MCC Palestine Update #25
Early morning, August 28, 2001 the Israeli military entered Beit Jala, a day after assassinating the political leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Ali Mustafa. The Israeli military shows no sign of leaving Beit Jala. In the afternoon of August 28, MCC country representative Alain Epp Weaver accompanied the Lutheran Bishop of Jerusalem Munib Younan to the Lutheran church and school in Beit Jala. Early in the morning, soldiers broke into the church's compound, which houses an orphanage for 45 boys, ages 6-17. The soldiers took the keys to the church from the frightened children and entered the church and an adjacent building which had been intended as an interfaith center. As of this writing, the soldiers have not left the church; Palestinians report that the soldiers have been firing from the roof of the church and the interfaith center.
The pastor of the church, Jadallah Shehadeh, was shot at this morning as he tried to reach the church. This afternoon an ecumenical delegation in which Alain participated went to the church / orphanage to distribute food to the boys held captive within.
Please pray for the citizens of Beit Jala, Christian and Muslim, held under tight curfew. Pray for the students at the Lutheran orphanage and school. Pray also for the boarding students at the Hope Secondary School (formerly Mennonite school) in Beit Jala--while not under curfew, the school is right next to an army base, and tanks are continually rolling by the school's gates.
YMCA visit: Haitham Qaraqe', six years old, was in a car with his pregnant mother, his father and his uncle the night he lost an eye last spring. Israeli soldiers from a nearby post opened fire on the car: their bullets pierced Haitham's eye, killed his father Imad, and seriously wounded his uncle.
The Israeli military later said that it had been a case of "mistaken identity." Nicola Abu hannam, also six years old, comes from a Palestinian Christian family in Beit Jala. He was going with his mother to visit the neighbors on the occasion of St. George's feast when a stray Israeli shell hit him and tore off his left arm, the arm his mother had been holding at the time.
Both Haitham and Nicola are clients of the YMCA Rehabilitation Center in Beit Sahour. The dedicated professionals of the YMCA Rehabilitation Center have sadly had an increased workload for the past year, with an estimated 2500 injured people left with ermanent disabilities. Please keep children like Haitham and Nicola, and the workers at the YMCA, in your prayers.
And pray for the safety of Palestinians as they try to circumvent roadblocks to do such basic tasks as buying school supplies. One Palestinian man was gunned down walking into Nablus on his way to buy backpacks for his children. With the siege on the occupied territories tighter than ever, some Palestinians are now taking a 3 kilometer donkey ride in order to enter Nablus. MCC country representative Alain Epp Weaver didn't have to take a donkey ride, but did have to join scores of Palestinians on a one kilometer walk over piles of dirt separating two impromptu taxi stands. A subsequent taxi ride from Nablus to Ramallah involved several kilometers through a "road" in an olive orchard, the bottom of the taxi scraping the ground every couple meters.
Included below are three pieces. The first, by Israeli commentator Meron Benvenisti, unflinchingly and correctly describes Israeli practice in the occupied territories as apartheid. The second, by Gideon Levy of Haaretz newspaper, outlines life at the checkpoints marking Palestinian existence. The final piece, by Haaretz journalist Amira Hass, looks at life under Israeli shelling in Rafah in the Gaza Strip along the Egyptian border.
1. Unilateral separation leads inexorably to Apartheid
Meron Benvinisti
Haaretz, 23 August 2001
While a wall separates Israel from the West Bank between Bat Hefer (left) and Tulkarm, unilateral separation of Israel from the Palestinians, like all ideologies, mocks any argument that dares challenge the feasibility of its implementation. (Photo: AP )
One day, more than 30 years ago, two Israelis who dealt with handling the Palestinian population - one in Jerusalem and the other in the West Bank - met a high-ranking South African official. At the meeting, the two explained their jobs and the way they were improving Israeli-Palestinian relations by letting the Palestinians manage their own lives.
Suddenly, the guest said, "What would you say if I invited you to assist the new regime in the Transkei homeland?" The Israelis were astonished. Their guest's question insinuated that their tolerant and liberal activities were similar to the racist practices of apartheid rule.
When they objected, he smiled at them. "I understand your reaction. But aren't you basically doing the same thing? You and we both face the same existential problems, so we reach the same solution. The only difference is that your solution is pragmatic and ours ideological. Yes, we're all in love with the compromises we make with ourselves."
More than 30 years have passed, and the pragmatic solutions "necessitated by reality" have crystallized into a coherent ideology. It's called unilateral separation. Like all ideologies, unilateral separation "rises above" pragmatic solutions to immediate needs, and purports to provide "an answer" to existential problems: Jewish existence (dubbed "Zionist") is in mortal danger because of the demo-geographic threat. Therefore everyone - liberals, conservatives, leftists and nationalists - rally round to save the Zionist enterprise by "separating" all the others, including Arab citizens of the state, using three barbed-wire fences – one "around Area A," the second "near the Green Line," and a third, never mentioned, along the international borders of mandatory Palestine.
