MCC Palestine Update #22
In conversations over the past couple of months with Palestinian partners and other international workers, the conviction is continually raised that the situation could not get worse. This must reflect a desperate wish rather than reality, because things do seem to keep getting worse. The past two weeks have seen horrific killings: the shell which killed four-month old Iman Hijo in Khan Younis refugee camps while in her mother's arms; Yossi Ishran and Kobi Mendel, two Israeli teenagers from the settlement of Tekoa' bludgeoned to death; eighteen-year-old Kifah Zu'rub who died from wounds received when settlers in the Mawasi region in the Gush Katif bloc of settlements west of Khan Younis unleashed their dogs on him as he returned home from school. Over 410 Palestinians and nearly 80 Israeli Jews have been killed since September 28, 2000. The perpetuation of the occupation is clearly not bringing peace and security, either to Palestinians or to Israelis.
More than ever your prayers and action for justice and peace are needed. MCC has produced worship and advocacy resources for personal and congregational use. These materials are now available on MCC's website at the following URL: http://www.mcc.org/middleeast/worship.html Feel free to copy, pass around, plagiarize, etc.
We (Alain and Sonia Epp Weaver and children) will be out of the country on home leave for the coming two months. The Palestine updates will be suspended during this time. The following websites are useful sources of regularly updated information and comment on the situation in Palestine/Israel:
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/
http://www.arij.org/
http://www.hdip.org/
http://www.pchrgaza.org/
http://www.lawsociety.org/
http://www.sabeel.org/
http://www.rapprochement.org/
Below you will find an interview with the Rev. Naim Ateek, director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. If you would like additional comments by Israeli journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy, please contact J. Daryl Byler in the MCC Washington Office (jdb@mcc.org).
Alain Epp Weaver, MCC Jerusalem Office
1. Palestine Report Interview: Rev. Naim Ateek
Palestine Report, 9 May 2001
This week Palestine Report Online interviews director of Sabeel Reverend Naim Ateek on the role of Palestinian and international Christians in the Aqsa Intifada.
PR: How do you see the role of Palestinian Christians in the ongoing Intifada?
Ateek: I see it in a number of ways, both locally and internationally. Locally, I think there have been a number of voices from the Christian community speaking out against the Israeli oppression. This was done through public speeches, through statements from churches and from other non-church organizations, and some of it has been carried out in the media. A person like Archmandrite Atallah Hanna has played a very significant role expressing the voice of the Christian community, especially regionally. I went with him to Morocco to meet with a group of foreign ministers and he has played a significant role in expressing the solidarity between Christians and Muslims and the importance of justice for Palestinians and the fact that Israel is not ready to honor United Nations resolutions. Internationally, I think a number of us have gone out, attending conferences, educating people, updating them on the situation, asking for a greater advocacy, helping people interpret the situation correctly. I think also that there have been a number of Christians getting together, not only by themselves, but also with Muslims and Jews, to strategize. In addition, I think that by and large (although I obviously cannot speak for all Christians and how Christians feel), many Christians know that if they are faithful to the Gospel, any resistance to injustice has to be done through non-violent action. I think that there has been a number of us who have been talking about the importance of nonviolent action and a non-violent resistance. The basic thing that I need to emphasize here is that we as a Christian community cannot sit back and watch things happen. Involvement is very important but our involvement is not in the area of an armed struggle, but in doing whatever we can non-violently towards the ending of the occupation. What all of us agree on is that the occupation must end.
PR: How do you view the Intifada in general? Would you prefer that the entire Intifada were non-violent?
Ateek: Let me begin with the premise that resisting injustice is a legitimate thing for any nation or any people who are living under oppression. I think the world community has legitimized rebellion. Whether we like it or not, resistance usually takes on the form of an armed struggle. Hopefully, there is also a resistance that is done non-violently. Now, this doesn't mean that all Christians believe in non-violence. But thank God there have always been Christians who believe that non-violence is the way to go. I believe that the Intifada is important and the Intifada is legitimate because Israel is not willing to give up its injustice and its control over all of Palestine and implement United Nations resolutions. I would like, personally, that [the Intifada] is conducted on more nonviolent terms. I believe that we will get greater support from the world community, including many Israelis, if we strengthen nonviolent action. There are also Palestinians who do feel uncomfortable with armed resistance, although the general feeling is that armed struggle is a quicker way. Unfortunately, the price is also very high, not only the physical price, but also the psychological, which remains within the community for many years. I am not saying that non-violent resistance does not have its price. It is also costly, but it is somehow the more human way of doing things, I think.
PR: I wanted to ask you about the growing dispute in the Bethlehem area between the local Christian communities and the armed fighters. There were reports in Ha'aretz that Christians were speaking out against the fighters coming into their neighborhoods and firing at the Israeli settlements, after which the Israeli military strikes hard at the neighborhood. It seems that this there has been some name-calling and leaflet-writing in both directions and I wonder if you could give us some perspective on that.
Ateek: I have not read these reports, but I can give you some perspective. I don't think it is right for anyone to shoot between the houses. I don't think this is the right way of resisting. If these people want to resist, they have to know how to do it and they have to do it in an organized way and not jeopardize the lives of civilians. If it is their choice to have armed resistance, they have to be much more mature and organized. I do think there is legitimate criticism there. There are all kinds of other things they can do. I think it is right for us to say to these people, to whoever it is, "Please think about it. If your family is there, would you do it? Think about it in the right way and don't add to the suffering of our people." We are already suffering from all kinds of things.
PR: Some people would say that making such a public outcry about the fighters shooting from certain neighborhoods will only create divisions in the Palestinian people, to be exploited by Israel.
Ateek: I would say that any honest criticism done with integrity is much needed. I think this is a very healthy thing. I would be very upset if we didn't like what is happening and we kept our mouths shut. I think part of the health of the community is to say clearly that this action is unacceptable and must stop. I think that kind of debate in the community, although it might be exploited here and there (and usually there is always exploitation of these things), is a healthier community that really speaks out against injustices. Obviously, it has to be done in the right way, in the right spirit, to the right people and once it is done that way, it will not cause friction in the community.
-Published 9/5/01 (c)Palestine Report
Friday, May 11
Saturday, April 28
MCC Palestine Update #21
MCC Palestine Update #21
"There is no escape from the solution of justice"--Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, April 2001
While Msgr. Sabbah is certainly correct in the eschatological sense that there is no escape from the solution of justice, for Palestinians in the occupied territories at present there is no escape from the Israeli siege. The siege has devastated the Palestinian economy. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics this past week announced the results of a survey which indicated that 64.2% of Palestinian households are now under the poverty level (55.7% in the West Bank, 81.4% in the Gaza Strip). 52% of households have encountered major obstacles in accessing health care because of the siege. 10.7% of households have lost all means of income, while 49.2% of households have lost 50% of their income. For the full results of the survey, look at http://www.pcbs.org/english/press_r/impact_p.htm.
Below are three pieces. The first two, by Israeli Jewish peace activist Jeff Halper and Palestinian advocate of nonviolence Ghassan Andoni (also director of MCC partner organization, Palestinian Center for Rapprochement), use sarcasm to good effect to undermine Israeli propoganda concerning the situation in the occupied territories. The final piece, by Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy, tells the story of a young infant shot in the head by Israeli border police.
1. How to Start an Uprising
Jeff Halper,* April 2001
First, you create great expectations. Handshakes on the White House lawn. A rhetoric of peace ("No more war. No more bloodshed"). Elections, giving them a flag of their own. Then secret meetings, summit meetings, dinners, retreats, peace treaties, interim agreements, promises, tantalizing benefits held before hungry eyes. More handshakes, more "gestures."
Then you create a framework of peace that guarantees you negotiating superiority. Take out international law, human rights covenants, UN resolutions, and for good measure enlist your
strategically, the strongest power in the world, the one who supplies you with all your arms, as the "mediator."
Then, as you talk peace in Oslo, Washington, Paris, Cairo, the Wye Plantation, Stockholm, Amman, Camp David, Sharm, you "create facts" on the ground that ensure your continued control and prejudice the negotiations altogether. You exploit the last seven years since the signing of the Oslo Accords to:
1. Dismember the West Bank into "Areas A, B and C," giving the Palestinian Authority full control of only 18% of the land while retaining control over 61%; divide tiny Gaza into "yellow, white, blue and green areas," giving 6,000 settlers control of 40% of the territory and confining 1,000,000 Palestinians to the rest; and completely sever East Jerusalem from the wider Palestinian society;
2. Expropriate 200 square kilometers of farm and pasture land from its Palestinian owners for your own exclusive settlements, highways and infrastructure;
3. Uproot some 80,000 olive and fruit trees that are in the way of your construction projects, thereby impoverishing their owners and making them casual day workers in your labor market -provided they can get access to your labor market;
4. Add some 30 new settlements, including whole cities like Kiryat Sefer and Tel Zion, to the dozens of settlements that already exist in the Occupied Territories over which negotiations are taking place, and construct 90,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem and the settlements exclusively for your own population;
5. Demolish more than 1200 homes of the people with whom you are negotiating peace;
6. Double your settler population across the 1967 border to 400,000, 90% of which you have already decided will remain under your sovereignty even though you haven't negotiated that with the other side yet;
7. Begin construction of 480 kms of massive highways and "by-pass" roads serving your settlements while dissecting the future territory of your peace partner into tiny disconnected islands, thereby preventing the emergence of another viable and competing economy next door;
8. Impose a permanent "closure" to prevent those whose lands you took from finding employment in your own economy, because you have discovered that workers from Rumania and Thailand are cheaper and more docile. While you're at it, you also exclude them from entering Jerusalem, the site of their holiest places;
9. Exploit their natural resources, unilaterally and illegally drawing, for example, 25% of your country's water from your neighbors' aquifers while leaving them thirsty for months on end;
10. Vandalize their countryside and environment, burying its fragile historic landscape under your massive settlements and highways and turning it into a disposal site for your industrial and urban wastes.
Next, you wait until your occupation has become irreversible and all-encompassing, until you've integrated your two economies under your control, the electrical grids, the highway and urban
infrastructure, until you've completely absorbed your partner's economy and society into your own. Then you announce that your concept of peace is "separation," and you lock your neighbors into a few small islands, taking away any hope they have for a better future, for a real country and identity of their own. You keep tightening your control, restricting their life space, humiliating and harassing them - until the uprising finally explodes.
Then you tell your story to the world: how you tried to negotiate, how "generous" you had been, how you wanted peace, and how disappointed you feel that "they" let you down. How "they" met your good intentions with stones, how "they" are not partners for peace, how "they" are not yet ready for peace. And so, until they agree to end their violence against you and return to the same negotiating table that allowed you to construct your matrix of control in the first place, you resort to force – defensive force, of course, since "they" are the aggressors. The most up- to-date American weapon systems, snipers, closures until starvation, clearing thousands of acres of agricultural land, destruction of hundreds of houses.... Until they get the message.
* Jeff Halper teaches anthropology at Ben Gurion University in Israel. He is co-ordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and is editor of the critical Israeli-Palestinian magazine NEWS FROM WITHIN, published by the Alternative Information Center.
2. A course to overcome Violence in the Middle East
Ghassan Andoni
Palestinian Center for Rapprochement
In following what many Israelis and supporters of Israel write about the current crisis in the Middle East, I get the impression that Israel is running an intensive disciplinary course 101. The students,
against their will, are 4 million Palestinians. The course outline is:
Pragmatism: how to find for your self another road if the main road is blocked; how to find for yourself a different piece of land if yours is expropriated; how to find for yourself a different country if yours is taken for someone else; how to be thankful and hopeful if your home is bombarded, your brother is shot dead, your family is starving, and your life is controlled by a teenager in uniform and a gun; how to serve in order to live; how to accept all offers regardless.
Non-violence: how wonderful it is to be a victim; how to be able to see the good side of the solider who destroyed your home; how to blame yourself for the cold blood killing of your dears; how to die quietly and at the same time be the shield that protect the ones who killed you; how to provide the excuse for the ones who torture you; how to control your anger and pain.
Obedience: how to blindly follow military orders; how to uproot your trees if the authority decides on their removal; how to demolish your home and save the army the headache of doing so; how to
serve the masters who decided to take your home and live on your land; how to accept control and dictates without questioning them; how to stay indoors in times of curfews; how to starve silently; how to protect the ones who attack you; how to turn the left cheek; how to offer your coat as well; how to convince your self that God created men/women as masters and slaves; how to remove No
from your dictionary.
Obedience Lab: you will be provided with a wide range of examples to what will happen if you are disobedient.
Experiment 1: you will experience massive bombardment of civilian residential areas. Equipment needed: tanks, choppers, and heavy machine guns.
Experiment 2: High Tech assassinations. Smart missiles will be used to destroy people who exceeded a certain level in disobeying orders. Booby trap assassinations: exploding bombs in peoples cars, telephone boxes, and cement blocks. You need to learn how not to call it an act of terror.
Experiment 3: collective punishment. A wide variety of experiments are available: curfews, road blockades, checkpoints, economic siege, indiscriminate shooting etc.
Our labs are different from other because you will be always the subject. You will experience them all being on the recipient side.
Voluntary work: in this course you will learn how to adjust to the needs, state of mind, and reactions of your masters. How to give voluntarily before it is taken by force; how to relinquish your rights voluntarily before you are forced to do so; how to leave the country voluntarily before Zeevi (Gandhi) replaces Sharon. [NOTE: Rehavam Zeevi, nicknamed "Gandhi," is a proponent of transfer and a minister in Ariel Sharon's government.]
By passing this course successfully, and if you manage to survive then you need to take course 102 and we will make sure that you will not pass it alive. You already know the golden rule: the only
good Arab is the dead Arab.
First part of this course is offered by Prof. Ehud Barak; currently offered by prof. Sharon; to register in course 102 please check with Prof. Zeevi (Gandhi).
3. They shoot babies, don't they?
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, 27 April 2001
Nothing can bring a smile to Amani's face. Not even the three new dolls - one pink, one yellow and one green - that she got as a present from her parents, who received their baby daughter as a gift when she was released from the hospital a few days ago and brought home. Amani goes around the house wearing festive clothes, also new - a red suit and shiny sandals - providing a sharp contrast to the poverty all around.Amani doesn't cry, and she doesn't laugh. Her big blue eyes are wide open and her smooth golden tresses cascade down the right side of her head; the left side is bare and bald, furrowed by three scars - a large arc of stitches on her forehead and two smaller scars below. Most of the time, Amani clings to her mother. She makes the occasional sortie into the living room, but quickly scurries back to her mother's arms, constantly enshrouded in silence. Even when her father picks her up and gives her a hug, she stretches out her arms toward her mother; she wants to go back to her.
Maybe it's because of the memory of that day, that terrible day, on which her father took her on his shoulders and the whole family walked innocently and tranquilly to the clinic in the city. Until the soldiers shot them.
Amani Gnaim is one year and nine months old. She was shot in the head by Border Policemen, at appallingly close range, it appears. If her father, who carried Amani on his shoulders on that bitter day, is to be believed, the troops fired a few rounds at his family as they walked along the side of the road. If we believe the spokeswoman for the Border Police, her organization knows nothing about any such a shocking incident of fire being opened at short range on a family. But the scars on Amani's head tell a story, and provide crushing, painful proof that is more convincing than a thousand testimonies and denials.
The turrets of Israeli tanks concealed on the ridge threaten those who use the road that ascends from Bethlehem to the village of Al Khader. Palestinians throwing stones and hurling Molotov cocktails, as well as snipers, threaten the Tunnel Road, "the settlers' highway," which runs below, in the valley. A Palestinian youngster wearing a black shirt labeled "Labor Party Youth" shows us the way to Amani's home, at the far end of a narrow alley. His friend walks on crutches. According to the data of Abd al-Ahmar, a field worker for the Palestinian Human Rights Group, 1,350 residents of Bethlehem, nearly all of them civilians, have been wounded since the start of the current Intifada; 95 of them are under the age of 18. Amani is the youngest to be wounded so far. In the past few weeks, she has also suffered from a severe throat inflammation, probably caused by the tear gas grenades the Israeli soldiers fire here occasionally.
The photograph of a shahid - martyr - Rami Yihyeh Mussa, who was 16 when he was killed on April 17 in shelling by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), hangs at the entrance to the neighborhood grocery store. The rusting remains of an old car lie on the road leading to the house: it served as a makeshift Palestinian barrier to the IDF jeeps that hurtle through the area from the Tunnel Road in pursuit of stone-throwers. Al Khader, which lies on the outskirts of Bethlehem, is under Israeli security control, but is a hotbed of unrest and violence. The improvised roadblock of the local residents has been shunted to the side of the road; it can no longer stop the progress of any jeep.The home of the Gnaim family is on the second floor, above the village blacksmith's shop, and the way to it passes through the shop, between iron bars, soldering irons and two sooty workers. This is a house of poverty: two rooms for seven souls, the plaster on the walls peeling. The family has lived here for 17 years. Nawal the mother, Mohammed the father and their five children: Amal, 14; Yusuf, 12; Mahmoud, 10; Omar, 8; and Amani, the baby. Mohammed was a construction worker in the settlement of Beit El, but has been out of work since the Intifada erupted more than six months ago. What do they live on? "We make do." It's the same answer you get in all the poverty-stricken homes of Palestinians. Neighbor women with their children sit on the floor: they have come to congratulate Amani on her almost- healthy return home from the hospital.
On Sunday, April 8, Amani's sore throat worsened and her temperature went up. Her parents decided to take her to the clinic run by Dr. Ali in Bethlehem. They had been to see him a few times, and he has said that the little girl was suffering from the effects of the tear gas, but it was her rising temperature that worried the parents. They left the house at about 2 P.M. - Nawal, Mohammed and their two children, Mahmoud and Amani. They walked down the alley and reached the main road, which is flanked on both sides by vineyards and overlooks the Tunnel Road. It's usually dangerous here, between the flying stones and the flying bullets, but Mohammed says they thought it was quiet, as quiet as on Sunday of this week, when we walked the same road with Mohammed to reconstruct the events.
