli arsenal that is unwilling to respect
international humanitarian and human rights law.
March 25, 2004
[Note: the text below is the first of eight entries in a “Palestine Diary” on MCC’s website that will run over a two week period. Other entries will be written by MCC workers Ed Nyce (Bethlehem), Bob Herr (MCC Peace Office) and Molly Graver (MCC UN Office). You can access the Palestine Diary at http://www.mcc.org/palestinediary/]
Sometimes it pays to get an early start. On Monday morning, March 22, I left the house with Sam and Kate a little after 7 am, with them heading to school and me to visit the northern West Bank village of Zababdeh, where MCC's Global Family program provides support for the local Catholic school. If we'd left a half hour later, we'd have been stuck at home most of the morning. As news of Israel's extra-judicial killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin began to spread, demonstrators started coming out onto the streets in our neighborhood on the Mount of Olives. They were met by Israeli police, who eventually dispersed them with tear gas. Many roads in East Jerusalem, including in our neighborhood, were closed down.
While part of me wondered about the wisdom of travelling in the northern West Bank on the day of Sheikh Yassin's assassination, I also did not want the efforts I had made to coordinate passage to go wasted. As travel restrictions on Palestinians have become increasingly tight, international aid organizations such as MCC must coordinate with the Israeli military if we wish to enter the Gaza Strip or parts of the West Bank, such as the Jenin district, where Zababdeh is located. Any worries I had about driving through angry crowds of protestors proved unfounded. Apart from a few burning tires in the road on the way up and a march in Tubas on the way back, the villages I passed through were relatively quiet, with most stores keeping their doors open. When I get back home later in the day, however, I discover that East Jerusalem has completely shut down.
"We weren't sure that you would come!" said Father Aktham, parish priest and headmaster of the Latin Patriarchate School in Zababdeh as I drove up to the church. "We dismissed school after students finished their mid-term exams, because the Palestinian Authority has declared three days of mourning. But there are still students around the school. Let's go talk to them!" MCC's Global Family program provides scholarships to Christian students who otherwise would not be able to afford tuition at this Christian school. Joleen Daibes, a ninth grade girl with four siblings, is a case in point. Joleen's father has been out of work for three years now. The checkpoints, closures and curfews imposed by the Israeli military on West Bank villages such as Zababdeh have resulted in unemployment and poverty levels running well over fifty percent. Father Aktham does a quick calculation, and reports that less than one fourth of the school's budget is covered by tuition payments: fewer and fewer families in Zababdeh find that they can pay the full annual tuition of US$400. Joleen, a star English student and center for the school's girls' basketball team, and her three sisters and one brother, couldn't afford the school without scholarship assistance.
"It's a difficult challenge to preach the Gospel of peace and reconciliation in Palestine today," confesses Father Aktham, as an orderly procession of Muslims and Christians (mostly youth) winds its way through Zababdeh protesting Sheikh Yassin's assassination, a killing that claimed seven other lives. "At the church and at the school, we teach that we can hate what the Israelis are doing, we can hate occupation and dispossession, we can hate killing, but we don't hate Israelis. We're called to teach for a future of peace." If this future seemed farther than ever today in Palestine/Israel, I nevertheless end the day buoyed by Father Aktham's words, rejoicing in the continued Christian witness in this land to the Gospel of peace, justice, and reconciliation.
Below you will find three pieces, all regarding the extra-judicial killing of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin (and the "collateral damage" of seven other persons killed). The first is from Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, while the second and third come from Al-Haq and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, the leading Palestinian human rights organizations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, respectively.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Another red line is crossed
By Amira Hass
Haaretz, March 24, 2004
There are four or five people in Gaza who now make up what is known as Hamas leadership. The liquidation of each one of them would ensure greater security, say government, IDF and Shin Bet officials. The liquidation of each one of them, says experience, also justifies the killing of people around him, including aides, bodyguards, relatives, neighbors, children, fellow worshipers. Based on the order to assassinate Ahmed Yassin only after he left the mosque, one may understand that the IDF is convinced it is making an effort to minimise collateral damage. Based on these calculations, the fact that seven men who did not deserve death were killed along with Yassin is evidently no great tragedy. Therefore, if we have five leaders deserving of death, then another 35, or 30, or maybe 48 or even 61 deaths, if you throw in the Islamic Jihad targets, too, evidently is no great tragedy either.
Between each of these targeted assassinations, there are also bound to be botched attempts. Several more people will be killed in these attempts "by mistake." How many? Will it be 14, or 22, including three children? The IDF Spokesman will underscore the danger posed by a deserving-of-death terrorist who managed to slip away, and will itemise the list of terrorist attacks he planned, executed, and will execute. And we'll forget about the wounded baby or the worker who was heading home from the market and was killed (not to mention the people killed at protest demonstrations).
You don't need intelligence reports to realize that as far as Hamas is concerned, Yassin's assassination can be considered a "mega-attack" that will elicit a response of commensurate magnitude. Almost certainly, they will not succeed at getting to a high-ranking Israeli, threats notwithstanding. Conceivably, their objective could be a particularly high number of Israeli civilian casualties, instead. Israeli intelligence efforts are now focusing on exposing attempts to avenge Yassin's blood. These intelligence efforts will generate a succession of new deserving-of-death terrorists. Ten men suspected of planning? Twenty worthy of targeted assassination? Just how many people around them is it permissible to kill or injure? Eighty? One hundred?
Sooner or later, the next reprisal terrorist attack will come. Eleven Israeli victims, or 19, dozens of wounded, harsh scenes from the hospital, suffering of the families - these will prove the murderousness of the Palestinians, who kill Jews simply for being Jews. And this terrorist attack, or the one after it, which we will not forget and not forgive, will make it okay to cross another red line. On Monday, they waited for Yassin to leave the mosque. Is the day far off when the helicopter crew obeys an order to launch a missile or bomb at the mosque itself? After which it will be explained: there were four deserving-of-death terrorists inside, each with four armed escorts, and, anyway, the imam there refers to Jews as monkeys and pigs.
And will the day arrive when an Israeli pilot fires a missile or bomb at a Palestinian mourning procession because marching in its two front rows are ranking members of Palestinian organizations, and right behind them are 30 armed masked men waving Kalashnikovs or Qassam launchers? Will that happen after or before the attack on a Jewish target abroad, which would take place after Hamas understands how hard it is, under conditions of a closure, to execute a local terrorist attack?
That is when the new Hamas leaders will sprout. The fact that the intelligence briefings have yet to include them does not mean they do not exist and are not prepared to take risks, be interviewed on television, and become targets of Israeli assassinations. Will this raise the number of those not-deserving-death in their environs that it is permissible to kill to, say, 100? In response to two Palestinian suicide bombings that will snuff out the lives of 30 Israelis, or 50, and another 45 attacks in preparation and three that were foiled, would the payment of 1,000 Palestinians killed be considered a suitable, logical, acceptable tax?
Israel's military and technological superiority is obvious to every Hamas activist in the Gaza Strip who swears to take revenge. The thousands who are prepared to commit suicide are well aware that they have nil (no real) chance of getting out of the Gaza Strip, and that most of them will be killed before managing to reach a nearby settlement. In Israel, military superiority was once presented as a precondition for any diplomatic settlement. But in effect it is the substitute that makes any diplomatic settlement superfluous.
Consciously or not, this superiority is hidden from the eyes of the average Israeli, who welcomes the assassination of Yassin, but is scared to death of the next terrorist attack. For many, this personal fear is translated into the deceptive sense that Israel itself faces existential threat. The Israeli government seemingly cultivates this fear of
existential threat. Therefore, this personal fear is an important factor in the ability of the Israeli military-intelligence-settlement elite, which is aware of its superiority, to cross another red line. It knows it has the backing of a majority of the Israeli public, which is convinced that this time, but really this time, the targeted assassination will bring us closer to a respite and to Palestinian surrender.
2. Al-Haq
22 March 2004
Press Release
For Immediate Release
Al-Haq condemns the Targeted Assassination of Skeikh Ahmed Yassin, and calls upon the International Community to immediately intervene to protect the Palestinian Civilian Population
Al-Haq condemns today’s killing of the political and spiritual leader of Hamas Sheikh Amed Yassin. In what Israeli Military spokesmen referred to as a targeted attack, Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at 67 year-old Sheikh Yassin as he returned from day-break morning prayers, and directly hit him in his wheelchair, 30-50 metres away from the mosque. Other than Yassin, the indiscriminate killing resulted in 7 more deaths and 20 injuries amongst Palestinian civilians, 5 of which are serious. The events of today took place at a time when no clashes were
reported in the Gaza Strip.
