MCC Palestine Update #99
April 5, 2004
[Go to the "Palestine Diary" section of the MCC website for a series of seven diary-style reflections by MCC workers Ed Nyce, Molly Graver, Bob Herr, and Alain Epp Weaver-http://www.mcc.org/palestinediary/]
As Holy Week begins, there are no shortage of possible topics to address in this brief missive: the assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin; the heightened security inside Israel as people brace for a response by Hamas; Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's renewed threats to "remove" Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat "from the historical arena"; Sharon's own legal troubles, that may yet threaten the future of his government; the ongoing demolition of homes in the occupied territories, particularly the Gaza Strip; Israeli attempts-which seem to be enjoying partial success-to obtain at least tacit US support for its "disengagement" plan (best understood as a unilateral, de facto annexation of large swathes of West Bank land and as a solidification of control over settlements built on that land and over West Bank land and water resources). All of these topics, and more, would easily warrant multiple essays. But instead I'll just mention one news item, one that has received scant attention in the world's press. This past week various United Nations agencies announced that, given ongoing Israeli restrictions and limitations at the Karni crossing point into the Gaza Strip, the UN agencies were suspending food aid operations to Palestinians. With the Palestinian economy in tatters, thanks to over 40 months of Israeli closures, checkpoints, and restrictions on movement, all resulting in poverty and unemployment rates running at least at 60% (using the most conservative of economic measurements), hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have found themselves dependent on external food aid. For months, UN agencies, donor governments, and international aid agencies have grappled with two questions: first, by helping to prevent the Palestinian economy from total collapse, are these food aid efforts in effect assisting Israel in maintaining the occupation-i.e., allowing it to control the occupied territories while absolving itself of any responsibility (which as an occupying power it should bear) for the welfare of civilians in the occupied territories? Second, at what point would ongoing Israeli obstacles to free humanitarian operation? The UN agencies have clearly decided that, with new restrictions at entry points into the Gaza Strip, the obstacles to humanitarian operations have become too great. I personally share many of the reservations about food aid listed by its critics: that it fosters dependency; that it can compromise the dignity and honor of its recipients; that, in the occupied territories, it unwittingly aids Israel in having the occupation without any of its consequences. That said, the well-being of hundreds of thousands of Gazans has now been made more tenuous, thanks to ongoing Israeli obstacles to humanitarian assistance. This Holy Week, pray that none might go hungry in the occupied territories; pray also that restrictions on ordinary Palestinian movement will be lifted, a move that, World Bank and other economists observe, would go a very long way in addressing poverty and unemployment among Palestinians.
Below you will find four pieces. In the first, MCC worker Ed Nyce reflects on the death of a neighbor this past week. In the second, Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy goes on a tour of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israeli troops in 1948, organized by MCC's Israeli partner organization, Zochrot. Israeli academic Avi Shlaim, based at Oxford, then looks at the "road map" to continued conflict that has been charted by current Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Finally, Gideon Levy takes a sobering look at what he calls "a sudden concern for the Palestinian child."
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Here We Go Again, Reflection by Ed Nyce, April 2, 2004
Today, Friday, April 2, one of Abu Nasser's sons was killed near Rachel's Tomb.
Several of you know Abu Nasser, who has a small food shop below the apartment where I live. A few others know the location. And the rest of you I included in this email either because you know the culture and situation, or I just wanted to tell you.
The first word regarding what may have happened is that the son, 16 years old, was throwing stones toward soldiers. If so, he was probably part of a group. It is not out of the realm of possibility.
Abu Nasser has welcomed me from the beginning. He does not know English. He likes to say that he gives me Arabic lessons and I return the favor with English lessons. He is knowingly exaggerating.
He and Abu Fuad, who used to have a shop across the street, would regularly invite passersby to join them for Arabic coffee. Times are tough enough now that the coffee doesn't show up like it once did – at least that (the tough $ times) is my interpretation. The shop often has very little merchandise, and I mean very little, and Abu Nasser is one who's been hit hard by the economics of the intifada. It's not that he had lost a lot during the intifada, because by the time it started in 2000, he already didn't have a lot. But still he has less than before. And after today, he has indeed lost a lot.
I don't see Abu Nasser everyday, but today I saw him three times before this happened, two of the times for extended periods.
First was when I went outside to try to put the front bumper of the Subaru back where it is supposed to be. When I went for an early morning walk, I didn't notice anything strange, but a little later, looking out the window, there was the rubber bumper hanging down perpendicular to its usual position. Zoughbi Zoughbi, my landlord and director of Wi'am, a peacemaking organization with whom MCC partners, called to confirm our meeting today, and I mentioned the bumper to him.
When we went out to look at it, Abu Nasser's shop was open. He said that some kids knocked the bumper down last night. Yet I hadn't seen it that way this morning. In any event, Zoughbi briefly went back inside or somewhere, and Abu Nasser showed me his shop. There was a large increase in merchandise quantity! He sold a dunam (1/4 acre) of land out near Tuqu' and invested it in more products. I congratulated him (though wasn't sure if the selling of the land was happy), and then Zoughbi and I left for the office.
I got a ride back around 10:30 or so from the garage in Beit Sahour, where I left the car, and went into Abu Nasser's shop. A sheikh whom I see walking at times, and he and I exchange waves and sometimes verbal greetings, started asking something I didn't quite get, but it seemed like it had to do with whether I was Muslim or whether I wanted to talk about it. In any event, Abu Nasser right away started saying, "No, no, no," told him I'm his friend, and a few other very helpful things. So then the sheikh's questions were more along the line of whether I'm married. Dialogue would have been fine, but so was the intervention. After he left for the Friday prayers, to which Abu Nasser would soon also go, I again expressed my joy that he had a fuller shop, and bought 32 shekels (roughly $7.11) worth of items, plus received a shekel's (maybe a shekel and a half) worth for free - his insistence.
Later, I saw Abu Nasser very briefly when I left to get the car (and when I returned).
In late afternoon, I went over to the home of some other friends. Abdullah, the youngest of six children, turns 8 today. It's a family I enjoy being with a lot, and feel really at ease there.
While there, someone noticed the written news flash on the television screen that Abu Nasser's son was killed near Rachel's Tomb. The spelling of the name, which I could make out (Arabic) only because it stayed for a long time on the screen, was actually Nassar (Nas SAAR) rather than Nasser (NAS ser), and those in the room were discussing that and weren't quite sure at first which name was accurate. However, the rest of the family names lined up, and already the word was going around outside, the kids said, that it was a son of his.
I am not quite sure yet which son it is. I know most of them, and one of several could be exactly 16, so we'll see.
I head out on my own at times, and some things I do with others. Visiting the family tomorrow, a cultural expression of grief, I plan to do with Zoughbi and others who go as a group. Usually, at least a small group shows up rather than an individual on these calls. Sometime tomorrow we'll do that.
So there was still a cake for Abdullah, though now with the news we didn't sing, but did anyway go on and have a good time. There would never be any cakes if we waited for good news. One boy turned 8, one boy died at 16. And, it seems, that's life.
"Ba'en Allah," Abu Nasser will probably say tomorrow - "God will help us." Just today we were talking about life, about none of us knowing what will happen in the next year (I said that), or the next hour (he said that). Really, we were. "Allah kariim," says Abu Nasser frequently - "God is generous."
Please pray for Abu Nasser and family.
2. Twilight zone / Social studies lesson
By Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz, April 1, 2004
A holiday excursion to the hidden side of the Land of Israel - the ruins of lost villages in the Galilee - led by a guide from Hurfish.
Look at this prickly pear plant. It's covering a mound of stones. This mound of stones was once a house, or a shed, or a sheep pen, or a school, or a stone fence. Once - until 56 years ago, a generation and a half ago - not that long ago. The cactus separated the houses and one lot from another, a living fence that is now also the only monument to the life that once was here. Take a look at the grove of pines around the prickly pear as well. Beneath it there was once a village. All of its 405 houses were destroyed in one day in 1948 and its 2,350 inhabitants scattered all over. No one ever told us about this. The pines were planted right afterward by the Jewish National Fund, to which we contributed in our childhood, every Friday, in order to cover the ruins, to cover the possibility of return and maybe also a little of the shame and the guilt.Then they put up a sign: "South Africa Forest. Parking. In Memory of Hans Riesenfeld, Rhodesia, Zimbabwe." Did the Riesenfelds know? A peculiar coincidence - the South Africa Forest, the Rhodesia parking area atop the ruins of Lubiya, of whose existence not a trace is left, not even a small sign. But here was a village whose sons are now scattered throughout the world and who carry the memories with them. For the information of our hikers and the philanthropists from Zimbabwe.A Russian couple spreads out their picnic meal on the wooden table: sandwiches, vegetables, cold cuts, vodka. Not far from them, by another JNF picnic table, stands Mahmoud Issa, the son of refugees and a Danish citizen, and spreads out an aerial photo of his parents' village produced by the Israel Mapping Center. The date of the photo: January 26, 1945. Three years before their tragedy, six years before he was born, outside the village. House, paths and vegetation. Issa made a Danish film about his village, with English subtitles. He also published a book in Danish, soon to be published in an English translation, and perhaps also in Hebrew. His brothers and sisters are spread out in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Denmark.Deep in the grove, one can find a single wall that survived from the village, as well as a stone archway that covered a cavern used to store crops. The dozens of wells that belonged to the village (Issa says there were more than 400) are surrounded by barbed wire. They are wrecked and full of garbage left behind by hikers in the South Africa Forest who must have thought that the JNF had dug big trash cans in the ground. How were they to know that these were freshwater wells?The two Russian immigrants are immersed in their meal near a large group of hikers standing around the next table, on which Issa has spread out the aerial photo. Two busloads of people from Nazareth - several dozen Jews and Arabs, and a number of foreign visitors, too - on a holiday outing sponsored by the Emil Toma Center, Va'ad Ha'akurim and the Zochrot Foundation - to the Galilee that is normally hidden from view, on the eve of Passover - the holiday of freedom - and of Land Day.Tour guide Nimr Nimr from Hurfish is glad to see that so many Jews have come on the trip. "For so many years, they were fed the slander that the Palestinians left of their own accord," he says. To the right is the grave of Izzadin al-Kassam, in Balad al-Sheikh, now the town of Nesher. And now, to the right, Daliat al-Carmel and Isfiya. "The Israelis argue that the Arabs will never receive all the rights they deserve as long as they do not serve in the IDF. The Druze in Isfiya and in Daliat al-Carmel serve in the IDF and they don't get their rights," Nimr explains to the group on the bus.There were once 27 villages in the Tiberias area; 25 of them were destroyed. Nimr pronounces the names slowly and with emphasis, as in a memorial ceremony: Al-Dalhamiya, Abu Shusha, Hittin, Kafr Sabt, Lubiya, Al-Majdal. The list is long. In Safsaf, there was a massacre, near the well, that frightened the residents of all the neighboring villages. ("52 men were tied together with a rope, put into a pit and shot ... Ten were killed ... three incidents of rape ... a 14-year-old girl ... another four killed, a woman and her baby ... another 11 killed." - from Israel Galili's testimony as it appears in Benny Morris' "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem").In Kafr Kana, many had been killed in battles by 1948. A memorial monument lists the names of the 26 casualties. To the left was Tzapuriya, a village of 5,000 inhabitants. To the right, an Arab neighborhood of Nazareth. Nazareth Illit, built on Arab lands, looms before us - 40,000 residents on 40,000 dunams; 120,000 residents in Nazareth and environs, on 7,000 dunams.Another tour guide gets on the bus. His name is Jamal Arafat and he is from the village of Mashhad. First stop, Sejera. Soldiers pass through the yellow iron gate of Ilaniya on their way to their base. In Sejera, Jews and Arabs lived together, with just a narrow valley separating the neighboring communities. Arafat says that relations between them were "idyllic."The pioneer David Green was here in the early part of the previous century and wrote: "Here I found the Land of Israel that I dreamed about. Nature, the people, the work - Everything here was different, more `Eretz-Yisraeli,' almost as I'd dreamed of it when I was still back in Plonsk ..." (David Ben-Gurion, Memoirs, Vol. I). His enthusiasm apparently faded, because before long, Ben-Gurion left his work in Sejera. A half-century later, on July 15, 1948, Sejera fell. The only thing left is the well, and it is completely fenced in. The cacti on the hillsides are the only witnesses.Kafr Sabt to the left, Sde Ilan, and this is Via Maris, the Sea Road. In front of the entrance to the house, the remnants of the khan on the main road and a guard post opposite it. Here the erasers of history were negligent in their work, and entire walls of the lovely building still remain.One young man on the tour, Imad Hourani from Haifa, says his family originally comes from Kfar Hittin and now lives mostly in Ilabun. He looks through the photos of documents and maps from his parents' lost village, and at the old stamps affixed to the contracts. His father, Mohammed Hourani, a contractor, refused to build the family a new house until 1970. That's when Egyptian president Nasser died, and with him, the father's hope of returning to his land. His father told him that after 22 people were killed in Ilabun, the residents of Hittin were so frightened that they evacuated all the men from the village. Only the women, children and old people were left. When the Jews came, they, too, were expelled - over the border, to Lebanon.The Golani junction. There's a memorial monument before the junction, the Golani museum, another Golani monument - we are in the land of monuments and selective memory. Here, too, Saladin defeated the Crusaders. Each year, on the anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe), Hourani takes his two children, now aged 10 and 11, to see the ruins of Kfar Hittin."We go to remember. It's your Independence Day and our Nakba. We sit under the trees and try to bring only traditional food - labaneh and za'atar. We don't barbecue - so it won't look like we're celebrating." Here is the village well, as indicated on his old map. "I'm continuing what my father asked, so we don't forget."On Menachem Begin Boulevard near Tiberias, you turn left to Kfar Hittim. Before the entrance to Kfar Zeitim, you turn left again, onto a dirt road that leads up to the remnants of the village. Mustafa Dahabra was seven years old and Amin Sa'ada was 17 on the day they were forced to flee the village. Now they are two withered old men in baseball caps - one wears his facing forward, the other, facing back. Dahabra leans on his cane. Two Israeli air force helicopters are up in the sky. The two old men make their way through the bushes to the mosque.A thick iron fence surrounds the ruin, but the two old men know where to find a hole in it. When Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister a decade ago, they say they were promised a budget of NIS 300,000 from the state and given permission to restore the mosque. Rabin's murder cut off their hope as well. A few years ago, they tried to sneak in some sacks of cement in order to begin restoring the ruined building; someone threw the cement straight into the pool of water that was in front of the mosque and sealed it forever.Dahabra etches the outline of the pool in the sand with his cane. Now there is no pool and no restoration. Heavy iron bars have been placed over the entrance to the mosque and the staircase leading to its minaret is also blocked. Strawberries and figs grow in the shaded yard. There aren't many places as lovely as the yard of Kfar Hittin's ruined mosque."What did we ask for?," asks Dahabra. "We told Rabin's deputy that if they let us come back, we won't throw out the Jews. We'll live together. He said to me: `Don't talk to me about that.' Why not? I'm an Israeli citizen."Dahabra, who now lives in Dir Hana, comes here several times a year. His friend, Sa'ada: "All we asked was to be able to come here once in a while to pray. Not every day. I have 170 dunams here and I'm an `absentee' owner - but I'm here. How is this possible?"At 70, his memories are still vivid: "It was a black day ... We walked from here to Marar and from there to Dir Hana ... We didn't go to the Arab countries because we had sheep. For a week before we left I didn't go to school because we knew there was a war. People left and I left, too, it was group after group, my father and mother and brothers and sisters. We didn't take anything, because my father said that we'd come back."We want to live together with the Jews, just let us clean up the mosque. If I live in one room and a Jew lives upstairs, I'll invite him down to have coffee every day. `We lost everything,' my father said."Another young man on the tour, Wadi'a Awada, says that his great-grandfather built this mosque. His son attends high school in Kafr Kana. "They make them visit Kiryat Shmona. It serves my interest to live together, but first of all I have to know myself before I know the other. When I stand here in front of the minaret I remember that and it hurts - that my son should go to Kiryat Shmona instead of coming here. And one isn't allowed to come here. It's the right of every person to know himself. It's part of the diagnosis that we first get to know ourselves, because otherwise we won't heal. I don't want my son to come here so he'll want to subvert the state. Israel is a fact and it has its weapons and we're content to be its citizens. But you can't bluff with people and you also can't take everything."This is the other country: Kabri is Al-Kabri, Kfar Hittim is Hittin, Batzat is Basah, Migdal Haemek is Majdal, Manot is Manw'ad. A beautiful, lush part of the country that always has a light side and a dark side. Some want to cause things to be forgotten, to erase any trace, and some want to remember and perpetuate and perhaps even return. Here is the Shlomi industrial zone. A Protestant church and an Orthodox church across from the Zoglobek factory, a mosque across from Matak Metal Industries, a boarded-up school across from a high-tech glass-paneled building.Just to make sure, someone went to the trouble of sealing up the two churches with bricks, and surrounding the half-ruined mosque with barbed wire, which is in turn surrounded by some iron bars, rusty heat panels, garbage carts, large slats and old street signs.Whoever did this obviously went to considerable effort to block access to what's left of this mosque. A stone sign in front of the mosque, whose minaret has toppled, reads: "This mosque was built by a group of blessed men in the year 1153 of the hejira of the Prophet Mohammed." We are now in the year 1426 of the hejira.
3. Road map is forgotten at dead end for negotiation
Avi Shlaim
Sunday March 28, 2004
The Observer
Avi Shlaim says that the Prime Minister's violent pursuit of a Greater
Israel has lengthened a relentless dance of death
Israel's assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, marked an extraordinarily dangerous escalation in the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. There could hardly be a more dramatic demonstration of the disparity in military power between the two parties to this conflict. The trouble is that there is no military solution and there are only losers in this dance of death.
Both the official Israeli justification for the killing of Yassin and the Hamas response were entirely predictable. Ariel Sharon described it as part of the war on terror and called Yassin the 'first and foremost leader of the Palestinian terrorist murderers'. He compared him to Osama bin Laden and congratulated the Israeli security forces on their success. Hamas leaders overflowed with fury, seeing the killing as an attack on Islam. They vowed to take revenge and escalate the armed struggle until they achieve independence. Israel, they said, had opened the gates of hell. Secular Palestinian leaders denounced the attack as dangerous, crazy and cowardly and suspected that the motive was to create chaos in Palestinian society and bring about the collapse of the Palestinian Authority.
One thing was clear: with this single act of violence, Israel killed any prospect of a revival of the Middle East peace process. The road map, launched with so much fanfare a year ago, is now dead. All of Tony Blair's efforts in prodding and persuading a reluctant George Bush to adopt this plan for a two-state solution by 2005 appear to have been in vain. No Arab leader can be expected even to talk about peace with Israel, given its callous disregard for both Muslim sensitivities and international legality.