Like all ideologies, unilateral separation mocks any argument that dares challenge the feasibility of its implementation. It all depends on making "brave national decisions" that rise to the occasion of the expected catastrophe, and those who are not ready to rise up to face the severity of the situation are being irresponsible. Opposition to the ideology of unilateral separation on principle, for example, like using the "demographic threat" to characterize "the proliferation" of the other, and that its implementation will only meet the needs of the ruling group and the price will be paid by the other, are rejected with disgust.
Along with mocking the soft bleeding hearts, the ideologues of unilateral separation emphasize the "fact" that it will require "the evacuation of 30- 35 settlements in Judea and Samaria and tearing out sections of the state populated by Arabs of Israel." That heavy price will remain, of course, theoretical, since the ideology of separation is based on the monopoly of absolute power (the "unilateral") remaining forever in the hands of the stronger side -whether it has a demographic majority or whether it becomes a minority "in 2010." And when the demographic reversal does take place, they'll simply stop counting the "others": in any case there's no relevance to the number of heads as long as they cannot raise their hands to vote.
The demographic "threat" is nothing more than a contemptible means to enlist xenophobia and the isolationist tendencies beating in the breasts of masses of frightened people who are lost without leadership, for the purpose of creating political movements that pretend to offer "solutions for the situation."
The ideological preaching serves as a cover for "pragmatic" steps like closures and sieges, and the failure of the method requires ever-more extreme measures of separation, accompanied by ever-more extremist declarations about the "others" to justify the extreme measures. And then, when the separation comes dangerously close to apartheid, everyone criesout, "How dare you compare? We're in favor of a Palestinian state prospering on the other side of and between the three barbed-wire fences. Bantustan, you say? That's an insult."
If that South African official were to return today, he'd shake his head in sorrow. "We reached the conclusion ten years ago that unilateral separation that keeps the monopoly of coercion in the hands of the white community simply won't last and has to go. Your political thinking now is the same as it was back when we first met. True, as I said then, the existential problems are the same; we chose a united multi-racial state(what you call a "binational" state). Maybe there's still the alternative of dividing the country with an agreement. If there is, grab it. Believe me, unilateral separation is not an option. It only will turn you into a pariah state isolated from the West, just as we were. We also thought the world didn't understand us, wasn't sensitive to our plight. You have it a little easier, because you can think it's all anti-Semitism. Forget it. Learn from us."
2. A slice of roadblock reality
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, 19 August 2001
The roadblock at Qalandiya, in June: Each vehicle has to wait in the withering heat for three to four hours in each direction - and this is not in the rush hour. (Photo: AP )
The reports that appeared at week's end about the tightening of the blockade of Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem in the West Bank, took at least a few of the local residents by surprise: "How can they tighten the siege any more?" wondered A, a resident of the closed city.
Still, the underlying rationale for the total prohibition the Israel Defense Forces imposed on vehicles seeking to travel south from Ramallah was understandable: Security sources reported that place-specific warnings had been received about suicide bombers, and many roadblocks were put up on Israeli roads, too. The siege of Ramallah will probably be lifted soon, the city will revert to its old routine, and Israel may even score propaganda points by declaring it has having "relaxed the closure." The traffic on the Jerusalem-Ramallah road will return to "normal" and the state of things will go back to what it was, for example, at the Qalandiya roadblock.
The roadblock at Qalandiya is a relatively new one, having been established in the midst of the current Intifada. It is located opposite the fence that surrounds the deserted international airport at Atarot, in the north of Jerusalem, on the main road to Ramallah, and next to the neighborhood of Qalandiya, which is within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem. This is not the Palestinians' entryway into Jerusalem and Israel - for that, there is the A-Ram checkpoint, a few kilometers to the south.
The Qalandiya roadblock is located on a road that is in a scandalous state of maintenance and is the busiest route in the West Bank. More than half a million Palestinians make use of it -residents of the Ramallah and East Jerusalem areas, including all the many villages and refugee camps around the cities. They have no other way. Jews do not have need of this route: The way to the settlements in the region passes on separate roads, on which Palestinians are forbidden to travel. Now another wide road is being built there, which will also be reserved exclusively for the use of the settlers.
At the Qalandiya roadblock three or four soldiers check the vehicles, their passengers and their contents (the permits to enter Israel are checked a bit later, at the A-Ram site). Here's how they go about it: the line of cars, which is several kilometers long, stretches toward the horizon behind concrete blocks and a terrifying army bulldozer, which sits, poised and mute, by the roadside, perhaps to intimidate the travelers, and one of the soldiers signals one vehicle at a time to move forward. When the check is over and the vehicle has been cleared to go ahead, the soldier takes a break - it can last two minutes, or five minutes, and sometimes more - before signaling the next vehicle to move forward to be checked. It's a methodical procedure. The result is that each vehicle has to wait for three to four hours in each direction - and this is not in the rush hour.