The recent attack on the life of Hamas_ leader Sheik Amed Yassin points
towards a serious escalation in the Israeli killing of Palestinian
political leaders during Israeli military attacks. Officially endorsed
by Israel_s government and military command structures at the highest
levels, Israeli Defence Minister Shaoul Mofaz vowed that Israel will
continue its policy of targeted assassinations as part of a campaign
against Hamas.
On 9 March 2004, following the most recent Israeli attack against the
Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps, Al-Haq had warned the international
community in its Action Alert of 9 March 2004, of the deteriorating
situation in the Gaza Strip and the grave consequences of the persisting
Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilian areas. Since Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon indicated his government_s intention to
unilaterally pull-out from the Gaza Strip in December 2003, tens of
Palestinian civilians have been victims of Israeli policy of targeted
assassinations throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
Israel_s practice of wilful killings and targeted assassinations of
Palestinian political leaders constitutes a grave breach of provisions
of humanitarian law. The assassination of Sheikh Yassin is in flagrant
violation of the right to life as stipulated in Article 23 of the Hague
Regulations and Common Article 3 to the Four Geneva Conventions Relative
to the Protection of Civilians in Times of War, both of which reflect
customary international law. The attack signals that Israel failed to
give utmost consideration to the civilian nature and status of
Palestinian residential areas, and therefore to cease all attacks on
them. Furthermore the heavy casualties amongst civilians following the
attack were the direct result of Israel_s excessive and disproportionate
use of force in the vicinity of a mosque, and which took place only
minutes following morning prayers. As an Occupying Power, Israel is
legally obliged to distinguish at all times between civilians and
combatants. The fact that Sheikh Yassin is one of the most prominent
Palestinian spiritual and political leaders shows that this practice is
used in part as a measure of collective punishment and/or intimidation
of the Palestinian civilian population, prohibited under Article 33 of
the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Wilful killings are a grave breach under Article 147 of the Fourth
Geneva Convention, and are war crimes for which there is mandatory
universal jurisdiction. It is high time that the High Contracting
Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention make a serious attempt to uphold
their obligation vis-Ã -vis the Palestinian civilian populations as
stipulated in Article 146 of the Convention that _[e]ach High
Contracting Party shall be under the obligation to search for persons
alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such
grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their
nationality, before its own courts._
The assassination of Sheikh Yassin also constitutes a blatant violation
of international human rights law. In its 2003 Concluding Observations,
the Human Rights Committee had expressed serious concern with _targeted
killings_ of those identified by Israel as suspected _terrorists_ in the
OPT, and deemed it to be an arbitrary denial of the right to life, and a
breach of Israel_s obligation under the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights.
It also confirms Al-Haq_s fears that the actions of the Israeli military
authorities _speak louder than words_ and that their official
proclamations regarding the intention to withdraw from the Gaza Strip
and evacuate existing Israeli settlements are mere rhetoric intended to
divert the attention of the international community from the systematic
violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which they
continue to commit against Palestinian civilians. As the upheaval in the
OPT provoked by the assassination confirms, such actions counter Israeli
claims that they seek to de-escalate the situation and that they are
working towards the achievement of peace and stability in the region.
Al-Haq views with grave concern the assassination of Sheikh Yassin and
others and calls upon:
1. the United Nations (UN) Security Council to convene an emergency
session to fulfil its legal obligations under the UN Charter to maintain
peace and security, in order to respond to the grave consequences of
Israeli deliberate methods of targeted assassinations against
Palestinians.
2. the International community through the UN General Assembly to
intervene with the Israeli authorities to ensure the protection of the
Palestinian civilian population in the OPT
3. the High Contracting Parties to put an end to the consistent
lack of full and fair investigations into ongoing violations committed
by the Israeli authorities by ensuring that their judicial authorities
open prosecution briefs on wilful killings in the Israeli occupied
territories, and to bring those responsible for such grave breaches to
justice.
3. PCHR
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights -Press Release
Ref: 51/2004 Date: 22 March 2004 Time: 08:30 GMT
Israeli Occupying Forces Assassinate Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
In an act of state terrorism, on Monday morning, 22 March 2004, Israeli
occupying forces assassinated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, 66, founder and
political leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), immediately
after he had left the mosque after finishing the dawn prayer. In
addition to Sheikh Yassin, 7 Palestinian civilians, including 3 of
Sheikh Yassin's bodyguards, were killed and 17 others injured, including
two of Sheikh Yassin's sons. This illegal and belligerent act is an
actual implementation of the Israeli authorities' threats to assassinate
Sheikh Yassin, which were recently articulated by Israeli political and
military officials. This is the second use of illegal and excessive
force of its kind committed by Israeli occupying forces against a top
figure in a Palestinian organization, as Israeli occupying forces
previously assassinated the Secretary General of the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine Abu 'Ali Mustafa in Ramallah on 27 August
2001.
According to preliminary investigations conducted by PCHR, at
approximately 05:20 on Monday morning, Israeli helicopter gunships
launched 3 missiles at Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, 66, an elderly disabled man,
after he had left the Islamic Association Mosque in the densely
populated al-Sabra neighborhood in the center of Gaza city, after the
dawn payer. Sheikh Yassin was traveling on his wheelchair accompanied
by 3 bodyguards, when one of the missiles directly hit Sheikh Yassin and
his bodyguards. The other two missiles exploded in the surrounding area
and killed 4 other civilians. In addition to those killed, 17 civilians
were injured, including Sheikh Yassin's two sons: 'Abdul Hamid, 33; and
'Abdul Ghani, 29. Four children were among those injured. 'Abdul Hamid
and 5 of the injured remain in serious condition. All of the casualties
were worshippers who had just left the mosque following the dawn prayer.
The other 7 victims killed were identified as:
1. Mo'men Ibrahim al-Yazouri, 28;
2. Rateb 'Abdul Rahman al-'Aloul, 35;
3. Khamis Mushtaha, 32;
4. Ameer Ahmed 'Abdul 'Aal, 25;
5. Rabi' 'Abdul Hai 'Abdul 'Aal, 18, a bodyguard of Sheikh Yassin;
6. Ayoub Ahmed 'Atallah, 26, a bodyguard of Sheikh Yassin;
7. Khalil 'Abdul Elah Abu Jayab, 30, a bodyguard of Sheikh Yassin.
Israeli media reported after the incident that Israeli official sources
announced that the assassination was approved by the Israeli government
and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon himself supervised the attack.
Sheikh Yassin had survived a previous assassination attempt on 6
September 2003, when Israeli warplanes attacked an apartment building in
which Sheikh Yassin and Isma'il Haniya, another leader of Hamas, were
present. The two leaders were lightly injured during that incident.
PCHR strongly condemns this illegal and excessive use of force, which
was committed in the context of the policy of extra-judicial
assassination officially adopted by the Israeli government, in violation
of international law and humanitarian law. PCHR believes that this
horrific act further proves that the Israeli government continues its
aggression contrary to its misleading claims of seeking peace. Such
actions signify that the Israeli government and Prime Minister Sharon
have decided to intentionally escalate tension in the whole region.
PCHR calls upon international community to immediately intervene to
prevent further deterioration in the region and provide protection for
the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who face
the destructive Israeli arsenal that is unwilling to respect
international humanitarian and human rights law.
Thursday, March 11
MCC Palestine Update #97
MCC Palestine Update #97
March 11, 2004
This past Advent season multiple cartoons ran in newspapers locally and worldwide of the wise men, or Mary and Joseph, or Santa Claus stymied trying to enter Bethlehem by an 8 meter high concrete wall. Nitpickers might have complained that the form the separation barrier took around Bethlehem was in the form of razor wire, patrol roads, and electronic fences instead of a concrete wall. The nitpickers, unfortunately, now have no nits to pick, as within the past 10 days Israel has begun installing the 8 meter concrete slabs—the ones that already run through many of East Jerusalem's neighboring villages and around parts of Qalqilyah—in northern Bethlehem. Thanks to walls, fences, and razor wire, the Bethlehem district has been progressively transformed into a prison: speak with anyone in Bethlehem, Christian or Muslim, and the horror and shock at the wall as it goes up is palpable. Bethlehem is being severed from its sister-city of Jerusalem; its economic future is being increasingly constrained; almost all land for urban expansion has been cut off.
The Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ), an MCC partner organization located less than two blocks from the new concrete slab barrier, has produced the following resources for background on the separation wall:
1. http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Bethlehem%204-03-04/index.htm
This brief update looks at the construction of the separation wall in northern Bethlehem.
2. http://www.arij.org/Presentations/Unilateral.zip/
This file contains a powerful slide show detailing how the Israeli government's "unilateral separation" plan is a way for Israel to consolidate its occupation of the West Bank.