The assassination is likely to strengthen rather than weaken Hamas. In the wretched Gaza refugee camps, recruitment of suicide bombers has never been much of a problem. With Yassin turned into a martyr, more desperate young people will rally behind the Islamic banner. Political support for Hamas is also likely to grow at the expense of its secular rival, Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. Yassin's spartan lifestyle commanded universal respect. His honesty and that of his colleagues stood in marked contrast to the endemic corruption in parts of Fatah.
Yassin's removal will almost certainly tilt the internal balance within Hamas in favour of the more radical military wing. The political wing, headed by the organisation's new leader, Dr Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was much more pragmatic than is commonly realised in the West. It observed several ceasefires scuppered by Israel. While approving suicide bombings as the only weapon available to their movement, its leaders leaned increasingly towards de facto acceptance of Israel within its 1967 borders. Israel's action, however, is bound to reinforce the argument of the hardliners that the Jewish state only understands force, and can only be dislodged from the occupied territories by force.
All this could have been predicted, so why did Israel embark on such a high-risk strategy? To answer this, you have to delve into the personality and policies of Israel's Prime Minister, a right-wing extremist who abhors negotiations and compromise and imposes his will by brute force. He is a proponent of Greater Israel and the champion of violent solutions. The Palestinians pose the main challenge to his vision of Greater Israel, so he has always advocated the use of military force to crush them.
By destroying the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Sharon hoped to break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The war was a disaster, but Sharon doggedly persisted in his objective of denying the Palestinians any independent political existence in Palestine. Evidence for this is ably presented by the sociologist Baruch Kimmerling in Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War against the Palestinians.
Equally dogged Palestinian resistance since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada persuaded Sharon that the dream of Greater Israel had to be modified, if not abandoned. His new strategy rests on two main planks. One is the building of the wall on the West Bank that would prepare the way for the de facto annexation of roughly half its territory to Israel. The other, announced in January, involves unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Few Israelis want to hang on to Gaza, where there are 1.2 million Arabs and 7,500 Israeli settlers, who control 25 per cent of the territory and 40 per cent of the arable land. Sharon knows that the occupation cannot be sustained in the long term, so he wants to cut his losses to consolidate occupation of half of the West Bank. This plan amounts to an attempt to redraw the map of Israel-Palestine unilaterally without negotiating with the Palestinian Authority, without complying with any external diktats, and without following any international roadmaps.
Yet although Sharon's plan is fixated exclusively on Israeli interests, it has met opposition inside his cabinet from the pro-settler, ultra-right-wing parties and from the aggressively hawkish Minister of Defence, Shaul Mofaz. The General Staff is worried that Hamas would turn Gaza into a launchpad for attacks on Israel, leaving it with a powerful enemy on its southern border. Therefore it wants to break Hamas before the withdrawal.
The decision to execute Yassin has to be seen in this light. Some Ministers and the director of the internal security service opposed the proposal on the grounds that it was illegal and would only increase the violence, but the majority voted in favour.
It transpired that the cabinet decided to eliminate not just Yassin but the entire Hamas leadership in response to the double suicide bombing in the port of Ashdod. This means that Israel will strike at Hamas leaders whenever opportunities present themselves, not only in retaliation. Israeli strikes will be followed, inevitably and inexorably, by Palestinian retaliation with suicide bombs. This is a recipe for violence and bloodshed without any hope. Sharon has truly opened the gates of hell.
· Avi Shlaim is a British Academy Research Professor at St Antony's College, Oxford, and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.
4. A sudden concern for the Palestinian child
By Gideon Levy
Haaretz, March 28, 2004
Suddenly, Israelis are worried about the bitter fate of a Palestinian child. To judge by the public shock over Hussam Bilal Abdu, who was caught wearing an explosives belt at the Hawara checkpoint, it would seem that nothing of a humane nature is foreign to us, even when it pertains to an enemy and his children. But this is an infuriating show of concern. The fate of a Palestinian child only touches us when it suits us, when it serves our purposes and when our hands are not involved.The hundreds of children who have been killed, the thousands who have been crippled, and the hundreds of thousands who live under conditions of siege and poverty, and are exposed every day to violence and humiliation - all this has failed to move the Israeli public. Just the child with the belt.Why weren't we shocked by the killing of Christine Sa'ada, who was shot dead in an IDF ambush while traveling in a car with her parents in Bethlehem, exactly a year ago today? Why was there no public outcry following the killing of Jamil and Ahmed Abu Aziz, two brothers who were riding their bicycles in Jenin in broad daylight when a tank fired a shell at them? How is their killing, which was documented on video, less cruel? Why didn't we show pictures of Basil and Abir Abu Samra, who were killed together with their mother in their vineyard near Nablus, just as we displayed pictures of Hussam Abdu? Why have we never discussed the killing of children at the entrance to the Qalandiyah refugee camp, where a child is killed by Border Police or IDF fire every few weeks? Why is a putting an explosives belt on a child more shocking than firing a shell at him?The harshest expressions are being uttered here, with much clucking of the tongue: "crossing the red line," "the pinnacle of cruelty," "a satanic act." And, in truth, it's impossible to understand such cruelty toward an innocent child who was cynically sent to his death. But Israelis have no moral right to criticize the Palestinians for their cruelty toward children; we are no less cruel.Sending a child to his death with an explosives belt is indeed a satanic action, but the shocked public reaction is tainted with hypocrisy and double standards. The cheap attempt to win points on the international public relations front from the picture of the child is ridiculous: the world knows that Israel's hands are not clean, that they are stained with the blood of children.From September 29, 2000 through February 29, 2004, IDF soldiers killed 486 children and teenagers, 255 of them under the age of 15, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG). This appalling figure should have long ago troubled the sleep of every decent Israeli and aroused a public protest. There can be no justification for the killing of children on such a large scale. The contention that the IDF does not intend to kill children has long ago lost its foundation. The real question is what is the IDF doing to prevent the killing of children. The answer - very little, if anything. When it drops bombs and missiles on population centers, such as during the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and when it sends tanks into residential neighborhoods, it cannot argue that it does not intend to kill children. There are many children living in the Darj neighborhood in Gaza City, where Mohammed Shehadeh lived. Whoever decided to toss a one-ton bomb there knew this very well. That is, he knowingly decided to kill children. No excuse can be made to relieve him of the responsibility for killing them.However, we're not only responsible for the deaths of Palestinian children. We're also responsible for their lives. Most of the Israelis who were shocked at the sight of Hussam Abdu have no idea, and are not at all interested in knowing, about the conditions in which the next generation of Palestinians is growing up. More than 25 percent of the children, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), suffer from chronic malnutrition. They live in a backward environmental - without community centers, computers, extracurricular activities, sports facilities, or playgrounds. No less serious are the traumatic incidents every Palestinian child is witness to. These children see their parents being humiliated and are exposed to violence and horror every day. Their nights are plagued with nightmares and their days are empty and depressing.Every brutal house search in the middle of the night and every contact with soldiers is a source of trauma. There is no Palestinian child who has not seen a house destroyed, an assassination operation, severe harassment or violence. They live in constant fear - that any moment soldiers will come, the tanks will enter and crush, the bulldozer will come and destroy, and the helicopter will fire a missile. Their fears are left untreated, just as their health and physical development are left unattended. As an occupier, we bear the responsibility for all of this.There is no need for incitement to instill hatred in these children. The daily sights they are exposed to constitute the greatest incitement. You don't need to promise too much to a child with this kind of life to make him want to commit suicide. Why shouldn't he want to? Because of his present life? Because of the future that awaits him? It's hard to know what motivated the child Hussam Abdu to put on an explosives belt. Virgins? The NIS 100 promised to his mother? But instead of being shocked by those who dispatched him, it would be better for us to focus on our responsibility for the conditions of his life. Whoever is truly concerned over the fate of Palestinian children should not only take interest when explosives belts are attached to their bodies.These children deserve a different fate. They deserve not to grow up among the rubble of their homes as children and be killed as teenagers - whether from a Palestinian explosives belt or from the bullet of an Israeli sniper. Both of these are cruel to exactly the same extent.
Monday, April 5
Thursday, March 25
MCC Palestine Update #98
MCC Palestine Update #98
March 25, 2004
[Note: the text below is the first of eight entries in a “Palestine Diary” on MCC’s website that will run over a two week period. Other entries will be written by MCC workers Ed Nyce (Bethlehem), Bob Herr (MCC Peace Office) and Molly Graver (MCC UN Office). You can access the Palestine Diary at http://www.mcc.org/palestinediary/]
Sometimes it pays to get an early start. On Monday morning, March 22, I left the house with Sam and Kate a little after 7 am, with them heading to school and me to visit the northern West Bank village of Zababdeh, where MCC's Global Family program provides support for the local Catholic school. If we'd left a half hour later, we'd have been stuck at home most of the morning. As news of Israel's extra-judicial killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin began to spread, demonstrators started coming out onto the streets in our neighborhood on the Mount of Olives. They were met by Israeli police, who eventually dispersed them with tear gas. Many roads in East Jerusalem, including in our neighborhood, were closed down.
While part of me wondered about the wisdom of travelling in the northern West Bank on the day of Sheikh Yassin's assassination, I also did not want the efforts I had made to coordinate passage to go wasted. As travel restrictions on Palestinians have become increasingly tight, international aid organizations such as MCC must coordinate with the Israeli military if we wish to enter the Gaza Strip or parts of the West Bank, such as the Jenin district, where Zababdeh is located. Any worries I had about driving through angry crowds of protestors proved unfounded. Apart from a few burning tires in the road on the way up and a march in Tubas on the way back, the villages I passed through were relatively quiet, with most stores keeping their doors open. When I get back home later in the day, however, I discover that East Jerusalem has completely shut down.
"We weren't sure that you would come!" said Father Aktham, parish priest and headmaster of the Latin Patriarchate School in Zababdeh as I drove up to the church. "We dismissed school after students finished their mid-term exams, because the Palestinian Authority has declared three days of mourning. But there are still students around the school. Let's go talk to them!" MCC's Global Family program provides scholarships to Christian students who otherwise would not be able to afford tuition at this Christian school. Joleen Daibes, a ninth grade girl with four siblings, is a case in point. Joleen's father has been out of work for three years now. The checkpoints, closures and curfews imposed by the Israeli military on West Bank villages such as Zababdeh have resulted in unemployment and poverty levels running well over fifty percent. Father Aktham does a quick calculation, and reports that less than one fourth of the school's budget is covered by tuition payments: fewer and fewer families in Zababdeh find that they can pay the full annual tuition of US$400. Joleen, a star English student and center for the school's girls' basketball team, and her three sisters and one brother, couldn't afford the school without scholarship assistance.
"It's a difficult challenge to preach the Gospel of peace and reconciliation in Palestine today," confesses Father Aktham, as an orderly procession of Muslims and Christians (mostly youth) winds its way through Zababdeh protesting Sheikh Yassin's assassination, a killing that claimed seven other lives. "At the church and at the school, we teach that we can hate what the Israelis are doing, we can hate occupation and dispossession, we can hate killing, but we don't hate Israelis. We're called to teach for a future of peace." If this future seemed farther than ever today in Palestine/Israel, I nevertheless end the day buoyed by Father Aktham's words, rejoicing in the continued Christian witness in this land to the Gospel of peace, justice, and reconciliation.
Below you will find three pieces, all regarding the extra-judicial killing of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin (and the "collateral damage" of seven other persons killed). The first is from Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, while the second and third come from Al-Haq and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, the leading Palestinian human rights organizations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, respectively.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Another red line is crossed
By Amira Hass
Haaretz, March 24, 2004
There are four or five people in Gaza who now make up what is known as Hamas leadership. The liquidation of each one of them would ensure greater security, say government, IDF and Shin Bet officials. The liquidation of each one of them, says experience, also justifies the killing of people around him, including aides, bodyguards, relatives, neighbors, children, fellow worshipers. Based on the order to assassinate Ahmed Yassin only after he left the mosque, one may understand that the IDF is convinced it is making an effort to minimise collateral damage. Based on these calculations, the fact that seven men who did not deserve death were killed along with Yassin is evidently no great tragedy. Therefore, if we have five leaders deserving of death, then another 35, or 30, or maybe 48 or even 61 deaths, if you throw in the Islamic Jihad targets, too, evidently is no great tragedy either.
Between each of these targeted assassinations, there are also bound to be botched attempts. Several more people will be killed in these attempts "by mistake." How many? Will it be 14, or 22, including three children? The IDF Spokesman will underscore the danger posed by a deserving-of-death terrorist who managed to slip away, and will itemise the list of terrorist attacks he planned, executed, and will execute. And we'll forget about the wounded baby or the worker who was heading home from the market and was killed (not to mention the people killed at protest demonstrations).
You don't need intelligence reports to realize that as far as Hamas is concerned, Yassin's assassination can be considered a "mega-attack" that will elicit a response of commensurate magnitude. Almost certainly, they will not succeed at getting to a high-ranking Israeli, threats notwithstanding. Conceivably, their objective could be a particularly high number of Israeli civilian casualties, instead. Israeli intelligence efforts are now focusing on exposing attempts to avenge Yassin's blood. These intelligence efforts will generate a succession of new deserving-of-death terrorists. Ten men suspected of planning? Twenty worthy of targeted assassination? Just how many people around them is it permissible to kill or injure? Eighty? One hundred?
Sooner or later, the next reprisal terrorist attack will come. Eleven Israeli victims, or 19, dozens of wounded, harsh scenes from the hospital, suffering of the families - these will prove the murderousness of the Palestinians, who kill Jews simply for being Jews. And this terrorist attack, or the one after it, which we will not forget and not forgive, will make it okay to cross another red line. On Monday, they waited for Yassin to leave the mosque. Is the day far off when the helicopter crew obeys an order to launch a missile or bomb at the mosque itself? After which it will be explained: there were four deserving-of-death terrorists inside, each with four armed escorts, and, anyway, the imam there refers to Jews as monkeys and pigs.
And will the day arrive when an Israeli pilot fires a missile or bomb at a Palestinian mourning procession because marching in its two front rows are ranking members of Palestinian organizations, and right behind them are 30 armed masked men waving Kalashnikovs or Qassam launchers? Will that happen after or before the attack on a Jewish target abroad, which would take place after Hamas understands how hard it is, under conditions of a closure, to execute a local terrorist attack?
That is when the new Hamas leaders will sprout. The fact that the intelligence briefings have yet to include them does not mean they do not exist and are not prepared to take risks, be interviewed on television, and become targets of Israeli assassinations. Will this raise the number of those not-deserving-death in their environs that it is permissible to kill to, say, 100? In response to two Palestinian suicide bombings that will snuff out the lives of 30 Israelis, or 50, and another 45 attacks in preparation and three that were foiled, would the payment of 1,000 Palestinians killed be considered a suitable, logical, acceptable tax?
Israel's military and technological superiority is obvious to every Hamas activist in the Gaza Strip who swears to take revenge. The thousands who are prepared to commit suicide are well aware that they have nil (no real) chance of getting out of the Gaza Strip, and that most of them will be killed before managing to reach a nearby settlement. In Israel, military superiority was once presented as a precondition for any diplomatic settlement. But in effect it is the substitute that makes any diplomatic settlement superfluous.
Consciously or not, this superiority is hidden from the eyes of the average Israeli, who welcomes the assassination of Yassin, but is scared to death of the next terrorist attack. For many, this personal fear is translated into the deceptive sense that Israel itself faces existential threat. The Israeli government seemingly cultivates this fear of
existential threat. Therefore, this personal fear is an important factor in the ability of the Israeli military-intelligence-settlement elite, which is aware of its superiority, to cross another red line. It knows it has the backing of a majority of the Israeli public, which is convinced that this time, but really this time, the targeted assassination will bring us closer to a respite and to Palestinian surrender.
2. Al-Haq
22 March 2004
Press Release
For Immediate Release
Al-Haq condemns the Targeted Assassination of Skeikh Ahmed Yassin, and calls upon the International Community to immediately intervene to protect the Palestinian Civilian Population
Al-Haq condemns today’s killing of the political and spiritual leader of Hamas Sheikh Amed Yassin. In what Israeli Military spokesmen referred to as a targeted attack, Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at 67 year-old Sheikh Yassin as he returned from day-break morning prayers, and directly hit him in his wheelchair, 30-50 metres away from the mosque. Other than Yassin, the indiscriminate killing resulted in 7 more deaths and 20 injuries amongst Palestinian civilians, 5 of which are serious. The events of today took place at a time when no clashes were
reported in the Gaza Strip.
The recent attack on the life of Hamas_ leader Sheik Amed Yassin points
towards a serious escalation in the Israeli killing of Palestinian
political leaders during Israeli military attacks. Officially endorsed
by Israel_s government and military command structures at the highest
levels, Israeli Defence Minister Shaoul Mofaz vowed that Israel will
continue its policy of targeted assassinations as part of a campaign
against Hamas.
On 9 March 2004, following the most recent Israeli attack against the
Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps, Al-Haq had warned the international
community in its Action Alert of 9 March 2004, of the deteriorating
situation in the Gaza Strip and the grave consequences of the persisting
Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilian areas. Since Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon indicated his government_s intention to
unilaterally pull-out from the Gaza Strip in December 2003, tens of
Palestinian civilians have been victims of Israeli policy of targeted
assassinations throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
Israel_s practice of wilful killings and targeted assassinations of
Palestinian political leaders constitutes a grave breach of provisions
of humanitarian law. The assassination of Sheikh Yassin is in flagrant
violation of the right to life as stipulated in Article 23 of the Hague
Regulations and Common Article 3 to the Four Geneva Conventions Relative
to the Protection of Civilians in Times of War, both of which reflect
customary international law. The attack signals that Israel failed to
give utmost consideration to the civilian nature and status of
Palestinian residential areas, and therefore to cease all attacks on
them. Furthermore the heavy casualties amongst civilians following the
attack were the direct result of Israel_s excessive and disproportionate
use of force in the vicinity of a mosque, and which took place only
minutes following morning prayers. As an Occupying Power, Israel is
legally obliged to distinguish at all times between civilians and
combatants. The fact that Sheikh Yassin is one of the most prominent
Palestinian spiritual and political leaders shows that this practice is
used in part as a measure of collective punishment and/or intimidation
of the Palestinian civilian population, prohibited under Article 33 of
the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Wilful killings are a grave breach under Article 147 of the Fourth
Geneva Convention, and are war crimes for which there is mandatory
universal jurisdiction. It is high time that the High Contracting
Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention make a serious attempt to uphold
their obligation vis-Ã -vis the Palestinian civilian populations as
stipulated in Article 146 of the Convention that _[e]ach High
Contracting Party shall be under the obligation to search for persons
alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such
grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their
nationality, before its own courts._
The assassination of Sheikh Yassin also constitutes a blatant violation
of international human rights law. In its 2003 Concluding Observations,
the Human Rights Committee had expressed serious concern with _targeted
killings_ of those identified by Israel as suspected _terrorists_ in the
OPT, and deemed it to be an arbitrary denial of the right to life, and a
breach of Israel_s obligation under the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights.