Under the blazing August sun thousands of perspiring, irritable drivers wait for the soldier's signal, so that one more car can at last move ahead. Some of them get out of their cars, unable to bear the overwhelming heat, others occasionally sound their horns in a furious cacophony, which quickly fades away because of its uselessness.
There are young people and old people, women and children, for whom the trip is obviously vital; otherwise, it stands to reason, they would not subject themselves to this agony. They wait in the vast traffic jam for hours to make a journey that in ordinary times would take a few minutes. Last Sunday, the Palestinian Authority's minister for international cooperation, Nabil Sha'ath, was also here, in his air-conditioned van, and he waited together with a bridegroom
in a decorated car: the Qalandiya roadblock is a great social leveler.
The sight of the pedestrians is even more pathetic. Having no other choice, thousands of Palestinians cross the roadblock on foot. No one checks them, even though they are carrying packages, a situation that raises doubts about the security usefulness of the roadblock. In a procession that can only arouse pity, are old people leaning on their son's shoulders, people who are ill and are making their way with their last remaining strength, the disabled, pregnant women and children who can't understand why they have to drag themselves like this in the withering heat.
Says the IDF spokesman in response: "In humanitarian cases the IDF ensures that the checks are expedited and that the travelers are not delayed." That is simply ridiculous: No vehicle, not even an ambulance, can get around this horrific traffic jam, and anyone who is ill is condemned to wait for hours in a vehicle or to make his way on foot.
The conclusions are almost unavoidable. To begin with, this roadblock is not meant only to check vehicles but also to punish their passengers, and perhaps to dissuade them from leaving
their places of residence. Otherwise it's hard to understand what the justification is for this most terrible of the West Bank roadblocks, for what do security needs have to do with the infuriatingly slow-motion behavior of the soldiers?
Second, along with the security benefits, whether real or imaginary, the security damage also has to be taken into account. No one can know whether it is more likely that a terrorist attack will be prevented by a permanent roadblock whose existence is known far and wide, or that the hatred that is generated during the long hours of exhausting and humiliating waiting will produce more terrorism.
Finally, if more Israelis were exposed to this slice of reality, which is a regular part of Palestinian life, and saw with their own eyes the ordeals endured by ordinary, innocent Palestinians, they might gain a better understanding of the roots of the hatred the Palestinians feel for them. One roadblock is enough to understand it.
3. ‘Why would we need a key when we don’t have a house?’
Amira Hass
Haaretz, 20 August 2001
Looking out at an IDF post from a shelled Palestinian home in Rafah, close to the border with Egypt. (Photo: Reuters)
Palestinians traveling along the roads of the Gaza Strip rarely see any Israeli soldiers. Expanses of tilled gray soil and dry thorns extend from either side of the roads.
Over the past 10 months, the Israel Defense Forces has uprooted thousands of olive, citrus and palm trees and grapevines, and flattened hundreds of dunams of fields and hothouses. In the
wasteland created by the army's bulldozers, the soldiers are invisible. What can be seen are the thickets of concrete blocks that bisect roads, dividing Israeli from Palestinian traffic, as well as
tanks, armored personnel carriers (APCs), armored jeeps, observation towers manned by video cameras, and positions dug into low hills, with camouflage nets and gun nests at their summits.
These guard posts - round concrete structures of varying height -have replaced the tanks, which at the start of the Intifada were positioned at the intersections. The rifle and machine-gun barrels
protrude from the narrow slits that ring these guard posts. Sometimes you spot a hand sticking out of a slit: it is a soldier directing a car either to stop or to keep moving. Nor does one see
the soldiers who man the positions that are only steps away from dense residential quarters, primarily in Khan Yunis and Rafah.
"As far as I could see, the bulldozer that destroyed my house may have been guided by remote control," says Anwar Kalloub from "O Block," a refugee neighborhood in Rafah that is adjacent to the Egyptian border. On the night of July 10, he watched as the huge tractor ("It wasn't a tractor, it was a building that moves") chewed up and spat out his home until it was a pile of rubble. He was not able to see who was operating the tractor. "A 15-year-old dream was destroyed in seconds; money I'd saved up from 20 years of work evaporated in a single night."
Sixteen residential homes were completely demolished that night, in what the IDF then described as "engineering activity and removal of abandoned buildings, from which came individuals who laid explosive charges and from which gunfire was directed at IDF soldiers."
All told, about 50 homes were demolished in Rafah, which has a population of about 100,000. Another thousand or so dwellings have been directly damaged by gunfire, mortar shells or fires
set off by incendiary illumination shells. The windows of several hundred more were shattered by the concussion waves from the shooting and shelling.
Life in Rafah goes on, in the shadow of the unseen soldiers, the APCs rumbling along the Egyptian border and the reinforced positions that are filled with weapons of every sort - between
the homes of the dead and injured of the Intifada, near the completely destroyed homes, within the homes pierced like sieves by the bullets, and amid unemployment of more than 60 percent.