3. http://www.arij.org/paleye/Segregation-Wall/index.htm
This book-length study examines in meticulous detail how the separation wall is part and parcel of Israeli colonization of the occupied territories and how its construction (coupled with ongoing settlement growth and expansion) is undermining any hope for a peaceful settlement between Palestinians and Israelis.
In these days of walls and fences, it is very easy to give in to despair, hopelessness, even cynicism. A powerful antidote to such temptations is the ongoing witness of the Palestinian churches. In this time of fasting, prayer and penitence, therefore, I have included below the Lenten message from Msgr. Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. This Lent, please join Msgr. Sabbah and the entire Palestinian church in prayer for peace, justice, and reconciliation.
--Alain Epp Weaver
LATIN PATRIARCHATE – JERUSALEM
Message for Lent 2004
Our spiritual life
1. The time of fasting is a time of repentance and return to God. It is a time of presence before God. “The Kingdom of God is among you”, Jesus says. God is present among you. All your life and not just during Lent, should be a time of perpetual purification in order to better perceive God among yourselves and in all His creatures, beginning with every brother and sister who has a part in your daily life.
Fasting is a spiritual path in the life of the believer, in the midst of daily preoccupations and the complexities of life, of its joys and its trials. The Spirit of God that sustains us and gives us the true strength to persevere and remain constant in our daily spiritual combat is our guide in the building up of the Kingdom of God on earth. Thus, every land and every parish might indeed become the abode of God on earth and a holy land.
In the daily life of the believer there is faith. However, there is also a perpetual combat with various challenges, both within us and in every manifestation of evil in our society. After forty days of fasting, the tempter says to Jesus: “Tell these stones to become loaves of bread” (Mt 4:3). In Jesus’ response: “Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”, we understand that material needs need not become an obstacle to listening to the word of God. It is the word that reminds us of God’s presence within us. The construction of God’s Kingdom is to be pursued in all circumstances, whether easy or difficult. God’s grace shall be given us in all circumstances, whether easy or difficult. “My grace is enough for you” (2Cor 12:9), God says to Saint Paul, who was also struggling between weaknesses in the face of evil within himself and the grace of God who had called him to preach the Gospel.
The criterion of a just Christian life, which is on the path to sanctity, is in the accomplishment of the single commandment that Jesus left us: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 19:19). If we want to know whether we are on the right path or not, we must question ourselves, we must review our positions and our behaviors, in order to see whether we really love our neighbor. It is he or she who shows us and tells us, according to our actions and our feelings with regards to him or her, whether we are on the right path or not. This neighbor is every neighbor without exception, every person in our life, a member of our church or of another church or of another religion. Christian love, conforming to the love of God, has no limits. Jesus says: “You must be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). Elsewhere, he also says: “Love one another just as I have loved you” (Jn 13:34). The example that must be imitated is God’s example, nothing less. If Jesus gives us this commandment it means that we are capable of fulfilling it and he will give us the grace to sustain us and make us capable of imitating him. Just as God loves all God’s creatures, so we too love all our brothers and sisters, members of all churches, belonging to all religions.
Fasting is to return to God and thereby to return to all our brothers and sisters. It is to rid ourselves of all the evils that have accumulated in us, so that we acquire the strength of the Spirit in order to be strong in all the areas of our life. The others will then respect our strength, which will be then the fruit of love and not the fruit of pride or the oppression of others.
The conflict in the Holy Land in our lives in these days
2. Lent is a time of sharing. In the difficult times we are living and in face of the various deprivations imposed on many, sharing is a duty. On the other hand, and spiritually speaking, we cannot build up the Kingdom of God that is among us alone. We build it up with all those that suffer. By living, within our souls and within our prayers, the oppression of some and the fears of others and by becoming conscious of our part in the responsibility for putting an end to this, we carry out our Lent. Thus we are involved in constructing the Kingdom of God among us and within our society that is at war.
The circumstances within society that we have to face in the Holy Land are in fact circumstances of war: siege imposed on all, death imposed on some, prison and torture, various deprivations, house demolitions, destruction of agriculture, attacks and killings of innocent victims. In the midst of all this, our life is a difficult and painful search for justice and peace. It is an unceasing demand to put an end to oppression and fear and to the cycle of violence that is their consequence. One day, God will get rid of all these but human beings will do this as well. We will participate with God, each of us, by refusing both the oppression of a people and the spilling of innocent blood, and leaders too, through their wisdom and their lack of vested interests, becoming the servants of the people instead of serving themselves and their own interests.
Those responsible for war in this land seem to be acting in these days as if they were planning for a permanent war and not for a permanent peace. However, the human person in this land is not called to live in a state of permanent war. God has said: Live in the land in peace, peace with God, who chose the land for his abode, and peace with those who live in it. Peace cannot be established while oppression and the violence that results from it continue. Depriving a people of its liberty and of its land is oppression that no conscience can accept. Likewise, no conscience can accept killing innocent people in order to protest oppression. Let us not become twofold victims of the war, first victims of material destruction and second, victims of a hatred that demolishes the human person, Palestinian or Israeli. No person is better than another when he or she is transformed into a carrier of hatred and revenge. Sadly, this is what is happening in this land, holy for the three religions and towards which the entire world looks because it is holy. This is why those who impose oppression have the duty to put an end to it so that the land might then know the security and peace that are so much desired.
Parish priests and men and women religious in the various parishes spend long hours at the military checkpoints in order to carry out their pastoral work in their parishes and throughout the diocese. We say to them: be patient and pray to God for every human person, Palestinian or Israeli. Make your trial a prayer for all, for all those who suffer on both sides of the conflict. Your trial is little compared to death, torture, attacks, demolitions that are faced by so many other victims. Accept these difficulties as a sharing with all the poor ones of this land, to whom God has sent us in order that we might serve them and share in their sufferings and their hopes.
Brothers and sisters,
3. Lent, a time of fasting and prayer, is a time to return to God. It is a time to be conscious of the Kingdom of God that is among us and that we are to establish in our society. It is a time when all believers in God might be filled both by His love and His force.
In the difficulties we face, let us continue to live and to believe. St Cyril of Jerusalem used to say to his faithful, who also were carrying a difficult cross at that time: “Do not rejoice in the cross in time of peace only, but hold fast to the same faith in time of persecution also. Do not be a friend of Jesus in time of peace only but also in time of persecution” (St Cyril of Jerusalem, 2nd reading, 4th week of the year).
+ Michel Sabbah, Patriarch
Jerusalem, Ash Wednesday
25.2.2004
March 11, 2004
This past Advent season multiple cartoons ran in newspapers locally and worldwide of the wise men, or Mary and Joseph, or Santa Claus stymied trying to enter Bethlehem by an 8 meter high concrete wall. Nitpickers might have complained that the form the separation barrier took around Bethlehem was in the form of razor wire, patrol roads, and electronic fences instead of a concrete wall. The nitpickers, unfortunately, now have no nits to pick, as within the past 10 days Israel has begun installing the 8 meter concrete slabs—the ones that already run through many of East Jerusalem's neighboring villages and around parts of Qalqilyah—in northern Bethlehem. Thanks to walls, fences, and razor wire, the Bethlehem district has been progressively transformed into a prison: speak with anyone in Bethlehem, Christian or Muslim, and the horror and shock at the wall as it goes up is palpable. Bethlehem is being severed from its sister-city of Jerusalem; its economic future is being increasingly constrained; almost all land for urban expansion has been cut off.
The Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ), an MCC partner organization located less than two blocks from the new concrete slab barrier, has produced the following resources for background on the separation wall:
1. http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Bethlehem%204-03-04/index.htm
This brief update looks at the construction of the separation wall in northern Bethlehem.
2. http://www.arij.org/Presentations/Unilateral.zip/
This file contains a powerful slide show detailing how the Israeli government's "unilateral separation" plan is a way for Israel to consolidate its occupation of the West Bank.
3. http://www.arij.org/paleye/Segregation-Wall/index.htm
This book-length study examines in meticulous detail how the separation wall is part and parcel of Israeli colonization of the occupied territories and how its construction (coupled with ongoing settlement growth and expansion) is undermining any hope for a peaceful settlement between Palestinians and Israelis.
In these days of walls and fences, it is very easy to give in to despair, hopelessness, even cynicism. A powerful antidote to such temptations is the ongoing witness of the Palestinian churches. In this time of fasting, prayer and penitence, therefore, I have included below the Lenten message from Msgr. Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. This Lent, please join Msgr. Sabbah and the entire Palestinian church in prayer for peace, justice, and reconciliation.
--Alain Epp Weaver
LATIN PATRIARCHATE – JERUSALEM
Message for Lent 2004
Our spiritual life
1. The time of fasting is a time of repentance and return to God. It is a time of presence before God. “The Kingdom of God is among you”, Jesus says. God is present among you. All your life and not just during Lent, should be a time of perpetual purification in order to better perceive God among yourselves and in all His creatures, beginning with every brother and sister who has a part in your daily life.