It also confirms Al-Haq_s fears that the actions of the Israeli military
authorities _speak louder than words_ and that their official
proclamations regarding the intention to withdraw from the Gaza Strip
and evacuate existing Israeli settlements are mere rhetoric intended to
divert the attention of the international community from the systematic
violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which they
continue to commit against Palestinian civilians. As the upheaval in the
OPT provoked by the assassination confirms, such actions counter Israeli
claims that they seek to de-escalate the situation and that they are
working towards the achievement of peace and stability in the region.
Al-Haq views with grave concern the assassination of Sheikh Yassin and
others and calls upon:
1. the United Nations (UN) Security Council to convene an emergency
session to fulfil its legal obligations under the UN Charter to maintain
peace and security, in order to respond to the grave consequences of
Israeli deliberate methods of targeted assassinations against
Palestinians.
2. the International community through the UN General Assembly to
intervene with the Israeli authorities to ensure the protection of the
Palestinian civilian population in the OPT
3. the High Contracting Parties to put an end to the consistent
lack of full and fair investigations into ongoing violations committed
by the Israeli authorities by ensuring that their judicial authorities
open prosecution briefs on wilful killings in the Israeli occupied
territories, and to bring those responsible for such grave breaches to
justice.
3. PCHR
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights -Press Release
Ref: 51/2004 Date: 22 March 2004 Time: 08:30 GMT
Israeli Occupying Forces Assassinate Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
In an act of state terrorism, on Monday morning, 22 March 2004, Israeli
occupying forces assassinated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, 66, founder and
political leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), immediately
after he had left the mosque after finishing the dawn prayer. In
addition to Sheikh Yassin, 7 Palestinian civilians, including 3 of
Sheikh Yassin's bodyguards, were killed and 17 others injured, including
two of Sheikh Yassin's sons. This illegal and belligerent act is an
actual implementation of the Israeli authorities' threats to assassinate
Sheikh Yassin, which were recently articulated by Israeli political and
military officials. This is the second use of illegal and excessive
force of its kind committed by Israeli occupying forces against a top
figure in a Palestinian organization, as Israeli occupying forces
previously assassinated the Secretary General of the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine Abu 'Ali Mustafa in Ramallah on 27 August
2001.
According to preliminary investigations conducted by PCHR, at
approximately 05:20 on Monday morning, Israeli helicopter gunships
launched 3 missiles at Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, 66, an elderly disabled man,
after he had left the Islamic Association Mosque in the densely
populated al-Sabra neighborhood in the center of Gaza city, after the
dawn payer. Sheikh Yassin was traveling on his wheelchair accompanied
by 3 bodyguards, when one of the missiles directly hit Sheikh Yassin and
his bodyguards. The other two missiles exploded in the surrounding area
and killed 4 other civilians. In addition to those killed, 17 civilians
were injured, including Sheikh Yassin's two sons: 'Abdul Hamid, 33; and
'Abdul Ghani, 29. Four children were among those injured. 'Abdul Hamid
and 5 of the injured remain in serious condition. All of the casualties
were worshippers who had just left the mosque following the dawn prayer.
The other 7 victims killed were identified as:
1. Mo'men Ibrahim al-Yazouri, 28;
2. Rateb 'Abdul Rahman al-'Aloul, 35;
3. Khamis Mushtaha, 32;
4. Ameer Ahmed 'Abdul 'Aal, 25;
5. Rabi' 'Abdul Hai 'Abdul 'Aal, 18, a bodyguard of Sheikh Yassin;
6. Ayoub Ahmed 'Atallah, 26, a bodyguard of Sheikh Yassin;
7. Khalil 'Abdul Elah Abu Jayab, 30, a bodyguard of Sheikh Yassin.
Israeli media reported after the incident that Israeli official sources
announced that the assassination was approved by the Israeli government
and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon himself supervised the attack.
Sheikh Yassin had survived a previous assassination attempt on 6
September 2003, when Israeli warplanes attacked an apartment building in
which Sheikh Yassin and Isma'il Haniya, another leader of Hamas, were
present. The two leaders were lightly injured during that incident.
PCHR strongly condemns this illegal and excessive use of force, which
was committed in the context of the policy of extra-judicial
assassination officially adopted by the Israeli government, in violation
of international law and humanitarian law. PCHR believes that this
horrific act further proves that the Israeli government continues its
aggression contrary to its misleading claims of seeking peace. Such
actions signify that the Israeli government and Prime Minister Sharon
have decided to intentionally escalate tension in the whole region.
PCHR calls upon international community to immediately intervene to
prevent further deterioration in the region and provide protection for
the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who face
the destructive Israeli arsenal that is unwilling to respect
international humanitarian and human rights law.
March 25, 2004
[Note: the text below is the first of eight entries in a “Palestine Diary” on MCC’s website that will run over a two week period. Other entries will be written by MCC workers Ed Nyce (Bethlehem), Bob Herr (MCC Peace Office) and Molly Graver (MCC UN Office). You can access the Palestine Diary at http://www.mcc.org/palestinediary/]
Sometimes it pays to get an early start. On Monday morning, March 22, I left the house with Sam and Kate a little after 7 am, with them heading to school and me to visit the northern West Bank village of Zababdeh, where MCC's Global Family program provides support for the local Catholic school. If we'd left a half hour later, we'd have been stuck at home most of the morning. As news of Israel's extra-judicial killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin began to spread, demonstrators started coming out onto the streets in our neighborhood on the Mount of Olives. They were met by Israeli police, who eventually dispersed them with tear gas. Many roads in East Jerusalem, including in our neighborhood, were closed down.
While part of me wondered about the wisdom of travelling in the northern West Bank on the day of Sheikh Yassin's assassination, I also did not want the efforts I had made to coordinate passage to go wasted. As travel restrictions on Palestinians have become increasingly tight, international aid organizations such as MCC must coordinate with the Israeli military if we wish to enter the Gaza Strip or parts of the West Bank, such as the Jenin district, where Zababdeh is located. Any worries I had about driving through angry crowds of protestors proved unfounded. Apart from a few burning tires in the road on the way up and a march in Tubas on the way back, the villages I passed through were relatively quiet, with most stores keeping their doors open. When I get back home later in the day, however, I discover that East Jerusalem has completely shut down.
"We weren't sure that you would come!" said Father Aktham, parish priest and headmaster of the Latin Patriarchate School in Zababdeh as I drove up to the church. "We dismissed school after students finished their mid-term exams, because the Palestinian Authority has declared three days of mourning. But there are still students around the school. Let's go talk to them!" MCC's Global Family program provides scholarships to Christian students who otherwise would not be able to afford tuition at this Christian school. Joleen Daibes, a ninth grade girl with four siblings, is a case in point. Joleen's father has been out of work for three years now. The checkpoints, closures and curfews imposed by the Israeli military on West Bank villages such as Zababdeh have resulted in unemployment and poverty levels running well over fifty percent. Father Aktham does a quick calculation, and reports that less than one fourth of the school's budget is covered by tuition payments: fewer and fewer families in Zababdeh find that they can pay the full annual tuition of US$400. Joleen, a star English student and center for the school's girls' basketball team, and her three sisters and one brother, couldn't afford the school without scholarship assistance.
"It's a difficult challenge to preach the Gospel of peace and reconciliation in Palestine today," confesses Father Aktham, as an orderly procession of Muslims and Christians (mostly youth) winds its way through Zababdeh protesting Sheikh Yassin's assassination, a killing that claimed seven other lives. "At the church and at the school, we teach that we can hate what the Israelis are doing, we can hate occupation and dispossession, we can hate killing, but we don't hate Israelis. We're called to teach for a future of peace." If this future seemed farther than ever today in Palestine/Israel, I nevertheless end the day buoyed by Father Aktham's words, rejoicing in the continued Christian witness in this land to the Gospel of peace, justice, and reconciliation.
Below you will find three pieces, all regarding the extra-judicial killing of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin (and the "collateral damage" of seven other persons killed). The first is from Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, while the second and third come from Al-Haq and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, the leading Palestinian human rights organizations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, respectively.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Another red line is crossed
By Amira Hass
Haaretz, March 24, 2004
There are four or five people in Gaza who now make up what is known as Hamas leadership. The liquidation of each one of them would ensure greater security, say government, IDF and Shin Bet officials. The liquidation of each one of them, says experience, also justifies the killing of people around him, including aides, bodyguards, relatives, neighbors, children, fellow worshipers. Based on the order to assassinate Ahmed Yassin only after he left the mosque, one may understand that the IDF is convinced it is making an effort to minimise collateral damage. Based on these calculations, the fact that seven men who did not deserve death were killed along with Yassin is evidently no great tragedy. Therefore, if we have five leaders deserving of death, then another 35, or 30, or maybe 48 or even 61 deaths, if you throw in the Islamic Jihad targets, too, evidently is no great tragedy either.
Between each of these targeted assassinations, there are also bound to be botched attempts. Several more people will be killed in these attempts "by mistake." How many? Will it be 14, or 22, including three children? The IDF Spokesman will underscore the danger posed by a deserving-of-death terrorist who managed to slip away, and will itemise the list of terrorist attacks he planned, executed, and will execute. And we'll forget about the wounded baby or the worker who was heading home from the market and was killed (not to mention the people killed at protest demonstrations).
You don't need intelligence reports to realize that as far as Hamas is concerned, Yassin's assassination can be considered a "mega-attack" that will elicit a response of commensurate magnitude. Almost certainly, they will not succeed at getting to a high-ranking Israeli, threats notwithstanding. Conceivably, their objective could be a particularly high number of Israeli civilian casualties, instead. Israeli intelligence efforts are now focusing on exposing attempts to avenge Yassin's blood. These intelligence efforts will generate a succession of new deserving-of-death terrorists. Ten men suspected of planning? Twenty worthy of targeted assassination? Just how many people around them is it permissible to kill or injure? Eighty? One hundred?
Sooner or later, the next reprisal terrorist attack will come. Eleven Israeli victims, or 19, dozens of wounded, harsh scenes from the hospital, suffering of the families - these will prove the murderousness of the Palestinians, who kill Jews simply for being Jews. And this terrorist attack, or the one after it, which we will not forget and not forgive, will make it okay to cross another red line. On Monday, they waited for Yassin to leave the mosque. Is the day far off when the helicopter crew obeys an order to launch a missile or bomb at the mosque itself? After which it will be explained: there were four deserving-of-death terrorists inside, each with four armed escorts, and, anyway, the imam there refers to Jews as monkeys and pigs.
And will the day arrive when an Israeli pilot fires a missile or bomb at a Palestinian mourning procession because marching in its two front rows are ranking members of Palestinian organizations, and right behind them are 30 armed masked men waving Kalashnikovs or Qassam launchers? Will that happen after or before the attack on a Jewish target abroad, which would take place after Hamas understands how hard it is, under conditions of a closure, to execute a local terrorist attack?
That is when the new Hamas leaders will sprout. The fact that the intelligence briefings have yet to include them does not mean they do not exist and are not prepared to take risks, be interviewed on television, and become targets of Israeli assassinations. Will this raise the number of those not-deserving-death in their environs that it is permissible to kill to, say, 100? In response to two Palestinian suicide bombings that will snuff out the lives of 30 Israelis, or 50, and another 45 attacks in preparation and three that were foiled, would the payment of 1,000 Palestinians killed be considered a suitable, logical, acceptable tax?
Israel's military and technological superiority is obvious to every Hamas activist in the Gaza Strip who swears to take revenge. The thousands who are prepared to commit suicide are well aware that they have nil (no real) chance of getting out of the Gaza Strip, and that most of them will be killed before managing to reach a nearby settlement. In Israel, military superiority was once presented as a precondition for any diplomatic settlement. But in effect it is the substitute that makes any diplomatic settlement superfluous.
Consciously or not, this superiority is hidden from the eyes of the average Israeli, who welcomes the assassination of Yassin, but is scared to death of the next terrorist attack. For many, this personal fear is translated into the deceptive sense that Israel itself faces existential threat. The Israeli government seemingly cultivates this fear of
existential threat. Therefore, this personal fear is an important factor in the ability of the Israeli military-intelligence-settlement elite, which is aware of its superiority, to cross another red line. It knows it has the backing of a majority of the Israeli public, which is convinced that this time, but really this time, the targeted assassination will bring us closer to a respite and to Palestinian surrender.
2. Al-Haq
22 March 2004
Press Release
For Immediate Release
Al-Haq condemns the Targeted Assassination of Skeikh Ahmed Yassin, and calls upon the International Community to immediately intervene to protect the Palestinian Civilian Population
Al-Haq condemns today’s killing of the political and spiritual leader of Hamas Sheikh Amed Yassin. In what Israeli Military spokesmen referred to as a targeted attack, Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at 67 year-old Sheikh Yassin as he returned from day-break morning prayers, and directly hit him in his wheelchair, 30-50 metres away from the mosque. Other than Yassin, the indiscriminate killing resulted in 7 more deaths and 20 injuries amongst Palestinian civilians, 5 of which are serious. The events of today took place at a time when no clashes were
reported in the Gaza Strip.
The recent attack on the life of Hamas_ leader Sheik Amed Yassin points
towards a serious escalation in the Israeli killing of Palestinian
political leaders during Israeli military attacks. Officially endorsed
by Israel_s government and military command structures at the highest
levels, Israeli Defence Minister Shaoul Mofaz vowed that Israel will
continue its policy of targeted assassinations as part of a campaign
against Hamas.
On 9 March 2004, following the most recent Israeli attack against the
Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps, Al-Haq had warned the international
community in its Action Alert of 9 March 2004, of the deteriorating
situation in the Gaza Strip and the grave consequences of the persisting
Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilian areas. Since Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon indicated his government_s intention to
unilaterally pull-out from the Gaza Strip in December 2003, tens of
Palestinian civilians have been victims of Israeli policy of targeted
assassinations throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
Israel_s practice of wilful killings and targeted assassinations of
Palestinian political leaders constitutes a grave breach of provisions
of humanitarian law. The assassination of Sheikh Yassin is in flagrant
violation of the right to life as stipulated in Article 23 of the Hague
Regulations and Common Article 3 to the Four Geneva Conventions Relative
to the Protection of Civilians in Times of War, both of which reflect
customary international law. The attack signals that Israel failed to
give utmost consideration to the civilian nature and status of
Palestinian residential areas, and therefore to cease all attacks on
them. Furthermore the heavy casualties amongst civilians following the
attack were the direct result of Israel_s excessive and disproportionate
use of force in the vicinity of a mosque, and which took place only
minutes following morning prayers. As an Occupying Power, Israel is
legally obliged to distinguish at all times between civilians and
combatants. The fact that Sheikh Yassin is one of the most prominent
Palestinian spiritual and political leaders shows that this practice is
used in part as a measure of collective punishment and/or intimidation
of the Palestinian civilian population, prohibited under Article 33 of
the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Wilful killings are a grave breach under Article 147 of the Fourth
Geneva Convention, and are war crimes for which there is mandatory
universal jurisdiction. It is high time that the High Contracting
Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention make a serious attempt to uphold
their obligation vis-Ã -vis the Palestinian civilian populations as
stipulated in Article 146 of the Convention that _[e]ach High
Contracting Party shall be under the obligation to search for persons
alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such
grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their
nationality, before its own courts._
The assassination of Sheikh Yassin also constitutes a blatant violation
of international human rights law. In its 2003 Concluding Observations,
the Human Rights Committee had expressed serious concern with _targeted
killings_ of those identified by Israel as suspected _terrorists_ in the
OPT, and deemed it to be an arbitrary denial of the right to life, and a
breach of Israel_s obligation under the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights.
It also confirms Al-Haq_s fears that the actions of the Israeli military
authorities _speak louder than words_ and that their official
proclamations regarding the intention to withdraw from the Gaza Strip
and evacuate existing Israeli settlements are mere rhetoric intended to
divert the attention of the international community from the systematic
violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which they
continue to commit against Palestinian civilians. As the upheaval in the
OPT provoked by the assassination confirms, such actions counter Israeli
claims that they seek to de-escalate the situation and that they are
working towards the achievement of peace and stability in the region.
Al-Haq views with grave concern the assassination of Sheikh Yassin and
others and calls upon:
1. the United Nations (UN) Security Council to convene an emergency
session to fulfil its legal obligations under the UN Charter to maintain
peace and security, in order to respond to the grave consequences of
Israeli deliberate methods of targeted assassinations against
Palestinians.
2. the International community through the UN General Assembly to
intervene with the Israeli authorities to ensure the protection of the
Palestinian civilian population in the OPT
3. the High Contracting Parties to put an end to the consistent
lack of full and fair investigations into ongoing violations committed
by the Israeli authorities by ensuring that their judicial authorities
open prosecution briefs on wilful killings in the Israeli occupied
territories, and to bring those responsible for such grave breaches to
justice.
3. PCHR
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights -Press Release
Ref: 51/2004 Date: 22 March 2004 Time: 08:30 GMT
Israeli Occupying Forces Assassinate Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
In an act of state terrorism, on Monday morning, 22 March 2004, Israeli
occupying forces assassinated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, 66, founder and
political leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), immediately
after he had left the mosque after finishing the dawn prayer. In
addition to Sheikh Yassin, 7 Palestinian civilians, including 3 of
Sheikh Yassin's bodyguards, were killed and 17 others injured, including
two of Sheikh Yassin's sons. This illegal and belligerent act is an
actual implementation of the Israeli authorities' threats to assassinate
Sheikh Yassin, which were recently articulated by Israeli political and
military officials. This is the second use of illegal and excessive
force of its kind committed by Israeli occupying forces against a top
figure in a Palestinian organization, as Israeli occupying forces
previously assassinated the Secretary General of the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine Abu 'Ali Mustafa in Ramallah on 27 August
2001.
According to preliminary investigations conducted by PCHR, at
approximately 05:20 on Monday morning, Israeli helicopter gunships
launched 3 missiles at Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, 66, an elderly disabled man,
after he had left the Islamic Association Mosque in the densely
populated al-Sabra neighborhood in the center of Gaza city, after the
dawn payer. Sheikh Yassin was traveling on his wheelchair accompanied
by 3 bodyguards, when one of the missiles directly hit Sheikh Yassin and
his bodyguards. The other two missiles exploded in the surrounding area
and killed 4 other civilians. In addition to those killed, 17 civilians
were injured, including Sheikh Yassin's two sons: 'Abdul Hamid, 33; and
'Abdul Ghani, 29. Four children were among those injured. 'Abdul Hamid
and 5 of the injured remain in serious condition. All of the casualties
were worshippers who had just left the mosque following the dawn prayer.