Anwar Kalloub is now sitting with other owners of demolished homes, at the still-intact house of a neighbor. Together they are looking through the piles of rubble: a shattered and overturned
refrigerator, a school backpack, a few scattered Lego blocks, torn school notebooks, shreds of furniture, bent iron hinges. "Are these abandoned homes?" Kalloub rhetorically asks.
He asks the guests not to get any closer to what had been his home: from his and his neighbor's experience, when anyone gets close to the border, the invisible soldiers from "Termite," the
nearby army post, start shooting.
Kalloub's home had been only a few meters from the border fence. Part of it was built in 1948, the rest in 1996. Anwar and his brother Jihad bought it from a previous owner. Their family originally came from Ashdod. Kalloub, 38, worked in the Tel Aviv's Carmel market for 20 years for the same employer. He would rehire Kalloub whenever the closures and curfews of the first Intifada were lifted. The two men speak on the phone occasionally. Kalloub stills owes
him a few hundred shekels he borrowed last year. Don't worry about the money, his boss told him. You'll pay it back when you come back to work. For the past nine months he hasn't been
able to go to work - a job for which he used to leave home every morning at 1:30 a.m., returning home at 9:00 p.m.
Kalloub paid $17,000 on September 2 for the house next to the border, a sizable sum in a city that has the highest poverty in the Strip. The houses are ringed by unpaved sandy paths, like most of the refugee neighborhoods in the city. A closed sewage system was completed only two months ago, replacing the open sewage canals.
The family moved into the home on October 10, a few days after the start of the Intifada. "Who thought it would go on so long?" he says. On October 18, the army fired at the neighborhood,
including Kalloub's house, for the first time. The IDF Spokesman said it was in response to Palestinian gunfire. On two occasions, the family was at home while shooting was going on outside. They crowded into a room on the far side from the border fence. "The soldiers
definitely knew there were children in the house," says Kalloub. The video camera on the observation tower, on the other side of the border fence - only meters from the front door of the
house -undoubtedly saw them as they walked in and out of the house.
Subsequently, when the exchanges of gunfire and mortar shellings grew more frequent, the family rented a small apartment in central Rafah. But when the money ran out, they had no other choice but to return to the house along the border. They comforted themselves by saying that things were calmer now, that there was less shooting, that the armed youths were no longer prowling around the neighborhood trying to squeeze off a few rounds at the well-protected position, which were invariably answered by volleys of rifle fire and a few shells.
According to Kalloub and the neighbors still living in the houses that have not been destroyed and which now form the front rank facing the border, the soldiers have fired from the position and from the APCs on countless occasions when not a single Palestinian shot had been fired at them. "We would be cringing two times a day, whenever a tank passed along the border fence," which is reinforced by concrete and piles of sand. At such times, the neighborhood would be quaking with fear and the rumbling of the APCs. (Palestinians do not differentiate between tanks
and APCs, but according to the agreement with Egypt, the IDF may not have tanks along the border).
Bulldozers approach
After midnight on July 10, Kalloub was chatting with some friends in the street when he heard the APCs coming. He ran home in time to see the bulldozers approaching and to wake up his six
children, as well as his neighbor, Abu Halil, in the next house over. He noticed that the man had not even emerged from his house before the teeth of the bulldozer blade were already chomping at it. It was only then that the exchanges of gunfire broke out. Armed Palestinians ran up and fired at the force, which returned fire.
"Should we take the house key?" one of Kalloub's daughters asked. He stared at her, dazed. "Why would we need a key when we don't have a house?" Incidentally, the large iron key of the
house in Ashdod is still kept in his parents' home.
The Palestinian Authority promised alternate housing to Kalloub and a few dozen others who had lost their homes. A 150-square meter parcel of land was allocated to each family, on which
UNWRA would build the home. Each family received NIS 8,000 in exchange for waiving its rights to the land on which their ruined homes had stood. Abu Halil, an elderly refugee from Be'er Sheva, refused to sign the waiver, or accept the money. He did not want to be a refugee for a second time, he says.
"O Block" is situated on the north side of Saladin Street, a commercial street that used to continue straight into the Egyptian part of Rafah, and from there to El Arish. Saladin was
considered the Champs-Elysees of Rafah. It was lit up, bustling, a magnet for shoppers and tradesmen. After Sinai was returned to Egypt, its popularity eclipsed. The current visitor requires a special brand of courage, or utter resignation with one's fate, to walk down the street in the direction of the border. All of the shops along the first 200 meters of the street, from the border side, are shuttered. Their metal doors are riddled with holes: countless holes of every size
testify to the bullets and shells they have absorbed. The holes also perforate the walls of all the homes still standing within a range of 100 to 500 meters of the border, on both sides of the
street. This is true for the refugee neighborhoods as well as the area south of Saladin Street, the older residential quarters. These are the original neighborhoods of pre-'48 Rafah, many of whose
residents belong to the large Khishta clan.