Two Border Police jeeps swooped down on them. Mohammed says they stopped a short distance from the family. There were six men in the jeeps; five emerged, and suddenly opened fire. That is what Mohammed says. Amani, whom he was carrying, began to bleed, Mahmoud and Nawal were also wounded lightly, the boy in his arm, the mother in the back. Mohammed says a few bullets whistled between his legs. They were rubber bullets, he says. His wife and son lay down on the sidewalk, he himself rushed the bleeding Amani to an ambulance that was parked below, where the Palestinian ambulances are always parked, ready for any incident that may occur - and does, in this violence-prone place.
Mohammed recalls that as he began to run with his daughter, he shouted at the Border Policemen, "Why did you do it?" - but they only smiled, perhaps in embarrassment, and sped off in their jeeps. According to Mohammed, there was no one else but them on the sidewalk at the time of the incident. "They saw that they shot a baby girl. There was no way they couldn't have seen that."
The Palestinian ambulance rushed Amani and her family to the Al-Husseini Hospital in Beit Jala, which borders on Jerusalem. That night, Amani was transferred to Al-Muqassed Hospital in East erusalem. A fractured skull, the doctors said. She underwent surgery. Her brother Mahmoud remained at Al-Husseini with his uncle. Amani was in intensive care for five days, and then spent another three days in the ward before being released. The doctors said it would be some time before it became clear whether permanent damage had been done. On May 5, her parents will take her for a follow-up examination. "I could identify them out of a million people," Mohammed says of those who shot his daughter. And an elderly woman neighbor interjects, "Who do you want to identify, and what for? There's plenty of them who do plenty of things. "Amani came home on Saturday. Says Nawal, the mother, with unabashed pride: "People ask her who shot her and she says the army. She's a smart girl." Mohammed: "Look how they treat our children. They shoot them and they laugh. In Hebron, they destroyed a whole neighborhood, the Abu Sneina neighborhood, because of a Jewish baby girl, and they refused to bury her until they avenged her death. We are simple people, we did nothing. All we did was to take our girl to the clinic. We didn't want to hurt anyone. I don't understand how the soldiers don't go crazy after they do something like that."
Here is a photograph of Amani from before the incident: a sweet little girl in the local studio, Disney figures in the background. She's holding a sweet in her hand - it looks like she has a strong grip. Here is Amani after the incident: with her head shaved and the stitches and the scars that will heal.
The spokeswoman for the Border Police, Chief Inspector Liat Perl: "The Border Police confirms the fact that there were severe disturbances that day in Al Khader, in which dozens of locals threw irebombs and stones at Border Police forces at the site. Because of the intensity of the events, the forces had to make use of means to disperse the mob. We have no knowledge of citizens who were urt and we are sorry if that in fact happened."
"There is no escape from the solution of justice"--Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, April 2001
While Msgr. Sabbah is certainly correct in the eschatological sense that there is no escape from the solution of justice, for Palestinians in the occupied territories at present there is no escape from the Israeli siege. The siege has devastated the Palestinian economy. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics this past week announced the results of a survey which indicated that 64.2% of Palestinian households are now under the poverty level (55.7% in the West Bank, 81.4% in the Gaza Strip). 52% of households have encountered major obstacles in accessing health care because of the siege. 10.7% of households have lost all means of income, while 49.2% of households have lost 50% of their income. For the full results of the survey, look at http://www.pcbs.org/english/press_r/impact_p.htm.
Below are three pieces. The first two, by Israeli Jewish peace activist Jeff Halper and Palestinian advocate of nonviolence Ghassan Andoni (also director of MCC partner organization, Palestinian Center for Rapprochement), use sarcasm to good effect to undermine Israeli propoganda concerning the situation in the occupied territories. The final piece, by Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy, tells the story of a young infant shot in the head by Israeli border police.
1. How to Start an Uprising
Jeff Halper,* April 2001
First, you create great expectations. Handshakes on the White House lawn. A rhetoric of peace ("No more war. No more bloodshed"). Elections, giving them a flag of their own. Then secret meetings, summit meetings, dinners, retreats, peace treaties, interim agreements, promises, tantalizing benefits held before hungry eyes. More handshakes, more "gestures."
Then you create a framework of peace that guarantees you negotiating superiority. Take out international law, human rights covenants, UN resolutions, and for good measure enlist your
strategically, the strongest power in the world, the one who supplies you with all your arms, as the "mediator."
Then, as you talk peace in Oslo, Washington, Paris, Cairo, the Wye Plantation, Stockholm, Amman, Camp David, Sharm, you "create facts" on the ground that ensure your continued control and prejudice the negotiations altogether. You exploit the last seven years since the signing of the Oslo Accords to:
1. Dismember the West Bank into "Areas A, B and C," giving the Palestinian Authority full control of only 18% of the land while retaining control over 61%; divide tiny Gaza into "yellow, white, blue and green areas," giving 6,000 settlers control of 40% of the territory and confining 1,000,000 Palestinians to the rest; and completely sever East Jerusalem from the wider Palestinian society;
2. Expropriate 200 square kilometers of farm and pasture land from its Palestinian owners for your own exclusive settlements, highways and infrastructure;
3. Uproot some 80,000 olive and fruit trees that are in the way of your construction projects, thereby impoverishing their owners and making them casual day workers in your labor market -provided they can get access to your labor market;
4. Add some 30 new settlements, including whole cities like Kiryat Sefer and Tel Zion, to the dozens of settlements that already exist in the Occupied Territories over which negotiations are taking place, and construct 90,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem and the settlements exclusively for your own population;
5. Demolish more than 1200 homes of the people with whom you are negotiating peace;
6. Double your settler population across the 1967 border to 400,000, 90% of which you have already decided will remain under your sovereignty even though you haven't negotiated that with the other side yet;
7. Begin construction of 480 kms of massive highways and "by-pass" roads serving your settlements while dissecting the future territory of your peace partner into tiny disconnected islands, thereby preventing the emergence of another viable and competing economy next door;
8. Impose a permanent "closure" to prevent those whose lands you took from finding employment in your own economy, because you have discovered that workers from Rumania and Thailand are cheaper and more docile. While you're at it, you also exclude them from entering Jerusalem, the site of their holiest places;
9. Exploit their natural resources, unilaterally and illegally drawing, for example, 25% of your country's water from your neighbors' aquifers while leaving them thirsty for months on end;
10. Vandalize their countryside and environment, burying its fragile historic landscape under your massive settlements and highways and turning it into a disposal site for your industrial and urban wastes.
Next, you wait until your occupation has become irreversible and all-encompassing, until you've integrated your two economies under your control, the electrical grids, the highway and urban
infrastructure, until you've completely absorbed your partner's economy and society into your own. Then you announce that your concept of peace is "separation," and you lock your neighbors into a few small islands, taking away any hope they have for a better future, for a real country and identity of their own. You keep tightening your control, restricting their life space, humiliating and harassing them - until the uprising finally explodes.
Then you tell your story to the world: how you tried to negotiate, how "generous" you had been, how you wanted peace, and how disappointed you feel that "they" let you down. How "they" met your good intentions with stones, how "they" are not partners for peace, how "they" are not yet ready for peace. And so, until they agree to end their violence against you and return to the same negotiating table that allowed you to construct your matrix of control in the first place, you resort to force – defensive force, of course, since "they" are the aggressors. The most up- to-date American weapon systems, snipers, closures until starvation, clearing thousands of acres of agricultural land, destruction of hundreds of houses.... Until they get the message.
* Jeff Halper teaches anthropology at Ben Gurion University in Israel. He is co-ordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and is editor of the critical Israeli-Palestinian magazine NEWS FROM WITHIN, published by the Alternative Information Center.
2. A course to overcome Violence in the Middle East
Ghassan Andoni
Palestinian Center for Rapprochement
In following what many Israelis and supporters of Israel write about the current crisis in the Middle East, I get the impression that Israel is running an intensive disciplinary course 101. The students,
against their will, are 4 million Palestinians. The course outline is:
Pragmatism: how to find for your self another road if the main road is blocked; how to find for yourself a different piece of land if yours is expropriated; how to find for yourself a different country if yours is taken for someone else; how to be thankful and hopeful if your home is bombarded, your brother is shot dead, your family is starving, and your life is controlled by a teenager in uniform and a gun; how to serve in order to live; how to accept all offers regardless.
Non-violence: how wonderful it is to be a victim; how to be able to see the good side of the solider who destroyed your home; how to blame yourself for the cold blood killing of your dears; how to die quietly and at the same time be the shield that protect the ones who killed you; how to provide the excuse for the ones who torture you; how to control your anger and pain.
Obedience: how to blindly follow military orders; how to uproot your trees if the authority decides on their removal; how to demolish your home and save the army the headache of doing so; how to
serve the masters who decided to take your home and live on your land; how to accept control and dictates without questioning them; how to stay indoors in times of curfews; how to starve silently; how to protect the ones who attack you; how to turn the left cheek; how to offer your coat as well; how to convince your self that God created men/women as masters and slaves; how to remove No
from your dictionary.
Obedience Lab: you will be provided with a wide range of examples to what will happen if you are disobedient.
Experiment 1: you will experience massive bombardment of civilian residential areas. Equipment needed: tanks, choppers, and heavy machine guns.
Experiment 2: High Tech assassinations. Smart missiles will be used to destroy people who exceeded a certain level in disobeying orders. Booby trap assassinations: exploding bombs in peoples cars, telephone boxes, and cement blocks. You need to learn how not to call it an act of terror.
Experiment 3: collective punishment. A wide variety of experiments are available: curfews, road blockades, checkpoints, economic siege, indiscriminate shooting etc.
Our labs are different from other because you will be always the subject. You will experience them all being on the recipient side.
Voluntary work: in this course you will learn how to adjust to the needs, state of mind, and reactions of your masters. How to give voluntarily before it is taken by force; how to relinquish your rights voluntarily before you are forced to do so; how to leave the country voluntarily before Zeevi (Gandhi) replaces Sharon. [NOTE: Rehavam Zeevi, nicknamed "Gandhi," is a proponent of transfer and a minister in Ariel Sharon's government.]
By passing this course successfully, and if you manage to survive then you need to take course 102 and we will make sure that you will not pass it alive. You already know the golden rule: the only
good Arab is the dead Arab.
First part of this course is offered by Prof. Ehud Barak; currently offered by prof. Sharon; to register in course 102 please check with Prof. Zeevi (Gandhi).
3. They shoot babies, don't they?
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, 27 April 2001
Nothing can bring a smile to Amani's face. Not even the three new dolls - one pink, one yellow and one green - that she got as a present from her parents, who received their baby daughter as a gift when she was released from the hospital a few days ago and brought home. Amani goes around the house wearing festive clothes, also new - a red suit and shiny sandals - providing a sharp contrast to the poverty all around.Amani doesn't cry, and she doesn't laugh. Her big blue eyes are wide open and her smooth golden tresses cascade down the right side of her head; the left side is bare and bald, furrowed by three scars - a large arc of stitches on her forehead and two smaller scars below. Most of the time, Amani clings to her mother. She makes the occasional sortie into the living room, but quickly scurries back to her mother's arms, constantly enshrouded in silence. Even when her father picks her up and gives her a hug, she stretches out her arms toward her mother; she wants to go back to her.
Maybe it's because of the memory of that day, that terrible day, on which her father took her on his shoulders and the whole family walked innocently and tranquilly to the clinic in the city. Until the soldiers shot them.
Amani Gnaim is one year and nine months old. She was shot in the head by Border Policemen, at appallingly close range, it appears. If her father, who carried Amani on his shoulders on that bitter day, is to be believed, the troops fired a few rounds at his family as they walked along the side of the road. If we believe the spokeswoman for the Border Police, her organization knows nothing about any such a shocking incident of fire being opened at short range on a family. But the scars on Amani's head tell a story, and provide crushing, painful proof that is more convincing than a thousand testimonies and denials.
The turrets of Israeli tanks concealed on the ridge threaten those who use the road that ascends from Bethlehem to the village of Al Khader. Palestinians throwing stones and hurling Molotov cocktails, as well as snipers, threaten the Tunnel Road, "the settlers' highway," which runs below, in the valley. A Palestinian youngster wearing a black shirt labeled "Labor Party Youth" shows us the way to Amani's home, at the far end of a narrow alley. His friend walks on crutches. According to the data of Abd al-Ahmar, a field worker for the Palestinian Human Rights Group, 1,350 residents of Bethlehem, nearly all of them civilians, have been wounded since the start of the current Intifada; 95 of them are under the age of 18. Amani is the youngest to be wounded so far. In the past few weeks, she has also suffered from a severe throat inflammation, probably caused by the tear gas grenades the Israeli soldiers fire here occasionally.
The photograph of a shahid - martyr - Rami Yihyeh Mussa, who was 16 when he was killed on April 17 in shelling by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), hangs at the entrance to the neighborhood grocery store. The rusting remains of an old car lie on the road leading to the house: it served as a makeshift Palestinian barrier to the IDF jeeps that hurtle through the area from the Tunnel Road in pursuit of stone-throwers. Al Khader, which lies on the outskirts of Bethlehem, is under Israeli security control, but is a hotbed of unrest and violence. The improvised roadblock of the local residents has been shunted to the side of the road; it can no longer stop the progress of any jeep.The home of the Gnaim family is on the second floor, above the village blacksmith's shop, and the way to it passes through the shop, between iron bars, soldering irons and two sooty workers. This is a house of poverty: two rooms for seven souls, the plaster on the walls peeling. The family has lived here for 17 years. Nawal the mother, Mohammed the father and their five children: Amal, 14; Yusuf, 12; Mahmoud, 10; Omar, 8; and Amani, the baby. Mohammed was a construction worker in the settlement of Beit El, but has been out of work since the Intifada erupted more than six months ago. What do they live on? "We make do." It's the same answer you get in all the poverty-stricken homes of Palestinians. Neighbor women with their children sit on the floor: they have come to congratulate Amani on her almost- healthy return home from the hospital.
On Sunday, April 8, Amani's sore throat worsened and her temperature went up. Her parents decided to take her to the clinic run by Dr. Ali in Bethlehem. They had been to see him a few times, and he has said that the little girl was suffering from the effects of the tear gas, but it was her rising temperature that worried the parents. They left the house at about 2 P.M. - Nawal, Mohammed and their two children, Mahmoud and Amani. They walked down the alley and reached the main road, which is flanked on both sides by vineyards and overlooks the Tunnel Road. It's usually dangerous here, between the flying stones and the flying bullets, but Mohammed says they thought it was quiet, as quiet as on Sunday of this week, when we walked the same road with Mohammed to reconstruct the events.
Two Border Police jeeps swooped down on them. Mohammed says they stopped a short distance from the family. There were six men in the jeeps; five emerged, and suddenly opened fire. That is what Mohammed says. Amani, whom he was carrying, began to bleed, Mahmoud and Nawal were also wounded lightly, the boy in his arm, the mother in the back. Mohammed says a few bullets whistled between his legs. They were rubber bullets, he says. His wife and son lay down on the sidewalk, he himself rushed the bleeding Amani to an ambulance that was parked below, where the Palestinian ambulances are always parked, ready for any incident that may occur - and does, in this violence-prone place.
Mohammed recalls that as he began to run with his daughter, he shouted at the Border Policemen, "Why did you do it?" - but they only smiled, perhaps in embarrassment, and sped off in their jeeps. According to Mohammed, there was no one else but them on the sidewalk at the time of the incident. "They saw that they shot a baby girl. There was no way they couldn't have seen that."
The Palestinian ambulance rushed Amani and her family to the Al-Husseini Hospital in Beit Jala, which borders on Jerusalem. That night, Amani was transferred to Al-Muqassed Hospital in East erusalem. A fractured skull, the doctors said. She underwent surgery. Her brother Mahmoud remained at Al-Husseini with his uncle. Amani was in intensive care for five days, and then spent another three days in the ward before being released. The doctors said it would be some time before it became clear whether permanent damage had been done. On May 5, her parents will take her for a follow-up examination. "I could identify them out of a million people," Mohammed says of those who shot his daughter. And an elderly woman neighbor interjects, "Who do you want to identify, and what for? There's plenty of them who do plenty of things. "Amani came home on Saturday. Says Nawal, the mother, with unabashed pride: "People ask her who shot her and she says the army. She's a smart girl." Mohammed: "Look how they treat our children. They shoot them and they laugh. In Hebron, they destroyed a whole neighborhood, the Abu Sneina neighborhood, because of a Jewish baby girl, and they refused to bury her until they avenged her death. We are simple people, we did nothing. All we did was to take our girl to the clinic. We didn't want to hurt anyone. I don't understand how the soldiers don't go crazy after they do something like that."
Here is a photograph of Amani from before the incident: a sweet little girl in the local studio, Disney figures in the background. She's holding a sweet in her hand - it looks like she has a strong grip. Here is Amani after the incident: with her head shaved and the stitches and the scars that will heal.
The spokeswoman for the Border Police, Chief Inspector Liat Perl: "The Border Police confirms the fact that there were severe disturbances that day in Al Khader, in which dozens of locals threw irebombs and stones at Border Police forces at the site. Because of the intensity of the events, the forces had to make use of means to disperse the mob. We have no knowledge of citizens who were urt and we are sorry if that in fact happened."
Tuesday, April 17
MCC Palestine Update #20
MCC Palestine Update #20
Introduction
Easter celebrations have come and gone in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, the restoration of our broken, human bodies is hard to discern in Jerusalem and in Palestine/Israel generally. The violence of the occupation continues harsher than ever: most sobering were the demolitions of lines of homes in refugee camps in Khan Younis and Rafah. Palestinians, one should add, also use violence.