The other 7 victims killed were identified as:
1. Mo'men Ibrahim al-Yazouri, 28;
2. Rateb 'Abdul Rahman al-'Aloul, 35;
3. Khamis Mushtaha, 32;
4. Ameer Ahmed 'Abdul 'Aal, 25;
5. Rabi' 'Abdul Hai 'Abdul 'Aal, 18, a bodyguard of Sheikh Yassin;
6. Ayoub Ahmed 'Atallah, 26, a bodyguard of Sheikh Yassin;
7. Khalil 'Abdul Elah Abu Jayab, 30, a bodyguard of Sheikh Yassin.
Israeli media reported after the incident that Israeli official sources
announced that the assassination was approved by the Israeli government
and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon himself supervised the attack.
Sheikh Yassin had survived a previous assassination attempt on 6
September 2003, when Israeli warplanes attacked an apartment building in
which Sheikh Yassin and Isma'il Haniya, another leader of Hamas, were
present. The two leaders were lightly injured during that incident.
PCHR strongly condemns this illegal and excessive use of force, which
was committed in the context of the policy of extra-judicial
assassination officially adopted by the Israeli government, in violation
of international law and humanitarian law. PCHR believes that this
horrific act further proves that the Israeli government continues its
aggression contrary to its misleading claims of seeking peace. Such
actions signify that the Israeli government and Prime Minister Sharon
have decided to intentionally escalate tension in the whole region.
PCHR calls upon international community to immediately intervene to
prevent further deterioration in the region and provide protection for
the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who face
the destructive Israeli arsenal that is unwilling to respect
international humanitarian and human rights law.
Thursday, March 11
MCC Palestine Update #97
MCC Palestine Update #97
March 11, 2004
This past Advent season multiple cartoons ran in newspapers locally and worldwide of the wise men, or Mary and Joseph, or Santa Claus stymied trying to enter Bethlehem by an 8 meter high concrete wall. Nitpickers might have complained that the form the separation barrier took around Bethlehem was in the form of razor wire, patrol roads, and electronic fences instead of a concrete wall. The nitpickers, unfortunately, now have no nits to pick, as within the past 10 days Israel has begun installing the 8 meter concrete slabs—the ones that already run through many of East Jerusalem's neighboring villages and around parts of Qalqilyah—in northern Bethlehem. Thanks to walls, fences, and razor wire, the Bethlehem district has been progressively transformed into a prison: speak with anyone in Bethlehem, Christian or Muslim, and the horror and shock at the wall as it goes up is palpable. Bethlehem is being severed from its sister-city of Jerusalem; its economic future is being increasingly constrained; almost all land for urban expansion has been cut off.
The Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ), an MCC partner organization located less than two blocks from the new concrete slab barrier, has produced the following resources for background on the separation wall:
1. http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Bethlehem%204-03-04/index.htm
This brief update looks at the construction of the separation wall in northern Bethlehem.
2. http://www.arij.org/Presentations/Unilateral.zip/
This file contains a powerful slide show detailing how the Israeli government's "unilateral separation" plan is a way for Israel to consolidate its occupation of the West Bank.
3. http://www.arij.org/paleye/Segregation-Wall/index.htm
This book-length study examines in meticulous detail how the separation wall is part and parcel of Israeli colonization of the occupied territories and how its construction (coupled with ongoing settlement growth and expansion) is undermining any hope for a peaceful settlement between Palestinians and Israelis.
In these days of walls and fences, it is very easy to give in to despair, hopelessness, even cynicism. A powerful antidote to such temptations is the ongoing witness of the Palestinian churches. In this time of fasting, prayer and penitence, therefore, I have included below the Lenten message from Msgr. Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. This Lent, please join Msgr. Sabbah and the entire Palestinian church in prayer for peace, justice, and reconciliation.
--Alain Epp Weaver
LATIN PATRIARCHATE – JERUSALEM
Message for Lent 2004
Our spiritual life
1. The time of fasting is a time of repentance and return to God. It is a time of presence before God. “The Kingdom of God is among you”, Jesus says. God is present among you. All your life and not just during Lent, should be a time of perpetual purification in order to better perceive God among yourselves and in all His creatures, beginning with every brother and sister who has a part in your daily life.
Fasting is a spiritual path in the life of the believer, in the midst of daily preoccupations and the complexities of life, of its joys and its trials. The Spirit of God that sustains us and gives us the true strength to persevere and remain constant in our daily spiritual combat is our guide in the building up of the Kingdom of God on earth. Thus, every land and every parish might indeed become the abode of God on earth and a holy land.
In the daily life of the believer there is faith. However, there is also a perpetual combat with various challenges, both within us and in every manifestation of evil in our society. After forty days of fasting, the tempter says to Jesus: “Tell these stones to become loaves of bread” (Mt 4:3). In Jesus’ response: “Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”, we understand that material needs need not become an obstacle to listening to the word of God. It is the word that reminds us of God’s presence within us. The construction of God’s Kingdom is to be pursued in all circumstances, whether easy or difficult. God’s grace shall be given us in all circumstances, whether easy or difficult. “My grace is enough for you” (2Cor 12:9), God says to Saint Paul, who was also struggling between weaknesses in the face of evil within himself and the grace of God who had called him to preach the Gospel.
The criterion of a just Christian life, which is on the path to sanctity, is in the accomplishment of the single commandment that Jesus left us: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 19:19). If we want to know whether we are on the right path or not, we must question ourselves, we must review our positions and our behaviors, in order to see whether we really love our neighbor. It is he or she who shows us and tells us, according to our actions and our feelings with regards to him or her, whether we are on the right path or not. This neighbor is every neighbor without exception, every person in our life, a member of our church or of another church or of another religion. Christian love, conforming to the love of God, has no limits. Jesus says: “You must be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). Elsewhere, he also says: “Love one another just as I have loved you” (Jn 13:34). The example that must be imitated is God’s example, nothing less. If Jesus gives us this commandment it means that we are capable of fulfilling it and he will give us the grace to sustain us and make us capable of imitating him. Just as God loves all God’s creatures, so we too love all our brothers and sisters, members of all churches, belonging to all religions.
Fasting is to return to God and thereby to return to all our brothers and sisters. It is to rid ourselves of all the evils that have accumulated in us, so that we acquire the strength of the Spirit in order to be strong in all the areas of our life. The others will then respect our strength, which will be then the fruit of love and not the fruit of pride or the oppression of others.
The conflict in the Holy Land in our lives in these days
2. Lent is a time of sharing. In the difficult times we are living and in face of the various deprivations imposed on many, sharing is a duty. On the other hand, and spiritually speaking, we cannot build up the Kingdom of God that is among us alone. We build it up with all those that suffer. By living, within our souls and within our prayers, the oppression of some and the fears of others and by becoming conscious of our part in the responsibility for putting an end to this, we carry out our Lent. Thus we are involved in constructing the Kingdom of God among us and within our society that is at war.
The circumstances within society that we have to face in the Holy Land are in fact circumstances of war: siege imposed on all, death imposed on some, prison and torture, various deprivations, house demolitions, destruction of agriculture, attacks and killings of innocent victims. In the midst of all this, our life is a difficult and painful search for justice and peace. It is an unceasing demand to put an end to oppression and fear and to the cycle of violence that is their consequence. One day, God will get rid of all these but human beings will do this as well. We will participate with God, each of us, by refusing both the oppression of a people and the spilling of innocent blood, and leaders too, through their wisdom and their lack of vested interests, becoming the servants of the people instead of serving themselves and their own interests.
Those responsible for war in this land seem to be acting in these days as if they were planning for a permanent war and not for a permanent peace. However, the human person in this land is not called to live in a state of permanent war. God has said: Live in the land in peace, peace with God, who chose the land for his abode, and peace with those who live in it. Peace cannot be established while oppression and the violence that results from it continue. Depriving a people of its liberty and of its land is oppression that no conscience can accept. Likewise, no conscience can accept killing innocent people in order to protest oppression. Let us not become twofold victims of the war, first victims of material destruction and second, victims of a hatred that demolishes the human person, Palestinian or Israeli. No person is better than another when he or she is transformed into a carrier of hatred and revenge. Sadly, this is what is happening in this land, holy for the three religions and towards which the entire world looks because it is holy. This is why those who impose oppression have the duty to put an end to it so that the land might then know the security and peace that are so much desired.
Parish priests and men and women religious in the various parishes spend long hours at the military checkpoints in order to carry out their pastoral work in their parishes and throughout the diocese. We say to them: be patient and pray to God for every human person, Palestinian or Israeli. Make your trial a prayer for all, for all those who suffer on both sides of the conflict. Your trial is little compared to death, torture, attacks, demolitions that are faced by so many other victims. Accept these difficulties as a sharing with all the poor ones of this land, to whom God has sent us in order that we might serve them and share in their sufferings and their hopes.
Brothers and sisters,
3. Lent, a time of fasting and prayer, is a time to return to God. It is a time to be conscious of the Kingdom of God that is among us and that we are to establish in our society. It is a time when all believers in God might be filled both by His love and His force.
In the difficulties we face, let us continue to live and to believe. St Cyril of Jerusalem used to say to his faithful, who also were carrying a difficult cross at that time: “Do not rejoice in the cross in time of peace only, but hold fast to the same faith in time of persecution also. Do not be a friend of Jesus in time of peace only but also in time of persecution” (St Cyril of Jerusalem, 2nd reading, 4th week of the year).
+ Michel Sabbah, Patriarch
Jerusalem, Ash Wednesday
25.2.2004
March 11, 2004
This past Advent season multiple cartoons ran in newspapers locally and worldwide of the wise men, or Mary and Joseph, or Santa Claus stymied trying to enter Bethlehem by an 8 meter high concrete wall. Nitpickers might have complained that the form the separation barrier took around Bethlehem was in the form of razor wire, patrol roads, and electronic fences instead of a concrete wall. The nitpickers, unfortunately, now have no nits to pick, as within the past 10 days Israel has begun installing the 8 meter concrete slabs—the ones that already run through many of East Jerusalem's neighboring villages and around parts of Qalqilyah—in northern Bethlehem. Thanks to walls, fences, and razor wire, the Bethlehem district has been progressively transformed into a prison: speak with anyone in Bethlehem, Christian or Muslim, and the horror and shock at the wall as it goes up is palpable. Bethlehem is being severed from its sister-city of Jerusalem; its economic future is being increasingly constrained; almost all land for urban expansion has been cut off.
The Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ), an MCC partner organization located less than two blocks from the new concrete slab barrier, has produced the following resources for background on the separation wall:
1. http://www.poica.org/casestudies/Bethlehem%204-03-04/index.htm
This brief update looks at the construction of the separation wall in northern Bethlehem.
2. http://www.arij.org/Presentations/Unilateral.zip/
This file contains a powerful slide show detailing how the Israeli government's "unilateral separation" plan is a way for Israel to consolidate its occupation of the West Bank.
3. http://www.arij.org/paleye/Segregation-Wall/index.htm
This book-length study examines in meticulous detail how the separation wall is part and parcel of Israeli colonization of the occupied territories and how its construction (coupled with ongoing settlement growth and expansion) is undermining any hope for a peaceful settlement between Palestinians and Israelis.
In these days of walls and fences, it is very easy to give in to despair, hopelessness, even cynicism. A powerful antidote to such temptations is the ongoing witness of the Palestinian churches. In this time of fasting, prayer and penitence, therefore, I have included below the Lenten message from Msgr. Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. This Lent, please join Msgr. Sabbah and the entire Palestinian church in prayer for peace, justice, and reconciliation.
--Alain Epp Weaver
LATIN PATRIARCHATE – JERUSALEM
Message for Lent 2004
Our spiritual life
1. The time of fasting is a time of repentance and return to God. It is a time of presence before God. “The Kingdom of God is among you”, Jesus says. God is present among you. All your life and not just during Lent, should be a time of perpetual purification in order to better perceive God among yourselves and in all His creatures, beginning with every brother and sister who has a part in your daily life.
Fasting is a spiritual path in the life of the believer, in the midst of daily preoccupations and the complexities of life, of its joys and its trials. The Spirit of God that sustains us and gives us the true strength to persevere and remain constant in our daily spiritual combat is our guide in the building up of the Kingdom of God on earth. Thus, every land and every parish might indeed become the abode of God on earth and a holy land.
In the daily life of the believer there is faith. However, there is also a perpetual combat with various challenges, both within us and in every manifestation of evil in our society. After forty days of fasting, the tempter says to Jesus: “Tell these stones to become loaves of bread” (Mt 4:3). In Jesus’ response: “Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”, we understand that material needs need not become an obstacle to listening to the word of God. It is the word that reminds us of God’s presence within us. The construction of God’s Kingdom is to be pursued in all circumstances, whether easy or difficult. God’s grace shall be given us in all circumstances, whether easy or difficult. “My grace is enough for you” (2Cor 12:9), God says to Saint Paul, who was also struggling between weaknesses in the face of evil within himself and the grace of God who had called him to preach the Gospel.
The criterion of a just Christian life, which is on the path to sanctity, is in the accomplishment of the single commandment that Jesus left us: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 19:19). If we want to know whether we are on the right path or not, we must question ourselves, we must review our positions and our behaviors, in order to see whether we really love our neighbor. It is he or she who shows us and tells us, according to our actions and our feelings with regards to him or her, whether we are on the right path or not. This neighbor is every neighbor without exception, every person in our life, a member of our church or of another church or of another religion. Christian love, conforming to the love of God, has no limits. Jesus says: “You must be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). Elsewhere, he also says: “Love one another just as I have loved you” (Jn 13:34). The example that must be imitated is God’s example, nothing less. If Jesus gives us this commandment it means that we are capable of fulfilling it and he will give us the grace to sustain us and make us capable of imitating him. Just as God loves all God’s creatures, so we too love all our brothers and sisters, members of all churches, belonging to all religions.
Fasting is to return to God and thereby to return to all our brothers and sisters. It is to rid ourselves of all the evils that have accumulated in us, so that we acquire the strength of the Spirit in order to be strong in all the areas of our life. The others will then respect our strength, which will be then the fruit of love and not the fruit of pride or the oppression of others.
The conflict in the Holy Land in our lives in these days
2. Lent is a time of sharing. In the difficult times we are living and in face of the various deprivations imposed on many, sharing is a duty. On the other hand, and spiritually speaking, we cannot build up the Kingdom of God that is among us alone. We build it up with all those that suffer. By living, within our souls and within our prayers, the oppression of some and the fears of others and by becoming conscious of our part in the responsibility for putting an end to this, we carry out our Lent. Thus we are involved in constructing the Kingdom of God among us and within our society that is at war.
The circumstances within society that we have to face in the Holy Land are in fact circumstances of war: siege imposed on all, death imposed on some, prison and torture, various deprivations, house demolitions, destruction of agriculture, attacks and killings of innocent victims. In the midst of all this, our life is a difficult and painful search for justice and peace. It is an unceasing demand to put an end to oppression and fear and to the cycle of violence that is their consequence. One day, God will get rid of all these but human beings will do this as well. We will participate with God, each of us, by refusing both the oppression of a people and the spilling of innocent blood, and leaders too, through their wisdom and their lack of vested interests, becoming the servants of the people instead of serving themselves and their own interests.
Those responsible for war in this land seem to be acting in these days as if they were planning for a permanent war and not for a permanent peace. However, the human person in this land is not called to live in a state of permanent war. God has said: Live in the land in peace, peace with God, who chose the land for his abode, and peace with those who live in it. Peace cannot be established while oppression and the violence that results from it continue. Depriving a people of its liberty and of its land is oppression that no conscience can accept. Likewise, no conscience can accept killing innocent people in order to protest oppression. Let us not become twofold victims of the war, first victims of material destruction and second, victims of a hatred that demolishes the human person, Palestinian or Israeli. No person is better than another when he or she is transformed into a carrier of hatred and revenge. Sadly, this is what is happening in this land, holy for the three religions and towards which the entire world looks because it is holy. This is why those who impose oppression have the duty to put an end to it so that the land might then know the security and peace that are so much desired.
Parish priests and men and women religious in the various parishes spend long hours at the military checkpoints in order to carry out their pastoral work in their parishes and throughout the diocese. We say to them: be patient and pray to God for every human person, Palestinian or Israeli. Make your trial a prayer for all, for all those who suffer on both sides of the conflict. Your trial is little compared to death, torture, attacks, demolitions that are faced by so many other victims. Accept these difficulties as a sharing with all the poor ones of this land, to whom God has sent us in order that we might serve them and share in their sufferings and their hopes.
Brothers and sisters,
3. Lent, a time of fasting and prayer, is a time to return to God. It is a time to be conscious of the Kingdom of God that is among us and that we are to establish in our society. It is a time when all believers in God might be filled both by His love and His force.
In the difficulties we face, let us continue to live and to believe. St Cyril of Jerusalem used to say to his faithful, who also were carrying a difficult cross at that time: “Do not rejoice in the cross in time of peace only, but hold fast to the same faith in time of persecution also. Do not be a friend of Jesus in time of peace only but also in time of persecution” (St Cyril of Jerusalem, 2nd reading, 4th week of the year).
+ Michel Sabbah, Patriarch
Jerusalem, Ash Wednesday
25.2.2004
Thursday, February 26
MCC Palestine Update #96
MCC Palestine Update #96
February 26, 2004
“I keep the curtains at the window drawn so I don’t have to look out at the fences that separate me from my land,” shared the mayor of Jayyous, a village of 3,000 people in the northern West Bank. During the last part of 2002 and the first part of 2003, the Israeli military constructed its separation barrier next to Jayyous village. As a result, Jayyous is a village today with a very tenuous economic future. Jayyous farmers own 12,500 dunums (1 dunum = ¼ of an acre). 600 dunums were bulldozed under to make way for the separation zone (consisting of barbed wire, foot trace paths, patrol roads, fences with electronic sensors). Another 8600 dunums are now on the western side of the separation zone. Soldiers open a gate in the fences two times a day (unless they don’t, thanks to Jewish holidays, or state holidays, or reasons unknown). In order to pass through the gate to the western side of the wall, one needs a permit issued by the Israeli civil administration of the military government. Obtaining this permit involves arduous bureaucratic procedures reminiscent of a Kafka short story. Many who apply are rejected for unspecified “security” reasons. Sometimes in one family only very young children or elderly persons who cannot carry out taxing agricultural work are given permits, while the healthy-bodied adults are denied them. As at the checkpoints throughout the West Bank, the regime instituted by the soldiers at the gates in the separation zone are arbitrary expressions of the soliders’ supreme power: at Jayyous, for example, farmers may not take their tractors through the gate, nor their sheep (unless they get permits for the sheep); in Falamiyyeh village just north of Jayyous, however, soldiers (at least sometimes) let tractors pass.