Fasting is a spiritual path in the life of the believer, in the midst of daily preoccupations and the complexities of life, of its joys and its trials. The Spirit of God that sustains us and gives us the true strength to persevere and remain constant in our daily spiritual combat is our guide in the building up of the Kingdom of God on earth. Thus, every land and every parish might indeed become the abode of God on earth and a holy land.
In the daily life of the believer there is faith. However, there is also a perpetual combat with various challenges, both within us and in every manifestation of evil in our society. After forty days of fasting, the tempter says to Jesus: “Tell these stones to become loaves of bread” (Mt 4:3). In Jesus’ response: “Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”, we understand that material needs need not become an obstacle to listening to the word of God. It is the word that reminds us of God’s presence within us. The construction of God’s Kingdom is to be pursued in all circumstances, whether easy or difficult. God’s grace shall be given us in all circumstances, whether easy or difficult. “My grace is enough for you” (2Cor 12:9), God says to Saint Paul, who was also struggling between weaknesses in the face of evil within himself and the grace of God who had called him to preach the Gospel.
The criterion of a just Christian life, which is on the path to sanctity, is in the accomplishment of the single commandment that Jesus left us: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 19:19). If we want to know whether we are on the right path or not, we must question ourselves, we must review our positions and our behaviors, in order to see whether we really love our neighbor. It is he or she who shows us and tells us, according to our actions and our feelings with regards to him or her, whether we are on the right path or not. This neighbor is every neighbor without exception, every person in our life, a member of our church or of another church or of another religion. Christian love, conforming to the love of God, has no limits. Jesus says: “You must be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). Elsewhere, he also says: “Love one another just as I have loved you” (Jn 13:34). The example that must be imitated is God’s example, nothing less. If Jesus gives us this commandment it means that we are capable of fulfilling it and he will give us the grace to sustain us and make us capable of imitating him. Just as God loves all God’s creatures, so we too love all our brothers and sisters, members of all churches, belonging to all religions.
Fasting is to return to God and thereby to return to all our brothers and sisters. It is to rid ourselves of all the evils that have accumulated in us, so that we acquire the strength of the Spirit in order to be strong in all the areas of our life. The others will then respect our strength, which will be then the fruit of love and not the fruit of pride or the oppression of others.
The conflict in the Holy Land in our lives in these days
2. Lent is a time of sharing. In the difficult times we are living and in face of the various deprivations imposed on many, sharing is a duty. On the other hand, and spiritually speaking, we cannot build up the Kingdom of God that is among us alone. We build it up with all those that suffer. By living, within our souls and within our prayers, the oppression of some and the fears of others and by becoming conscious of our part in the responsibility for putting an end to this, we carry out our Lent. Thus we are involved in constructing the Kingdom of God among us and within our society that is at war.
The circumstances within society that we have to face in the Holy Land are in fact circumstances of war: siege imposed on all, death imposed on some, prison and torture, various deprivations, house demolitions, destruction of agriculture, attacks and killings of innocent victims. In the midst of all this, our life is a difficult and painful search for justice and peace. It is an unceasing demand to put an end to oppression and fear and to the cycle of violence that is their consequence. One day, God will get rid of all these but human beings will do this as well. We will participate with God, each of us, by refusing both the oppression of a people and the spilling of innocent blood, and leaders too, through their wisdom and their lack of vested interests, becoming the servants of the people instead of serving themselves and their own interests.
Those responsible for war in this land seem to be acting in these days as if they were planning for a permanent war and not for a permanent peace. However, the human person in this land is not called to live in a state of permanent war. God has said: Live in the land in peace, peace with God, who chose the land for his abode, and peace with those who live in it. Peace cannot be established while oppression and the violence that results from it continue. Depriving a people of its liberty and of its land is oppression that no conscience can accept. Likewise, no conscience can accept killing innocent people in order to protest oppression. Let us not become twofold victims of the war, first victims of material destruction and second, victims of a hatred that demolishes the human person, Palestinian or Israeli. No person is better than another when he or she is transformed into a carrier of hatred and revenge. Sadly, this is what is happening in this land, holy for the three religions and towards which the entire world looks because it is holy. This is why those who impose oppression have the duty to put an end to it so that the land might then know the security and peace that are so much desired.
Parish priests and men and women religious in the various parishes spend long hours at the military checkpoints in order to carry out their pastoral work in their parishes and throughout the diocese. We say to them: be patient and pray to God for every human person, Palestinian or Israeli. Make your trial a prayer for all, for all those who suffer on both sides of the conflict. Your trial is little compared to death, torture, attacks, demolitions that are faced by so many other victims. Accept these difficulties as a sharing with all the poor ones of this land, to whom God has sent us in order that we might serve them and share in their sufferings and their hopes.
Brothers and sisters,
3. Lent, a time of fasting and prayer, is a time to return to God. It is a time to be conscious of the Kingdom of God that is among us and that we are to establish in our society. It is a time when all believers in God might be filled both by His love and His force.
In the difficulties we face, let us continue to live and to believe. St Cyril of Jerusalem used to say to his faithful, who also were carrying a difficult cross at that time: “Do not rejoice in the cross in time of peace only, but hold fast to the same faith in time of persecution also. Do not be a friend of Jesus in time of peace only but also in time of persecution” (St Cyril of Jerusalem, 2nd reading, 4th week of the year).
+ Michel Sabbah, Patriarch
Jerusalem, Ash Wednesday
25.2.2004
Thursday, February 26
MCC Palestine Update #96
MCC Palestine Update #96
February 26, 2004
“I keep the curtains at the window drawn so I don’t have to look out at the fences that separate me from my land,” shared the mayor of Jayyous, a village of 3,000 people in the northern West Bank. During the last part of 2002 and the first part of 2003, the Israeli military constructed its separation barrier next to Jayyous village. As a result, Jayyous is a village today with a very tenuous economic future. Jayyous farmers own 12,500 dunums (1 dunum = ¼ of an acre). 600 dunums were bulldozed under to make way for the separation zone (consisting of barbed wire, foot trace paths, patrol roads, fences with electronic sensors). Another 8600 dunums are now on the western side of the separation zone. Soldiers open a gate in the fences two times a day (unless they don’t, thanks to Jewish holidays, or state holidays, or reasons unknown). In order to pass through the gate to the western side of the wall, one needs a permit issued by the Israeli civil administration of the military government. Obtaining this permit involves arduous bureaucratic procedures reminiscent of a Kafka short story. Many who apply are rejected for unspecified “security” reasons. Sometimes in one family only very young children or elderly persons who cannot carry out taxing agricultural work are given permits, while the healthy-bodied adults are denied them. As at the checkpoints throughout the West Bank, the regime instituted by the soldiers at the gates in the separation zone are arbitrary expressions of the soliders’ supreme power: at Jayyous, for example, farmers may not take their tractors through the gate, nor their sheep (unless they get permits for the sheep); in Falamiyyeh village just north of Jayyous, however, soldiers (at least sometimes) let tractors pass.
I visited Jayyous and Falamiyyeh this past Monday with a colleague from Catholic Relief Services and with videographers in the country who are working on a video sponsored by MCC, Catholic Relief Services and World Vision on the separation wall. We heard from numerous farmers in both communities tell how their livelihoods had been crushed thanks to the barrier. MCC and Catholic Relief Services are joining with the Palestinian Hydrology Group in both communities (and three other nearby towns and villages) to help farmers repair and renovate wells and water networks damaged and destroyed by Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers during the construction of the separation zone. “We sit around all day, looking out towards our land,” shared one farmer. “We see our trees dying. It’s tearing us up inside.”
This past Monday the International Court of Justice began hearing arguments from various parties about the legality of the wall. Israel has refused to attend the hearing, saying that the ICJ has no right to hand down an advisory opinion in this matter. Israel claims that the wall is to protect its citizens from violent attacks, such as the horrific suicide bombing in Jerusalem this week that claimed 8 lives. Some Israelis, however, with whom the film crew has met, disagree: “This wall won’t bring me security. It’s about grabbing land from Palestinians and separating them from one another. That won’t bring me security,” Na’ama Nagar of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, an MCC partner organization, told them.