A day in the occupied territories, however, is enough to convince anyone that the violence is not balanced, and the contending parties are not of equal strength. Israel aims to solidify its occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by force, while Palestinians desperately search for ways--and more and more Palestinians are becoming convinced that only nonviolent methods will be effective--to combat the siege under which they live. Violence clearly will not bring Israelis security; nor will it bring Palestinians the liberation they long for.
Please pray that Israelis may be graced with the wisdom to act justly and in accordance with international law and resolutions; pray that Palestinians may be graced with the strength and determination to resist the occupation nonviolently.
This update contains news about MCC projects along with an opinion piece which debunks the enduring myth that Palestinians foolishly rejected a generous offer by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti outlines Palestinian objections to Barak's proposals.
Two other opinion pieces are available upon request to the MCC Washington Office (jdb@mcc.org). The first is a reflection by MCC peace development worker Ed Nyce on a trip to Hebron. In the other, Amira Hass of Ha'aretz newspaper suggests that Israel is squandering an opportunity to have peace.
MCC Project News
An MCC partner, the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement, organized a series of nonviolent protests in Bethlehem, Atara north of Ramallah, and in the Nablus-Salfit area. The protests involved marches on checkpoints and the attempted dismantling of dirt barricades blocking the entrances to villages. In two of the demonstrations, Israeli peace activists joined Palestinians in a show of nonviolent resistance.
In 1997 MCC supported renovations to the Hope Flower (Amal al-Zuhur) kindergarten in the Aida refugee camp next to Bethlehem. This week MCC received word that Israeli shells had pierced through the kindergarten's walls, causing significant structural damage. A visit demonstrated that more than one wall will have to be replaced. The shelling occurred during the daylight hours while children were in the building; fortunately, only one girl was injured (in the abdomen). A bullet hole in the kindergarten's lone slide provided a chilling picture.
1. Why Palestinians could not accept Barak's proposal
Dr Mustafa Barghouti
Palestine Monitor, 16 April 2001
Time and again Palestinians are accused by the Israeli government of bringing the conflict of the past six months upon themselves by refusing to accept the "generous offers" made by Barak at Camp David. For some people, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer at Camp David of 94 percent of the West Bank sounded more than generous, revolutionary even, and Palestinians were castigated and called "inflexible," and "unreasonable" for refusing to go that extra step and make a compromise. The fact that Barak offered more than any previous Israeli leader is unimportant but if we examine what was offered and what the reality of these offers was on the ground, a clear picture begins to emerge. The offers proposed by Barak made the possibility of a viable Palestinian state an impossibility.
The first issue we have to examine is that of the generous territorial offer. It was said that Palestinians were offered eventual control of 95 - 96% of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS). However, after analysis it becomes obvious that this is far from the reality. For example if the actual territory offered was calculated, it transpires that the Palestinians would control of much less than the claimed percentages. This difference arises because Israel's "total" does not include Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, the Jordan Valley or settlements in its computations.
Furthermore, the discussion about 'this percent' versus 'that percent' does not address the main issues for the Palestinians. Most importantly, it ignores international law and the rights conferred upon the Palestinians, and effectively serves to push these legal frameworks aside. Without a commitment to these frameworks any settlement will be an Israeli dictated agreement.
The second issue overlooked in the discussion of why Palestinians rejected the Camp David proposals, can be referred to as "compromising the compromise". The 1947 United Nations General Assembly resolution 181, from which Israel derives its legitimacy, provided 45% of historical Palestine for the Palestinian state. The demands of UN Resolution 242 for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders means a Palestinian state would be founded on 22% of the area of historic Palestine. In their acceptance of Oslo, Palestinians accepted a 2 state solution. This is a compromise of over half of the area that was originally assigned to them. As Kofi Anan asked - is it acceptable by international standards to appropriate land by force?
UN resolution 242 stipulates that Israel has to withdraw from the lands it occupied, clearly indicating that no land can be illegally occupied. UN resolution 338 reaffirms this. For the sake of peace and in hope of building a state, Palestinians are accepting this initial compromise, but any further compromise would undermine the "continuing and unqualified Palestinian right to self- determination" that the European Union, Berlin declaration of March 1999 affirmed, as well as the restricting the potential for the establishment of a sovereign, viable, prosperous, contiguous and democratic state.
The third reason for the rejection by the Palestinian negotiators to of the less than "generous" offer from Barak stems from the continued illegal occupation, confiscation and expropriation of Palestinian land. Israel has already confiscated a large portion of the West Bank for its ever- growing illegal settlement blocks. This violation of international law restricts the viability of a Palestinian state. The settlements, the system of highways and by-pass roads linking the illegal settlements to Israel proper, industrial parks, the web of closed military areas, army bases and internal checkpoints all occupy large tracts of land. Passages from one area to the other are also controlled by Israel
The West Bank and Gaza Strip have been transformed into 64 clusters of townships that imprison over three million Palestinians, a people held hostage for the sake of 450,000 illegal settlers. The confiscation of Palestinian land has been a systematic pattern of Barak, Sharon and other Israeli leaders, in order to increase the number of Jewish citizens in the Occupies Territories.
Unable to successfully transfer the native Palestinian population from these areas, Israel has restricted them to tiny enclaves through a series of measures designed to restrict Arab growth. Israel has exploited Palestinian land, water, and natural resources and continues to have sovereignty over them in addition to the concerted effort made to separate the Palestinian people from their land and thereby denying Palestinians a viable state.
The illegal annexation of East Jerusalem is a perfect example of Israeli policy towards Palestinians. Instead of permitting Palestinians sovereignty over the 1967 areas, with Israel maintaining control over West Jerusalem, Israel has used various administrative measures including denial and removal of residency rights and house demolitions to once more transfer people from the area. As experts point out, "63.5 square kilometers -- 90 percent of the land annexed by Israel as "East Jerusalem" -- in fact belonged to 28 Palestinian West bank villages, which suddenly found themselves part of an "indivisible," "historic" and "sacred" Jewish city"
Israeli settlements cut East Jerusalem into clusters, huge areas land have been annexed to serve the needs of settlers and settlements, and only some civil affairs are under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Accepting any Israeli control of the occupied territories negatively affects the quality of the Palestinian state and would transform areas of Palestinian Authority into clusters of Bantustans, as well as legitimize and reward Israel for illegally occupying and annexing land, and changing facts on the ground in violation of international law, in fact under international law these actions can be regarded as war crimes.
The fourth and equally important reason for the rejection of the Camp David offer can be attributed to the lack of settlement of the refugee issue. Most Palestinians are realistic about the possibility of a compromise. Nonetheless, the fate of over 3.7 million Palestinian refugees registered by the United Nations and about 2 million others unregistered is of utmost concern to Palestinians. The issue at stake is the acknowledgement of the right of return, as well as Israel's culpability in the creation of the refugee problem, and the application of the United Nations Resolution 194. Paragraph 11 states: "...the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date... compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return."
The right of every human who has been dispossessed of land and forced to flee was not even mentioned in Camp David. They did not accept to discuss the return of refugees at the level of interim agreement - they chose instead to force a full and complete acceptance of a final solution without any right of future discussion and obliterate any right these millions of Palestinians have.
The Israeli government tried to bargain away the right of refugees as well as sovereignty of Jerusalem and the Muslim Holy site of Al Aqsa mosque for an entity that is not even a feasible state. Israel wanted to achieve the termination of the conflict without tangible compromises or resolving the basic issues. Their intransigence at the negotiating table has led to the rejection of the Camp David settlement and now they accuse the Palestinians of not wanting peace. Israel must be ready to accept and acknowledge that it is illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip and must withdraw after 34 years of a long and terrible military occupation and that the settlements, illegal in international law and viewed as such by the world, must be removed. Israel must accept international legitimacy and the application of international standards. What we have witnessed in the past 6-months is the culmination of violations of international law and human rights.
When one looks at the West Bank and Gaza Strip, even without indulging in conspiracy theories, one gets the impression that Labour and Likud were alternating to practically implement a process of Judaization through the systematic transfer of an Israeli civilian population into the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Through illegal settlement, the continuing expropriation and confiscation of Palestinian land, and Bantustanisation of a peoples homeland, Israel is destroying the potential for peace, a peace that is based on international law, - a compromise, that Israel is unwilling to make.
Introduction
Easter celebrations have come and gone in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, the restoration of our broken, human bodies is hard to discern in Jerusalem and in Palestine/Israel generally. The violence of the occupation continues harsher than ever: most sobering were the demolitions of lines of homes in refugee camps in Khan Younis and Rafah. Palestinians, one should add, also use violence.
A day in the occupied territories, however, is enough to convince anyone that the violence is not balanced, and the contending parties are not of equal strength. Israel aims to solidify its occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by force, while Palestinians desperately search for ways--and more and more Palestinians are becoming convinced that only nonviolent methods will be effective--to combat the siege under which they live. Violence clearly will not bring Israelis security; nor will it bring Palestinians the liberation they long for.
Please pray that Israelis may be graced with the wisdom to act justly and in accordance with international law and resolutions; pray that Palestinians may be graced with the strength and determination to resist the occupation nonviolently.
This update contains news about MCC projects along with an opinion piece which debunks the enduring myth that Palestinians foolishly rejected a generous offer by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti outlines Palestinian objections to Barak's proposals.
Two other opinion pieces are available upon request to the MCC Washington Office (jdb@mcc.org). The first is a reflection by MCC peace development worker Ed Nyce on a trip to Hebron. In the other, Amira Hass of Ha'aretz newspaper suggests that Israel is squandering an opportunity to have peace.
MCC Project News
An MCC partner, the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement, organized a series of nonviolent protests in Bethlehem, Atara north of Ramallah, and in the Nablus-Salfit area. The protests involved marches on checkpoints and the attempted dismantling of dirt barricades blocking the entrances to villages. In two of the demonstrations, Israeli peace activists joined Palestinians in a show of nonviolent resistance.
In 1997 MCC supported renovations to the Hope Flower (Amal al-Zuhur) kindergarten in the Aida refugee camp next to Bethlehem. This week MCC received word that Israeli shells had pierced through the kindergarten's walls, causing significant structural damage. A visit demonstrated that more than one wall will have to be replaced. The shelling occurred during the daylight hours while children were in the building; fortunately, only one girl was injured (in the abdomen). A bullet hole in the kindergarten's lone slide provided a chilling picture.
1. Why Palestinians could not accept Barak's proposal
Dr Mustafa Barghouti
Palestine Monitor, 16 April 2001
Time and again Palestinians are accused by the Israeli government of bringing the conflict of the past six months upon themselves by refusing to accept the "generous offers" made by Barak at Camp David. For some people, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer at Camp David of 94 percent of the West Bank sounded more than generous, revolutionary even, and Palestinians were castigated and called "inflexible," and "unreasonable" for refusing to go that extra step and make a compromise. The fact that Barak offered more than any previous Israeli leader is unimportant but if we examine what was offered and what the reality of these offers was on the ground, a clear picture begins to emerge. The offers proposed by Barak made the possibility of a viable Palestinian state an impossibility.
The first issue we have to examine is that of the generous territorial offer. It was said that Palestinians were offered eventual control of 95 - 96% of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS). However, after analysis it becomes obvious that this is far from the reality. For example if the actual territory offered was calculated, it transpires that the Palestinians would control of much less than the claimed percentages. This difference arises because Israel's "total" does not include Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, the Jordan Valley or settlements in its computations.
Furthermore, the discussion about 'this percent' versus 'that percent' does not address the main issues for the Palestinians. Most importantly, it ignores international law and the rights conferred upon the Palestinians, and effectively serves to push these legal frameworks aside. Without a commitment to these frameworks any settlement will be an Israeli dictated agreement.
The second issue overlooked in the discussion of why Palestinians rejected the Camp David proposals, can be referred to as "compromising the compromise". The 1947 United Nations General Assembly resolution 181, from which Israel derives its legitimacy, provided 45% of historical Palestine for the Palestinian state. The demands of UN Resolution 242 for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders means a Palestinian state would be founded on 22% of the area of historic Palestine. In their acceptance of Oslo, Palestinians accepted a 2 state solution. This is a compromise of over half of the area that was originally assigned to them. As Kofi Anan asked - is it acceptable by international standards to appropriate land by force?
UN resolution 242 stipulates that Israel has to withdraw from the lands it occupied, clearly indicating that no land can be illegally occupied. UN resolution 338 reaffirms this. For the sake of peace and in hope of building a state, Palestinians are accepting this initial compromise, but any further compromise would undermine the "continuing and unqualified Palestinian right to self- determination" that the European Union, Berlin declaration of March 1999 affirmed, as well as the restricting the potential for the establishment of a sovereign, viable, prosperous, contiguous and democratic state.
The third reason for the rejection by the Palestinian negotiators to of the less than "generous" offer from Barak stems from the continued illegal occupation, confiscation and expropriation of Palestinian land. Israel has already confiscated a large portion of the West Bank for its ever- growing illegal settlement blocks. This violation of international law restricts the viability of a Palestinian state. The settlements, the system of highways and by-pass roads linking the illegal settlements to Israel proper, industrial parks, the web of closed military areas, army bases and internal checkpoints all occupy large tracts of land. Passages from one area to the other are also controlled by Israel
The West Bank and Gaza Strip have been transformed into 64 clusters of townships that imprison over three million Palestinians, a people held hostage for the sake of 450,000 illegal settlers. The confiscation of Palestinian land has been a systematic pattern of Barak, Sharon and other Israeli leaders, in order to increase the number of Jewish citizens in the Occupies Territories.
Unable to successfully transfer the native Palestinian population from these areas, Israel has restricted them to tiny enclaves through a series of measures designed to restrict Arab growth. Israel has exploited Palestinian land, water, and natural resources and continues to have sovereignty over them in addition to the concerted effort made to separate the Palestinian people from their land and thereby denying Palestinians a viable state.
The illegal annexation of East Jerusalem is a perfect example of Israeli policy towards Palestinians. Instead of permitting Palestinians sovereignty over the 1967 areas, with Israel maintaining control over West Jerusalem, Israel has used various administrative measures including denial and removal of residency rights and house demolitions to once more transfer people from the area. As experts point out, "63.5 square kilometers -- 90 percent of the land annexed by Israel as "East Jerusalem" -- in fact belonged to 28 Palestinian West bank villages, which suddenly found themselves part of an "indivisible," "historic" and "sacred" Jewish city"
Israeli settlements cut East Jerusalem into clusters, huge areas land have been annexed to serve the needs of settlers and settlements, and only some civil affairs are under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Accepting any Israeli control of the occupied territories negatively affects the quality of the Palestinian state and would transform areas of Palestinian Authority into clusters of Bantustans, as well as legitimize and reward Israel for illegally occupying and annexing land, and changing facts on the ground in violation of international law, in fact under international law these actions can be regarded as war crimes.
The fourth and equally important reason for the rejection of the Camp David offer can be attributed to the lack of settlement of the refugee issue. Most Palestinians are realistic about the possibility of a compromise. Nonetheless, the fate of over 3.7 million Palestinian refugees registered by the United Nations and about 2 million others unregistered is of utmost concern to Palestinians. The issue at stake is the acknowledgement of the right of return, as well as Israel's culpability in the creation of the refugee problem, and the application of the United Nations Resolution 194. Paragraph 11 states: "...the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date... compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return."
The right of every human who has been dispossessed of land and forced to flee was not even mentioned in Camp David. They did not accept to discuss the return of refugees at the level of interim agreement - they chose instead to force a full and complete acceptance of a final solution without any right of future discussion and obliterate any right these millions of Palestinians have.
The Israeli government tried to bargain away the right of refugees as well as sovereignty of Jerusalem and the Muslim Holy site of Al Aqsa mosque for an entity that is not even a feasible state. Israel wanted to achieve the termination of the conflict without tangible compromises or resolving the basic issues. Their intransigence at the negotiating table has led to the rejection of the Camp David settlement and now they accuse the Palestinians of not wanting peace. Israel must be ready to accept and acknowledge that it is illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip and must withdraw after 34 years of a long and terrible military occupation and that the settlements, illegal in international law and viewed as such by the world, must be removed. Israel must accept international legitimacy and the application of international standards. What we have witnessed in the past 6-months is the culmination of violations of international law and human rights.
When one looks at the West Bank and Gaza Strip, even without indulging in conspiracy theories, one gets the impression that Labour and Likud were alternating to practically implement a process of Judaization through the systematic transfer of an Israeli civilian population into the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Through illegal settlement, the continuing expropriation and confiscation of Palestinian land, and Bantustanisation of a peoples homeland, Israel is destroying the potential for peace, a peace that is based on international law, - a compromise, that Israel is unwilling to make.
Saturday, April 7
MCC Palestine Update #19
MCC Palestine Update #19
This week, as Christians the world over commemorate Christ's passion, we at MCC Palestine ask especially for your prayers for Palestinians on their daily Via Dolorosa under occupation. On Palm Sunday, the preacher at the local Lutheran church noted that Jesus stands at the checkpoint, seeking to enter Jerusalem but denied entry.
Please pray for all of those trapped by the siege of occupation: students denied access to their studies, those denied access to health care, those whose money is running out or has run out, and are making do on the kindness of neighbors.
Pray also for Israelis trapped in a siege mentality, a mentality which convinces that security can be bought at the price of the wholsesale oppression of an entire nation. This coming Sunday Palestinian Christians will be gathering to celebrate the miracle of Jesus's resurrection from the dead. They will greet each other, saying, "al-Masih qaam! Haqan qaam!" Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! May God grant us all the grace during these troubling times to join them in proclaiming these words in the faith that Christ has defeated the powers of death and oppression.