I visited Jayyous and Falamiyyeh this past Monday with a colleague from Catholic Relief Services and with videographers in the country who are working on a video sponsored by MCC, Catholic Relief Services and World Vision on the separation wall. We heard from numerous farmers in both communities tell how their livelihoods had been crushed thanks to the barrier. MCC and Catholic Relief Services are joining with the Palestinian Hydrology Group in both communities (and three other nearby towns and villages) to help farmers repair and renovate wells and water networks damaged and destroyed by Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers during the construction of the separation zone. “We sit around all day, looking out towards our land,” shared one farmer. “We see our trees dying. It’s tearing us up inside.”
This past Monday the International Court of Justice began hearing arguments from various parties about the legality of the wall. Israel has refused to attend the hearing, saying that the ICJ has no right to hand down an advisory opinion in this matter. Israel claims that the wall is to protect its citizens from violent attacks, such as the horrific suicide bombing in Jerusalem this week that claimed 8 lives. Some Israelis, however, with whom the film crew has met, disagree: “This wall won’t bring me security. It’s about grabbing land from Palestinians and separating them from one another. That won’t bring me security,” Na’ama Nagar of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, an MCC partner organization, told them.
Even as walls that divide and dispossess are being erected, there are Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for justice, peace and reconciliation. This Lenten season, please remember these peacemakers in your prayers. Pray for a future of bridges instead of walls, that the God who, in Christ, has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile might sustain the efforts of those Palestinians and Israelis who reject the legal, psychological, spiritual and physical walls that have divided and continue to divide the two peoples.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by a 15-year-old Palestinian girl from the West Bank village of Budrus where the wall is currently being built, explains why the wall is not a security barrier but a land grab. The second, by Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, looks at the tenuous future of communities trapped between the wall and the Green Line or surrounded by walls and fences inside the West Bank; with the Israeli military government demanding that residents of these villages obtain permits simply to remain in their homes, a process fraught with difficulties, the Palestinian fears of “transfer” are becoming increasingly real. Finally, Gideon Levy of Haaretz reports on the wanton, brutal exercise of power at one checkpoint in the northern West Bank.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/7994868.htm
Posted on Fri, Feb. 20, 2004
It exists not for security but for apartheid
Iltezam Morrar
A 15-year-old Palestinian student living in the West Bank
On Monday, the International Court of Justice in the Hague will begin hearings on the wall Israel is building around Palestinian cities and villages. I live in one of them: Budrus, a small village west of Ramallah. It is a very simple life here. Old women and farmers tend their sheep; children go to school, and people live together peacefully. Our village has many olive trees, which are very important for food and oil.
Americans should know that, from our viewpoint, the wall is not a security wall. Security and safety do not come from stealing land (Budrus lost about 80 percent of its village area in 1948, when Israel was formed, and stands to shrink by another 20 percent if the wall goes up). Security does not come from killing or harassing people (there is hardly a family in Palestine without some member who has been killed, hurt or imprisoned) or cutting trees (which Israeli officials have started doing around my village). So this is not a security wall. It is an apartheid wall.
Palestine will be separated into little pieces. Many people will be unable to go to work. Students won't be able to travel to university. After all this, when we are without land or olive trees, unable to work or study, people will leave. That is what the Israeli occupation is for. In 1953, for example, when Ariel Sharon led a military operation resulting in 69 civilian deaths at Qibya, the next village over from us, some people in Budrus were afraid and left. Everything the Israeli government has done is to make the people leave their land.
At the first demonstration to stop the wall in Budrus, only three old women participated with the men. I asked my father if the demonstrations were just for men, and he said no, they were for women as well. Some women and girls came to the next demonstration but left when they didn't see many other women. I told my father that we needed a demonstration only for women, and we made one.
On the first day Israeli officials came to cut the trees, I was at school. I said, "We should go; the land is more important than our exams." We marched to the fields, the boys and then the girls. Soldiers threw tear gas into the middle of us. We carried on; we were still holding our schoolbooks when we came to the Israeli captain. He was very angry and shouted, "Stop here. If you walk one more step, we will hit you." He pushed me, so I stood beside him and shouted "Free, free Palestine."
Because of the occupation, I cannot see my country. I can't travel in my country. It is like a big prison, and the wall will make it worse. If there were no occupation, I could be free. For me, the day my country is free will be my birthday. In the occupation, I have no future.
I want to study to help my country. I want to be a doctor, because here in Palestine, many people get hurt and there are few hospitals or doctors and little medicine. I want four children, but then, I want to be a doctor and will work late nights, so perhaps two is enough.
We don't hate Israelis because they are Israelis. The only thing between us is what we see as their theft of our land. If they gave back our land, nothing would be between us. We need enough land that all the Palestinian refugees who live outside could come and live here. Many Palestinians live in other countries, in tents, with no work.
Peaceful struggle is very important. It is the only way in which we can become free and stop the wall, even if we know the Israeli army does not want peace and will use violence. I think: If I use violence, all the children in Israel will feel in danger and they will use violence. So this makes the two sides always live in violence. It is important to show the world we are a peaceful people and all we want is peace.
The hearings in the Hague are very important even though we are not sure they will stop the wall. It is very important that the international community does something to say the wall should be stopped, even if it doesn't succeed.
2. Has the transfer of enclaves begun?
Haaretz, Feb. 24, 2004
By Amira Hass
"The Tanzim showed up one day," said the woman, 60-ish, the fear visible in her eyes. These are not Fatah people. This is a department within the Civil Administration - "the subcommittee for supervision of the supreme planning council," whose accepted and frightening abbreviation among Palestinian residents of the West Bank is "the Tanzim" (the planning). This is the department that issues demolition orders for Palestinian houses and stop work orders for construction projects.
H.A., an official in the Civil Administration's Tanzim, which the frightened woman was referring to, came twice during the last two months to the small Bedouin town of Arab a-Ramadin, south of Qalqilyah, on December 28, 2003 and on February 10, 2004. He hung up and took down three different kinds of orders: four "stop work orders", six "final stop work and razing orders and two "notices granting the right to object to demolition orders."
The buildings designated for demolition are: tin structure 10x8, tin structure 8x6 and tin structure 12x10, cement block and tin structure 10x10, cement block and tin structure 18x8 and cement block and tin structure 14x8. Two orders dated December 28, 2003 grant the residents a three-day extension to request that another cement block structure not be razed and one to request that the generator building and electricity pylons not be razed. The rest of the buildings in this town are like the structures for which demolition orders were issued: around 10 small, simple concrete structures and another 23 tin huts, that are boiling hot in summer and freezing cold in winter, in which the 250 members of the tribe live.
Eight kilometers from the Green Line
The speakers beg that their names be omitted, that whatever they say not be attributed to them and that their photos not be printed in the newspaper. "I just want to get home to be with my family, I don't want them to prevent me from being with my family at home," said one tribe member. They are frightened; they fear possible revenge from the Civil Administration, or in its alternate, euphemistic name, "the Coordination and Liaison Administration," which issues them permits allowing them to be in their homes that are valid for six months. Arab a-Ramadin and another four neighboring Palestinian communities (Arab Abu Farda and the villages of Wadi ar-Rasha, Ras a-Tira and a-Daba) are trapped in one of 80 enclaves, the loops that have been and will be created by the separation fence between them and the Green Line.
These enclave-loops were created in order to ensure that most of the settlements are outside the fence. The enclave of Arab a-Ramadin was created to ensure that Alfei Menashe is outside the fence. The fence - with its barbed wire, ditches, patrol tracks, wide security road and the gates that should open three times a day - creates a loop here that penetrates deep into the West Bank, a distance of around eight kilometers from the Green Line. As in other enclaves, it cuts off residents from their fields, separates clinics and their medical staffs from their patients, grocery stores from their customers, students from their schools. A school and grocery store that were respectively 300 and 700 meters away until a year or two ago, are now several kilometres further away and that in turn also imposes economic hardship on the family: the cost of taxi fares.
Three of the older Bedouin who still tended sheep had to sell them: the enclave does not provide enough space for grazing. The families no longer have the means to regularly purchase fodder for the sheep and goats due to the loss of job opportunities in Israel and the West Bank. All three of the elderly shepherds became physically ill after they sold their flocks.
The IDF and the Civil Administration in October 2003 created a special category for those thousands of Palestinians who live in the area between the fence and the Green Line, which has been officially declared a military area closed to Palestinians, but not closed to Jews: "long-term residents." The regulations that apply to this new category and the fact that the area is a closed military area grant Civil Administration officials full authority to check residency permits once every few months, and to renew or not renew them.
The new category obligates the residents to request an entry permit to those areas for anyone who is not registered with the Israeli authorities as a resident of the enclave: relatives, cab drivers, doctors, sanitation men, teachers, etc. Some receive the permits; others do not. The permits issued to Arab a-Ramadin residents - so that they can stay in their homes inside the closed military area, leave and then return - are valid until April 2004. Tribe members are convinced that if they are quoted, someone in the Civil Administration or the Shin Bet General Security Service, upon whose good graces they depend, will decide "due to security reasons" not to renew their permit to enter their home.
The word "home" prompts tired smiles on the faces of Arab a-Ramadin residents. Their small tin huts and concrete structures are spread over a green hill and its rocky slopes, in between a few sheep pens, small vegetable patches, improvised fences, family diwans (spaces covered with cloth sheets and rugs). They are originally from the Be'er Sheva area and were expelled and fled in 1948. They first settled in the Hebron area and in the mid-1950s headed north with their flocks to the Qalqilyah region. Gradually, and especially after the economic changes sparked by the capture of the territories in 1967, they began to settle down, and attempted to modernize: from tents and a nomadic life of shepherding, they switched to corrugated tin huts, more urban livelihoods such as construction, and started sending their sons and daughters to study in local schools. It was a natural process, not something imposed on them from above. Some of them purchased their lands from the surrounding villages, others leased lands or swapped other parcels of land for the lands here.
Without a master plan
According to some of the final demolition orders, it seem that already in 2000 stop work orders were issued for some of the structures, including the one that houses the electricity generator. Arab a-Ramadin residents always knew that the Israeli authorities did not draw up a master plan for them and that there was no point in submitting requests to build real houses that matched the improved financial situation of several of them and their changed, modern tastes. Because there is no master plan, they also did not connect to the electricity grid - the one that lights up, for example, the neighboring community which has been developing since 1982: Alfei Menashe. They are also not officially connected to the water network: they hooked up a long plastic pipe from the village of Habla. In the summer, the water is boiling. The Oslo Accords designated them as Area C, which is under Israeli civilian and security responsibility. Several demolition and stop work orders were also issued in two nearby places: the village of Wadi ar-Rasha and the corrugated tin hut community of the small Abu Farda tribe. Each one has around 90 residents. Both of them abut Alfei Menashe: one is located adjacent to its industrial zone and the other is adjacent to its western neighborhoods.
When Israel started building the separation fence's loops around them, the workers razed one of Wadi ar-Rasha's barns, built by its owners six years earlier. The reason: It was too close to the fence. In April 2003, when construction of the fence was fully underway, five additional demolition orders arrived in Wadi ar-Rasha: for a concrete structure, for an extension of an existing house and for a large tin structure. And there were another two demolition orders for two barns. This village, like several other neighboring villages, was apparently set up in the 19th century by residents of the village of Tulat, which is located to the east, whose lands officially extend to Jaljuliya in the west. It was a natural process of Palestinian settlement, typical of the rural residents who went with their flocks several kilometers away from the parent community, made homes inside caves and gradually settled in the new location. In recent years, after the Civil Administration issued demolition orders, building extensions intended to ease the crowding in Wadi ar-Rasha were razed.
In the two Bedouin communities and in Wadi ar-Rasha, residents are convinced that the Civil Administration's aim is to eliminate them completely from the area so that Alfei Menashe can develop even more, in the direction of the Green Line. One of the residents points to section six of their residence permit: "this permit does not represent proof of legal rights, including legal ownership or residency rights in the area, whichever is relevant." In other words, say the threatened residents, someone will come tomorrow and say that the land we are living on – not just the house - is not ours and that we are trespassing, that we have to leave.
And indeed, the Civil Administration, in its response to Haaretz, claims "the settlement of the Ramadin tribe, Abu Farda and Wadi ar-Rasha are illegal [the mistakes are in the original - A.H.]. Over the years, orders were issued, as they are issued for all illegal construction." The Civil Administration spokesman also stated that there is no connection between the construction of the fence and the issuing of demolition orders. "This a statutory legal process, civilian, of enforcing the law ... the Civil Administration is charged with enforcing the law as it relates to all matters of illegal construction in Area C of Judea and Samaria."
According to one Arab a-Ramadin resident, a Civil Administration official has tried over the last few months to lobby them to leave the area and settle elsewhere. In her response, the Civil Administration spokesman does not confirm or deny this claim. But, she said, "The Civil Administration is now in the middle of concerted efforts to review the correlation between master plans in Area C and the reality and the needs of the Palestinian population living in the area, in order to find solutions for issues of this nature." The Civil Administration's response also stated that work is now underway to connect the villages to the electricity grid (but in Arab a-Ramadin, for example, they do not know about that and haven't seen any signs that they're being connected to the electricity grid).
The Palestinians in the Alfei Menashe enclave do not believe the Israeli promises. For them, the demolition orders are more tangible than any promise given in response to an Israeli newspaper's query, while the discussions in The Hague are going on. "If they raze all of our tin and cement block structure," says an Arab a-Ramadin resident, "we will move into tents. The way it used to be. And if they want us to go away from here, then please, send us back to our natural place, where we were originally - Be'er Sheva."
3. When soldiers become bullies
By Gideon Levy
Three armed bullies in black ski masks get out of the jeep quickly. One breaks into shouts at the taxi driver who is letting off a female passenger, waving a rifle in the driver's face and ordering him out of the car. The bully then orders the frightened driver to hand over the keys to his taxi and get going. The helpless driver hands over his keys. In a feeble voice he asks if and when he can get his taxi back. "Maybe at the end of the day, maybe Wednesday. We'll see," says the thug, sticking the keys into his pocket, getting back in the jeep and driving away.
Highway bandits in Chechnya? Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Balata? No. The three bullies were Israeli soldiers. They confiscated the car from its owner, as they routinely do, because he let out a passenger on the other side of a blurry yellow line painted onto the Tul Karm road. The road is blocked by an unmanned iron bar. Passengers are supposed to cross on foot, from taxis on one side to taxis on the other - it's not at all clear why - and the drivers know that if they cross the yellow line the soldiers will appear out of nowhere and confiscate the cars or slice the tires. Indeed, one of the soldiers threatened to slice the tires of our car, which was parked past the remnants of the yellow line.
This "battle heritage" is passed down through the Israel Defense Forces without obstruction and all the Palestinians drivers know it. Any time they venture onto one of the few roads left to them in the West Bank, they are taking a risk. Maybe they'll be shot "by mistake," maybe their car will be confiscated for some vague reason. That's why the few roads of the West Bank where Palestinians are allowed to drive are nearly always empty. The driver whose car was confiscated, Samr Abdullah, did not know how to get home.
A brigadier who serves in the territories said in a private conversation on the weekend that the confiscation of cars and ID cards is prohibited by the army. Really? After all, if the army wanted to put an end to it, it could easily do so. The IDF Spokesman's Office also says there is no policy of confiscating cars and if it turns out that the events we witnessed last Sunday happened, "the soldiers will be severely punished."
Is the IDF Spokesman's Office being naive or disingenuous or was this really the first time it heard about soldiers confiscating the keys to a Palestinian car or slashing its tires? It's not clear what's worse. Any soldier nowadays can take any Palestinian car for any reason and for as long as he wants. When every soldier is a king, any group of soldiers can turn into a gang.
Confiscating cars is only one example of how an IDF regime of bullying has emerged and is being strengthened in the territories. There is a great deal of hypocrisy in the talk about how anarchy will reign in the territories after the IDF leaves. The disintegration of the rule of law and order begins inside the army. Every day one can see soldiers confiscating ID cards from residents, making them line up for hours in the sun and rain for no reason whatsoever, and just for the fun of it smashing memorial monuments to Palestinian casualties - like last week in Beir Furik.
In the last three years, an atmosphere of anything goes has taken root in the IDF in the territories. Any soldier can do whatever he feels like to any Palestinian - the incident won't be investigated, the soldier won't be punished.
The disintegration of the rule of law does not stop with the soldiers. Brothers Naim and Ayad Murar, who organized nonviolent demonstrations against the separation fence in Budrus, were arrested a month ago with the intention of throwing them into long months of administrative detention without trial. At the last minute, Ayad was freed by a judge who ruled that nonviolent demonstrations are no cause for administrative detention. But his brother Naim was sent to four months of administrative detention for his "terror-supporting activity." Only due to the intervention of attorneys Tamar Peleg and Yal Barda, and the courageous position taken by Lieutenant Colonel Shlomi Kochav, was Naim freed on the weekend after a month in detention, thus preventing a further disgrace. Serious questions are raised by the arrogance of security officials who wanted to lock people up for attempting to organize nonviolent demonstrations against a fence being built on their property.
There is a direct and disgusting line between the car confiscators and those who jail demonstrators without trial. Both are manifestations of gangland rule. Despite the separation fence, that kind of behavior will inevitably cross the Green Line.
February 26, 2004
“I keep the curtains at the window drawn so I don’t have to look out at the fences that separate me from my land,” shared the mayor of Jayyous, a village of 3,000 people in the northern West Bank. During the last part of 2002 and the first part of 2003, the Israeli military constructed its separation barrier next to Jayyous village. As a result, Jayyous is a village today with a very tenuous economic future. Jayyous farmers own 12,500 dunums (1 dunum = ¼ of an acre). 600 dunums were bulldozed under to make way for the separation zone (consisting of barbed wire, foot trace paths, patrol roads, fences with electronic sensors). Another 8600 dunums are now on the western side of the separation zone. Soldiers open a gate in the fences two times a day (unless they don’t, thanks to Jewish holidays, or state holidays, or reasons unknown). In order to pass through the gate to the western side of the wall, one needs a permit issued by the Israeli civil administration of the military government. Obtaining this permit involves arduous bureaucratic procedures reminiscent of a Kafka short story. Many who apply are rejected for unspecified “security” reasons. Sometimes in one family only very young children or elderly persons who cannot carry out taxing agricultural work are given permits, while the healthy-bodied adults are denied them. As at the checkpoints throughout the West Bank, the regime instituted by the soldiers at the gates in the separation zone are arbitrary expressions of the soliders’ supreme power: at Jayyous, for example, farmers may not take their tractors through the gate, nor their sheep (unless they get permits for the sheep); in Falamiyyeh village just north of Jayyous, however, soldiers (at least sometimes) let tractors pass.