During a guided tour of one home there, attention is called to the perforated walls, which have been patched with mortar. Look, there are eight holes in the children's room. In the older aunt's room -nine holes. In the northern room - a large hole made by a shell, which had to be sealed with a few cinder blocks. The metal back door of the house is carefully opened. More piles of
rubble come into view. Some of the homes were demolished on April 14, others on July 19. Here and there is a yellow chrysanthemum bush. And looming over the entire scene is the Termite position, with its observation tower and video camera. Here, too, they warn visitors against walking around the rubble, lest someone open fire from the position or from a tank concealed
behind the concrete fence and sand embankment.
The Khishta family knows the reason for caution: The wife of one of the brothers was seriously injured while she was cooking in the kitchen of her home, which is in the fourth or fifth row of
houses from the border. She was hit by shrapnel from a shell that was intended for somewhere else. She lost an eye, and is now paralyzed in one arm and both legs. She is hospitalized in Saudi
Arabia, and defined as 90 percent disabled.
In November, one of the brothers, Najib, was walking home from a field owned by the family. It is situated in an open expanse between the fourth and fifth rows of houses. An IDF bullet
penetrated a narrow metal grating in a garage under one of the homes, and hit him in the head. He was one of Rafah's first residents to be killed.
Lesson for the deaf
Shadi Siam, 17 was killed on May 24. Siam supported himself though odd jobs in carpentry or agriculture. He was deaf, and as he was walking near Saladin Street that day, he did not hear the
gunfire. He was hit by a bullet in the chest, which exited his back. The school for the deaf and dumb that he had attended until two years earlier suspended classes for three days after Siam's
death. The teachers held special sessions with the agitated students, and discussed ways that the deaf might avoid gunfire in the future.
Siam's killing spiked awareness in Rafah of the problems now faced by the deaf, when shots are suddenly fired by invisible soldiers from observation towers or tanks or outposts. Rafah has
an especially high incidence of deafness: the older families of Rafah tend to intermarry, so as to keep the real estate assets in the family. These marriages between relatives often result in the
birth of children with hearing problems. Ten years ago, the Rafah community decided to build a school for them. No one thought they would need special coaching on how to act when a civilian
population is under fire.
Friday, August 24
Monday, August 13
MCC Palestine Update #24
MCC Palestine Update #24
It is difficult to find words to express the numb sadness we at MCC have felt this past week. The suicide bombing by a Hamas activist of a pizza restaurant in West Jerusalem was shocking, if, sadly, not unexpected.
Not unexpected because the anger, despair, and humiliation felt by Palestinians living under siege in the occupied territories--people confined by roadblocks and checkpoints to their villages, almost daily burying new dead (a frighteningly large number of them children), coping with thousands of injured persons who will be forever disabled, facing constant confiscation of land for the construction of illegal Israeli colonies, and now dealing with the takeover of Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem--was bound to find expression. Noting the fundamental violence of the Israeli occupation is, of course, not to excuse horrific attacks against civilians, such as the pizza restaurant bombing; nor is it even to excuse attacks against Israeli soldiers, even as international law allows for an occupied people to resist an occupying force militarily within the standard norms of warfare.
For pacifist Christians such as ourselves, violence can find no excuse. We at MCC deplore the use of violence by Israeli and Palestinian alike and yearn for the justice which will allow both to live in peace. Below we have included two pieces. The first is by Ghassan Andoni, director of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between Peoples, a long-time MCC partner. Ghassan's outline of a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a helpful antidote to voices who would portray this conflict as an eternal, insoluble struggle. The other piece is the prayers of the people offered by MCC country co- representative Alain Epp Weaver at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer on August 12. Two additional pieces are available by contacting the MCC Washington Office (jdb@mcc.org): The first, by British journalist Robert Fisk, highlights how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a type of war not dissimilar from other anti-colonialist wars. Fisk's article usefully underscores the choice facing Israel: does it wish to continue its colonization of the occupied territories (which of necessity involves violence) and live with the violent reaction, or can it decide to end the occupation and thus create the conditions for peace? The second, by Israeli commentator Meron Benvenisti, explores how the use of language can mask certain forms of violence.
1. Make no mistake; it is solvable, yet the interest of some stands against a solution.
Ghassan Andoni
The Palestinian problem is solvable. Both Palestinians and Israelis can live with peace without changing their beliefs or relinquishing their rights. Some want us to believe that there is no solution to this problem and that another option is inevitable. Someone is preparing us for an ideological war in which all of us except the ideological fanatics will lose. Someone wants to reverse history, bring it back to the forties of last century. Some fanatics are dreaming of genocide and forced transfer as the ultimate solution to the problem.
Yes, with all the magnified problems such as Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, and the creation of a state for Palestinians, the crisis is solvable. With all the incitement, fear, and racist education, the problem is solvable. We need not to forget this even for one minute. Many have lost their lives and the queue is long. We need not allow fanatics to wage the war until the last one of us.