MCC Project News
On April 7, 1948, at least 100 Palestinian civilians were massacred by Israeli army troops in the village of Deir Yassin. This was one of over 30 massacres perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians during the 1948 war. This year on April 7, Palestinians and believers in justice worldwide held rallies calling for the internationally-recognized right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes to be upheld and implemented. MCC Palestine partner, the Badil Refugee Resource Center, was involved in planning rallies in the occupied West Bank. For more on Badil's work, see www.badil.org. For ways to get involved to promote the return of refugees in North America, visit www.al-awda.org to find out about Al-Awda (Return) groups in your area.
Action suggestion
Write to your elected officials on two points: 1) urge that your government's contribution to the United Nations Relief Works Administration (UNRWA), responsible for social services in Palestinian refugee camps, increase to help UNRWA keep pace with population increases in the camps; 2) explain that any durable solution to the Palestinian refugee problem must give priority to the principle of refugee choice, including the choice to return to their former homes; without an affirmation of the right of return and a safeguarding of the principle of refugee choice, the quest for a durable peace in Palestine/Israel will prove elusive.
1. Easter Message from the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center
Naim Ateek
6 April 2001
Dear friends,
As we approach Holy Week and Easter, the suffering of Jesus Christ at the hands of evil political and religious powers two thousand years ago is lived out again in Palestine. The number of innocent Palestinians and Israelis that have fallen victim to Israeli state policy is increasing.
Here in Palestine Jesus is again walking the via dolorosa. Jesus is the powerless Palestinian humiliated at a checkpoint, the woman trying to get through to the hospital for treatment, the young man whose dignity is trampled, the young student who cannot get to the university to study, the unemployed father who needs to find bread to feed his family; the list is tragically getting longer, and Jesus is there in their midst suffering with them. He is with them when their homes are shelled by tanks and helicopter gunships. He is with them in their towns and villages, in their pains and sorrows.
In this season of Lent, it seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him. It only takes people of insight to see the hundreds of thousands of crosses throughout the land, Palestinian men, women, and children being crucified. Palestine has become one huge golgotha. The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily. Palestine has become the place of the skull.
Using the Gospel story one can put it in a different and still very poignant way. Four things are clear today. Jerusalem still does not know what makes for peace; Jesus is weeping and his tears are mixed with many other people's tears; the number of people who are carrying their crosses is multiplying phenomenally; and the women of Palestine as well as many Jewish women are weeping over the many killed and wounded innocents. This is the reality of life today.
In the midst of this hopeless and confusing situation, inundated with injustice and death, we refuse to give in to despair. We want to affirm the power of resurrection and life. With St. Paul we can say this Easter, "That I may know him, the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings…" (Philippians 3:10). Our faith in God does not allow us to lose hope. The resurrection of Christ remains the reality that inspires and empowers us. The day will come, and we pray soon, when joy will replace grief, trust will remove fear, justice will triumph over oppression, and reconciliation will supplant alienation. The living Christ is urging us to stand firm and be assured of the inevitability of the resurrection. We will, therefore, continue in our struggle against the evil structures that dominate and oppress. Our hope is in God. The resurrection is coming, and it will bring with it the promise of a new life and liberation for all the people of our land.
We count on your prayers and solidarity. Thank you for your continued support.
HAPPY EASTER
Best wishes,
Naim Ateek
President
Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center
www.sabeel.org
This week, as Christians the world over commemorate Christ's passion, we at MCC Palestine ask especially for your prayers for Palestinians on their daily Via Dolorosa under occupation. On Palm Sunday, the preacher at the local Lutheran church noted that Jesus stands at the checkpoint, seeking to enter Jerusalem but denied entry.
Please pray for all of those trapped by the siege of occupation: students denied access to their studies, those denied access to health care, those whose money is running out or has run out, and are making do on the kindness of neighbors.
Pray also for Israelis trapped in a siege mentality, a mentality which convinces that security can be bought at the price of the wholsesale oppression of an entire nation. This coming Sunday Palestinian Christians will be gathering to celebrate the miracle of Jesus's resurrection from the dead. They will greet each other, saying, "al-Masih qaam! Haqan qaam!" Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! May God grant us all the grace during these troubling times to join them in proclaiming these words in the faith that Christ has defeated the powers of death and oppression.
MCC Project News
On April 7, 1948, at least 100 Palestinian civilians were massacred by Israeli army troops in the village of Deir Yassin. This was one of over 30 massacres perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians during the 1948 war. This year on April 7, Palestinians and believers in justice worldwide held rallies calling for the internationally-recognized right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes to be upheld and implemented. MCC Palestine partner, the Badil Refugee Resource Center, was involved in planning rallies in the occupied West Bank. For more on Badil's work, see www.badil.org. For ways to get involved to promote the return of refugees in North America, visit www.al-awda.org to find out about Al-Awda (Return) groups in your area.
Action suggestion
Write to your elected officials on two points: 1) urge that your government's contribution to the United Nations Relief Works Administration (UNRWA), responsible for social services in Palestinian refugee camps, increase to help UNRWA keep pace with population increases in the camps; 2) explain that any durable solution to the Palestinian refugee problem must give priority to the principle of refugee choice, including the choice to return to their former homes; without an affirmation of the right of return and a safeguarding of the principle of refugee choice, the quest for a durable peace in Palestine/Israel will prove elusive.
1. Easter Message from the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center
Naim Ateek
6 April 2001
Dear friends,
As we approach Holy Week and Easter, the suffering of Jesus Christ at the hands of evil political and religious powers two thousand years ago is lived out again in Palestine. The number of innocent Palestinians and Israelis that have fallen victim to Israeli state policy is increasing.
Here in Palestine Jesus is again walking the via dolorosa. Jesus is the powerless Palestinian humiliated at a checkpoint, the woman trying to get through to the hospital for treatment, the young man whose dignity is trampled, the young student who cannot get to the university to study, the unemployed father who needs to find bread to feed his family; the list is tragically getting longer, and Jesus is there in their midst suffering with them. He is with them when their homes are shelled by tanks and helicopter gunships. He is with them in their towns and villages, in their pains and sorrows.
In this season of Lent, it seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him. It only takes people of insight to see the hundreds of thousands of crosses throughout the land, Palestinian men, women, and children being crucified. Palestine has become one huge golgotha. The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily. Palestine has become the place of the skull.
Using the Gospel story one can put it in a different and still very poignant way. Four things are clear today. Jerusalem still does not know what makes for peace; Jesus is weeping and his tears are mixed with many other people's tears; the number of people who are carrying their crosses is multiplying phenomenally; and the women of Palestine as well as many Jewish women are weeping over the many killed and wounded innocents. This is the reality of life today.
In the midst of this hopeless and confusing situation, inundated with injustice and death, we refuse to give in to despair. We want to affirm the power of resurrection and life. With St. Paul we can say this Easter, "That I may know him, the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings…" (Philippians 3:10). Our faith in God does not allow us to lose hope. The resurrection of Christ remains the reality that inspires and empowers us. The day will come, and we pray soon, when joy will replace grief, trust will remove fear, justice will triumph over oppression, and reconciliation will supplant alienation. The living Christ is urging us to stand firm and be assured of the inevitability of the resurrection. We will, therefore, continue in our struggle against the evil structures that dominate and oppress. Our hope is in God. The resurrection is coming, and it will bring with it the promise of a new life and liberation for all the people of our land.
We count on your prayers and solidarity. Thank you for your continued support.
HAPPY EASTER
Best wishes,
Naim Ateek
President
Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center
www.sabeel.org
Sunday, March 25
MCC Palestine Update #18
MCC Palestine Update #18
This update contains two items. The first is a summary of and reflection on a project visit to the Gaza Strip by country co-representative Alain Epp Weaver. For more information on Gaza, see the website of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, www.pchrgaza.org.
The second is a commentary on the right of return by Jewish theologian Marc Ellis. In distinction from those Israelis and Jews who out of hand reject the notion of the right of Palestinian refugees to return, Ellis offers a creative perspective.
1. Anguish and Hope in Gaza
Alain Epp Weaver, MCC Country Co-representative to the West Bank and Gaza
The Gaza Strip is a part of Palestine very close to my heart. My family and I lived there for nearly two years of our lives while working with MCC. It is because of this personal connection that work trips to Gaza since the outbreak of the current intifada have been the hardest part of my job, emotionally. Some parts of the West Bank, such as the Nablus and Hebron areas, in many ways suffer as much as Gaza from the harsh Israeli siege, but it is when I visit Gaza that I find myself overwhelmed by a mixture of lament and anger.
On April 1 I traveled to visit MCC partners in the south of the Gaza Strip. Traveling from Gaza City in the north of the Gaza Strip down to Khan Younis and Rafah in the south has become a dreaded chore for most Palestinians. Before October 2000, the taxi ride from north to south would take at most 30 minutes; now, the journey routinely takes over one hour, sometimes much more. Much of the main north-south highway is now blocked to Palestinian traffic, reserved exclusively for use by the Israeli military and settlers. Palestinian cars, then, must take alternative roads. These roads, in turn, pass through checkpoints manned by Israelis in tanks. Cars pass by one by one, following cues from the soldier in the tank. The Israeli military can, and routinely does, completely close off this road, making travel between north and south impossible.
This daily uncertainty about travel has a devastating impact on Gaza’s economy and social life: families are separated, students from the south cannot attend universities in the north, employees in the Palestinian Authorities ministries cannot reach their jobs in Gaza. This apartheid road Network has been constructed for the benefit of around 5000 Israeli settler colonists still living in the Gaza Strip on 40% of the land, while the 1.2 million Palestinians survive on 60% of a strip of land 28 miles long and between 3.5 to 7.8 miles wide.
At points along my trip south, I could barely recognize my surroundings. At the Netzarim junction (where Muhammad al-Durra was gunned down in his father’s arms) and again along the main highway south of the Kfar Darom settlement, the physical landscape has been ransacked. The tall, majestic trees near Khan Younis, along with citrus groves south of Gaza city, have been razed. Agricultural land has been plowed under, as have many homes. Large, khaki green military bulldozers were busy at work as I drove past, plowing under hopes and dreams for justice and peace.
My first stop was at Rawdat as-Salaheen, a kindergarten operated by a local grassroots Islamic organization, has been an MCC partner for the past three years. MCC has supported renovations to the kindergartens building, including construction of new bathrooms, new roofing, windows, and paint. MCC also sponsored two summer camps organized by the kindergarten’s staff. The kindergarten lies less than 400 meters away from the line separating the Palestinian-controlled area and the southern section of the Israeli-controlled Gush Katif bloc of colonies.
Every night homes on the edge of Tel el-Sultan adjacent to the Israeli-controlled area are targets for Israeli shelling. One Palestinian shot towards the settlement bloc brings on a massive Israeli response; often, the Israelis do not wait for a Palestinian shot to begin firing. Families in homes along the border of Gush Katif, both in Tel el-Sultan as well as in the Khan Younis refugee camp further north, and families in Rafah whose homes are adjacent to the border with Egypt, do not sleep at home during the night, but rely on extended families to provide them shelter.
Rafah, like the rest of the Gaza Strip, has been hard hit economically by the Israeli siege. The director of as-Salaheen, Abu Isma’en, for example, is the only one of ten brothers still working: the other nine had been dependent on day labor inside Israel for their livelihood.
Economist Sara Roy, in her definitive study of the Gaza Strip”s economy, explains that from 1967 to 1993 Israel promoted a policy of de-development in the occupied territories, particularly in Gaza, issuing military orders to limit the expansion of the Strip’s industrial base and curbing agricultural exports; as a result, most Gazans served as a cheap labor pool for Israeli construction and agriculture industries.
With the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 60% of the Gaza Strip in 1994, there has been little development of the economy, as investors are wary to commit their money, knowing that Israeli border closures can stop the movement of goods at any time and cripple the Gazan economy. When Israeli imposes a full siege on the Gaza Strip, then, the tens of thousands of Gazans who had worked inside Israel have few other work possibilities. When these people are out of work, furthermore, the service economy in the Gaza Strip is naturally effected as well.
With so many people unemployed and underemployed, basic needs are increasingly hard to meet. Thirty of the kindergarten’s 150 students have had to withdraw because then could not pay even part of the schools annual tuition of 150 shekels (ca. US $38). Most families in Tel el-Sultan can no longer afford to buy meat.
We watch all of these sheep and cows being killed in England because of foot-and-mouth disease, jokes Abu Isma’in. This meat is still good for eating: send it over here! Starvation is not present in the occupied territories, even in the hardest hit parts such as Rafah, thanks to traditional community mechanisms of sharing food with families in the direst financial straits. However, notes I’tedal al-Khatib, director of Ard al-Insan, a Palestinian NGO working to promote early childhood nutrition, her clinic is seeing an increase in the number of children suffering from malnutrition.
From Rafah, I proceeded northwards to Khan Younis, stopping at al-Mustaqbal Society for the Blind and Visually Impaired. We had recently received a drop of good news, when we heard that al-Mustaqbal had been able, after months of frustration, to import the machinery and raw materials they needed to start up a bamboo furniture workshop which would train Palestinians with visual disabilities and, eventually, lead to a steady source of income. The workshop was bustling during my visit, as trainees worked on the workshop’s first order of 150 chairs for a local restaurant. There was an excitement and joy among the trainees which was hard to resist. The pessimist in me, however, worried about the economic viability of the project: if the siege continues, the market for bamboo furniture, as for everything else, will suffer. This project, approved before the renewal of the uprising in October, is but one small example of how all economic development projects in the occupied territories are in a state of uncertainty and peril because of the Israeli siege.
I concluded my trip with a stop at the Culture and Free Thought Association, where I visited with the program coordinator, Amal Khoudeir. Amal studied at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at Eastern Mennonite University in the summer of 1999 via MCC. As we discussed a children’s art project which MCC was supporting, I asked Amal, whose name means hope, whether or not she had any hope for the future. Ya Alain, she said, as long as the sun comes up every morning and we are still here, I have hope. Our challenge is to keep working with the children so that they can grow up with hope. We can’t let them take away our hope.
My prayer as I left Khan Younis was that I would be graced with some of Amal’s hope. The apartheid network Israeli is imposing throughout the occupied territories has created a reality--geographical, economic, political, spiritual--where hope for the future is, at least for me, hard to see, hard to feel. I find myself living much more in lament than in hope,particularly when I visit the Gaza Strip. In the meantime, I am grateful for those such as Amal who witness through their words and deeds to a hope for a better future, a hope for justice and peace.
2. On the Palestinian Right of Return: A Jewish Meditation on History, Rights and Return
Marc H. Ellis
I have been speaking and writing on the subjects of Jewish history, the Holocaust, and Israel and Palestine for over twenty years. I must confess that I have never addressed directly the Palestinian right of return. One can speculate on this lacuna and perhaps properly so. Is it fear of the issue that may in fact lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its resolution? Is it a desire, even when severely criticizing Israel and Israeli policy, to dodge the issue of Israel's right to exist or its continuation as a Jewish state?
As a Jew who has publicly taken positions that are seen as extremely negative by the Jewish establishment, meaning by this not only leaders of Jewish organizations in the United States but also the university network of Jewish and Holocaust Studies programs that have mushroomed over the last decades, am I content to speak in the generalities of ethics and morality without facing the hard practical issues, the very issues that might make the difference? Though very critical of the Jewish renewal movement exemplified by Tikkun magazine in the United States and similarly critical of Peace Now in Israel for claiming a progressive agenda that often covers over the sins of settlement and expansion, by avoiding the Palestinian right of return, do I also participate in the progressive movement I have criticized? --That judgement ultimately belongs to the reader.
The following is my attempt to approach the question of the Palestinian right of return. I begin by advancing my own views on a variety of issues surrounding the right of return and the context from which these views emanate. As with any issue of depth and moment, autobiography is crucial to factorin. My own biases, identities and struggles are important, at least to how I enter the question before us: as an American Jew born in the first decade after the Holocaust, it is impossible to pretend an objective analysis on the questions of Jewishness, Israel, and the Palestinians.
To begin with, I place to the side questions of international law, United Nations resolutions and the modern understanding of human rights. I do this not because they are irrelevant or because they favor one side or the other; institutions and statements should obviously be used to assert the rights and dignity of the displaced and those who struggle for freedom. I also leave aside the power of the powerful to conquer and occupy and then to assert innocence and destiny in the exercise of that power. Clearly, the power of the powerful is a factor that cannot be denied through history and today as well. I take for granted that power to dislocate and destroy should be opposed. Finally, I bypass the argument, at least in its deepest sense, of the complexity of history and all that this implies. The complexity of history is a topic for discussion on this and many other issues, but it is most often used as an excuse or a justification for lack of criticism of unjust power. It may be that history is simply a progression of one atrocity after another, where victory is to be celebrated and defeat to be avenged until the end of time - I cannot rationally argue against this view of human history. But in the end I do not stand in this kind of history; I would be dishonest to invoke it.
By not dealing with these issues, I do not seek to demean their significance for Israelis and Palestinians. In many ways the invocation of law, power and the travails of history are constant and significant in the lives of both peoples. They are also part of the cycle of dislocation and atrocity that threatens to become the future for Israel and Palestine rather than a bloody past. In a cumulative way, these issues point to a deeper place of decision, at least for Jews. For the refusal to find certain claims as central to the argument can heighten their significance as signposts for reflection. Could it be that international law, the power of the powerful and the cycle of dislocation and atrocity warn Jews of our tradition of suffering and struggle, one that we inherit and are now squandering?