I visited Jayyous and Falamiyyeh this past Monday with a colleague from Catholic Relief Services and with videographers in the country who are working on a video sponsored by MCC, Catholic Relief Services and World Vision on the separation wall. We heard from numerous farmers in both communities tell how their livelihoods had been crushed thanks to the barrier. MCC and Catholic Relief Services are joining with the Palestinian Hydrology Group in both communities (and three other nearby towns and villages) to help farmers repair and renovate wells and water networks damaged and destroyed by Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers during the construction of the separation zone. “We sit around all day, looking out towards our land,” shared one farmer. “We see our trees dying. It’s tearing us up inside.”
This past Monday the International Court of Justice began hearing arguments from various parties about the legality of the wall. Israel has refused to attend the hearing, saying that the ICJ has no right to hand down an advisory opinion in this matter. Israel claims that the wall is to protect its citizens from violent attacks, such as the horrific suicide bombing in Jerusalem this week that claimed 8 lives. Some Israelis, however, with whom the film crew has met, disagree: “This wall won’t bring me security. It’s about grabbing land from Palestinians and separating them from one another. That won’t bring me security,” Na’ama Nagar of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, an MCC partner organization, told them.
Even as walls that divide and dispossess are being erected, there are Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for justice, peace and reconciliation. This Lenten season, please remember these peacemakers in your prayers. Pray for a future of bridges instead of walls, that the God who, in Christ, has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile might sustain the efforts of those Palestinians and Israelis who reject the legal, psychological, spiritual and physical walls that have divided and continue to divide the two peoples.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by a 15-year-old Palestinian girl from the West Bank village of Budrus where the wall is currently being built, explains why the wall is not a security barrier but a land grab. The second, by Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, looks at the tenuous future of communities trapped between the wall and the Green Line or surrounded by walls and fences inside the West Bank; with the Israeli military government demanding that residents of these villages obtain permits simply to remain in their homes, a process fraught with difficulties, the Palestinian fears of “transfer” are becoming increasingly real. Finally, Gideon Levy of Haaretz reports on the wanton, brutal exercise of power at one checkpoint in the northern West Bank.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/7994868.htm
Posted on Fri, Feb. 20, 2004
It exists not for security but for apartheid
Iltezam Morrar
A 15-year-old Palestinian student living in the West Bank
On Monday, the International Court of Justice in the Hague will begin hearings on the wall Israel is building around Palestinian cities and villages. I live in one of them: Budrus, a small village west of Ramallah. It is a very simple life here. Old women and farmers tend their sheep; children go to school, and people live together peacefully. Our village has many olive trees, which are very important for food and oil.
Americans should know that, from our viewpoint, the wall is not a security wall. Security and safety do not come from stealing land (Budrus lost about 80 percent of its village area in 1948, when Israel was formed, and stands to shrink by another 20 percent if the wall goes up). Security does not come from killing or harassing people (there is hardly a family in Palestine without some member who has been killed, hurt or imprisoned) or cutting trees (which Israeli officials have started doing around my village). So this is not a security wall. It is an apartheid wall.
Palestine will be separated into little pieces. Many people will be unable to go to work. Students won't be able to travel to university. After all this, when we are without land or olive trees, unable to work or study, people will leave. That is what the Israeli occupation is for. In 1953, for example, when Ariel Sharon led a military operation resulting in 69 civilian deaths at Qibya, the next village over from us, some people in Budrus were afraid and left. Everything the Israeli government has done is to make the people leave their land.
At the first demonstration to stop the wall in Budrus, only three old women participated with the men. I asked my father if the demonstrations were just for men, and he said no, they were for women as well. Some women and girls came to the next demonstration but left when they didn't see many other women. I told my father that we needed a demonstration only for women, and we made one.
On the first day Israeli officials came to cut the trees, I was at school. I said, "We should go; the land is more important than our exams." We marched to the fields, the boys and then the girls. Soldiers threw tear gas into the middle of us. We carried on; we were still holding our schoolbooks when we came to the Israeli captain. He was very angry and shouted, "Stop here. If you walk one more step, we will hit you." He pushed me, so I stood beside him and shouted "Free, free Palestine."
Because of the occupation, I cannot see my country. I can't travel in my country. It is like a big prison, and the wall will make it worse. If there were no occupation, I could be free. For me, the day my country is free will be my birthday. In the occupation, I have no future.
I want to study to help my country. I want to be a doctor, because here in Palestine, many people get hurt and there are few hospitals or doctors and little medicine. I want four children, but then, I want to be a doctor and will work late nights, so perhaps two is enough.
We don't hate Israelis because they are Israelis. The only thing between us is what we see as their theft of our land. If they gave back our land, nothing would be between us. We need enough land that all the Palestinian refugees who live outside could come and live here. Many Palestinians live in other countries, in tents, with no work.
Peaceful struggle is very important. It is the only way in which we can become free and stop the wall, even if we know the Israeli army does not want peace and will use violence. I think: If I use violence, all the children in Israel will feel in danger and they will use violence. So this makes the two sides always live in violence. It is important to show the world we are a peaceful people and all we want is peace.
The hearings in the Hague are very important even though we are not sure they will stop the wall. It is very important that the international community does something to say the wall should be stopped, even if it doesn't succeed.
2. Has the transfer of enclaves begun?
Haaretz, Feb. 24, 2004
By Amira Hass
"The Tanzim showed up one day," said the woman, 60-ish, the fear visible in her eyes. These are not Fatah people. This is a department within the Civil Administration - "the subcommittee for supervision of the supreme planning council," whose accepted and frightening abbreviation among Palestinian residents of the West Bank is "the Tanzim" (the planning). This is the department that issues demolition orders for Palestinian houses and stop work orders for construction projects.
H.A., an official in the Civil Administration's Tanzim, which the frightened woman was referring to, came twice during the last two months to the small Bedouin town of Arab a-Ramadin, south of Qalqilyah, on December 28, 2003 and on February 10, 2004. He hung up and took down three different kinds of orders: four "stop work orders", six "final stop work and razing orders and two "notices granting the right to object to demolition orders."
The buildings designated for demolition are: tin structure 10x8, tin structure 8x6 and tin structure 12x10, cement block and tin structure 10x10, cement block and tin structure 18x8 and cement block and tin structure 14x8. Two orders dated December 28, 2003 grant the residents a three-day extension to request that another cement block structure not be razed and one to request that the generator building and electricity pylons not be razed. The rest of the buildings in this town are like the structures for which demolition orders were issued: around 10 small, simple concrete structures and another 23 tin huts, that are boiling hot in summer and freezing cold in winter, in which the 250 members of the tribe live.
Eight kilometers from the Green Line
The speakers beg that their names be omitted, that whatever they say not be attributed to them and that their photos not be printed in the newspaper. "I just want to get home to be with my family, I don't want them to prevent me from being with my family at home," said one tribe member. They are frightened; they fear possible revenge from the Civil Administration, or in its alternate, euphemistic name, "the Coordination and Liaison Administration," which issues them permits allowing them to be in their homes that are valid for six months. Arab a-Ramadin and another four neighboring Palestinian communities (Arab Abu Farda and the villages of Wadi ar-Rasha, Ras a-Tira and a-Daba) are trapped in one of 80 enclaves, the loops that have been and will be created by the separation fence between them and the Green Line.
These enclave-loops were created in order to ensure that most of the settlements are outside the fence. The enclave of Arab a-Ramadin was created to ensure that Alfei Menashe is outside the fence. The fence - with its barbed wire, ditches, patrol tracks, wide security road and the gates that should open three times a day - creates a loop here that penetrates deep into the West Bank, a distance of around eight kilometers from the Green Line. As in other enclaves, it cuts off residents from their fields, separates clinics and their medical staffs from their patients, grocery stores from their customers, students from their schools. A school and grocery store that were respectively 300 and 700 meters away until a year or two ago, are now several kilometres further away and that in turn also imposes economic hardship on the family: the cost of taxi fares.
Three of the older Bedouin who still tended sheep had to sell them: the enclave does not provide enough space for grazing. The families no longer have the means to regularly purchase fodder for the sheep and goats due to the loss of job opportunities in Israel and the West Bank. All three of the elderly shepherds became physically ill after they sold their flocks.
The IDF and the Civil Administration in October 2003 created a special category for those thousands of Palestinians who live in the area between the fence and the Green Line, which has been officially declared a military area closed to Palestinians, but not closed to Jews: "long-term residents." The regulations that apply to this new category and the fact that the area is a closed military area grant Civil Administration officials full authority to check residency permits once every few months, and to renew or not renew them.
The new category obligates the residents to request an entry permit to those areas for anyone who is not registered with the Israeli authorities as a resident of the enclave: relatives, cab drivers, doctors, sanitation men, teachers, etc. Some receive the permits; others do not. The permits issued to Arab a-Ramadin residents - so that they can stay in their homes inside the closed military area, leave and then return - are valid until April 2004. Tribe members are convinced that if they are quoted, someone in the Civil Administration or the Shin Bet General Security Service, upon whose good graces they depend, will decide "due to security reasons" not to renew their permit to enter their home.
The word "home" prompts tired smiles on the faces of Arab a-Ramadin residents. Their small tin huts and concrete structures are spread over a green hill and its rocky slopes, in between a few sheep pens, small vegetable patches, improvised fences, family diwans (spaces covered with cloth sheets and rugs). They are originally from the Be'er Sheva area and were expelled and fled in 1948. They first settled in the Hebron area and in the mid-1950s headed north with their flocks to the Qalqilyah region. Gradually, and especially after the economic changes sparked by the capture of the territories in 1967, they began to settle down, and attempted to modernize: from tents and a nomadic life of shepherding, they switched to corrugated tin huts, more urban livelihoods such as construction, and started sending their sons and daughters to study in local schools. It was a natural process, not something imposed on them from above. Some of them purchased their lands from the surrounding villages, others leased lands or swapped other parcels of land for the lands here.
Without a master plan
According to some of the final demolition orders, it seem that already in 2000 stop work orders were issued for some of the structures, including the one that houses the electricity generator. Arab a-Ramadin residents always knew that the Israeli authorities did not draw up a master plan for them and that there was no point in submitting requests to build real houses that matched the improved financial situation of several of them and their changed, modern tastes. Because there is no master plan, they also did not connect to the electricity grid - the one that lights up, for example, the neighboring community which has been developing since 1982: Alfei Menashe. They are also not officially connected to the water network: they hooked up a long plastic pipe from the village of Habla. In the summer, the water is boiling. The Oslo Accords designated them as Area C, which is under Israeli civilian and security responsibility. Several demolition and stop work orders were also issued in two nearby places: the village of Wadi ar-Rasha and the corrugated tin hut community of the small Abu Farda tribe. Each one has around 90 residents. Both of them abut Alfei Menashe: one is located adjacent to its industrial zone and the other is adjacent to its western neighborhoods.
When Israel started building the separation fence's loops around them, the workers razed one of Wadi ar-Rasha's barns, built by its owners six years earlier. The reason: It was too close to the fence. In April 2003, when construction of the fence was fully underway, five additional demolition orders arrived in Wadi ar-Rasha: for a concrete structure, for an extension of an existing house and for a large tin structure. And there were another two demolition orders for two barns. This village, like several other neighboring villages, was apparently set up in the 19th century by residents of the village of Tulat, which is located to the east, whose lands officially extend to Jaljuliya in the west. It was a natural process of Palestinian settlement, typical of the rural residents who went with their flocks several kilometers away from the parent community, made homes inside caves and gradually settled in the new location. In recent years, after the Civil Administration issued demolition orders, building extensions intended to ease the crowding in Wadi ar-Rasha were razed.
In the two Bedouin communities and in Wadi ar-Rasha, residents are convinced that the Civil Administration's aim is to eliminate them completely from the area so that Alfei Menashe can develop even more, in the direction of the Green Line. One of the residents points to section six of their residence permit: "this permit does not represent proof of legal rights, including legal ownership or residency rights in the area, whichever is relevant." In other words, say the threatened residents, someone will come tomorrow and say that the land we are living on – not just the house - is not ours and that we are trespassing, that we have to leave.
And indeed, the Civil Administration, in its response to Haaretz, claims "the settlement of the Ramadin tribe, Abu Farda and Wadi ar-Rasha are illegal [the mistakes are in the original - A.H.]. Over the years, orders were issued, as they are issued for all illegal construction." The Civil Administration spokesman also stated that there is no connection between the construction of the fence and the issuing of demolition orders. "This a statutory legal process, civilian, of enforcing the law ... the Civil Administration is charged with enforcing the law as it relates to all matters of illegal construction in Area C of Judea and Samaria."
According to one Arab a-Ramadin resident, a Civil Administration official has tried over the last few months to lobby them to leave the area and settle elsewhere. In her response, the Civil Administration spokesman does not confirm or deny this claim. But, she said, "The Civil Administration is now in the middle of concerted efforts to review the correlation between master plans in Area C and the reality and the needs of the Palestinian population living in the area, in order to find solutions for issues of this nature." The Civil Administration's response also stated that work is now underway to connect the villages to the electricity grid (but in Arab a-Ramadin, for example, they do not know about that and haven't seen any signs that they're being connected to the electricity grid).
The Palestinians in the Alfei Menashe enclave do not believe the Israeli promises. For them, the demolition orders are more tangible than any promise given in response to an Israeli newspaper's query, while the discussions in The Hague are going on. "If they raze all of our tin and cement block structure," says an Arab a-Ramadin resident, "we will move into tents. The way it used to be. And if they want us to go away from here, then please, send us back to our natural place, where we were originally - Be'er Sheva."
3. When soldiers become bullies
By Gideon Levy
Three armed bullies in black ski masks get out of the jeep quickly. One breaks into shouts at the taxi driver who is letting off a female passenger, waving a rifle in the driver's face and ordering him out of the car. The bully then orders the frightened driver to hand over the keys to his taxi and get going. The helpless driver hands over his keys. In a feeble voice he asks if and when he can get his taxi back. "Maybe at the end of the day, maybe Wednesday. We'll see," says the thug, sticking the keys into his pocket, getting back in the jeep and driving away.
Highway bandits in Chechnya? Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Balata? No. The three bullies were Israeli soldiers. They confiscated the car from its owner, as they routinely do, because he let out a passenger on the other side of a blurry yellow line painted onto the Tul Karm road. The road is blocked by an unmanned iron bar. Passengers are supposed to cross on foot, from taxis on one side to taxis on the other - it's not at all clear why - and the drivers know that if they cross the yellow line the soldiers will appear out of nowhere and confiscate the cars or slice the tires. Indeed, one of the soldiers threatened to slice the tires of our car, which was parked past the remnants of the yellow line.
This "battle heritage" is passed down through the Israel Defense Forces without obstruction and all the Palestinians drivers know it. Any time they venture onto one of the few roads left to them in the West Bank, they are taking a risk. Maybe they'll be shot "by mistake," maybe their car will be confiscated for some vague reason. That's why the few roads of the West Bank where Palestinians are allowed to drive are nearly always empty. The driver whose car was confiscated, Samr Abdullah, did not know how to get home.
A brigadier who serves in the territories said in a private conversation on the weekend that the confiscation of cars and ID cards is prohibited by the army. Really? After all, if the army wanted to put an end to it, it could easily do so. The IDF Spokesman's Office also says there is no policy of confiscating cars and if it turns out that the events we witnessed last Sunday happened, "the soldiers will be severely punished."
Is the IDF Spokesman's Office being naive or disingenuous or was this really the first time it heard about soldiers confiscating the keys to a Palestinian car or slashing its tires? It's not clear what's worse. Any soldier nowadays can take any Palestinian car for any reason and for as long as he wants. When every soldier is a king, any group of soldiers can turn into a gang.
Confiscating cars is only one example of how an IDF regime of bullying has emerged and is being strengthened in the territories. There is a great deal of hypocrisy in the talk about how anarchy will reign in the territories after the IDF leaves. The disintegration of the rule of law and order begins inside the army. Every day one can see soldiers confiscating ID cards from residents, making them line up for hours in the sun and rain for no reason whatsoever, and just for the fun of it smashing memorial monuments to Palestinian casualties - like last week in Beir Furik.
In the last three years, an atmosphere of anything goes has taken root in the IDF in the territories. Any soldier can do whatever he feels like to any Palestinian - the incident won't be investigated, the soldier won't be punished.
The disintegration of the rule of law does not stop with the soldiers. Brothers Naim and Ayad Murar, who organized nonviolent demonstrations against the separation fence in Budrus, were arrested a month ago with the intention of throwing them into long months of administrative detention without trial. At the last minute, Ayad was freed by a judge who ruled that nonviolent demonstrations are no cause for administrative detention. But his brother Naim was sent to four months of administrative detention for his "terror-supporting activity." Only due to the intervention of attorneys Tamar Peleg and Yal Barda, and the courageous position taken by Lieutenant Colonel Shlomi Kochav, was Naim freed on the weekend after a month in detention, thus preventing a further disgrace. Serious questions are raised by the arrogance of security officials who wanted to lock people up for attempting to organize nonviolent demonstrations against a fence being built on their property.
There is a direct and disgusting line between the car confiscators and those who jail demonstrators without trial. Both are manifestations of gangland rule. Despite the separation fence, that kind of behavior will inevitably cross the Green Line.
Friday, February 13
MCC Palestine Update #95
MCC Palestine Update #95
February 13, 2004
“The Government of Israel does not believe that pilgrims and tourists have normal cause to visit Gaza.” That’s what an official from the Israeli Embassy in Great Britain told a Catholic priest who had called to inquire about troubling new Israeli regulations that were being handed to many international visitors upon their arrivals in Israel, informing them that entry into “Palestinian Authority” areas—Bethlehem, Gaza, Ramallah, Jericho—was forbidden without prior written authorisation. The Israeli official denied that the regulations applied say, to tourists and pilgrims wishing to visit the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, but only to Gaza. With the pattern of the past years having been one of increased restrictions on movement, and with the fences and walls Israel is erecting in the West Bank progressively giving it the capability it has in Gaza of enclosing entire populations, one can legitimately be sceptical that, in the future, entry to Bethlehem and Jericho, say, will not become difficult to impossible. For now, however, it’s abundantly clear that Israel plans to place severe limits on internationals wishing to enter the Gaza Strip. Diplomats, aid workers (including MCCers), UN staff usually can gain access, even if they have their stories of frustration. Others, however, will most likely be turned away.
On February 10, 2004, MCC workers accompanied a group of students and professors from Eastern Mennonite University, in the country as part of a cross-cultural semester in the Middle East. The group has been staying in the Bethlehem area (and thus in “Area A,” in violation of the regulations as spelled out in the recent travel warning), enjoying Palestinian hospitality, attending lectures, being immersed in the historical, social, religious, and political complexities of Palestine/Israel. The past several times EMU groups have been in the country, they have incorporated trips to Gaza, where they met with MCC mission partners.
This week the group was to have visited the local Catholic church and school in Gaza and children’s centers operated by the Culture and Free Thought Association in the refugee camps of the southern Gaza Strip. Despite the fact that I had been in repeated contact with the Israeli military officials at the Erez crossing point into the Gaza Strip, furnishing them weeks in advance with the passport information for each member of the group, the group was denied entry, simply told that authorisation had not been granted; over an hour of follow-up phone calls were in vain.