Even as walls that divide and dispossess are being erected, there are Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for justice, peace and reconciliation. This Lenten season, please remember these peacemakers in your prayers. Pray for a future of bridges instead of walls, that the God who, in Christ, has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile might sustain the efforts of those Palestinians and Israelis who reject the legal, psychological, spiritual and physical walls that have divided and continue to divide the two peoples.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by a 15-year-old Palestinian girl from the West Bank village of Budrus where the wall is currently being built, explains why the wall is not a security barrier but a land grab. The second, by Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, looks at the tenuous future of communities trapped between the wall and the Green Line or surrounded by walls and fences inside the West Bank; with the Israeli military government demanding that residents of these villages obtain permits simply to remain in their homes, a process fraught with difficulties, the Palestinian fears of “transfer” are becoming increasingly real. Finally, Gideon Levy of Haaretz reports on the wanton, brutal exercise of power at one checkpoint in the northern West Bank.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/7994868.htm
Posted on Fri, Feb. 20, 2004
It exists not for security but for apartheid
Iltezam Morrar
A 15-year-old Palestinian student living in the West Bank
On Monday, the International Court of Justice in the Hague will begin hearings on the wall Israel is building around Palestinian cities and villages. I live in one of them: Budrus, a small village west of Ramallah. It is a very simple life here. Old women and farmers tend their sheep; children go to school, and people live together peacefully. Our village has many olive trees, which are very important for food and oil.
Americans should know that, from our viewpoint, the wall is not a security wall. Security and safety do not come from stealing land (Budrus lost about 80 percent of its village area in 1948, when Israel was formed, and stands to shrink by another 20 percent if the wall goes up). Security does not come from killing or harassing people (there is hardly a family in Palestine without some member who has been killed, hurt or imprisoned) or cutting trees (which Israeli officials have started doing around my village). So this is not a security wall. It is an apartheid wall.
Palestine will be separated into little pieces. Many people will be unable to go to work. Students won't be able to travel to university. After all this, when we are without land or olive trees, unable to work or study, people will leave. That is what the Israeli occupation is for. In 1953, for example, when Ariel Sharon led a military operation resulting in 69 civilian deaths at Qibya, the next village over from us, some people in Budrus were afraid and left. Everything the Israeli government has done is to make the people leave their land.
At the first demonstration to stop the wall in Budrus, only three old women participated with the men. I asked my father if the demonstrations were just for men, and he said no, they were for women as well. Some women and girls came to the next demonstration but left when they didn't see many other women. I told my father that we needed a demonstration only for women, and we made one.
On the first day Israeli officials came to cut the trees, I was at school. I said, "We should go; the land is more important than our exams." We marched to the fields, the boys and then the girls. Soldiers threw tear gas into the middle of us. We carried on; we were still holding our schoolbooks when we came to the Israeli captain. He was very angry and shouted, "Stop here. If you walk one more step, we will hit you." He pushed me, so I stood beside him and shouted "Free, free Palestine."
Because of the occupation, I cannot see my country. I can't travel in my country. It is like a big prison, and the wall will make it worse. If there were no occupation, I could be free. For me, the day my country is free will be my birthday. In the occupation, I have no future.
I want to study to help my country. I want to be a doctor, because here in Palestine, many people get hurt and there are few hospitals or doctors and little medicine. I want four children, but then, I want to be a doctor and will work late nights, so perhaps two is enough.
We don't hate Israelis because they are Israelis. The only thing between us is what we see as their theft of our land. If they gave back our land, nothing would be between us. We need enough land that all the Palestinian refugees who live outside could come and live here. Many Palestinians live in other countries, in tents, with no work.
Peaceful struggle is very important. It is the only way in which we can become free and stop the wall, even if we know the Israeli army does not want peace and will use violence. I think: If I use violence, all the children in Israel will feel in danger and they will use violence. So this makes the two sides always live in violence. It is important to show the world we are a peaceful people and all we want is peace.
The hearings in the Hague are very important even though we are not sure they will stop the wall. It is very important that the international community does something to say the wall should be stopped, even if it doesn't succeed.
2. Has the transfer of enclaves begun?
Haaretz, Feb. 24, 2004
By Amira Hass
"The Tanzim showed up one day," said the woman, 60-ish, the fear visible in her eyes. These are not Fatah people. This is a department within the Civil Administration - "the subcommittee for supervision of the supreme planning council," whose accepted and frightening abbreviation among Palestinian residents of the West Bank is "the Tanzim" (the planning). This is the department that issues demolition orders for Palestinian houses and stop work orders for construction projects.
H.A., an official in the Civil Administration's Tanzim, which the frightened woman was referring to, came twice during the last two months to the small Bedouin town of Arab a-Ramadin, south of Qalqilyah, on December 28, 2003 and on February 10, 2004. He hung up and took down three different kinds of orders: four "stop work orders", six "final stop work and razing orders and two "notices granting the right to object to demolition orders."
The buildings designated for demolition are: tin structure 10x8, tin structure 8x6 and tin structure 12x10, cement block and tin structure 10x10, cement block and tin structure 18x8 and cement block and tin structure 14x8. Two orders dated December 28, 2003 grant the residents a three-day extension to request that another cement block structure not be razed and one to request that the generator building and electricity pylons not be razed. The rest of the buildings in this town are like the structures for which demolition orders were issued: around 10 small, simple concrete structures and another 23 tin huts, that are boiling hot in summer and freezing cold in winter, in which the 250 members of the tribe live.
Eight kilometers from the Green Line
The speakers beg that their names be omitted, that whatever they say not be attributed to them and that their photos not be printed in the newspaper. "I just want to get home to be with my family, I don't want them to prevent me from being with my family at home," said one tribe member. They are frightened; they fear possible revenge from the Civil Administration, or in its alternate, euphemistic name, "the Coordination and Liaison Administration," which issues them permits allowing them to be in their homes that are valid for six months. Arab a-Ramadin and another four neighboring Palestinian communities (Arab Abu Farda and the villages of Wadi ar-Rasha, Ras a-Tira and a-Daba) are trapped in one of 80 enclaves, the loops that have been and will be created by the separation fence between them and the Green Line.
These enclave-loops were created in order to ensure that most of the settlements are outside the fence. The enclave of Arab a-Ramadin was created to ensure that Alfei Menashe is outside the fence. The fence - with its barbed wire, ditches, patrol tracks, wide security road and the gates that should open three times a day - creates a loop here that penetrates deep into the West Bank, a distance of around eight kilometers from the Green Line. As in other enclaves, it cuts off residents from their fields, separates clinics and their medical staffs from their patients, grocery stores from their customers, students from their schools. A school and grocery store that were respectively 300 and 700 meters away until a year or two ago, are now several kilometres further away and that in turn also imposes economic hardship on the family: the cost of taxi fares.
Three of the older Bedouin who still tended sheep had to sell them: the enclave does not provide enough space for grazing. The families no longer have the means to regularly purchase fodder for the sheep and goats due to the loss of job opportunities in Israel and the West Bank. All three of the elderly shepherds became physically ill after they sold their flocks.
The IDF and the Civil Administration in October 2003 created a special category for those thousands of Palestinians who live in the area between the fence and the Green Line, which has been officially declared a military area closed to Palestinians, but not closed to Jews: "long-term residents." The regulations that apply to this new category and the fact that the area is a closed military area grant Civil Administration officials full authority to check residency permits once every few months, and to renew or not renew them.
The new category obligates the residents to request an entry permit to those areas for anyone who is not registered with the Israeli authorities as a resident of the enclave: relatives, cab drivers, doctors, sanitation men, teachers, etc. Some receive the permits; others do not. The permits issued to Arab a-Ramadin residents - so that they can stay in their homes inside the closed military area, leave and then return - are valid until April 2004. Tribe members are convinced that if they are quoted, someone in the Civil Administration or the Shin Bet General Security Service, upon whose good graces they depend, will decide "due to security reasons" not to renew their permit to enter their home.
The word "home" prompts tired smiles on the faces of Arab a-Ramadin residents. Their small tin huts and concrete structures are spread over a green hill and its rocky slopes, in between a few sheep pens, small vegetable patches, improvised fences, family diwans (spaces covered with cloth sheets and rugs). They are originally from the Be'er Sheva area and were expelled and fled in 1948. They first settled in the Hebron area and in the mid-1950s headed north with their flocks to the Qalqilyah region. Gradually, and especially after the economic changes sparked by the capture of the territories in 1967, they began to settle down, and attempted to modernize: from tents and a nomadic life of shepherding, they switched to corrugated tin huts, more urban livelihoods such as construction, and started sending their sons and daughters to study in local schools. It was a natural process, not something imposed on them from above. Some of them purchased their lands from the surrounding villages, others leased lands or swapped other parcels of land for the lands here.