It is the tradition of suffering and struggle that I turn to, the place from which Israel emerges and Judaism finds its roots. I refer here to formative experiences of slavery and freedom, the difficult path of nation building and occupation, then the dispersion and diaspora, the suffering within Christendom, the embrace and disappointment with the Enlightenment, the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Within this history so many ideals and possibilities emerge: of chosenness and justice, of vocation and service, of society and the prophetic. And yet it is here that some claim the problematic to lie. In Jewish history, especially in the Biblical period, is a self-righteousness and militarism. The peoples beyond and next to Israel are pawns in the salvation history of the tribes of Yahweh. Dispossession is mandated by the promise of the land and God legitimates, even leads, Israel into the land. In Israel's wake is desolation and death. Is this history the forebearer of modern Israel? The lacuna between these ancient histories of violence and retribution and the peaceful, often suffering, journey of diaspora Jewry is time without power. When power is achieved the ancient reasserts itself and the real character of the Jews is displayed.
Is Ariel Sharon the real Jew, ancient in modern dress? Is the nation-state Israel, heir to Biblical Israel, again the real Israel in modern style? The danger of essentialism is everywhere, origins as destiny, freedom circumscribed by ancient beginnings. So too the danger of the modern, origins as the present with no precursors, goodness as goodness,violence as violence, as if nothing is historical and particular. In the former view, Jews are Jews with no difference between them except style and strategy; in the latter view Ariel Sharon and the voices found in the progressive Jewish journal, Tikkun, are disconnected and discontinuous.
Between essentialism and the modern lies a connection that is neither determinative nor disconnected. The connection is multifaceted and diverse, opening history and possibility through the mediation of text and tradition, within patterns of thought and life over the millennia, in light of conscience. Here decisions are made within a framework that is real and flexible, one that has origins and freedom, a vocation that evolves and is embodied within and beyond the individual.
Within this understanding is there such a thing as a real Jew as opposed to an inauthentic Jew? Can the nation-state Israel be claimed as the real heir to Jewish history or as inauthentic to that history? My own sense is that claims of real and inauthentic pegged to individual Jews or Israel fail to address the question of what it means to be Jewish or indeed what it means to be a Jewish state. It also tells us little about our obligations to ourselves, our people and to the world.
What then defines us as individual Jews and as a people in our time? Here contemporary history assumes importance. Values in the Jewish tradition have grown within a history and are tested in every generation. These values are found within certain patterns of thought and hope, yet their embodiment is contextual, arguing for independence status in certain places and times, in some eras under assault, in other contexts able to exist in an interdependence with other cultures and systems. Of course, in a community that exists in diverse settings and frameworks, the contextual reality is of great importance. And it can be that different communities in the same time period will pursue different paths.
This is certainly true in our time: just a cursory exploration of Jewish life inAmerica and Israel point to tremendous differences in relating to neighbor, culture, the military and the nation-state.
Still, the commonality remains, at least in bonds of sensibility and solidarity. In some ways, because of mass communication and travel, we are more aware of these bonds than ever before. In other ways, perhaps precisely because of mass communication and travel, the bonds are more strained. At least at the elite level, American Jews know of Israeli policies and Israelis know of American Jewish understandings in detail and immediately.
Is Ariel Sharon the real Jew, ancient in modern dress? Is the nation-state Israel, heir to Biblical Israel, again the real Israel in modern style? The danger of essentialism is everywhere, origins as destiny, freedom circumscribed by ancient beginnings. So too the danger of the modern, origins as the present with no precursors, goodness as goodness, violence as violence, as if nothing is historical and particular. In the former view, Jews are Jews with no difference between them except style and strategy; in the latter view Ariel Sharon and the voices found in the progressive Jewish journal, Tikkun, are disconnected and discontinuous.
Between essentialism and the modern lies a connection that is neither determinative nor disconnected. The connection is multifaceted and diverse, opening history and possibility through the mediation of text and tradition, within patterns of thought and life over the millennia, in light of conscience. Here decisions are made within a framework that is real and flexible, one that has origins and freedom, a vocation that evolves and is embodied within and beyond the individual.
Within this understanding is there such a thing as a real Jew as opposed to an inauthentic Jew? Can the nation-state Israel be claimed as the real heir to Jewish history or as inauthentic to that history? My own sense is that claims of real and inauthentic pegged to individual Jews or Israel fail to address the question of what it means to be Jewish or indeed what it means to be a Jewish state. It also tells us little about our obligations to ourselves, our people and to the world.
What then defines us as individual Jews and as a people in our time? Here contemporary history assumes importance. Values in the Jewish tradition have grown within a history and are tested in every generation. These values are found within certain patterns of thought and hope, yet their embodiment is contextual, arguing for independence status in certain places and times, in some eras under assault, in other contexts able to exist in an interdependence with other cultures and systems. Of course, in a community that exists in diverse settings and frameworks, the contextual reality is of great importance. And it can be that different communities in the same time period will pursue different paths. This is certainly true in our time: just a cursory exploration of Jewish life in America and Israel point to tremendous differences in relating to neighbor, culture, the military and the nation-state.
Still, the commonality remains, at least in bonds of sensibility and solidarity. In some ways, because of mass communication and travel, we are more aware of these bonds than ever before. In other ways, perhaps precisely because of mass communication and travel, the bonds are more strained. At least at the elite level, American Jews know of Israeli policies and Israelis know of American Jewish understandings in detail and immediately. Policies and responses can be coordinated by organizations,between on the one side, the Israeli government and American Israel Political Action Committee, and on the other side, between Peace Now and Tikkun. If commonality with regard to the state can be coordinated so can commonality in dissent. Solidarity on both sides of the divide are instantaneously possible which, on a different level, can also heighten the divide. There are some who believe that in our time two nations are forming within the Jewish community, one in Israel, the other in the United States. But I wonder if these nations, or better yet two divergent sensibilities, are forming within Israel and America precisely
over the future of Jewish life.
Is it in this division that the kernel of the Palestinian question is found? And is it here that the question of the Palestinian right of return is also to be located?
The divisions in Jewish life are complex. But here it is important to understand that the division is widening and is foundational in nature.What does it mean to be Jewish? What is the destiny of the Jewish people? What practice defines Judaism and Jewish life? Can Jews live within a community of Jews that define themselves in a pluralistic way and with others who are non-Jewish, themselves pluralistic in their outlook and identities? How does statehood, including the very conception of citizenship, affect one's sense of Jewishness and Jewish identity? The question of history is important here. Does the past, especially in Europe, of isolation and ghettoization, of pogroms and Holocaust, define the Jewish future? Or is this past really past, invoked now to warn against transgressions against any community, including but not limited to Jews?
Ideology and theology notwithstanding, Jews have chosen, even after the Holocaust, to live in secular, pluralist, democratic nation-states. This is clearly true with regard to the United States and Europe; it is also true,at least with regard to Jews, in Israel. Israel is founded on these principles and the peculiar intermingling of synagogue and state that flows from Jewish history is, in relative terms, akin to the relations of church and state in America. The restrictions on citizenship of the Palestinian minority also have their parallels with historic restrictions on African-Americans in the United States. Despite reversals, and with the realization that significant struggles lie ahead, the fight for equality of Jews and Palestinians will continue, even escalate in the years ahead.
As a modern, Western-oriented nation-state, Israel and Israelis will have no choice but to continue on the path toward expanding the practice of pluralism and democracy. The primary challenge, of course, will be the greater integration of Palestinians, those in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, into this citizenship. The proximity of the two peoples geographically, culturally, historically, economically and linguistically -makes this expansion of citizenship inevitable, even if some Jews and Palestinians resist this integration, at least symbolically. I use the term symbolically for a specific reason: who, looking at the map of Israel and Palestine, with the intermingling of populations, settlements, roads,security, borders and economy can seriously consider a separation that is more than symbolic? The crossing of boundaries between Jews and Palestinians has steadily increased over the years and will increase in the future, this in spite of the stated policy of separation. Much, perhaps most, of this interaction has been imposed by occupation, dislocation and atrocity, the attempt above all to create an apartheid system in the name of Jewish history, but the unintended consequences are the future. This future of integration, under two flags or one, at first in victory and surrender, will one day see the creation of a new identity for Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine that will carry aspects of each people's past and elements of joint experiences forged in blood, struggle and solidarity.
Today, in the midst of a new intifada and the governance of Ariel Sharon, history seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Naturally, in this situation, the ideology of separation, always linked to a romanticized past, is played, on both sides, politically and dramatically. And who can protest these dreams of the past, especially among the suffering who, in their lifetime, have experienced and continue to experience exile today? Who in conscience, especially Jews, can help but be thoroughly disgusted with the bellicose claims of a united Jerusalem, eternally, under Jewish power, with no sense of other connections to land and religion?
The Palestinian right of return rests here, at least in my understanding. The argument can be made on many levels - including and beyond the areas I have left aside but the right of return, or better phrased the possibility of return, rests, ultimately, less on rights, history, or power than it does on the unintended consequences of victory and the long run of history that always, everywhere, and especially where it is denied ideologically and symbolically, moves toward integration. The division of the Jewish community in Israel and America, but more importantly the choice of Jews to live in secular, pluralistic, and democratic societies regardless of their theology, is part of this future movement.
This update contains two items. The first is a summary of and reflection on a project visit to the Gaza Strip by country co-representative Alain Epp Weaver. For more information on Gaza, see the website of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, www.pchrgaza.org.
The second is a commentary on the right of return by Jewish theologian Marc Ellis. In distinction from those Israelis and Jews who out of hand reject the notion of the right of Palestinian refugees to return, Ellis offers a creative perspective.
1. Anguish and Hope in Gaza
Alain Epp Weaver, MCC Country Co-representative to the West Bank and Gaza
The Gaza Strip is a part of Palestine very close to my heart. My family and I lived there for nearly two years of our lives while working with MCC. It is because of this personal connection that work trips to Gaza since the outbreak of the current intifada have been the hardest part of my job, emotionally. Some parts of the West Bank, such as the Nablus and Hebron areas, in many ways suffer as much as Gaza from the harsh Israeli siege, but it is when I visit Gaza that I find myself overwhelmed by a mixture of lament and anger.
On April 1 I traveled to visit MCC partners in the south of the Gaza Strip. Traveling from Gaza City in the north of the Gaza Strip down to Khan Younis and Rafah in the south has become a dreaded chore for most Palestinians. Before October 2000, the taxi ride from north to south would take at most 30 minutes; now, the journey routinely takes over one hour, sometimes much more. Much of the main north-south highway is now blocked to Palestinian traffic, reserved exclusively for use by the Israeli military and settlers. Palestinian cars, then, must take alternative roads. These roads, in turn, pass through checkpoints manned by Israelis in tanks. Cars pass by one by one, following cues from the soldier in the tank. The Israeli military can, and routinely does, completely close off this road, making travel between north and south impossible.
This daily uncertainty about travel has a devastating impact on Gaza’s economy and social life: families are separated, students from the south cannot attend universities in the north, employees in the Palestinian Authorities ministries cannot reach their jobs in Gaza. This apartheid road Network has been constructed for the benefit of around 5000 Israeli settler colonists still living in the Gaza Strip on 40% of the land, while the 1.2 million Palestinians survive on 60% of a strip of land 28 miles long and between 3.5 to 7.8 miles wide.
At points along my trip south, I could barely recognize my surroundings. At the Netzarim junction (where Muhammad al-Durra was gunned down in his father’s arms) and again along the main highway south of the Kfar Darom settlement, the physical landscape has been ransacked. The tall, majestic trees near Khan Younis, along with citrus groves south of Gaza city, have been razed. Agricultural land has been plowed under, as have many homes. Large, khaki green military bulldozers were busy at work as I drove past, plowing under hopes and dreams for justice and peace.
My first stop was at Rawdat as-Salaheen, a kindergarten operated by a local grassroots Islamic organization, has been an MCC partner for the past three years. MCC has supported renovations to the kindergartens building, including construction of new bathrooms, new roofing, windows, and paint. MCC also sponsored two summer camps organized by the kindergarten’s staff. The kindergarten lies less than 400 meters away from the line separating the Palestinian-controlled area and the southern section of the Israeli-controlled Gush Katif bloc of colonies.
Every night homes on the edge of Tel el-Sultan adjacent to the Israeli-controlled area are targets for Israeli shelling. One Palestinian shot towards the settlement bloc brings on a massive Israeli response; often, the Israelis do not wait for a Palestinian shot to begin firing. Families in homes along the border of Gush Katif, both in Tel el-Sultan as well as in the Khan Younis refugee camp further north, and families in Rafah whose homes are adjacent to the border with Egypt, do not sleep at home during the night, but rely on extended families to provide them shelter.
Rafah, like the rest of the Gaza Strip, has been hard hit economically by the Israeli siege. The director of as-Salaheen, Abu Isma’en, for example, is the only one of ten brothers still working: the other nine had been dependent on day labor inside Israel for their livelihood.
Economist Sara Roy, in her definitive study of the Gaza Strip”s economy, explains that from 1967 to 1993 Israel promoted a policy of de-development in the occupied territories, particularly in Gaza, issuing military orders to limit the expansion of the Strip’s industrial base and curbing agricultural exports; as a result, most Gazans served as a cheap labor pool for Israeli construction and agriculture industries.
With the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 60% of the Gaza Strip in 1994, there has been little development of the economy, as investors are wary to commit their money, knowing that Israeli border closures can stop the movement of goods at any time and cripple the Gazan economy. When Israeli imposes a full siege on the Gaza Strip, then, the tens of thousands of Gazans who had worked inside Israel have few other work possibilities. When these people are out of work, furthermore, the service economy in the Gaza Strip is naturally effected as well.
With so many people unemployed and underemployed, basic needs are increasingly hard to meet. Thirty of the kindergarten’s 150 students have had to withdraw because then could not pay even part of the schools annual tuition of 150 shekels (ca. US $38). Most families in Tel el-Sultan can no longer afford to buy meat.
We watch all of these sheep and cows being killed in England because of foot-and-mouth disease, jokes Abu Isma’in. This meat is still good for eating: send it over here! Starvation is not present in the occupied territories, even in the hardest hit parts such as Rafah, thanks to traditional community mechanisms of sharing food with families in the direst financial straits. However, notes I’tedal al-Khatib, director of Ard al-Insan, a Palestinian NGO working to promote early childhood nutrition, her clinic is seeing an increase in the number of children suffering from malnutrition.
From Rafah, I proceeded northwards to Khan Younis, stopping at al-Mustaqbal Society for the Blind and Visually Impaired. We had recently received a drop of good news, when we heard that al-Mustaqbal had been able, after months of frustration, to import the machinery and raw materials they needed to start up a bamboo furniture workshop which would train Palestinians with visual disabilities and, eventually, lead to a steady source of income. The workshop was bustling during my visit, as trainees worked on the workshop’s first order of 150 chairs for a local restaurant. There was an excitement and joy among the trainees which was hard to resist. The pessimist in me, however, worried about the economic viability of the project: if the siege continues, the market for bamboo furniture, as for everything else, will suffer. This project, approved before the renewal of the uprising in October, is but one small example of how all economic development projects in the occupied territories are in a state of uncertainty and peril because of the Israeli siege.
I concluded my trip with a stop at the Culture and Free Thought Association, where I visited with the program coordinator, Amal Khoudeir. Amal studied at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at Eastern Mennonite University in the summer of 1999 via MCC. As we discussed a children’s art project which MCC was supporting, I asked Amal, whose name means hope, whether or not she had any hope for the future. Ya Alain, she said, as long as the sun comes up every morning and we are still here, I have hope. Our challenge is to keep working with the children so that they can grow up with hope. We can’t let them take away our hope.
My prayer as I left Khan Younis was that I would be graced with some of Amal’s hope. The apartheid network Israeli is imposing throughout the occupied territories has created a reality--geographical, economic, political, spiritual--where hope for the future is, at least for me, hard to see, hard to feel. I find myself living much more in lament than in hope,particularly when I visit the Gaza Strip. In the meantime, I am grateful for those such as Amal who witness through their words and deeds to a hope for a better future, a hope for justice and peace.
2. On the Palestinian Right of Return: A Jewish Meditation on History, Rights and Return
Marc H. Ellis
I have been speaking and writing on the subjects of Jewish history, the Holocaust, and Israel and Palestine for over twenty years. I must confess that I have never addressed directly the Palestinian right of return. One can speculate on this lacuna and perhaps properly so. Is it fear of the issue that may in fact lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its resolution? Is it a desire, even when severely criticizing Israel and Israeli policy, to dodge the issue of Israel's right to exist or its continuation as a Jewish state?
As a Jew who has publicly taken positions that are seen as extremely negative by the Jewish establishment, meaning by this not only leaders of Jewish organizations in the United States but also the university network of Jewish and Holocaust Studies programs that have mushroomed over the last decades, am I content to speak in the generalities of ethics and morality without facing the hard practical issues, the very issues that might make the difference? Though very critical of the Jewish renewal movement exemplified by Tikkun magazine in the United States and similarly critical of Peace Now in Israel for claiming a progressive agenda that often covers over the sins of settlement and expansion, by avoiding the Palestinian right of return, do I also participate in the progressive movement I have criticized? --That judgement ultimately belongs to the reader.
The following is my attempt to approach the question of the Palestinian right of return. I begin by advancing my own views on a variety of issues surrounding the right of return and the context from which these views emanate. As with any issue of depth and moment, autobiography is crucial to factorin. My own biases, identities and struggles are important, at least to how I enter the question before us: as an American Jew born in the first decade after the Holocaust, it is impossible to pretend an objective analysis on the questions of Jewishness, Israel, and the Palestinians.
To begin with, I place to the side questions of international law, United Nations resolutions and the modern understanding of human rights. I do this not because they are irrelevant or because they favor one side or the other; institutions and statements should obviously be used to assert the rights and dignity of the displaced and those who struggle for freedom. I also leave aside the power of the powerful to conquer and occupy and then to assert innocence and destiny in the exercise of that power. Clearly, the power of the powerful is a factor that cannot be denied through history and today as well. I take for granted that power to dislocate and destroy should be opposed. Finally, I bypass the argument, at least in its deepest sense, of the complexity of history and all that this implies. The complexity of history is a topic for discussion on this and many other issues, but it is most often used as an excuse or a justification for lack of criticism of unjust power. It may be that history is simply a progression of one atrocity after another, where victory is to be celebrated and defeat to be avenged until the end of time - I cannot rationally argue against this view of human history. But in the end I do not stand in this kind of history; I would be dishonest to invoke it.