We at MCC are very disturbed by this denial of entry to the EMU group. We believe that Christians have very compelling reasons to visit the Gaza Strip (beyond enjoying the sea, which is lovely, the food, which is delicious, and visiting Byzantine, Crusader, Mamluke, and Ottoman-era churches, mosques, and baths). Christians should be allowed to visit the Gaza Strip in order to be in spiritual solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Christ who worship at Gaza’s Orthodox, Catholic, and Baptist churches. Christians should be allowed to visit the Gaza Strip as a show of support to Christian institutions such as the Near East Council of Churches and the Ahli Arabi Hospital. Christians should be allowed to visit non-Christian Organisations, such as the Culture and Free Thought Association, who join with Christian Organisations such as MCC to promote the development of healthy, thriving communities. [Persons of other faiths, of course, would have other valid reasons for wanting to visit Gaza.]
Any claims that restrictions on entry into the Gaza Strip are motivated by security are suspect at best. Israel tightly controls the Gaza Strip, with all passage in and out going through multiple passport controls, with baggage checks and metal detectors. Meanwhile, Israeli officials say, tourists and pilgrims can still go into Bethlehem (from which, for the time being, it is possible, with some determination, to exit without being subject to Israeli checks). It is hard to escape the conclusion that Israel’s primary motivation for keeping internationals out of the Gaza Strip is to reduce the number of people who witness Israeli policies of dispossession in practice. The Gaza Strip is constantly stereotyped: its people are terrorists, its cities and refugee camps are squalid, etc. Visits by tourists and pilgrims to the Strip are concrete ways of breaking down such inaccurate portrayals. The current Israeli government, however, appears much less intent on fostering bridge-building than on shoring up psychological, legal, and concrete walls that generate hate.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Amira Hass of Haaretz, critically dissects the claim made by Israeli National Security Advisor Giora Eiland that “The planners of the fence failed to predict its effects on innocent Palestinians.” The problem was not one of a failure of prediction, but rather a failure to care. The second, again by Hass, looks at life in the village of Budrus, west of Ramallah and only a few kilometres east of the “Green Line” between Israel and the West Bank; the separation wall, as Hass describes, will have a devastating effect on this community. In the final piece, US commentators Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibisih take a critical look at the rhetoric and the reality of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s proposed evacuation of Gaza Strip settlements.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Failed predictions, Haaretz, Feb. 11, 2004
By Amira Hass
"The planners of the fence failed to predict its effects on innocent Palestinians," National Security Advisor Giora Eiland told a high-level diplomatic-security forum in Germany this week (Haaretz, February 9). Like Eiland, other Israeli representatives are now trying to convince the western countries and the United States in particular that the route of the separation fence is a human, localized and almost chance error that can be corrected to minimize the damage.
We have a new sentry to blame for what has gone wrong: the rather anonymous planners of the separation fence. Some sort of personal, individual limitation caused them to fail and not to predict the extent to which "the lives of innocent people would be affected" by the construction of the fortifications, which has destroyed and is destroying wells that are essential to agriculture, is uprooting tens of thousands of olive trees and other trees and is wiping out hundreds of greenhouses in which thousands of people have invested the savings of years.
One really does need special analytical powers to predict that caging thousands of people behind iron gates and stationing 19-year-old soldiers to open them, if they feel like it, two or three times a day - would have a deleterious affect on studies at schools and universities, sabotage medical treatment for cancer and kidney patients and split up families. After all, only especially creative minds could have guessed that it would be very hard for 260,000 people to maintain "a normal fabric of life" in the 81 enclaves of various sorts that the fence creates. Eighty-one enclaves that separate them from neighboring villages, from the provincial towns and from the rest of the West Bank, shutting them in behind barbed wire fences and guard towers and excavations and double fences and bureaucratic-military systems of permits to go in and out of the enclaves that are needed by garbage collectors and doctors, family members and teachers.
The truth is that what was hard to predict was the international shock at the fence. United States National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is not pleased (and not only the United nations General Assembly) and Western diplomats are saying things in inner conclaves, especially when it turns out that development projects that had been funded by their countries have been destroyed under the fence's bulldozers.
The European countries are opposed to holding the deliberations at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, but they too have reservations about the fence's route and the damage it causes. Television channels around the world are showing documentary films about the fence and its ills, and it isn't possible to keep repeating the chorus that the motives are anti-Semitic. If it were not for all this, it is doubtful that various representatives of the state - like the Prosecutor's Office and before that, military sources - would be hinting about a change in the route of the fence and admitting a failure to "predict" how bad the damage would be to the innocent. They simply did not care about the damage.
After all, the kinds of damage that the fence is causing are not new. The Israeli occupation regime has been testing them successfully for 37 years now, sometimes in the name of security and sometimes in the name of the Jewish people's right to preferential rights in this country.
Neither the Meridor committee nor the Oslo agreement did away with the Israeli habit of harming the Palestinians' rights to water, land, freedom of movement, earning a living and development.
By the second half of 2002 it was already possible to know that the route of the fence was far from the Green Line (pre-Six Day War border), that it creates enclaves and that it harms the "vegetable garden" of the Palestinian economy. But at that time it was hard to bring to the Israeli media - which evinced no interest in the matter at that stage - reports about the extent of the fence's damage to the civilian population. The data and the reports on massive confiscations and uprooting of trees that were published by various Palestinian Organisations were not read in Hebrew. B'Tselem published its first position paper in September, 2002, which warned of the implications of the route of the fence, including a mortal blow to Palestinian life. Who remembers?
By the middle of 2003 the planners of the route of the fence had full backing - from the political system, from the print and the electronic media, from the street and from key figures in the Israeli peace camp. The idea of the fence, without going into detail, offered people frightened by the suicide terror attacks a hope that their personal security was achievable with no connection to any political solution. It offered a refuge from the disturbing knowledge that Israel is evading an offer of a sustainable political, humane, rational solution that the Palestinians can accept.
The military plan to build elevated bridges and sunken roads between the enclaves is a bone thrown to international public opinion and another vain solution offered to the Israelis that diverts attention from the essence. The planners of the route that harms the Palestinians are doing this on behalf of the state of Israel, which almost unhindered has built in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip a regime of Jewish superiority that inevitably violates the rights of the Palestinian individual and collective. Key parts of Israeli society have become blind to the damage, and the occupation regime is as much taken for granted as the sunrise in the east.
2. The village against the fence, Haaretz, Feb. 11, 2004
By Amira Hass
A serious-looking black dog, whose eyes looked almost hollow, freely crossed the naked strip of land west of the villages of Qibiya and Budrus, which stretches from the village of Rantis, about five
kilometers to the north.
A young resident of Qibiya guiding the visitors among the olive groves and fruit orchards of his village, up to the route of the fence, hastened to cross the ditch that has already been dug on both sides of the route, and to disappear among the trees. It was soon clear why – an Israeli security vehicle was approaching from the north toward those walking on the exposed strip, as soon as it detected them.
The vehicle stopped and two men got out. One, the shorter and older, carrying a rifle, was from Kfar Yonah; the second was from a Bedouin community in the Galilee. The one with the rifle angrily demanded that the visitors who came on foot leave immediately, or he would call the police so they would explain, if you insist, that this is a closed military area, even if he had no papers to prove it. His friend, who served in the army for seven years and was discharged half a year ago, calmed things down before they heated up.
The one with the rifle asserted that the presence of cameras encourages people to come and demonstrate, and that's how the waves of riots begin. "Isn't it you, by your work, who are causing the waves of rioting?" he asked, and the question wasn't quite understood. What are you talking about, we are doing our work, explained the younger man. And of course I support the fence, so I won't explode with my family in a restaurant.
The "riots" the two were talking about are a series of demonstrations against the fence that have been held by the residents of Budrus for about a month. "We decided that unlike other places until now, where international peace activists conducted the battle against the fence and the Palestinians supported them, we, the residents of Budrus, would wage our own battle."
Those are the words of Ayad Murar, 42, a veteran Fatah activist, who with his brother Naim was among the founders of the popular committee in the village "for the struggle against the apartheid wall." The popular committee, he says, emphasized to the people that the battle against the bulldozers and the many soldiers and police who protect them must be conducted without violence.
Curfew and arrests
All residents answered the call to demonstrate - young and old, men and women. What began as a strike along the route of the fence reached a climax on December 30. Somebody saw a bulldozer approaching the olive grove. The speaker in the mosque quickly announced it, and everyone who was in the village ran westward, toward the grove.
School children ran out of the classrooms, books in hand. Tear gas, rubber bullets and blows did not stop the villagers, who dispersed and returned to stand or to sit in front of the soldiers and the police, on the ground. Eyewitnesses say that the female students sat in front of the many soldiers, who retreated to their jeeps. The appearance of several television cameras helped.
During the following days, the Israel Defense Forces imposed a curfew on the village in order to prevent the residents from going out to demonstrate. Mainly young men violated the curfew and walked to the olive grove, to prevent the bulldozers from doing their work. Up to this week, the bulldozers have not returned to work - after they already uprooted about 60 olive trees. The people of Budrus attribute this to their stubbornness and determination.
A few days after this demonstration, the IDF arrested Naim Murar. He was released on January 11, but didn't manage to be home for more than three days when the army came again to arrest him and his brother Ayad. The military prosecutor demanded that they be placed under administrative detention.
In the military court at the Ofer army base, the judge, Major Adrian Agassi, decided to release Ayad. "I found it proper to intervene in the decision of the military commander," ruled Agassi in his decision. "After all, we cannot allow the military commander to use his authority to order the administrative detention of a person only because of this activity [against the fence]. In my opinion, this is a mistaken decision that did not stem from clear security considerations."
But the judge decided to approve the decision of the military commander to place Naim Murar under administrative detention. As is customary in administrative detention, only the judge was allowed to peruse the classified documents given to him by members of the Shin Bet security services, and according to these documents, "the intelligence material attributes to him activity in support of terror, in the context of the Tanzim organization."
But in Budrus people are convinced that the second detention of Naim Murar - like that of eight other activists against the fence - is an attempt to dismantle the opposition in the village. From Budrus' threatened olive grove sounds of firing can be heard - sounds of training exercises. They come from the Adam military base, which is a few dozen meters to the west, 20-30 meters west of the Green Line.
In Budrus they believe that because of this army base, which is a few dozen meters from the Green Line, the route of the fence was pushed straight into the beautiful olive grove that they have been nurturing for decades. Budrus lost most of its lands in 1948 - many thousands of dunams, some count up to 20,000, remained on the western side of the Green Line.
Some land remained in the demilitarized zone, which both Israeli and Jordanian forces were forbidden to enter. Since 1967, say the villagers, the demilitarized zone has become Israeli, and they weren't allowed to return to work their land there as well.
The route that is planned according to the map of the Israeli security services looks as though it is right on the Green Line. But in reality, all the difference lies in several dozen meters east of the Green Line. Now, of the 5,000 dunams that remain to the approximately 1,400 residents of Budrus, they estimate that they will lose about one fifth.
Some of this land is being confiscated for the fence itself, part of the area of the village will remain behind the fence - between the fence and the Green Line. The villagers estimate that 3,000 olive trees, which cover an area of about 5,000 dunams, will be lost under the teeth of the bulldozers or will be trapped in areas where entry is forbidden.
They figure that the "fence" - namely, two ditches that will be dug on both sides of it, and the two barbed wire fences, and the electronic fence with the sensors, and the patrol roads between them, and the watchtowers - will almost touch some of the most western houses in the village, including the school.
Imprisoned enclave
The occupation and preparation of the land here, west of Kibiya and Budrus, are being carried out in the context of the second stage of the building of the security fence. According to the plan, and as long as it has not been decided or proved otherwise, in the context of this stage two Palestinian enclaves will be created west of Ramallah.
These are two out of 81 Palestinian enclaves that have been created and will be created all along the fence, which are discussed in the report by B'Tselem. Some will be between the fence and the Green Line, some in small "loops" created by the fence, and some will be the result of "secondary obstacles," as the army puts it.
Budrus is one of the nine Palestinian villages that will find themselves in an enclave with an area of 53.2 square kilometers. These villages include Luban al Gharabiyeh, Rantis, Shuqba, Qibiya, Shabtin, Budrus,
Midya, Na'lin and Dir Kadis. The village of Midiya will be surrounded on all sides by the separation fence, as in a loop.
According to the map of the Israeli security services, one could have concluded immediately that an enclave would be created here. The routes of the western and eastern fences are the same color, as though there is no difference between them.
Military spokesman did in fact explain to members of the support unit of the Palestinian negotiating division that the eastern fence would not be similar to the western one, and would apparently be composed of what is called a "secondary obstacle" (a system of ditches and barbed wire fences) and an eastern gate on the roads to Ramallah and the villages surrounding it - which would be locked and blocked off only in case of security alerts. But in any case, this promise does not reassure the village residents, who know that they are losing thousands of dunams of their land.
In the past three years they have already had a taste of checkpoints that prevented their access to the neighboring villages or to the district center, Ramallah. And even if the gate or the gates in the eastern, "secondary" fence are open most of the time - in Rantis, Budrus and the other villages they point to the maps and to the new political geography that is being created before their eyes.
The two small Palestinian enclaves that are being created west of Ramallah leave two large settlement blocs outside of them, which cut deep into the Palestinian territory and are joined within Israel itself,
until one can no longer see that there was a Green Line.
"That's why we are fighting against this fence," says Ayad Murar from his home, talking about this new geography. "It is part of our struggle for a peaceful solution to the conflict - the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel."
Between November and December 2003, military orders began to be posted in the Rantis, Budrus and other villages, regarding the "temporary" seizure of land (until December 2005) for military purposes. According to these orders, which are signed by the chief of Central Command Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, the width of the strips of land confiscated from the villages will range from 68 to 490 meters. The entire length of the (primary and secondary) fence that will surround the nine villages in the enclave - 32.2 kilometers.
Meanwhile, some of the residents of Budrus continue to sneak into Israel on foot, to make a living, mainly in construction. Others, who have lost their jobs in Israel in recent years, have found various jobs in the Ramallah area. But if they are closed within an enclave, they are liable to lose these places of work. Palestinian employers cannot withstand the frequent incidents of lateness caused by the blocks and the checkpoints.
"Come to live in Ramallah, or leave the job," they are told. Grocery store owners are feeling the difference. People come in infrequently, buy on credit, they buy only what is essential. It's hard to imagine what else will happen when the large olive grove is crushed beneath the teeth of the bulldozers or is swallowed up on the other side of the fence, and when it won't be possible to work in Israel at all any longer.
3. Chicago Tribune
February 6, 2004
What does Sharon's latest settlement move mean for Israel?
By Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's announcement that he plans to remove virtually all Israeli settlers from the occupied Gaza Strip has caused a shock wave in Israel.
Has some sudden epiphany convinced Sharon that the settlements are the key obstacle to peace and that Israel's future is jeopardized by the continued attempt to incorporate occupied Palestinian territories into a greater Israel?
Many Israelis, especially in the military, have long felt that the Gaza settlements are pointless, and a massive drain on national resources for no serious purpose. The small Gaza settlements are purely symbolic, in stark contrast to the massive settlements on the West Bank, which have literally reshaped the landscape and are designed also to transform its demographic and political realities, making Israel's control permanent.
While Sharon talks about removing settlements in Gaza, he is continuing to build them all over the West Bank, because he has no intention of permitting a real Palestinian state to be constructed.
One of the main reasons President Bush's "road map" for peace failed was that Sharon reneged on promises that he would start removing new settlement "outposts." Instead, he made a show of removing a few small, uninhabited sites, while setting up many more new ones and expanding dozens of major settlements up and down the West Bank.
Since Sharon broke those promises, Israel has announced thousands of new settler housing units. It recently allocated $1 million for yet another Jewish-only road in the West Bank, this one to connect an outpost settlement to a school run by an extremist Israeli group the U.S. State Department has formally designated as a terrorist organization.
Sharon's announcement could simply be a ploy to offset scandals at home, and growing pressure on Israel abroad, by trying to create the impression that he is taking some far-reaching initiative without intending to actually do anything.
Within Israel, his proposal has divided the opposition.
The right now is split between those who see him as a traitor to the cause of settling all of "Eretz Yisrael," or the Land of Israel, and those who see him as a pragmatist who can make tough decisions. Some on the left mistrust him completely, while others, like Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, welcome his proposals.
Sharon's announcement has also drawn international attention away from the appalling separation barrier Israel is building in the West Bank.
Sharon probably does intend to remove the settlements from Gaza, although his strategic vision has only been hinted at.
His spokesman Raanan Gissin explained that "Sharon envisages territorial exchanges with the Palestinians as part of future permanent arrangements, under which Arab Israeli localities would pass under the sovereignty of the latter, while Jewish settlements [in the West Bank] would be integrated into
Israeli territory."
Sharon seems to be looking for a way to keep control of the West Bank--hence all the new settlements and the separation wall deep inside Palestinian territory--but maintain a Jewish majority among citizens of Israel.
Twenty percent of Israel's citizens are Arabs. Gissin is proposing to strip at least some of them of their citizenship and transfer their villages to a Palestinian mini-state within a greater Israel.
From what we can piece together from his actions and statements, Sharon's vision includes offloading to a faux Palestinian state the burden of Gaza, political responsibility for Palestinians in the West Bank, and a significant number of Israeli citizens of Arab origin as well.
Such an arrangement would closely resemble efforts by South Africa's apartheid rulers to maintain white rule and strip black citizens of their rights as South Africans by creating ostensibly independent states for them known as Bantustans.
That ploy failed disastrously because the international community saw this deception for what it was, while the injustices it created on the ground led to ever more determined protest and resistance.
It appears that Sharon is hoping to pull the same trick and get away with it.
Ali Abunimah is a political analyst based in Chicago. Hussein Ibish is communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
February 13, 2004
“The Government of Israel does not believe that pilgrims and tourists have normal cause to visit Gaza.” That’s what an official from the Israeli Embassy in Great Britain told a Catholic priest who had called to inquire about troubling new Israeli regulations that were being handed to many international visitors upon their arrivals in Israel, informing them that entry into “Palestinian Authority” areas—Bethlehem, Gaza, Ramallah, Jericho—was forbidden without prior written authorisation. The Israeli official denied that the regulations applied say, to tourists and pilgrims wishing to visit the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, but only to Gaza. With the pattern of the past years having been one of increased restrictions on movement, and with the fences and walls Israel is erecting in the West Bank progressively giving it the capability it has in Gaza of enclosing entire populations, one can legitimately be sceptical that, in the future, entry to Bethlehem and Jericho, say, will not become difficult to impossible. For now, however, it’s abundantly clear that Israel plans to place severe limits on internationals wishing to enter the Gaza Strip. Diplomats, aid workers (including MCCers), UN staff usually can gain access, even if they have their stories of frustration. Others, however, will most likely be turned away.