Without a master plan
According to some of the final demolition orders, it seem that already in 2000 stop work orders were issued for some of the structures, including the one that houses the electricity generator. Arab a-Ramadin residents always knew that the Israeli authorities did not draw up a master plan for them and that there was no point in submitting requests to build real houses that matched the improved financial situation of several of them and their changed, modern tastes. Because there is no master plan, they also did not connect to the electricity grid - the one that lights up, for example, the neighboring community which has been developing since 1982: Alfei Menashe. They are also not officially connected to the water network: they hooked up a long plastic pipe from the village of Habla. In the summer, the water is boiling. The Oslo Accords designated them as Area C, which is under Israeli civilian and security responsibility. Several demolition and stop work orders were also issued in two nearby places: the village of Wadi ar-Rasha and the corrugated tin hut community of the small Abu Farda tribe. Each one has around 90 residents. Both of them abut Alfei Menashe: one is located adjacent to its industrial zone and the other is adjacent to its western neighborhoods.
When Israel started building the separation fence's loops around them, the workers razed one of Wadi ar-Rasha's barns, built by its owners six years earlier. The reason: It was too close to the fence. In April 2003, when construction of the fence was fully underway, five additional demolition orders arrived in Wadi ar-Rasha: for a concrete structure, for an extension of an existing house and for a large tin structure. And there were another two demolition orders for two barns. This village, like several other neighboring villages, was apparently set up in the 19th century by residents of the village of Tulat, which is located to the east, whose lands officially extend to Jaljuliya in the west. It was a natural process of Palestinian settlement, typical of the rural residents who went with their flocks several kilometers away from the parent community, made homes inside caves and gradually settled in the new location. In recent years, after the Civil Administration issued demolition orders, building extensions intended to ease the crowding in Wadi ar-Rasha were razed.
In the two Bedouin communities and in Wadi ar-Rasha, residents are convinced that the Civil Administration's aim is to eliminate them completely from the area so that Alfei Menashe can develop even more, in the direction of the Green Line. One of the residents points to section six of their residence permit: "this permit does not represent proof of legal rights, including legal ownership or residency rights in the area, whichever is relevant." In other words, say the threatened residents, someone will come tomorrow and say that the land we are living on – not just the house - is not ours and that we are trespassing, that we have to leave.
And indeed, the Civil Administration, in its response to Haaretz, claims "the settlement of the Ramadin tribe, Abu Farda and Wadi ar-Rasha are illegal [the mistakes are in the original - A.H.]. Over the years, orders were issued, as they are issued for all illegal construction." The Civil Administration spokesman also stated that there is no connection between the construction of the fence and the issuing of demolition orders. "This a statutory legal process, civilian, of enforcing the law ... the Civil Administration is charged with enforcing the law as it relates to all matters of illegal construction in Area C of Judea and Samaria."
According to one Arab a-Ramadin resident, a Civil Administration official has tried over the last few months to lobby them to leave the area and settle elsewhere. In her response, the Civil Administration spokesman does not confirm or deny this claim. But, she said, "The Civil Administration is now in the middle of concerted efforts to review the correlation between master plans in Area C and the reality and the needs of the Palestinian population living in the area, in order to find solutions for issues of this nature." The Civil Administration's response also stated that work is now underway to connect the villages to the electricity grid (but in Arab a-Ramadin, for example, they do not know about that and haven't seen any signs that they're being connected to the electricity grid).
The Palestinians in the Alfei Menashe enclave do not believe the Israeli promises. For them, the demolition orders are more tangible than any promise given in response to an Israeli newspaper's query, while the discussions in The Hague are going on. "If they raze all of our tin and cement block structure," says an Arab a-Ramadin resident, "we will move into tents. The way it used to be. And if they want us to go away from here, then please, send us back to our natural place, where we were originally - Be'er Sheva."
3. When soldiers become bullies
By Gideon Levy
Three armed bullies in black ski masks get out of the jeep quickly. One breaks into shouts at the taxi driver who is letting off a female passenger, waving a rifle in the driver's face and ordering him out of the car. The bully then orders the frightened driver to hand over the keys to his taxi and get going. The helpless driver hands over his keys. In a feeble voice he asks if and when he can get his taxi back. "Maybe at the end of the day, maybe Wednesday. We'll see," says the thug, sticking the keys into his pocket, getting back in the jeep and driving away.
Highway bandits in Chechnya? Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Balata? No. The three bullies were Israeli soldiers. They confiscated the car from its owner, as they routinely do, because he let out a passenger on the other side of a blurry yellow line painted onto the Tul Karm road. The road is blocked by an unmanned iron bar. Passengers are supposed to cross on foot, from taxis on one side to taxis on the other - it's not at all clear why - and the drivers know that if they cross the yellow line the soldiers will appear out of nowhere and confiscate the cars or slice the tires. Indeed, one of the soldiers threatened to slice the tires of our car, which was parked past the remnants of the yellow line.
This "battle heritage" is passed down through the Israel Defense Forces without obstruction and all the Palestinians drivers know it. Any time they venture onto one of the few roads left to them in the West Bank, they are taking a risk. Maybe they'll be shot "by mistake," maybe their car will be confiscated for some vague reason. That's why the few roads of the West Bank where Palestinians are allowed to drive are nearly always empty. The driver whose car was confiscated, Samr Abdullah, did not know how to get home.
A brigadier who serves in the territories said in a private conversation on the weekend that the confiscation of cars and ID cards is prohibited by the army. Really? After all, if the army wanted to put an end to it, it could easily do so. The IDF Spokesman's Office also says there is no policy of confiscating cars and if it turns out that the events we witnessed last Sunday happened, "the soldiers will be severely punished."
Is the IDF Spokesman's Office being naive or disingenuous or was this really the first time it heard about soldiers confiscating the keys to a Palestinian car or slashing its tires? It's not clear what's worse. Any soldier nowadays can take any Palestinian car for any reason and for as long as he wants. When every soldier is a king, any group of soldiers can turn into a gang.
Confiscating cars is only one example of how an IDF regime of bullying has emerged and is being strengthened in the territories. There is a great deal of hypocrisy in the talk about how anarchy will reign in the territories after the IDF leaves. The disintegration of the rule of law and order begins inside the army. Every day one can see soldiers confiscating ID cards from residents, making them line up for hours in the sun and rain for no reason whatsoever, and just for the fun of it smashing memorial monuments to Palestinian casualties - like last week in Beir Furik.
In the last three years, an atmosphere of anything goes has taken root in the IDF in the territories. Any soldier can do whatever he feels like to any Palestinian - the incident won't be investigated, the soldier won't be punished.
The disintegration of the rule of law does not stop with the soldiers. Brothers Naim and Ayad Murar, who organized nonviolent demonstrations against the separation fence in Budrus, were arrested a month ago with the intention of throwing them into long months of administrative detention without trial. At the last minute, Ayad was freed by a judge who ruled that nonviolent demonstrations are no cause for administrative detention. But his brother Naim was sent to four months of administrative detention for his "terror-supporting activity." Only due to the intervention of attorneys Tamar Peleg and Yal Barda, and the courageous position taken by Lieutenant Colonel Shlomi Kochav, was Naim freed on the weekend after a month in detention, thus preventing a further disgrace. Serious questions are raised by the arrogance of security officials who wanted to lock people up for attempting to organize nonviolent demonstrations against a fence being built on their property.
There is a direct and disgusting line between the car confiscators and those who jail demonstrators without trial. Both are manifestations of gangland rule. Despite the separation fence, that kind of behavior will inevitably cross the Green Line.
February 26, 2004
“I keep the curtains at the window drawn so I don’t have to look out at the fences that separate me from my land,” shared the mayor of Jayyous, a village of 3,000 people in the northern West Bank. During the last part of 2002 and the first part of 2003, the Israeli military constructed its separation barrier next to Jayyous village. As a result, Jayyous is a village today with a very tenuous economic future. Jayyous farmers own 12,500 dunums (1 dunum = ¼ of an acre). 600 dunums were bulldozed under to make way for the separation zone (consisting of barbed wire, foot trace paths, patrol roads, fences with electronic sensors). Another 8600 dunums are now on the western side of the separation zone. Soldiers open a gate in the fences two times a day (unless they don’t, thanks to Jewish holidays, or state holidays, or reasons unknown). In order to pass through the gate to the western side of the wall, one needs a permit issued by the Israeli civil administration of the military government. Obtaining this permit involves arduous bureaucratic procedures reminiscent of a Kafka short story. Many who apply are rejected for unspecified “security” reasons. Sometimes in one family only very young children or elderly persons who cannot carry out taxing agricultural work are given permits, while the healthy-bodied adults are denied them. As at the checkpoints throughout the West Bank, the regime instituted by the soldiers at the gates in the separation zone are arbitrary expressions of the soliders’ supreme power: at Jayyous, for example, farmers may not take their tractors through the gate, nor their sheep (unless they get permits for the sheep); in Falamiyyeh village just north of Jayyous, however, soldiers (at least sometimes) let tractors pass.