By not dealing with these issues, I do not seek to demean their significance for Israelis and Palestinians. In many ways the invocation of law, power and the travails of history are constant and significant in the lives of both peoples. They are also part of the cycle of dislocation and atrocity that threatens to become the future for Israel and Palestine rather than a bloody past. In a cumulative way, these issues point to a deeper place of decision, at least for Jews. For the refusal to find certain claims as central to the argument can heighten their significance as signposts for reflection. Could it be that international law, the power of the powerful and the cycle of dislocation and atrocity warn Jews of our tradition of suffering and struggle, one that we inherit and are now squandering?
It is the tradition of suffering and struggle that I turn to, the place from which Israel emerges and Judaism finds its roots. I refer here to formative experiences of slavery and freedom, the difficult path of nation building and occupation, then the dispersion and diaspora, the suffering within Christendom, the embrace and disappointment with the Enlightenment, the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Within this history so many ideals and possibilities emerge: of chosenness and justice, of vocation and service, of society and the prophetic. And yet it is here that some claim the problematic to lie. In Jewish history, especially in the Biblical period, is a self-righteousness and militarism. The peoples beyond and next to Israel are pawns in the salvation history of the tribes of Yahweh. Dispossession is mandated by the promise of the land and God legitimates, even leads, Israel into the land. In Israel's wake is desolation and death. Is this history the forebearer of modern Israel? The lacuna between these ancient histories of violence and retribution and the peaceful, often suffering, journey of diaspora Jewry is time without power. When power is achieved the ancient reasserts itself and the real character of the Jews is displayed.
Is Ariel Sharon the real Jew, ancient in modern dress? Is the nation-state Israel, heir to Biblical Israel, again the real Israel in modern style? The danger of essentialism is everywhere, origins as destiny, freedom circumscribed by ancient beginnings. So too the danger of the modern, origins as the present with no precursors, goodness as goodness,violence as violence, as if nothing is historical and particular. In the former view, Jews are Jews with no difference between them except style and strategy; in the latter view Ariel Sharon and the voices found in the progressive Jewish journal, Tikkun, are disconnected and discontinuous.
Between essentialism and the modern lies a connection that is neither determinative nor disconnected. The connection is multifaceted and diverse, opening history and possibility through the mediation of text and tradition, within patterns of thought and life over the millennia, in light of conscience. Here decisions are made within a framework that is real and flexible, one that has origins and freedom, a vocation that evolves and is embodied within and beyond the individual.
Within this understanding is there such a thing as a real Jew as opposed to an inauthentic Jew? Can the nation-state Israel be claimed as the real heir to Jewish history or as inauthentic to that history? My own sense is that claims of real and inauthentic pegged to individual Jews or Israel fail to address the question of what it means to be Jewish or indeed what it means to be a Jewish state. It also tells us little about our obligations to ourselves, our people and to the world.
What then defines us as individual Jews and as a people in our time? Here contemporary history assumes importance. Values in the Jewish tradition have grown within a history and are tested in every generation. These values are found within certain patterns of thought and hope, yet their embodiment is contextual, arguing for independence status in certain places and times, in some eras under assault, in other contexts able to exist in an interdependence with other cultures and systems. Of course, in a community that exists in diverse settings and frameworks, the contextual reality is of great importance. And it can be that different communities in the same time period will pursue different paths.
This is certainly true in our time: just a cursory exploration of Jewish life inAmerica and Israel point to tremendous differences in relating to neighbor, culture, the military and the nation-state.
Still, the commonality remains, at least in bonds of sensibility and solidarity. In some ways, because of mass communication and travel, we are more aware of these bonds than ever before. In other ways, perhaps precisely because of mass communication and travel, the bonds are more strained. At least at the elite level, American Jews know of Israeli policies and Israelis know of American Jewish understandings in detail and immediately.
Is Ariel Sharon the real Jew, ancient in modern dress? Is the nation-state Israel, heir to Biblical Israel, again the real Israel in modern style? The danger of essentialism is everywhere, origins as destiny, freedom circumscribed by ancient beginnings. So too the danger of the modern, origins as the present with no precursors, goodness as goodness, violence as violence, as if nothing is historical and particular. In the former view, Jews are Jews with no difference between them except style and strategy; in the latter view Ariel Sharon and the voices found in the progressive Jewish journal, Tikkun, are disconnected and discontinuous.
Between essentialism and the modern lies a connection that is neither determinative nor disconnected. The connection is multifaceted and diverse, opening history and possibility through the mediation of text and tradition, within patterns of thought and life over the millennia, in light of conscience. Here decisions are made within a framework that is real and flexible, one that has origins and freedom, a vocation that evolves and is embodied within and beyond the individual.
Within this understanding is there such a thing as a real Jew as opposed to an inauthentic Jew? Can the nation-state Israel be claimed as the real heir to Jewish history or as inauthentic to that history? My own sense is that claims of real and inauthentic pegged to individual Jews or Israel fail to address the question of what it means to be Jewish or indeed what it means to be a Jewish state. It also tells us little about our obligations to ourselves, our people and to the world.
What then defines us as individual Jews and as a people in our time? Here contemporary history assumes importance. Values in the Jewish tradition have grown within a history and are tested in every generation. These values are found within certain patterns of thought and hope, yet their embodiment is contextual, arguing for independence status in certain places and times, in some eras under assault, in other contexts able to exist in an interdependence with other cultures and systems. Of course, in a community that exists in diverse settings and frameworks, the contextual reality is of great importance. And it can be that different communities in the same time period will pursue different paths. This is certainly true in our time: just a cursory exploration of Jewish life in America and Israel point to tremendous differences in relating to neighbor, culture, the military and the nation-state.
Still, the commonality remains, at least in bonds of sensibility and solidarity. In some ways, because of mass communication and travel, we are more aware of these bonds than ever before. In other ways, perhaps precisely because of mass communication and travel, the bonds are more strained. At least at the elite level, American Jews know of Israeli policies and Israelis know of American Jewish understandings in detail and immediately. Policies and responses can be coordinated by organizations,between on the one side, the Israeli government and American Israel Political Action Committee, and on the other side, between Peace Now and Tikkun. If commonality with regard to the state can be coordinated so can commonality in dissent. Solidarity on both sides of the divide are instantaneously possible which, on a different level, can also heighten the divide. There are some who believe that in our time two nations are forming within the Jewish community, one in Israel, the other in the United States. But I wonder if these nations, or better yet two divergent sensibilities, are forming within Israel and America precisely
over the future of Jewish life.
Is it in this division that the kernel of the Palestinian question is found? And is it here that the question of the Palestinian right of return is also to be located?
The divisions in Jewish life are complex. But here it is important to understand that the division is widening and is foundational in nature.What does it mean to be Jewish? What is the destiny of the Jewish people? What practice defines Judaism and Jewish life? Can Jews live within a community of Jews that define themselves in a pluralistic way and with others who are non-Jewish, themselves pluralistic in their outlook and identities? How does statehood, including the very conception of citizenship, affect one's sense of Jewishness and Jewish identity? The question of history is important here. Does the past, especially in Europe, of isolation and ghettoization, of pogroms and Holocaust, define the Jewish future? Or is this past really past, invoked now to warn against transgressions against any community, including but not limited to Jews?
Ideology and theology notwithstanding, Jews have chosen, even after the Holocaust, to live in secular, pluralist, democratic nation-states. This is clearly true with regard to the United States and Europe; it is also true,at least with regard to Jews, in Israel. Israel is founded on these principles and the peculiar intermingling of synagogue and state that flows from Jewish history is, in relative terms, akin to the relations of church and state in America. The restrictions on citizenship of the Palestinian minority also have their parallels with historic restrictions on African-Americans in the United States. Despite reversals, and with the realization that significant struggles lie ahead, the fight for equality of Jews and Palestinians will continue, even escalate in the years ahead.
As a modern, Western-oriented nation-state, Israel and Israelis will have no choice but to continue on the path toward expanding the practice of pluralism and democracy. The primary challenge, of course, will be the greater integration of Palestinians, those in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, into this citizenship. The proximity of the two peoples geographically, culturally, historically, economically and linguistically -makes this expansion of citizenship inevitable, even if some Jews and Palestinians resist this integration, at least symbolically. I use the term symbolically for a specific reason: who, looking at the map of Israel and Palestine, with the intermingling of populations, settlements, roads,security, borders and economy can seriously consider a separation that is more than symbolic? The crossing of boundaries between Jews and Palestinians has steadily increased over the years and will increase in the future, this in spite of the stated policy of separation. Much, perhaps most, of this interaction has been imposed by occupation, dislocation and atrocity, the attempt above all to create an apartheid system in the name of Jewish history, but the unintended consequences are the future. This future of integration, under two flags or one, at first in victory and surrender, will one day see the creation of a new identity for Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine that will carry aspects of each people's past and elements of joint experiences forged in blood, struggle and solidarity.
Today, in the midst of a new intifada and the governance of Ariel Sharon, history seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Naturally, in this situation, the ideology of separation, always linked to a romanticized past, is played, on both sides, politically and dramatically. And who can protest these dreams of the past, especially among the suffering who, in their lifetime, have experienced and continue to experience exile today? Who in conscience, especially Jews, can help but be thoroughly disgusted with the bellicose claims of a united Jerusalem, eternally, under Jewish power, with no sense of other connections to land and religion?
The Palestinian right of return rests here, at least in my understanding. The argument can be made on many levels - including and beyond the areas I have left aside but the right of return, or better phrased the possibility of return, rests, ultimately, less on rights, history, or power than it does on the unintended consequences of victory and the long run of history that always, everywhere, and especially where it is denied ideologically and symbolically, moves toward integration. The division of the Jewish community in Israel and America, but more importantly the choice of Jews to live in secular, pluralistic, and democratic societies regardless of their theology, is part of this future movement.
Tuesday, March 13
MCC Palestine Update #17
MCC Palestine Update #17
As Ariel Sharon arrived in Washington, D.C. to open arms at the White House this past week, the Israeli government was busy proclaiming loudly that the siege on the occupied territories was being eased. While it was true that movement in some areas became somewhat easier, however, the mechanisms of siege remained in place for the most part (dirt and cement barriers, trenches, checkpoints), along with the military occupation which makes the siege possible.
Palestinians have no illusions about the "peace" plan Sharon discussed with U.S. President Bush--Sharon's vision of extended interim agreements will, like Oslo, simply allow for continued settlement expansion and Palestinian dispossession. Palestinians are also bemused when Sharon declares that he won't negotiate while violence continues: Palestinians, it appears, are expected to negotiate even as the everyday violence of the Israeli occupation continues.
Project Update
As engineers from the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC) were completing work on an agricultural road between Deir Ibziya and Ein Kinya (funded by MCC) on March 20, the Israeli military authorities arrived and put a halt to the work and forbade any further work on the road. Please keep PARC and the farmers of Deir Ibziya and Ein Kinya in your prayers.
Action suggestion
Write to your congressional representatives or parliamentary officials to inform them that the work of Mennonite Central Committee and other international relief and development agencies in Palestine (such as World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children) is routinely disrupted and thwarted by random Israeli military procedures: roadblocks prevent free travel within the occupied territories; projects, such as the agricultural road mentioned above, are suspended for no reason; the siege in the occupied territories destroys projects aimed to promote sustainable development. Explain that a just, durable peace in Palestine/Israel cannot be achieved so long as the Israeli military occupation continues, constraining Palestinian economic development and making Palestinians prisoners in their own country. For information on how to get in touch with your elected officials, contact MCC's offices in Washington, DC (jdb@mail.mcc.org) or Ottawa (mccott@web.ca).
On March 31, the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem is organizing a day of prayer and fasting for justice and peace in Palestine/Israel. During this time of Lent, fasting and prayer is more vital than ever: consider organizing a day of prayer and fasting, either on March 31 or later in the year, as an act of solidarity with Palestinians and Israelis who struggle for justice and true peace.
Below is an article written by Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, a prominent Palestinian spokesperson. Dr. Ashrawi recently led a nonviolent protest march by women towards the Ram checkpoint in the north of Jerusalem: the march was met with tear gas and percussion grenades.
1. Sharon’s Message to the Palestinian People
Hanan Ashrawi
MIFTAH, 12 March 2001
To every man, woman, and child in the Palestinian territories. YOU are my target; you will be made to suffer; and you shall pay for the original crime of being a Palestinian and for being there.
Every camp, village, town, and city is hereby declared a prison. Instead of arresting each individual and having to build even more incarceration centers and foot the bill for your detention, I shall simply instruct the army to dig ditches and build barricades around your population centers, thus with one sweep render your isolation complete. Wherever you are, you are under arrest at your own expense and in your own home.
School children may not reach their schools and college students are to stay home. Some of you might try to climb over the dirt barriers or walk around the ditches. Take your chance! After Hours of misery you might find a tank (or more) lying in wait for you. You might find snipers on your hilltops or armored vehicles at your crossroads. Defy the siege at your own peril, and if you die don’t blame me. In my book, you are guilty of the subversive act of seeking education. The same applies to your teachers and school administrators who are guilty of the equally heinous crime of attempting to teach. Besides, I can close down all your educational institutions with a military order: That would tarnish my new and improved image in the West (and my new ally Shimon might not like it). This way, your institutions will collapse by themselves and ignorance will prevail.
All patients seeking treatment (including cancer, kidney, and heart patients) are hereby forbidden to reach their hospitals and clinics. You shall suffer in silence and you shall die in silence, for you are guilty of daring to claim the same human treatment reserved for real people not for subhuman genetic terrorists like you. All pregnant women will deliver in their own homes, or in ambulances and at checkpoints if they dare defy the siege. Should you suffer complications leading to the death of your infants (or to your own death), you have only yourselves to blame. For you are guilty of the ultimate crime of attempting to give birth to even more Palestinian terrorists. All mothers should know that no vaccination will be allowed to reach your children, for they deserve no protection against infancy and childhood diseases. They too will grow up to be a threat to our security.
All shopkeepers, tradesmen, industrialists, construction workers, businessmen (and women we don’t discriminate) are hereby forbidden from engaging in any kind of gainful activity. Since you cannot go anywhere anyway, you might as well stay home and watch your families starve even if your warehouses are full of products you cannot market. You too are guilty for attempting to conduct a normal life in defiance of the occupation.
This applies even more directly to farmers and peasants and all those involved in agricultural activity. Is it not enough that we confiscated most of your land to build settlements for those Brave settlers who had defied real hardships in New York, London, Moscow, and other such hostile places to come to the Land of Milk and Honey? You had no business being there, tilling the land and feeding your children. Now, we have to confiscate even more lands for these settlers to build by-pass roads (i.e. to bypass your reality) and to connect them to Israel directly without having to witness the mere fact of your existence. You call it apartheid? We call it security by the power of the gun.
If our brave settlers used their guns against you, uprooted your trees, destroyed your crops, and terrified your children, that is the least they could do given the hardships they endured in their drive to grab more land. We, of course, are more than happy to provide them with the full protection and support of our army while they wreak havoc amongst you, and will distort our laws to find them innocent no matter whom they kill, maim, or injure from amongst you. When will you learn that you do not count? They do, and we will make sure that in this equation you finally learn that you are the zero.
Let me be painfully frank with you. I blame you for forcing us to besiege you, kill you, shell your homes, assassinate your activists and leaders, and perform other such distasteful tasks (even though, I must admit I have had a long and rich experience in invading Arab lands, murdering civilians and prisoners of war, and massacring Palestinians wholesale while destroying whole villages). You are truly exasperating. We made you a generous offer whereby wewould annex only parts of your land (including our settlement clusters), expand settlements according to need (and will), annex Jerusalem and keep it under our sovereignty (while trying our best to render it Palestinian-free), and totally deny the Palestinian refugees their right to return. Yet, ungrateful wretches that you are, you persisted in your stubborn refusal. You claim international law and legitimacy? What nonsense! Only our law prevails, and we deem you illegal.
Despite all our attempts at persuasion (our gun ships, tanks, sniper fire, and military checkpoints are very subtle means of persuasion), you continued to deny us our rights to your lands and rights. We have to be able to help ourselves to that which is yours, what else is occupation for? What other use of power if not to be unleashed on the weak?
I therefore find you guilty and deserving of the utmost punishment (we may not have the death penalty in our laws, but we can carry out as many extra-judicial murders and assassinations as we please). You are guilty for holding on to your humanity, for daring to exercise a collective (and individual) will, for refusing to succumb, for daring to claim equal rights before the law, for maintaining your dignity and a stubborn yearning for freedom.
We, on the other hand, should be free to inflict any type of pain and brutality on you, and it should be your lot to lie down and die quietly. You must not be allowed to disturb our peace or security. We have the right to drive you to desperation, and should you protest or react, not only will you be conveniently branded as terrorists, we will also pound you into submission while calling on you to stop the violence and end terrorism.
Not only that, but we will stand up before CNN (and all the friendly Western press) to expose you for not accepting our hand stretched out to you in peace. Don’t worry. They will swallow it hook, line, and sinker. We have been feeding them our spin for years to the point where they have lost not only their critical judgment and journalistic integrity, but also their sense of sight and hearing when it comes to your image and narrative. They are guaranteed to pay attention only when you harm an Israeli or provide them with a negative proof of our stereotype. So don’t count on any audience or sympathy in the world for you are guilty and will be blamed. And if you suffer from any misguided notion that the UN or any other global body will come to your rescue, rest assured it ain’t gonna happen! Kofi Anan has been dispatched forthwith to prevent the destruction of statues (cultural heritage) in Afghanistan; he can’t be expected to deal with human reality at the same time. Besides, we might promise him a role in the peace process provided he behaves himself and looks the other way. We might have a harder time with your European friends, but they too can’t afford to irk us. As for the new US administration, don’t hold your breath. It, too, has decided to give me time to demonstrate my peace making skills. And I’m busy demonstrating those to the hilt, as you can see and feel. I will make peace with you if it takes everything that you have, including your land, lives, rights, and freedom.