On February 10, 2004, MCC workers accompanied a group of students and professors from Eastern Mennonite University, in the country as part of a cross-cultural semester in the Middle East. The group has been staying in the Bethlehem area (and thus in “Area A,” in violation of the regulations as spelled out in the recent travel warning), enjoying Palestinian hospitality, attending lectures, being immersed in the historical, social, religious, and political complexities of Palestine/Israel. The past several times EMU groups have been in the country, they have incorporated trips to Gaza, where they met with MCC mission partners.
This week the group was to have visited the local Catholic church and school in Gaza and children’s centers operated by the Culture and Free Thought Association in the refugee camps of the southern Gaza Strip. Despite the fact that I had been in repeated contact with the Israeli military officials at the Erez crossing point into the Gaza Strip, furnishing them weeks in advance with the passport information for each member of the group, the group was denied entry, simply told that authorisation had not been granted; over an hour of follow-up phone calls were in vain.
We at MCC are very disturbed by this denial of entry to the EMU group. We believe that Christians have very compelling reasons to visit the Gaza Strip (beyond enjoying the sea, which is lovely, the food, which is delicious, and visiting Byzantine, Crusader, Mamluke, and Ottoman-era churches, mosques, and baths). Christians should be allowed to visit the Gaza Strip in order to be in spiritual solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Christ who worship at Gaza’s Orthodox, Catholic, and Baptist churches. Christians should be allowed to visit the Gaza Strip as a show of support to Christian institutions such as the Near East Council of Churches and the Ahli Arabi Hospital. Christians should be allowed to visit non-Christian Organisations, such as the Culture and Free Thought Association, who join with Christian Organisations such as MCC to promote the development of healthy, thriving communities. [Persons of other faiths, of course, would have other valid reasons for wanting to visit Gaza.]
Any claims that restrictions on entry into the Gaza Strip are motivated by security are suspect at best. Israel tightly controls the Gaza Strip, with all passage in and out going through multiple passport controls, with baggage checks and metal detectors. Meanwhile, Israeli officials say, tourists and pilgrims can still go into Bethlehem (from which, for the time being, it is possible, with some determination, to exit without being subject to Israeli checks). It is hard to escape the conclusion that Israel’s primary motivation for keeping internationals out of the Gaza Strip is to reduce the number of people who witness Israeli policies of dispossession in practice. The Gaza Strip is constantly stereotyped: its people are terrorists, its cities and refugee camps are squalid, etc. Visits by tourists and pilgrims to the Strip are concrete ways of breaking down such inaccurate portrayals. The current Israeli government, however, appears much less intent on fostering bridge-building than on shoring up psychological, legal, and concrete walls that generate hate.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Amira Hass of Haaretz, critically dissects the claim made by Israeli National Security Advisor Giora Eiland that “The planners of the fence failed to predict its effects on innocent Palestinians.” The problem was not one of a failure of prediction, but rather a failure to care. The second, again by Hass, looks at life in the village of Budrus, west of Ramallah and only a few kilometres east of the “Green Line” between Israel and the West Bank; the separation wall, as Hass describes, will have a devastating effect on this community. In the final piece, US commentators Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibisih take a critical look at the rhetoric and the reality of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s proposed evacuation of Gaza Strip settlements.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Failed predictions, Haaretz, Feb. 11, 2004
By Amira Hass
"The planners of the fence failed to predict its effects on innocent Palestinians," National Security Advisor Giora Eiland told a high-level diplomatic-security forum in Germany this week (Haaretz, February 9). Like Eiland, other Israeli representatives are now trying to convince the western countries and the United States in particular that the route of the separation fence is a human, localized and almost chance error that can be corrected to minimize the damage.
We have a new sentry to blame for what has gone wrong: the rather anonymous planners of the separation fence. Some sort of personal, individual limitation caused them to fail and not to predict the extent to which "the lives of innocent people would be affected" by the construction of the fortifications, which has destroyed and is destroying wells that are essential to agriculture, is uprooting tens of thousands of olive trees and other trees and is wiping out hundreds of greenhouses in which thousands of people have invested the savings of years.
One really does need special analytical powers to predict that caging thousands of people behind iron gates and stationing 19-year-old soldiers to open them, if they feel like it, two or three times a day - would have a deleterious affect on studies at schools and universities, sabotage medical treatment for cancer and kidney patients and split up families. After all, only especially creative minds could have guessed that it would be very hard for 260,000 people to maintain "a normal fabric of life" in the 81 enclaves of various sorts that the fence creates. Eighty-one enclaves that separate them from neighboring villages, from the provincial towns and from the rest of the West Bank, shutting them in behind barbed wire fences and guard towers and excavations and double fences and bureaucratic-military systems of permits to go in and out of the enclaves that are needed by garbage collectors and doctors, family members and teachers.
The truth is that what was hard to predict was the international shock at the fence. United States National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is not pleased (and not only the United nations General Assembly) and Western diplomats are saying things in inner conclaves, especially when it turns out that development projects that had been funded by their countries have been destroyed under the fence's bulldozers.
The European countries are opposed to holding the deliberations at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, but they too have reservations about the fence's route and the damage it causes. Television channels around the world are showing documentary films about the fence and its ills, and it isn't possible to keep repeating the chorus that the motives are anti-Semitic. If it were not for all this, it is doubtful that various representatives of the state - like the Prosecutor's Office and before that, military sources - would be hinting about a change in the route of the fence and admitting a failure to "predict" how bad the damage would be to the innocent. They simply did not care about the damage.
After all, the kinds of damage that the fence is causing are not new. The Israeli occupation regime has been testing them successfully for 37 years now, sometimes in the name of security and sometimes in the name of the Jewish people's right to preferential rights in this country.
Neither the Meridor committee nor the Oslo agreement did away with the Israeli habit of harming the Palestinians' rights to water, land, freedom of movement, earning a living and development.
By the second half of 2002 it was already possible to know that the route of the fence was far from the Green Line (pre-Six Day War border), that it creates enclaves and that it harms the "vegetable garden" of the Palestinian economy. But at that time it was hard to bring to the Israeli media - which evinced no interest in the matter at that stage - reports about the extent of the fence's damage to the civilian population. The data and the reports on massive confiscations and uprooting of trees that were published by various Palestinian Organisations were not read in Hebrew. B'Tselem published its first position paper in September, 2002, which warned of the implications of the route of the fence, including a mortal blow to Palestinian life. Who remembers?
By the middle of 2003 the planners of the route of the fence had full backing - from the political system, from the print and the electronic media, from the street and from key figures in the Israeli peace camp. The idea of the fence, without going into detail, offered people frightened by the suicide terror attacks a hope that their personal security was achievable with no connection to any political solution. It offered a refuge from the disturbing knowledge that Israel is evading an offer of a sustainable political, humane, rational solution that the Palestinians can accept.
The military plan to build elevated bridges and sunken roads between the enclaves is a bone thrown to international public opinion and another vain solution offered to the Israelis that diverts attention from the essence. The planners of the route that harms the Palestinians are doing this on behalf of the state of Israel, which almost unhindered has built in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip a regime of Jewish superiority that inevitably violates the rights of the Palestinian individual and collective. Key parts of Israeli society have become blind to the damage, and the occupation regime is as much taken for granted as the sunrise in the east.
2. The village against the fence, Haaretz, Feb. 11, 2004
By Amira Hass
A serious-looking black dog, whose eyes looked almost hollow, freely crossed the naked strip of land west of the villages of Qibiya and Budrus, which stretches from the village of Rantis, about five
kilometers to the north.
A young resident of Qibiya guiding the visitors among the olive groves and fruit orchards of his village, up to the route of the fence, hastened to cross the ditch that has already been dug on both sides of the route, and to disappear among the trees. It was soon clear why – an Israeli security vehicle was approaching from the north toward those walking on the exposed strip, as soon as it detected them.
The vehicle stopped and two men got out. One, the shorter and older, carrying a rifle, was from Kfar Yonah; the second was from a Bedouin community in the Galilee. The one with the rifle angrily demanded that the visitors who came on foot leave immediately, or he would call the police so they would explain, if you insist, that this is a closed military area, even if he had no papers to prove it. His friend, who served in the army for seven years and was discharged half a year ago, calmed things down before they heated up.
The one with the rifle asserted that the presence of cameras encourages people to come and demonstrate, and that's how the waves of riots begin. "Isn't it you, by your work, who are causing the waves of rioting?" he asked, and the question wasn't quite understood. What are you talking about, we are doing our work, explained the younger man. And of course I support the fence, so I won't explode with my family in a restaurant.
The "riots" the two were talking about are a series of demonstrations against the fence that have been held by the residents of Budrus for about a month. "We decided that unlike other places until now, where international peace activists conducted the battle against the fence and the Palestinians supported them, we, the residents of Budrus, would wage our own battle."
Those are the words of Ayad Murar, 42, a veteran Fatah activist, who with his brother Naim was among the founders of the popular committee in the village "for the struggle against the apartheid wall." The popular committee, he says, emphasized to the people that the battle against the bulldozers and the many soldiers and police who protect them must be conducted without violence.
Curfew and arrests
All residents answered the call to demonstrate - young and old, men and women. What began as a strike along the route of the fence reached a climax on December 30. Somebody saw a bulldozer approaching the olive grove. The speaker in the mosque quickly announced it, and everyone who was in the village ran westward, toward the grove.
School children ran out of the classrooms, books in hand. Tear gas, rubber bullets and blows did not stop the villagers, who dispersed and returned to stand or to sit in front of the soldiers and the police, on the ground. Eyewitnesses say that the female students sat in front of the many soldiers, who retreated to their jeeps. The appearance of several television cameras helped.
During the following days, the Israel Defense Forces imposed a curfew on the village in order to prevent the residents from going out to demonstrate. Mainly young men violated the curfew and walked to the olive grove, to prevent the bulldozers from doing their work. Up to this week, the bulldozers have not returned to work - after they already uprooted about 60 olive trees. The people of Budrus attribute this to their stubbornness and determination.
A few days after this demonstration, the IDF arrested Naim Murar. He was released on January 11, but didn't manage to be home for more than three days when the army came again to arrest him and his brother Ayad. The military prosecutor demanded that they be placed under administrative detention.
In the military court at the Ofer army base, the judge, Major Adrian Agassi, decided to release Ayad. "I found it proper to intervene in the decision of the military commander," ruled Agassi in his decision. "After all, we cannot allow the military commander to use his authority to order the administrative detention of a person only because of this activity [against the fence]. In my opinion, this is a mistaken decision that did not stem from clear security considerations."
But the judge decided to approve the decision of the military commander to place Naim Murar under administrative detention. As is customary in administrative detention, only the judge was allowed to peruse the classified documents given to him by members of the Shin Bet security services, and according to these documents, "the intelligence material attributes to him activity in support of terror, in the context of the Tanzim organization."
But in Budrus people are convinced that the second detention of Naim Murar - like that of eight other activists against the fence - is an attempt to dismantle the opposition in the village. From Budrus' threatened olive grove sounds of firing can be heard - sounds of training exercises. They come from the Adam military base, which is a few dozen meters to the west, 20-30 meters west of the Green Line.
In Budrus they believe that because of this army base, which is a few dozen meters from the Green Line, the route of the fence was pushed straight into the beautiful olive grove that they have been nurturing for decades. Budrus lost most of its lands in 1948 - many thousands of dunams, some count up to 20,000, remained on the western side of the Green Line.
Some land remained in the demilitarized zone, which both Israeli and Jordanian forces were forbidden to enter. Since 1967, say the villagers, the demilitarized zone has become Israeli, and they weren't allowed to return to work their land there as well.
The route that is planned according to the map of the Israeli security services looks as though it is right on the Green Line. But in reality, all the difference lies in several dozen meters east of the Green Line. Now, of the 5,000 dunams that remain to the approximately 1,400 residents of Budrus, they estimate that they will lose about one fifth.
Some of this land is being confiscated for the fence itself, part of the area of the village will remain behind the fence - between the fence and the Green Line. The villagers estimate that 3,000 olive trees, which cover an area of about 5,000 dunams, will be lost under the teeth of the bulldozers or will be trapped in areas where entry is forbidden.
They figure that the "fence" - namely, two ditches that will be dug on both sides of it, and the two barbed wire fences, and the electronic fence with the sensors, and the patrol roads between them, and the watchtowers - will almost touch some of the most western houses in the village, including the school.
Imprisoned enclave
The occupation and preparation of the land here, west of Kibiya and Budrus, are being carried out in the context of the second stage of the building of the security fence. According to the plan, and as long as it has not been decided or proved otherwise, in the context of this stage two Palestinian enclaves will be created west of Ramallah.
These are two out of 81 Palestinian enclaves that have been created and will be created all along the fence, which are discussed in the report by B'Tselem. Some will be between the fence and the Green Line, some in small "loops" created by the fence, and some will be the result of "secondary obstacles," as the army puts it.
Budrus is one of the nine Palestinian villages that will find themselves in an enclave with an area of 53.2 square kilometers. These villages include Luban al Gharabiyeh, Rantis, Shuqba, Qibiya, Shabtin, Budrus,
Midya, Na'lin and Dir Kadis. The village of Midiya will be surrounded on all sides by the separation fence, as in a loop.
According to the map of the Israeli security services, one could have concluded immediately that an enclave would be created here. The routes of the western and eastern fences are the same color, as though there is no difference between them.
Military spokesman did in fact explain to members of the support unit of the Palestinian negotiating division that the eastern fence would not be similar to the western one, and would apparently be composed of what is called a "secondary obstacle" (a system of ditches and barbed wire fences) and an eastern gate on the roads to Ramallah and the villages surrounding it - which would be locked and blocked off only in case of security alerts. But in any case, this promise does not reassure the village residents, who know that they are losing thousands of dunams of their land.
In the past three years they have already had a taste of checkpoints that prevented their access to the neighboring villages or to the district center, Ramallah. And even if the gate or the gates in the eastern, "secondary" fence are open most of the time - in Rantis, Budrus and the other villages they point to the maps and to the new political geography that is being created before their eyes.
The two small Palestinian enclaves that are being created west of Ramallah leave two large settlement blocs outside of them, which cut deep into the Palestinian territory and are joined within Israel itself,
until one can no longer see that there was a Green Line.
"That's why we are fighting against this fence," says Ayad Murar from his home, talking about this new geography. "It is part of our struggle for a peaceful solution to the conflict - the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel."
Between November and December 2003, military orders began to be posted in the Rantis, Budrus and other villages, regarding the "temporary" seizure of land (until December 2005) for military purposes. According to these orders, which are signed by the chief of Central Command Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, the width of the strips of land confiscated from the villages will range from 68 to 490 meters. The entire length of the (primary and secondary) fence that will surround the nine villages in the enclave - 32.2 kilometers.
Meanwhile, some of the residents of Budrus continue to sneak into Israel on foot, to make a living, mainly in construction. Others, who have lost their jobs in Israel in recent years, have found various jobs in the Ramallah area. But if they are closed within an enclave, they are liable to lose these places of work. Palestinian employers cannot withstand the frequent incidents of lateness caused by the blocks and the checkpoints.
"Come to live in Ramallah, or leave the job," they are told. Grocery store owners are feeling the difference. People come in infrequently, buy on credit, they buy only what is essential. It's hard to imagine what else will happen when the large olive grove is crushed beneath the teeth of the bulldozers or is swallowed up on the other side of the fence, and when it won't be possible to work in Israel at all any longer.
3. Chicago Tribune
February 6, 2004
What does Sharon's latest settlement move mean for Israel?
By Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's announcement that he plans to remove virtually all Israeli settlers from the occupied Gaza Strip has caused a shock wave in Israel.
Has some sudden epiphany convinced Sharon that the settlements are the key obstacle to peace and that Israel's future is jeopardized by the continued attempt to incorporate occupied Palestinian territories into a greater Israel?
Many Israelis, especially in the military, have long felt that the Gaza settlements are pointless, and a massive drain on national resources for no serious purpose. The small Gaza settlements are purely symbolic, in stark contrast to the massive settlements on the West Bank, which have literally reshaped the landscape and are designed also to transform its demographic and political realities, making Israel's control permanent.
While Sharon talks about removing settlements in Gaza, he is continuing to build them all over the West Bank, because he has no intention of permitting a real Palestinian state to be constructed.
One of the main reasons President Bush's "road map" for peace failed was that Sharon reneged on promises that he would start removing new settlement "outposts." Instead, he made a show of removing a few small, uninhabited sites, while setting up many more new ones and expanding dozens of major settlements up and down the West Bank.
Since Sharon broke those promises, Israel has announced thousands of new settler housing units. It recently allocated $1 million for yet another Jewish-only road in the West Bank, this one to connect an outpost settlement to a school run by an extremist Israeli group the U.S. State Department has formally designated as a terrorist organization.
Sharon's announcement could simply be a ploy to offset scandals at home, and growing pressure on Israel abroad, by trying to create the impression that he is taking some far-reaching initiative without intending to actually do anything.
Within Israel, his proposal has divided the opposition.
The right now is split between those who see him as a traitor to the cause of settling all of "Eretz Yisrael," or the Land of Israel, and those who see him as a pragmatist who can make tough decisions. Some on the left mistrust him completely, while others, like Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, welcome his proposals.
Sharon's announcement has also drawn international attention away from the appalling separation barrier Israel is building in the West Bank.
Sharon probably does intend to remove the settlements from Gaza, although his strategic vision has only been hinted at.
His spokesman Raanan Gissin explained that "Sharon envisages territorial exchanges with the Palestinians as part of future permanent arrangements, under which Arab Israeli localities would pass under the sovereignty of the latter, while Jewish settlements [in the West Bank] would be integrated into
Israeli territory."
Sharon seems to be looking for a way to keep control of the West Bank--hence all the new settlements and the separation wall deep inside Palestinian territory--but maintain a Jewish majority among citizens of Israel.
Twenty percent of Israel's citizens are Arabs. Gissin is proposing to strip at least some of them of their citizenship and transfer their villages to a Palestinian mini-state within a greater Israel.
From what we can piece together from his actions and statements, Sharon's vision includes offloading to a faux Palestinian state the burden of Gaza, political responsibility for Palestinians in the West Bank, and a significant number of Israeli citizens of Arab origin as well.
Such an arrangement would closely resemble efforts by South Africa's apartheid rulers to maintain white rule and strip black citizens of their rights as South Africans by creating ostensibly independent states for them known as Bantustans.
That ploy failed disastrously because the international community saw this deception for what it was, while the injustices it created on the ground led to ever more determined protest and resistance.
It appears that Sharon is hoping to pull the same trick and get away with it.
Ali Abunimah is a political analyst based in Chicago. Hussein Ibish is communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
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