I visited Jayyous and Falamiyyeh this past Monday with a colleague from Catholic Relief Services and with videographers in the country who are working on a video sponsored by MCC, Catholic Relief Services and World Vision on the separation wall. We heard from numerous farmers in both communities tell how their livelihoods had been crushed thanks to the barrier. MCC and Catholic Relief Services are joining with the Palestinian Hydrology Group in both communities (and three other nearby towns and villages) to help farmers repair and renovate wells and water networks damaged and destroyed by Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers during the construction of the separation zone. “We sit around all day, looking out towards our land,” shared one farmer. “We see our trees dying. It’s tearing us up inside.”
This past Monday the International Court of Justice began hearing arguments from various parties about the legality of the wall. Israel has refused to attend the hearing, saying that the ICJ has no right to hand down an advisory opinion in this matter. Israel claims that the wall is to protect its citizens from violent attacks, such as the horrific suicide bombing in Jerusalem this week that claimed 8 lives. Some Israelis, however, with whom the film crew has met, disagree: “This wall won’t bring me security. It’s about grabbing land from Palestinians and separating them from one another. That won’t bring me security,” Na’ama Nagar of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, an MCC partner organization, told them.
Even as walls that divide and dispossess are being erected, there are Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for justice, peace and reconciliation. This Lenten season, please remember these peacemakers in your prayers. Pray for a future of bridges instead of walls, that the God who, in Christ, has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile might sustain the efforts of those Palestinians and Israelis who reject the legal, psychological, spiritual and physical walls that have divided and continue to divide the two peoples.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by a 15-year-old Palestinian girl from the West Bank village of Budrus where the wall is currently being built, explains why the wall is not a security barrier but a land grab. The second, by Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, looks at the tenuous future of communities trapped between the wall and the Green Line or surrounded by walls and fences inside the West Bank; with the Israeli military government demanding that residents of these villages obtain permits simply to remain in their homes, a process fraught with difficulties, the Palestinian fears of “transfer” are becoming increasingly real. Finally, Gideon Levy of Haaretz reports on the wanton, brutal exercise of power at one checkpoint in the northern West Bank.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/7994868.htm
Posted on Fri, Feb. 20, 2004
It exists not for security but for apartheid
Iltezam Morrar
A 15-year-old Palestinian student living in the West Bank
On Monday, the International Court of Justice in the Hague will begin hearings on the wall Israel is building around Palestinian cities and villages. I live in one of them: Budrus, a small village west of Ramallah. It is a very simple life here. Old women and farmers tend their sheep; children go to school, and people live together peacefully. Our village has many olive trees, which are very important for food and oil.
Americans should know that, from our viewpoint, the wall is not a security wall. Security and safety do not come from stealing land (Budrus lost about 80 percent of its village area in 1948, when Israel was formed, and stands to shrink by another 20 percent if the wall goes up). Security does not come from killing or harassing people (there is hardly a family in Palestine without some member who has been killed, hurt or imprisoned) or cutting trees (which Israeli officials have started doing around my village). So this is not a security wall. It is an apartheid wall.
Palestine will be separated into little pieces. Many people will be unable to go to work. Students won't be able to travel to university. After all this, when we are without land or olive trees, unable to work or study, people will leave. That is what the Israeli occupation is for. In 1953, for example, when Ariel Sharon led a military operation resulting in 69 civilian deaths at Qibya, the next village over from us, some people in Budrus were afraid and left. Everything the Israeli government has done is to make the people leave their land.
At the first demonstration to stop the wall in Budrus, only three old women participated with the men. I asked my father if the demonstrations were just for men, and he said no, they were for women as well. Some women and girls came to the next demonstration but left when they didn't see many other women. I told my father that we needed a demonstration only for women, and we made one.
On the first day Israeli officials came to cut the trees, I was at school. I said, "We should go; the land is more important than our exams." We marched to the fields, the boys and then the girls. Soldiers threw tear gas into the middle of us. We carried on; we were still holding our schoolbooks when we came to the Israeli captain. He was very angry and shouted, "Stop here. If you walk one more step, we will hit you." He pushed me, so I stood beside him and shouted "Free, free Palestine."
Because of the occupation, I cannot see my country. I can't travel in my country. It is like a big prison, and the wall will make it worse. If there were no occupation, I could be free. For me, the day my country is free will be my birthday. In the occupation, I have no future.
I want to study to help my country. I want to be a doctor, because here in Palestine, many people get hurt and there are few hospitals or doctors and little medicine. I want four children, but then, I want to be a doctor and will work late nights, so perhaps two is enough.
We don't hate Israelis because they are Israelis. The only thing between us is what we see as their theft of our land. If they gave back our land, nothing would be between us. We need enough land that all the Palestinian refugees who live outside could come and live here. Many Palestinians live in other countries, in tents, with no work.
Peaceful struggle is very important. It is the only way in which we can become free and stop the wall, even if we know the Israeli army does not want peace and will use violence. I think: If I use violence, all the children in Israel will feel in danger and they will use violence. So this makes the two sides always live in violence. It is important to show the world we are a peaceful people and all we want is peace.
The hearings in the Hague are very important even though we are not sure they will stop the wall. It is very important that the international community does something to say the wall should be stopped, even if it doesn't succeed.
2. Has the transfer of enclaves begun?
Haaretz, Feb. 24, 2004
By Amira Hass
"The Tanzim showed up one day," said the woman, 60-ish, the fear visible in her eyes. These are not Fatah people. This is a department within the Civil Administration - "the subcommittee for supervision of the supreme planning council," whose accepted and frightening abbreviation among Palestinian residents of the West Bank is "the Tanzim" (the planning). This is the department that issues demolition orders for Palestinian houses and stop work orders for construction projects.
H.A., an official in the Civil Administration's Tanzim, which the frightened woman was referring to, came twice during the last two months to the small Bedouin town of Arab a-Ramadin, south of Qalqilyah, on December 28, 2003 and on February 10, 2004. He hung up and took down three different kinds of orders: four "stop work orders", six "final stop work and razing orders and two "notices granting the right to object to demolition orders."
The buildings designated for demolition are: tin structure 10x8, tin structure 8x6 and tin structure 12x10, cement block and tin structure 10x10, cement block and tin structure 18x8 and cement block and tin structure 14x8. Two orders dated December 28, 2003 grant the residents a three-day extension to request that another cement block structure not be razed and one to request that the generator building and electricity pylons not be razed. The rest of the buildings in this town are like the structures for which demolition orders were issued: around 10 small, simple concrete structures and another 23 tin huts, that are boiling hot in summer and freezing cold in winter, in which the 250 members of the tribe live.
Eight kilometers from the Green Line
The speakers beg that their names be omitted, that whatever they say not be attributed to them and that their photos not be printed in the newspaper. "I just want to get home to be with my family, I don't want them to prevent me from being with my family at home," said one tribe member. They are frightened; they fear possible revenge from the Civil Administration, or in its alternate, euphemistic name, "the Coordination and Liaison Administration," which issues them permits allowing them to be in their homes that are valid for six months. Arab a-Ramadin and another four neighboring Palestinian communities (Arab Abu Farda and the villages of Wadi ar-Rasha, Ras a-Tira and a-Daba) are trapped in one of 80 enclaves, the loops that have been and will be created by the separation fence between them and the Green Line.
These enclave-loops were created in order to ensure that most of the settlements are outside the fence. The enclave of Arab a-Ramadin was created to ensure that Alfei Menashe is outside the fence. The fence - with its barbed wire, ditches, patrol tracks, wide security road and the gates that should open three times a day - creates a loop here that penetrates deep into the West Bank, a distance of around eight kilometers from the Green Line. As in other enclaves, it cuts off residents from their fields, separates clinics and their medical staffs from their patients, grocery stores from their customers, students from their schools. A school and grocery store that were respectively 300 and 700 meters away until a year or two ago, are now several kilometres further away and that in turn also imposes economic hardship on the family: the cost of taxi fares.
Three of the older Bedouin who still tended sheep had to sell them: the enclave does not provide enough space for grazing. The families no longer have the means to regularly purchase fodder for the sheep and goats due to the loss of job opportunities in Israel and the West Bank. All three of the elderly shepherds became physically ill after they sold their flocks.
The IDF and the Civil Administration in October 2003 created a special category for those thousands of Palestinians who live in the area between the fence and the Green Line, which has been officially declared a military area closed to Palestinians, but not closed to Jews: "long-term residents." The regulations that apply to this new category and the fact that the area is a closed military area grant Civil Administration officials full authority to check residency permits once every few months, and to renew or not renew them.