My colleagues (including Chief of Staff General Mofaz and Minister of Defense General Ben Eliezer) concur with me. It is wonderful to be able to do my worst and still have Labor instruments (like Fuad) and apologists (like Peres) on my team. They certainly clean up my image! Besides, I’m not doing anymuch worse than Barak did. At least I‘m not shelling your homes for now (the Americans didn’t Like our use of Apaches for that purpose, and it didn’t look good before the cameras anyway.
So, if you know what is good for you, please behave like good little natives and kiss the hand that beats you. Say YES to peace, my way, and I guarantee you an efficient apartheid system. In the meantime, stop the violence and stop being the terrorists that youare. As for me, I remain forever a pacifist and a humanist (my way).
If only you would see it my way.
p.s. Note from Shimon (Peres). I really am pained at what you have to endure, but I am truly helpless having cast my lot with the Sharons, Liebermans and Ze’evis of this world. However, I will continue to work for my vision of new realities in the Middle East. This is only a sample of what it has in store for you. I have to rush and meet with my European colleagues and members of the press to let them know that Sharon isn’t all that bad. He is a new man for a new age. Given my (and his) history and age I have a tough job selling that spin! What do you think?
As Ariel Sharon arrived in Washington, D.C. to open arms at the White House this past week, the Israeli government was busy proclaiming loudly that the siege on the occupied territories was being eased. While it was true that movement in some areas became somewhat easier, however, the mechanisms of siege remained in place for the most part (dirt and cement barriers, trenches, checkpoints), along with the military occupation which makes the siege possible.
Palestinians have no illusions about the "peace" plan Sharon discussed with U.S. President Bush--Sharon's vision of extended interim agreements will, like Oslo, simply allow for continued settlement expansion and Palestinian dispossession. Palestinians are also bemused when Sharon declares that he won't negotiate while violence continues: Palestinians, it appears, are expected to negotiate even as the everyday violence of the Israeli occupation continues.
Project Update
As engineers from the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC) were completing work on an agricultural road between Deir Ibziya and Ein Kinya (funded by MCC) on March 20, the Israeli military authorities arrived and put a halt to the work and forbade any further work on the road. Please keep PARC and the farmers of Deir Ibziya and Ein Kinya in your prayers.
Action suggestion
Write to your congressional representatives or parliamentary officials to inform them that the work of Mennonite Central Committee and other international relief and development agencies in Palestine (such as World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children) is routinely disrupted and thwarted by random Israeli military procedures: roadblocks prevent free travel within the occupied territories; projects, such as the agricultural road mentioned above, are suspended for no reason; the siege in the occupied territories destroys projects aimed to promote sustainable development. Explain that a just, durable peace in Palestine/Israel cannot be achieved so long as the Israeli military occupation continues, constraining Palestinian economic development and making Palestinians prisoners in their own country. For information on how to get in touch with your elected officials, contact MCC's offices in Washington, DC (jdb@mail.mcc.org) or Ottawa (mccott@web.ca).
On March 31, the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem is organizing a day of prayer and fasting for justice and peace in Palestine/Israel. During this time of Lent, fasting and prayer is more vital than ever: consider organizing a day of prayer and fasting, either on March 31 or later in the year, as an act of solidarity with Palestinians and Israelis who struggle for justice and true peace.
Below is an article written by Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, a prominent Palestinian spokesperson. Dr. Ashrawi recently led a nonviolent protest march by women towards the Ram checkpoint in the north of Jerusalem: the march was met with tear gas and percussion grenades.
1. Sharon’s Message to the Palestinian People
Hanan Ashrawi
MIFTAH, 12 March 2001
To every man, woman, and child in the Palestinian territories. YOU are my target; you will be made to suffer; and you shall pay for the original crime of being a Palestinian and for being there.
Every camp, village, town, and city is hereby declared a prison. Instead of arresting each individual and having to build even more incarceration centers and foot the bill for your detention, I shall simply instruct the army to dig ditches and build barricades around your population centers, thus with one sweep render your isolation complete. Wherever you are, you are under arrest at your own expense and in your own home.
School children may not reach their schools and college students are to stay home. Some of you might try to climb over the dirt barriers or walk around the ditches. Take your chance! After Hours of misery you might find a tank (or more) lying in wait for you. You might find snipers on your hilltops or armored vehicles at your crossroads. Defy the siege at your own peril, and if you die don’t blame me. In my book, you are guilty of the subversive act of seeking education. The same applies to your teachers and school administrators who are guilty of the equally heinous crime of attempting to teach. Besides, I can close down all your educational institutions with a military order: That would tarnish my new and improved image in the West (and my new ally Shimon might not like it). This way, your institutions will collapse by themselves and ignorance will prevail.
All patients seeking treatment (including cancer, kidney, and heart patients) are hereby forbidden to reach their hospitals and clinics. You shall suffer in silence and you shall die in silence, for you are guilty of daring to claim the same human treatment reserved for real people not for subhuman genetic terrorists like you. All pregnant women will deliver in their own homes, or in ambulances and at checkpoints if they dare defy the siege. Should you suffer complications leading to the death of your infants (or to your own death), you have only yourselves to blame. For you are guilty of the ultimate crime of attempting to give birth to even more Palestinian terrorists. All mothers should know that no vaccination will be allowed to reach your children, for they deserve no protection against infancy and childhood diseases. They too will grow up to be a threat to our security.
All shopkeepers, tradesmen, industrialists, construction workers, businessmen (and women we don’t discriminate) are hereby forbidden from engaging in any kind of gainful activity. Since you cannot go anywhere anyway, you might as well stay home and watch your families starve even if your warehouses are full of products you cannot market. You too are guilty for attempting to conduct a normal life in defiance of the occupation.
This applies even more directly to farmers and peasants and all those involved in agricultural activity. Is it not enough that we confiscated most of your land to build settlements for those Brave settlers who had defied real hardships in New York, London, Moscow, and other such hostile places to come to the Land of Milk and Honey? You had no business being there, tilling the land and feeding your children. Now, we have to confiscate even more lands for these settlers to build by-pass roads (i.e. to bypass your reality) and to connect them to Israel directly without having to witness the mere fact of your existence. You call it apartheid? We call it security by the power of the gun.
If our brave settlers used their guns against you, uprooted your trees, destroyed your crops, and terrified your children, that is the least they could do given the hardships they endured in their drive to grab more land. We, of course, are more than happy to provide them with the full protection and support of our army while they wreak havoc amongst you, and will distort our laws to find them innocent no matter whom they kill, maim, or injure from amongst you. When will you learn that you do not count? They do, and we will make sure that in this equation you finally learn that you are the zero.
Let me be painfully frank with you. I blame you for forcing us to besiege you, kill you, shell your homes, assassinate your activists and leaders, and perform other such distasteful tasks (even though, I must admit I have had a long and rich experience in invading Arab lands, murdering civilians and prisoners of war, and massacring Palestinians wholesale while destroying whole villages). You are truly exasperating. We made you a generous offer whereby wewould annex only parts of your land (including our settlement clusters), expand settlements according to need (and will), annex Jerusalem and keep it under our sovereignty (while trying our best to render it Palestinian-free), and totally deny the Palestinian refugees their right to return. Yet, ungrateful wretches that you are, you persisted in your stubborn refusal. You claim international law and legitimacy? What nonsense! Only our law prevails, and we deem you illegal.
Despite all our attempts at persuasion (our gun ships, tanks, sniper fire, and military checkpoints are very subtle means of persuasion), you continued to deny us our rights to your lands and rights. We have to be able to help ourselves to that which is yours, what else is occupation for? What other use of power if not to be unleashed on the weak?
I therefore find you guilty and deserving of the utmost punishment (we may not have the death penalty in our laws, but we can carry out as many extra-judicial murders and assassinations as we please). You are guilty for holding on to your humanity, for daring to exercise a collective (and individual) will, for refusing to succumb, for daring to claim equal rights before the law, for maintaining your dignity and a stubborn yearning for freedom.
We, on the other hand, should be free to inflict any type of pain and brutality on you, and it should be your lot to lie down and die quietly. You must not be allowed to disturb our peace or security. We have the right to drive you to desperation, and should you protest or react, not only will you be conveniently branded as terrorists, we will also pound you into submission while calling on you to stop the violence and end terrorism.
Not only that, but we will stand up before CNN (and all the friendly Western press) to expose you for not accepting our hand stretched out to you in peace. Don’t worry. They will swallow it hook, line, and sinker. We have been feeding them our spin for years to the point where they have lost not only their critical judgment and journalistic integrity, but also their sense of sight and hearing when it comes to your image and narrative. They are guaranteed to pay attention only when you harm an Israeli or provide them with a negative proof of our stereotype. So don’t count on any audience or sympathy in the world for you are guilty and will be blamed. And if you suffer from any misguided notion that the UN or any other global body will come to your rescue, rest assured it ain’t gonna happen! Kofi Anan has been dispatched forthwith to prevent the destruction of statues (cultural heritage) in Afghanistan; he can’t be expected to deal with human reality at the same time. Besides, we might promise him a role in the peace process provided he behaves himself and looks the other way. We might have a harder time with your European friends, but they too can’t afford to irk us. As for the new US administration, don’t hold your breath. It, too, has decided to give me time to demonstrate my peace making skills. And I’m busy demonstrating those to the hilt, as you can see and feel. I will make peace with you if it takes everything that you have, including your land, lives, rights, and freedom.
My colleagues (including Chief of Staff General Mofaz and Minister of Defense General Ben Eliezer) concur with me. It is wonderful to be able to do my worst and still have Labor instruments (like Fuad) and apologists (like Peres) on my team. They certainly clean up my image! Besides, I’m not doing anymuch worse than Barak did. At least I‘m not shelling your homes for now (the Americans didn’t Like our use of Apaches for that purpose, and it didn’t look good before the cameras anyway.
So, if you know what is good for you, please behave like good little natives and kiss the hand that beats you. Say YES to peace, my way, and I guarantee you an efficient apartheid system. In the meantime, stop the violence and stop being the terrorists that youare. As for me, I remain forever a pacifist and a humanist (my way).
If only you would see it my way.
p.s. Note from Shimon (Peres). I really am pained at what you have to endure, but I am truly helpless having cast my lot with the Sharons, Liebermans and Ze’evis of this world. However, I will continue to work for my vision of new realities in the Middle East. This is only a sample of what it has in store for you. I have to rush and meet with my European colleagues and members of the press to let them know that Sharon isn’t all that bad. He is a new man for a new age. Given my (and his) history and age I have a tough job selling that spin! What do you think?
Sunday, March 11
MCC Palestine Update #16
MCC Palestine Update #16
The major developments in the occupied territories during the first week of the Sheres (Sharon-Peres) unity government have been the digging of trenches around villages west of Ramallah, isolating over 30 villages from educational institutions, health care facilities, and employment.
MCC has supported kindergarten renovation in many of these villages, and recently completed work in cooperation with the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees on a road connecting two of the villages, Ein Qinya and Deir Ibziya. Two of MCC's locally-appointed workers, Sahir Dajani and Viola Tucktuck, live in Ramallah. In the past they used to take one service (shared taxi) straight from Ramallah to Jerusalem, a 30 minute drive. With the recent Israeli siege measures, the trip has become a trail of tears. New checkpoints at the Qalandia refugee camp and at Kufr Aqab prevent taxis from making the journey, so someone wishing to commute between Ramallah and Jerusalem is forced to take two, often three separate taxis, walking across checkpoints which prevent taxis from passing.
These measures are creating a pressure cooker in Ramallah and elsewhere in the occupied territories: far from "pacifying" a supposedly violent population, these brutal measures inflame Palestinian frustration and anger. Please keep MCC's Palestinian workers and our Palestinian partners in your prayers as they cope with increased Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement.
Below you will find an incisive analysis by Gideon Levy of different types of violence.
1. Defining violence
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, 11 March 2001
Who's a terrorist?
Aida Fatahia was walking in the street; Ubei Daraj was playing in the yard. She was the mother of three; he was nine years old. Both were killed last week by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bullets, for no reason. Their killing raises once again, in all its horror, the question of whether Palestinian violence is the only violence that should be called terrorism. Is only car bombing terrorism, while shooting at a woman and child is not?.Fatahia and Daraj join a long list of men, women, and children who were innocent of wrongdoing and killed in the past five months by the IDF.
In the Israeli debate, their deaths were not a result of "terror actions" or "terrorist attacks" and the killers are not "terrorists." Those are terms used only for Palestinian violence. The right - and the left - in Israel always make that distinction: Palestinian violence is terrorism; Israel only defends itself. The huge gap between the numbers of innocent victims on both sides doesn't change this one- sided definition.
IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz, commander of an army that has killed almost 90 children in the last five months, calls the Palestinian Authority (PA) a "terrorist entity," and totally ignores the actions of the army - and the results of those actions. But the questions must be asked: Aren't massive land expropriations, systematic house destructions, the uprooting of orchards and groves, also a form of violence? Isn't cutting off entire towns and villages from their source of water a type of violence? Isn't limitation on freedom of movement by slicing whole areas of the population off from each other and denying medical attention to the residents - even when it's a matter of life and death - any less painful than highway shootings? A pregnant woman whose baby dies or a patient who died because they couldn't get to the hospital - something that has become almost routine in the territories - aren't they victims of terrible violence? What about the behavior of soldiers and police at checkpoints, on the roads, everywhere? The humiliations and beatings, and the settler's own violence against Palestinians - what should that be called?
For most Israelis, the violence is what the Palestinians are doing to us. The Israeli reaction is always just a reaction, much more fatal, perhaps, but a lot less ruthless. They blow up bombs in our markets, and we only shoot at the planners, the inciters, and the terrorists. So, sometimes chips may fly, as the saying lately goes, and some innocents are also killed, but of course, nobody meant it. That's just the way things are in war. That way, Israel always comes out the winner: It doesn't intend to kill innocent people. But does the intention matter to the many victims?
Israelis don't consider all of Israel's other steps - the sieges and curfews, the expropriations and house destruction - violence, of course. That's why Israel says it wants an end to the violence "and a return to the status quo ante," whether as a condition, by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, or as a demand, by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, for renewal of the negotiations. When Israel says it wants a return to the status quo before the Intifada, it means it wants the Palestinians to stop their violence, and then Israel's violence, which is only a defensive reaction to the Palestinians', will naturally stop. In other words, Israel wants the Palestinians to reassume their meek surrender to the brutality of the occupation, while the violence of the occupation continues.
Back in Oslo, both sides agreed to avoid violence, Israel claims, so the current outbreak of violence is therefore a gross violation of the agreement. Moreover, since the Palestinians initiated the Intifada, - "they started it" -the responsibility for stopping it is on their shoulders. But wasn't the Intifada preceded by a series of violent acts by Israel, which expropriated land, closed areas, uprooted farms, expelled people, tortured suspects, dried up resources and destroyed homes - long before the Intifada, and with no less violence than the Palestinians?
Israel is not demanding an end to that violence. When it's only exploding buses and mortar rounds falling on settlements that is defined as violence, it's easy to blame the other side for violating agreements. But that's not the whole picture. Israel is not ready in the same breath to put an end to its own violence.
The demand for an end to violence is obviously right and justified. Violence - any violence - is wrong, and an end to the violence has to be on the top of the agenda of any political negotiation. Israel can and should demand that the Palestinians silence their weapons. But it should demand the same of itself, regarding all the various weapons it uses against the Palestinians. But when, as it did last week, Israel uses bulldozers to create impassable barriers to and from 33 villages, and there's no way for an ambulance or water container to get in, the demand for an end to the violence is outrageously hypocritical.
An end to the violence?
Why shouldn't Israel, as the stronger side, try being the first?
The major developments in the occupied territories during the first week of the Sheres (Sharon-Peres) unity government have been the digging of trenches around villages west of Ramallah, isolating over 30 villages from educational institutions, health care facilities, and employment.
MCC has supported kindergarten renovation in many of these villages, and recently completed work in cooperation with the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees on a road connecting two of the villages, Ein Qinya and Deir Ibziya. Two of MCC's locally-appointed workers, Sahir Dajani and Viola Tucktuck, live in Ramallah. In the past they used to take one service (shared taxi) straight from Ramallah to Jerusalem, a 30 minute drive. With the recent Israeli siege measures, the trip has become a trail of tears. New checkpoints at the Qalandia refugee camp and at Kufr Aqab prevent taxis from making the journey, so someone wishing to commute between Ramallah and Jerusalem is forced to take two, often three separate taxis, walking across checkpoints which prevent taxis from passing.
These measures are creating a pressure cooker in Ramallah and elsewhere in the occupied territories: far from "pacifying" a supposedly violent population, these brutal measures inflame Palestinian frustration and anger. Please keep MCC's Palestinian workers and our Palestinian partners in your prayers as they cope with increased Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement.
Below you will find an incisive analysis by Gideon Levy of different types of violence.
1. Defining violence
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, 11 March 2001
Who's a terrorist?
Aida Fatahia was walking in the street; Ubei Daraj was playing in the yard. She was the mother of three; he was nine years old. Both were killed last week by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bullets, for no reason. Their killing raises once again, in all its horror, the question of whether Palestinian violence is the only violence that should be called terrorism. Is only car bombing terrorism, while shooting at a woman and child is not?.Fatahia and Daraj join a long list of men, women, and children who were innocent of wrongdoing and killed in the past five months by the IDF.