So, how it is solvable? In territorial terms, dividing the land around 70% Israel, 30% Palestine is not only possible but will help both sides to preserve the main characters of their state and sovereignty and solve their major national problems. Israel can continue being Jewish and Palestine can become integral, sovereign, and able to solve, within its territory, the refugee problem. As the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza is 22% of the total area of Mandate Palestine; it is evident that an additional 8% is required to insure the Palestinian state integrity and to solve the Palestinian refugee problem. I know for sure that if racist education, incitement, and fear are put aside, there exists a reasonable majority on both sides that supports the idea of sharing the country between two nations.
The major obstacle, which stands in the way, is the misconception that "the land is already shared according to established realities." Established realities are only pointing towards racial segregation and apartheid, and can only serve the ones who want to continue with the bloodshed. Sharing the land between the two nations is very different from segregating both societies.
The only two options available for a peaceful solution are living in one country with equal rights, or sharing the country between the two nations and creating two separate sovereign states. Anything in between is not only inhuman but as well insures the continuity of the conflict.
In security terms, the best solution available and tested to insure the security of both is a peace treaty signed between two sovereign states. People tend to forget that a peace treaty between Israel and both Jordan and Egypt granted a level of security never encountered from before. Israelis have to remember that from the Jordanian borders many Israeli sensitive areas are within the reach of conventional weapons that both Jordanians and others have. While, the difficult situation in the north is primarily due to the lack of a peace treaty between Israel and both Syria and Lebanon.
There is no way to keep the conflict alive, unresolved, and enjoy peace and security. There are limitations to how much the utilization of military superiority can achieve. Examining the events of the past 10 years will make my point self-evident.
The only way to insure a state security is through working out a solution to the crisis with its surrounding, sign a peace treaty, and with years work out good relations based on common interests. This is what is attempted all over the world and the Middle East is not exceptional. But, what if there are groups among Palestinians who will not be satisfied with such a solution and still demand mandate Palestine as their final goal? Evidently there will still be such groups in both sides. They exist all over the world. Yet, communities are established to live and work for prosperity and better living conditions. Such groups on both sides will become more isolated, self-focused, and marginal when the majority decide on peace and create the proper education for peace.
All attempts to establish a peace environment and education prior to a peace treaty have failed, not only here but also worldwide. How would such arrangements end the refugee problem? What about the right to return? The additional 8% mentioned as part of the territorial dimension represents, more or less, the Palestinian built up area prior to 1948. So, in principle refugees will regain their property claims. As the right of return will be applicable within the context of a two state solution, Palestinian refugees can be rehabilitated on the territories provided as an exchange for their original and at the same time enjoy their own national identity and state. Such formula will be acceptable by the vast majority of refugees.
What about settlements? If Israelis want to stick to residential and territorial claims in the West Bank and Gaza strip, then there is no point in even attempting to solve the problem. Public opinion polls indicate that there exists a reasonable majority that stands against such claims. As a result of the Camp David negotiations, I have no doubts that a practical solution to this issue is possible.
What about Jerusalem? In Camp David summit, it was evident that both parties were very close to an agreement on Jerusalem. So, and without more arguing, if the religious side of the problem is dealt with more wisely, Jerusalem will not stand as the hard nut of the whole crisis.
The ones who want us to believe that the problem is not solvable are actively preparing the ground for using all of us as a fuel for their ideological war. The way to do so is to convince all of us that this problem is not solvable.
2. Prayers of the People, Redeemer Lutheran Church, Jerusalem
Alain Epp Weaver
12 August 2001
We gather together this morning before God, hearts filled with anger, bitterness, despair, cynicism, lament.
We come before God, wishing to offer praise and thanksgiving, but finding our tongues numbed by grief.
We approach God with righteous indignation at the violence and injustice perpetrated by others, but find ourselves painfully reminded of our own complicity, in spirit and in deed, with the powers of domination and violence.
With these burdens which we bring before God, it is truly a miracle of grace to be empowered to pray, be it with words spoken aloud or held before God in our hearts.
And so we welcome you to share your prayer requests, your joys and concerns, so that we may lift them up to God. Let us join together in prayer:
Gracious and merciful God, Creator of heaven and earth, of olive and sage, desert and forest, ocean and sky, we approach you humbled and awed by the works of your hand.