The new category obligates the residents to request an entry permit to those areas for anyone who is not registered with the Israeli authorities as a resident of the enclave: relatives, cab drivers, doctors, sanitation men, teachers, etc. Some receive the permits; others do not. The permits issued to Arab a-Ramadin residents - so that they can stay in their homes inside the closed military area, leave and then return - are valid until April 2004. Tribe members are convinced that if they are quoted, someone in the Civil Administration or the Shin Bet General Security Service, upon whose good graces they depend, will decide "due to security reasons" not to renew their permit to enter their home.
The word "home" prompts tired smiles on the faces of Arab a-Ramadin residents. Their small tin huts and concrete structures are spread over a green hill and its rocky slopes, in between a few sheep pens, small vegetable patches, improvised fences, family diwans (spaces covered with cloth sheets and rugs). They are originally from the Be'er Sheva area and were expelled and fled in 1948. They first settled in the Hebron area and in the mid-1950s headed north with their flocks to the Qalqilyah region. Gradually, and especially after the economic changes sparked by the capture of the territories in 1967, they began to settle down, and attempted to modernize: from tents and a nomadic life of shepherding, they switched to corrugated tin huts, more urban livelihoods such as construction, and started sending their sons and daughters to study in local schools. It was a natural process, not something imposed on them from above. Some of them purchased their lands from the surrounding villages, others leased lands or swapped other parcels of land for the lands here.
Without a master plan
According to some of the final demolition orders, it seem that already in 2000 stop work orders were issued for some of the structures, including the one that houses the electricity generator. Arab a-Ramadin residents always knew that the Israeli authorities did not draw up a master plan for them and that there was no point in submitting requests to build real houses that matched the improved financial situation of several of them and their changed, modern tastes. Because there is no master plan, they also did not connect to the electricity grid - the one that lights up, for example, the neighboring community which has been developing since 1982: Alfei Menashe. They are also not officially connected to the water network: they hooked up a long plastic pipe from the village of Habla. In the summer, the water is boiling. The Oslo Accords designated them as Area C, which is under Israeli civilian and security responsibility. Several demolition and stop work orders were also issued in two nearby places: the village of Wadi ar-Rasha and the corrugated tin hut community of the small Abu Farda tribe. Each one has around 90 residents. Both of them abut Alfei Menashe: one is located adjacent to its industrial zone and the other is adjacent to its western neighborhoods.
When Israel started building the separation fence's loops around them, the workers razed one of Wadi ar-Rasha's barns, built by its owners six years earlier. The reason: It was too close to the fence. In April 2003, when construction of the fence was fully underway, five additional demolition orders arrived in Wadi ar-Rasha: for a concrete structure, for an extension of an existing house and for a large tin structure. And there were another two demolition orders for two barns. This village, like several other neighboring villages, was apparently set up in the 19th century by residents of the village of Tulat, which is located to the east, whose lands officially extend to Jaljuliya in the west. It was a natural process of Palestinian settlement, typical of the rural residents who went with their flocks several kilometers away from the parent community, made homes inside caves and gradually settled in the new location. In recent years, after the Civil Administration issued demolition orders, building extensions intended to ease the crowding in Wadi ar-Rasha were razed.
In the two Bedouin communities and in Wadi ar-Rasha, residents are convinced that the Civil Administration's aim is to eliminate them completely from the area so that Alfei Menashe can develop even more, in the direction of the Green Line. One of the residents points to section six of their residence permit: "this permit does not represent proof of legal rights, including legal ownership or residency rights in the area, whichever is relevant." In other words, say the threatened residents, someone will come tomorrow and say that the land we are living on – not just the house - is not ours and that we are trespassing, that we have to leave.
And indeed, the Civil Administration, in its response to Haaretz, claims "the settlement of the Ramadin tribe, Abu Farda and Wadi ar-Rasha are illegal [the mistakes are in the original - A.H.]. Over the years, orders were issued, as they are issued for all illegal construction." The Civil Administration spokesman also stated that there is no connection between the construction of the fence and the issuing of demolition orders. "This a statutory legal process, civilian, of enforcing the law ... the Civil Administration is charged with enforcing the law as it relates to all matters of illegal construction in Area C of Judea and Samaria."
According to one Arab a-Ramadin resident, a Civil Administration official has tried over the last few months to lobby them to leave the area and settle elsewhere. In her response, the Civil Administration spokesman does not confirm or deny this claim. But, she said, "The Civil Administration is now in the middle of concerted efforts to review the correlation between master plans in Area C and the reality and the needs of the Palestinian population living in the area, in order to find solutions for issues of this nature." The Civil Administration's response also stated that work is now underway to connect the villages to the electricity grid (but in Arab a-Ramadin, for example, they do not know about that and haven't seen any signs that they're being connected to the electricity grid).
The Palestinians in the Alfei Menashe enclave do not believe the Israeli promises. For them, the demolition orders are more tangible than any promise given in response to an Israeli newspaper's query, while the discussions in The Hague are going on. "If they raze all of our tin and cement block structure," says an Arab a-Ramadin resident, "we will move into tents. The way it used to be. And if they want us to go away from here, then please, send us back to our natural place, where we were originally - Be'er Sheva."
3. When soldiers become bullies
By Gideon Levy
Three armed bullies in black ski masks get out of the jeep quickly. One breaks into shouts at the taxi driver who is letting off a female passenger, waving a rifle in the driver's face and ordering him out of the car. The bully then orders the frightened driver to hand over the keys to his taxi and get going. The helpless driver hands over his keys. In a feeble voice he asks if and when he can get his taxi back. "Maybe at the end of the day, maybe Wednesday. We'll see," says the thug, sticking the keys into his pocket, getting back in the jeep and driving away.
Highway bandits in Chechnya? Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Balata? No. The three bullies were Israeli soldiers. They confiscated the car from its owner, as they routinely do, because he let out a passenger on the other side of a blurry yellow line painted onto the Tul Karm road. The road is blocked by an unmanned iron bar. Passengers are supposed to cross on foot, from taxis on one side to taxis on the other - it's not at all clear why - and the drivers know that if they cross the yellow line the soldiers will appear out of nowhere and confiscate the cars or slice the tires. Indeed, one of the soldiers threatened to slice the tires of our car, which was parked past the remnants of the yellow line.
This "battle heritage" is passed down through the Israel Defense Forces without obstruction and all the Palestinians drivers know it. Any time they venture onto one of the few roads left to them in the West Bank, they are taking a risk. Maybe they'll be shot "by mistake," maybe their car will be confiscated for some vague reason. That's why the few roads of the West Bank where Palestinians are allowed to drive are nearly always empty. The driver whose car was confiscated, Samr Abdullah, did not know how to get home.
A brigadier who serves in the territories said in a private conversation on the weekend that the confiscation of cars and ID cards is prohibited by the army. Really? After all, if the army wanted to put an end to it, it could easily do so. The IDF Spokesman's Office also says there is no policy of confiscating cars and if it turns out that the events we witnessed last Sunday happened, "the soldiers will be severely punished."
Is the IDF Spokesman's Office being naive or disingenuous or was this really the first time it heard about soldiers confiscating the keys to a Palestinian car or slashing its tires? It's not clear what's worse. Any soldier nowadays can take any Palestinian car for any reason and for as long as he wants. When every soldier is a king, any group of soldiers can turn into a gang.
Confiscating cars is only one example of how an IDF regime of bullying has emerged and is being strengthened in the territories. There is a great deal of hypocrisy in the talk about how anarchy will reign in the territories after the IDF leaves. The disintegration of the rule of law and order begins inside the army. Every day one can see soldiers confiscating ID cards from residents, making them line up for hours in the sun and rain for no reason whatsoever, and just for the fun of it smashing memorial monuments to Palestinian casualties - like last week in Beir Furik.
In the last three years, an atmosphere of anything goes has taken root in the IDF in the territories. Any soldier can do whatever he feels like to any Palestinian - the incident won't be investigated, the soldier won't be punished.
The disintegration of the rule of law does not stop with the soldiers. Brothers Naim and Ayad Murar, who organized nonviolent demonstrations against the separation fence in Budrus, were arrested a month ago with the intention of throwing them into long months of administrative detention without trial. At the last minute, Ayad was freed by a judge who ruled that nonviolent demonstrations are no cause for administrative detention. But his brother Naim was sent to four months of administrative detention for his "terror-supporting activity." Only due to the intervention of attorneys Tamar Peleg and Yal Barda, and the courageous position taken by Lieutenant Colonel Shlomi Kochav, was Naim freed on the weekend after a month in detention, thus preventing a further disgrace. Serious questions are raised by the arrogance of security officials who wanted to lock people up for attempting to organize nonviolent demonstrations against a fence being built on their property.
There is a direct and disgusting line between the car confiscators and those who jail demonstrators without trial. Both are manifestations of gangland rule. Despite the separation fence, that kind of behavior will inevitably cross the Green Line.
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