In the Israeli debate, their deaths were not a result of "terror actions" or "terrorist attacks" and the killers are not "terrorists." Those are terms used only for Palestinian violence. The right - and the left - in Israel always make that distinction: Palestinian violence is terrorism; Israel only defends itself. The huge gap between the numbers of innocent victims on both sides doesn't change this one- sided definition.
IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz, commander of an army that has killed almost 90 children in the last five months, calls the Palestinian Authority (PA) a "terrorist entity," and totally ignores the actions of the army - and the results of those actions. But the questions must be asked: Aren't massive land expropriations, systematic house destructions, the uprooting of orchards and groves, also a form of violence? Isn't cutting off entire towns and villages from their source of water a type of violence? Isn't limitation on freedom of movement by slicing whole areas of the population off from each other and denying medical attention to the residents - even when it's a matter of life and death - any less painful than highway shootings? A pregnant woman whose baby dies or a patient who died because they couldn't get to the hospital - something that has become almost routine in the territories - aren't they victims of terrible violence? What about the behavior of soldiers and police at checkpoints, on the roads, everywhere? The humiliations and beatings, and the settler's own violence against Palestinians - what should that be called?
For most Israelis, the violence is what the Palestinians are doing to us. The Israeli reaction is always just a reaction, much more fatal, perhaps, but a lot less ruthless. They blow up bombs in our markets, and we only shoot at the planners, the inciters, and the terrorists. So, sometimes chips may fly, as the saying lately goes, and some innocents are also killed, but of course, nobody meant it. That's just the way things are in war. That way, Israel always comes out the winner: It doesn't intend to kill innocent people. But does the intention matter to the many victims?
Israelis don't consider all of Israel's other steps - the sieges and curfews, the expropriations and house destruction - violence, of course. That's why Israel says it wants an end to the violence "and a return to the status quo ante," whether as a condition, by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, or as a demand, by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, for renewal of the negotiations. When Israel says it wants a return to the status quo before the Intifada, it means it wants the Palestinians to stop their violence, and then Israel's violence, which is only a defensive reaction to the Palestinians', will naturally stop. In other words, Israel wants the Palestinians to reassume their meek surrender to the brutality of the occupation, while the violence of the occupation continues.
Back in Oslo, both sides agreed to avoid violence, Israel claims, so the current outbreak of violence is therefore a gross violation of the agreement. Moreover, since the Palestinians initiated the Intifada, - "they started it" -the responsibility for stopping it is on their shoulders. But wasn't the Intifada preceded by a series of violent acts by Israel, which expropriated land, closed areas, uprooted farms, expelled people, tortured suspects, dried up resources and destroyed homes - long before the Intifada, and with no less violence than the Palestinians?
Israel is not demanding an end to that violence. When it's only exploding buses and mortar rounds falling on settlements that is defined as violence, it's easy to blame the other side for violating agreements. But that's not the whole picture. Israel is not ready in the same breath to put an end to its own violence.
The demand for an end to violence is obviously right and justified. Violence - any violence - is wrong, and an end to the violence has to be on the top of the agenda of any political negotiation. Israel can and should demand that the Palestinians silence their weapons. But it should demand the same of itself, regarding all the various weapons it uses against the Palestinians. But when, as it did last week, Israel uses bulldozers to create impassable barriers to and from 33 villages, and there's no way for an ambulance or water container to get in, the demand for an end to the violence is outrageously hypocritical.
An end to the violence?
Why shouldn't Israel, as the stronger side, try being the first?
Tuesday, March 6
MCC Palestine Update #15
MCC Palestine Update #15
The Lenten season of repentance and reflection is upon us. Sadly, Lent in Palestine/Israel promises to be more somber than usual, with the cycle of violence continuing to spin: three more Palestinians were killed over the weekend, including a boy helping his father paint inside their home in al-Bireh, while several Israelis were killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. The Israeli network of checkpoints and blockades grows continually tighter: trenches were recently dug around Jericho and Bir Zeit.
MCC began its fiscal year on March 1. MCC Palestine is slowly starting to reorganize its development program, reducing the number of partners with whom we work. Over the coming year we will be working with the following groups:
Justice/Peace: The Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem; MCC will sponsor Sabeel's work with Palestinian youth, women, and clergy; Badil Refugee Resource Center: MCC will support Badil's advocacy for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes; The Wi'am Conflict Resolution Center in Bethlehem: in addition to assisting the center's promotion of conflict resolution within Palestinian society, MCC will also send one of Wi'am's workers to the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at Eastern Mennonite University.
Agriculture: Through The Center for Agricultural Services and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees MCC will support land reclamation and income-generating projects.
Women: MCC will continue to partner with the Women's Training Unit of the YMCA in Ramallah by offering training courses to women in agriculture, livestock production, and fiscal management.
Persons with Disabilities: In partnership with the al-Mostaqbal Society for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Khan Younis and the YMCA Rehabilitaiton Center in Beit Sahour MCC will sponsor projects which aim to build capacity among persons with disabilities.
Education: MCC will continue to support the ministry of the Hope Secondary School in Beit Jala, and will also work with 8-10 community kindergartens to identify infrastructural and institutional capacity needs.
Please remember MCC's workers and partners in your prayers, both during Lent and throughout the year. Your financial support of MCC's projects is also appreciated. Information about Palestine cash-giving projects for congregations, families, and individuals is available from MCC in Akron (tel. 717-859-1151) or directly from us upon request.
Below find a Lenten message issued by the Latin (Roman Catholic) Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah: his call for Israel to destroy churches, not homes, is particularly poignant.
1. Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem Letter for Lent 2001
Michel Sabbah, Patriarch -Jerusalem
1 March 2001
Brothers and Sisters,
1. The peace of Christ be with you. We begin our fast on Ash Wednesday, remembering the passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, His death and His glorious Resurrection. He is our model: just as he prayed and fasted for forty days in the desert of Jericho, we also fast for the forty days that precede Easter. Jesus began his preaching, saying: "Repent for the Kingdom of God is close at hand" (cf. Mk 1,15). The Kingdom of God is God's presence in us, for He created us in His own image and likeness. The Kingdom of God is God who accompanies us in our present trials through which, today, he constructs our history.
2. Over the past few days I have visited some parishes in Palestine and I listened to the faithful. I also listened to the civil authorities. Their language is that of all the parishes, their concerns are the concerns of all of you. The first concern, which comprises all the others, is the difficult political situation these days: the closed roads, the blockade imposed on the towns and villages, the lack of work, the continual Israeli bombardment, the destruction of houses, and in addition, the difficulties within Palestinian society, and finally, the idea of emigration. Nonetheless, I saw, despite the trials, the anxieties and the idea of emigration, the basic will to stand firm and to patiently wait until our liberty is returned to us and until the image of God in us and also in those who oppress us is manifested.
3. Concerning emigration, we add our voice to the voice of all those who are patient, and we say to you: Brothers and sisters, do not leave your land. Be patient. It is here that God wants you, as believers in Him and witnesses of Jesus Christ in His land. Stand firm around the Holy Places. In this land, you are a part of the mystery of God in it. Try to reflect on this so that you might be able to see God and neighbour and understand the meaning of our presence here.
You have been called to a difficult life: do you have the courage to accept the difficult life to which God is calling you? Some say: "The future is not clear". The future depends on what you do today and on what you fear to do. Why leave to others the making of your future? This is a time when the believers say, with the freedom of children of God, what they want to express and thus contribute effectively towards the construction of their future, founded on the solid bases of peace, justice and love.
4. Furthermore, know that our help comes from one another and from our love for each other. If someone is in need, let them search out those in greater need than they are. Let them then bring the necessary help from the little or the lot that they possess. To all those who are hungry, we say that we want to share your hunger and share our bread with you. We invite the faithful in all our parishes and the religious to share their bread with those who are in need, either by inviting them to their tables or by covering the costs of daily food through contributions to Caritas or to some other philanthropic organization. We are living through a war which has been imposed on us. We must adapt ourselves and our way of living to privations and to generosity with regard to all our brothers and sisters in need.
5. As regards the houses which continually undergo the Israeli bombardments, we say to the Israelis: Destroy our churches but spare the homes of our faithful. If you must impose, at any price, collective punishment and if there needs be a ransom in order to procure the tranquillity of innocent children and families, we offer our churches: Destroy them; we will find other places in which to pray and we will continue to pray for ourselves and for you.
And to the Palestinian militants who think that it is necessary to direct their fire against the Israelis from populated houses, even when the orders are clear: Do not transform peaceful homes into a line of fire -- to them too we say: Obey the orders, preserve the cohesion of Palestinian society, and spare the homes of the innocent. We agree to offer our churches as ransom for any house that they want to demolish. However, we cannot agree to the demolition of the homes of our children so that they be forced to abandon their land.
6. During these days, we pray and we walk the way of repentance in order to go to meet God. We say to every Palestinian and to every Israeli who loves peace and asks for security: Try to see God with us. To the Israelis we say: In the sight of God, try to see that the Christian or Muslim Palestinian is not the image that you have decided to see: they are neither terrorists nor people who want to hate and kill. Try to see that your occupation of their land since 1967, the privation of their liberty, and, today, the blockade of the towns and villages with all the suffering that results, leads to that which you call terrorism.
In fact, this is the cry of the poor and the oppressed who are demanding their liberty and their dignity. Remember this and be just today. That which you call security measures is simply an invitation to more violence. Give back the land to its owners, give them back their liberty, listen to the voice of the oppressed and the poor for it is lifted up to God and God will listen one day and answer this cry.
7. To all those who suffer among our children, we say: Be patient. We remind you of the difficult commandment, love your enemies. "Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors, in order to become children of your Father who is in heaven, for He makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good and makes rain fall on the just and the unjust" (Mt 5:44-45). Love is not a weakness nor an escape. It is the vision of the face of God in every person, both Palestinian and Israeli. The Israeli who withholds our liberty remains a carrier of the image of God. With this vision I purify my heart of all anger and I ask the Israeli, with the force of the spirit and the truth, to put an end to the oppression, to end the occupation of the land and the privation of liberty.
We ask for justice and peace because God is justice and peace. For this we pray and we fast during these days in order to purify ourselves of our sins and in order to co-operate with God in the construction of our new history. Here, in our land, God was revealed and He manifested His love for all humanity.
Let us ask God to introduce us into the depths of His mystery so that we might see Him and love Him: thus we will be able, all of us together, to see Him in all of His creatures and to love Him in all of His children, in justice, equity and mercy. I ask God to give you the force of the spirit and of love so that you will all be ready to welcome the glory of the Resurrection. Amen.
+ Michel Sabbah, Patriarch -Jerusalem, 1 March, 2001
The Lenten season of repentance and reflection is upon us. Sadly, Lent in Palestine/Israel promises to be more somber than usual, with the cycle of violence continuing to spin: three more Palestinians were killed over the weekend, including a boy helping his father paint inside their home in al-Bireh, while several Israelis were killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. The Israeli network of checkpoints and blockades grows continually tighter: trenches were recently dug around Jericho and Bir Zeit.
MCC began its fiscal year on March 1. MCC Palestine is slowly starting to reorganize its development program, reducing the number of partners with whom we work. Over the coming year we will be working with the following groups:
Justice/Peace: The Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem; MCC will sponsor Sabeel's work with Palestinian youth, women, and clergy; Badil Refugee Resource Center: MCC will support Badil's advocacy for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes; The Wi'am Conflict Resolution Center in Bethlehem: in addition to assisting the center's promotion of conflict resolution within Palestinian society, MCC will also send one of Wi'am's workers to the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at Eastern Mennonite University.
Agriculture: Through The Center for Agricultural Services and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees MCC will support land reclamation and income-generating projects.
Women: MCC will continue to partner with the Women's Training Unit of the YMCA in Ramallah by offering training courses to women in agriculture, livestock production, and fiscal management.
Persons with Disabilities: In partnership with the al-Mostaqbal Society for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Khan Younis and the YMCA Rehabilitaiton Center in Beit Sahour MCC will sponsor projects which aim to build capacity among persons with disabilities.
Education: MCC will continue to support the ministry of the Hope Secondary School in Beit Jala, and will also work with 8-10 community kindergartens to identify infrastructural and institutional capacity needs.
Please remember MCC's workers and partners in your prayers, both during Lent and throughout the year. Your financial support of MCC's projects is also appreciated. Information about Palestine cash-giving projects for congregations, families, and individuals is available from MCC in Akron (tel. 717-859-1151) or directly from us upon request.
Below find a Lenten message issued by the Latin (Roman Catholic) Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah: his call for Israel to destroy churches, not homes, is particularly poignant.
1. Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem Letter for Lent 2001
Michel Sabbah, Patriarch -Jerusalem
1 March 2001
Brothers and Sisters,
1. The peace of Christ be with you. We begin our fast on Ash Wednesday, remembering the passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, His death and His glorious Resurrection. He is our model: just as he prayed and fasted for forty days in the desert of Jericho, we also fast for the forty days that precede Easter. Jesus began his preaching, saying: "Repent for the Kingdom of God is close at hand" (cf. Mk 1,15). The Kingdom of God is God's presence in us, for He created us in His own image and likeness. The Kingdom of God is God who accompanies us in our present trials through which, today, he constructs our history.
2. Over the past few days I have visited some parishes in Palestine and I listened to the faithful. I also listened to the civil authorities. Their language is that of all the parishes, their concerns are the concerns of all of you. The first concern, which comprises all the others, is the difficult political situation these days: the closed roads, the blockade imposed on the towns and villages, the lack of work, the continual Israeli bombardment, the destruction of houses, and in addition, the difficulties within Palestinian society, and finally, the idea of emigration. Nonetheless, I saw, despite the trials, the anxieties and the idea of emigration, the basic will to stand firm and to patiently wait until our liberty is returned to us and until the image of God in us and also in those who oppress us is manifested.
3. Concerning emigration, we add our voice to the voice of all those who are patient, and we say to you: Brothers and sisters, do not leave your land. Be patient. It is here that God wants you, as believers in Him and witnesses of Jesus Christ in His land. Stand firm around the Holy Places. In this land, you are a part of the mystery of God in it. Try to reflect on this so that you might be able to see God and neighbour and understand the meaning of our presence here.
You have been called to a difficult life: do you have the courage to accept the difficult life to which God is calling you? Some say: "The future is not clear". The future depends on what you do today and on what you fear to do. Why leave to others the making of your future? This is a time when the believers say, with the freedom of children of God, what they want to express and thus contribute effectively towards the construction of their future, founded on the solid bases of peace, justice and love.
4. Furthermore, know that our help comes from one another and from our love for each other. If someone is in need, let them search out those in greater need than they are. Let them then bring the necessary help from the little or the lot that they possess. To all those who are hungry, we say that we want to share your hunger and share our bread with you. We invite the faithful in all our parishes and the religious to share their bread with those who are in need, either by inviting them to their tables or by covering the costs of daily food through contributions to Caritas or to some other philanthropic organization. We are living through a war which has been imposed on us. We must adapt ourselves and our way of living to privations and to generosity with regard to all our brothers and sisters in need.
5. As regards the houses which continually undergo the Israeli bombardments, we say to the Israelis: Destroy our churches but spare the homes of our faithful. If you must impose, at any price, collective punishment and if there needs be a ransom in order to procure the tranquillity of innocent children and families, we offer our churches: Destroy them; we will find other places in which to pray and we will continue to pray for ourselves and for you.
And to the Palestinian militants who think that it is necessary to direct their fire against the Israelis from populated houses, even when the orders are clear: Do not transform peaceful homes into a line of fire -- to them too we say: Obey the orders, preserve the cohesion of Palestinian society, and spare the homes of the innocent. We agree to offer our churches as ransom for any house that they want to demolish. However, we cannot agree to the demolition of the homes of our children so that they be forced to abandon their land.
6. During these days, we pray and we walk the way of repentance in order to go to meet God. We say to every Palestinian and to every Israeli who loves peace and asks for security: Try to see God with us. To the Israelis we say: In the sight of God, try to see that the Christian or Muslim Palestinian is not the image that you have decided to see: they are neither terrorists nor people who want to hate and kill. Try to see that your occupation of their land since 1967, the privation of their liberty, and, today, the blockade of the towns and villages with all the suffering that results, leads to that which you call terrorism.
In fact, this is the cry of the poor and the oppressed who are demanding their liberty and their dignity. Remember this and be just today. That which you call security measures is simply an invitation to more violence. Give back the land to its owners, give them back their liberty, listen to the voice of the oppressed and the poor for it is lifted up to God and God will listen one day and answer this cry.
7. To all those who suffer among our children, we say: Be patient. We remind you of the difficult commandment, love your enemies. "Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors, in order to become children of your Father who is in heaven, for He makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good and makes rain fall on the just and the unjust" (Mt 5:44-45). Love is not a weakness nor an escape. It is the vision of the face of God in every person, both Palestinian and Israeli. The Israeli who withholds our liberty remains a carrier of the image of God. With this vision I purify my heart of all anger and I ask the Israeli, with the force of the spirit and the truth, to put an end to the oppression, to end the occupation of the land and the privation of liberty.
We ask for justice and peace because God is justice and peace. For this we pray and we fast during these days in order to purify ourselves of our sins and in order to co-operate with God in the construction of our new history. Here, in our land, God was revealed and He manifested His love for all humanity.
Let us ask God to introduce us into the depths of His mystery so that we might see Him and love Him: thus we will be able, all of us together, to see Him in all of His creatures and to love Him in all of His children, in justice, equity and mercy. I ask God to give you the force of the spirit and of love so that you will all be ready to welcome the glory of the Resurrection. Amen.
+ Michel Sabbah, Patriarch -Jerusalem, 1 March, 2001
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