The land, the sea-- all is a gift of your creative bounty. Give your children new hearts to accept this gift, not with a spirit of hoarding and domination, but with an eagerness to share it with others.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer. Sovereign God, you rule over the nations in truth and in justice, yet your rule is often obscured to our prideful and arrogant eyes. Curb our warring madness, calm our lust for domination, break our prideful insistence to justify oppression and violence on the pretexts of security, liberation, or revenge. Spur in all leaders a thirst for justice and righteousness. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
Healing God, we come before you with broken bodies. Our political bodies are torn apart by lies, injustice, and violence. Once more this week fragile human bodies have been torn apart, caught in a cycle of violence and revenge. We pray for Israelis and Palestinians who were killed and injured this week. We don't want these, your precious children, to be reduced to statistics in mind and soul- numbing lists of dead and injured. And yet pondering each loss of life, each life-altering injury, threatens to overwhelm our hearts and paralyze us. Help us to memorialize death in a way that moves us to action, action on behalf of justice and peace so that no more lives are lost. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
Sustainer God, we ask for your encouraging Spirit to bind together your broken church. You have called us your own and made us your people; now embolden us to live as prophetic, embodied signs of your boundary-breaking Kingdom. Bind up our bodies and spirits, Lord. Be with those struggling with illness, fear, and isolation. Make us as a congregation and as individuals a part of your healing Spirit. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
O Lord, you know us in our inmost hearts, and have heard our prayers spoken and unspoken. Loosen our tongues, strengthen our feet and hands, embolden our hearts, so that our lives might be ones of unceasing prayerful action. In the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.
It is difficult to find words to express the numb sadness we at MCC have felt this past week. The suicide bombing by a Hamas activist of a pizza restaurant in West Jerusalem was shocking, if, sadly, not unexpected.
Not unexpected because the anger, despair, and humiliation felt by Palestinians living under siege in the occupied territories--people confined by roadblocks and checkpoints to their villages, almost daily burying new dead (a frighteningly large number of them children), coping with thousands of injured persons who will be forever disabled, facing constant confiscation of land for the construction of illegal Israeli colonies, and now dealing with the takeover of Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem--was bound to find expression. Noting the fundamental violence of the Israeli occupation is, of course, not to excuse horrific attacks against civilians, such as the pizza restaurant bombing; nor is it even to excuse attacks against Israeli soldiers, even as international law allows for an occupied people to resist an occupying force militarily within the standard norms of warfare.
For pacifist Christians such as ourselves, violence can find no excuse. We at MCC deplore the use of violence by Israeli and Palestinian alike and yearn for the justice which will allow both to live in peace. Below we have included two pieces. The first is by Ghassan Andoni, director of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between Peoples, a long-time MCC partner. Ghassan's outline of a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a helpful antidote to voices who would portray this conflict as an eternal, insoluble struggle. The other piece is the prayers of the people offered by MCC country co- representative Alain Epp Weaver at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer on August 12. Two additional pieces are available by contacting the MCC Washington Office (jdb@mcc.org): The first, by British journalist Robert Fisk, highlights how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a type of war not dissimilar from other anti-colonialist wars. Fisk's article usefully underscores the choice facing Israel: does it wish to continue its colonization of the occupied territories (which of necessity involves violence) and live with the violent reaction, or can it decide to end the occupation and thus create the conditions for peace? The second, by Israeli commentator Meron Benvenisti, explores how the use of language can mask certain forms of violence.
1. Make no mistake; it is solvable, yet the interest of some stands against a solution.
Ghassan Andoni
The Palestinian problem is solvable. Both Palestinians and Israelis can live with peace without changing their beliefs or relinquishing their rights. Some want us to believe that there is no solution to this problem and that another option is inevitable. Someone is preparing us for an ideological war in which all of us except the ideological fanatics will lose. Someone wants to reverse history, bring it back to the forties of last century. Some fanatics are dreaming of genocide and forced transfer as the ultimate solution to the problem.
Yes, with all the magnified problems such as Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, and the creation of a state for Palestinians, the crisis is solvable. With all the incitement, fear, and racist education, the problem is solvable. We need not to forget this even for one minute. Many have lost their lives and the queue is long. We need not allow fanatics to wage the war until the last one of us.
So, how it is solvable? In territorial terms, dividing the land around 70% Israel, 30% Palestine is not only possible but will help both sides to preserve the main characters of their state and sovereignty and solve their major national problems. Israel can continue being Jewish and Palestine can become integral, sovereign, and able to solve, within its territory, the refugee problem. As the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza is 22% of the total area of Mandate Palestine; it is evident that an additional 8% is required to insure the Palestinian state integrity and to solve the Palestinian refugee problem. I know for sure that if racist education, incitement, and fear are put aside, there exists a reasonable majority on both sides that supports the idea of sharing the country between two nations.
The major obstacle, which stands in the way, is the misconception that "the land is already shared according to established realities." Established realities are only pointing towards racial segregation and apartheid, and can only serve the ones who want to continue with the bloodshed. Sharing the land between the two nations is very different from segregating both societies.
The only two options available for a peaceful solution are living in one country with equal rights, or sharing the country between the two nations and creating two separate sovereign states. Anything in between is not only inhuman but as well insures the continuity of the conflict.
In security terms, the best solution available and tested to insure the security of both is a peace treaty signed between two sovereign states. People tend to forget that a peace treaty between Israel and both Jordan and Egypt granted a level of security never encountered from before. Israelis have to remember that from the Jordanian borders many Israeli sensitive areas are within the reach of conventional weapons that both Jordanians and others have. While, the difficult situation in the north is primarily due to the lack of a peace treaty between Israel and both Syria and Lebanon.
There is no way to keep the conflict alive, unresolved, and enjoy peace and security. There are limitations to how much the utilization of military superiority can achieve. Examining the events of the past 10 years will make my point self-evident.
The only way to insure a state security is through working out a solution to the crisis with its surrounding, sign a peace treaty, and with years work out good relations based on common interests. This is what is attempted all over the world and the Middle East is not exceptional. But, what if there are groups among Palestinians who will not be satisfied with such a solution and still demand mandate Palestine as their final goal? Evidently there will still be such groups in both sides. They exist all over the world. Yet, communities are established to live and work for prosperity and better living conditions. Such groups on both sides will become more isolated, self-focused, and marginal when the majority decide on peace and create the proper education for peace.
All attempts to establish a peace environment and education prior to a peace treaty have failed, not only here but also worldwide. How would such arrangements end the refugee problem? What about the right to return? The additional 8% mentioned as part of the territorial dimension represents, more or less, the Palestinian built up area prior to 1948. So, in principle refugees will regain their property claims. As the right of return will be applicable within the context of a two state solution, Palestinian refugees can be rehabilitated on the territories provided as an exchange for their original and at the same time enjoy their own national identity and state. Such formula will be acceptable by the vast majority of refugees.
What about settlements? If Israelis want to stick to residential and territorial claims in the West Bank and Gaza strip, then there is no point in even attempting to solve the problem. Public opinion polls indicate that there exists a reasonable majority that stands against such claims. As a result of the Camp David negotiations, I have no doubts that a practical solution to this issue is possible.
What about Jerusalem? In Camp David summit, it was evident that both parties were very close to an agreement on Jerusalem. So, and without more arguing, if the religious side of the problem is dealt with more wisely, Jerusalem will not stand as the hard nut of the whole crisis.
The ones who want us to believe that the problem is not solvable are actively preparing the ground for using all of us as a fuel for their ideological war. The way to do so is to convince all of us that this problem is not solvable.
2. Prayers of the People, Redeemer Lutheran Church, Jerusalem
Alain Epp Weaver
12 August 2001
We gather together this morning before God, hearts filled with anger, bitterness, despair, cynicism, lament.
We come before God, wishing to offer praise and thanksgiving, but finding our tongues numbed by grief.
We approach God with righteous indignation at the violence and injustice perpetrated by others, but find ourselves painfully reminded of our own complicity, in spirit and in deed, with the powers of domination and violence.
With these burdens which we bring before God, it is truly a miracle of grace to be empowered to pray, be it with words spoken aloud or held before God in our hearts.
And so we welcome you to share your prayer requests, your joys and concerns, so that we may lift them up to God. Let us join together in prayer:
Gracious and merciful God, Creator of heaven and earth, of olive and sage, desert and forest, ocean and sky, we approach you humbled and awed by the works of your hand.
The land, the sea-- all is a gift of your creative bounty. Give your children new hearts to accept this gift, not with a spirit of hoarding and domination, but with an eagerness to share it with others.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer. Sovereign God, you rule over the nations in truth and in justice, yet your rule is often obscured to our prideful and arrogant eyes. Curb our warring madness, calm our lust for domination, break our prideful insistence to justify oppression and violence on the pretexts of security, liberation, or revenge. Spur in all leaders a thirst for justice and righteousness. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
Healing God, we come before you with broken bodies. Our political bodies are torn apart by lies, injustice, and violence. Once more this week fragile human bodies have been torn apart, caught in a cycle of violence and revenge. We pray for Israelis and Palestinians who were killed and injured this week. We don't want these, your precious children, to be reduced to statistics in mind and soul- numbing lists of dead and injured. And yet pondering each loss of life, each life-altering injury, threatens to overwhelm our hearts and paralyze us. Help us to memorialize death in a way that moves us to action, action on behalf of justice and peace so that no more lives are lost. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
Sustainer God, we ask for your encouraging Spirit to bind together your broken church. You have called us your own and made us your people; now embolden us to live as prophetic, embodied signs of your boundary-breaking Kingdom. Bind up our bodies and spirits, Lord. Be with those struggling with illness, fear, and isolation. Make us as a congregation and as individuals a part of your healing Spirit. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
O Lord, you know us in our inmost hearts, and have heard our prayers spoken and unspoken. Loosen our tongues, strengthen our feet and hands, embolden our hearts, so that our lives might be ones of unceasing prayerful action. In the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.
Thursday, August 2
MCC Palestine Update #23
MCC Palestine Update #23
2 August 2001
On July 26, we (we in this case being Alain and Sonia Epp Weaver, MCC Palestine country representatives) returned to Jerusalem after two months in the US on home leave. While difficult to believe, the situation in the occupied territories has worsened over the past two months. The siege which cuts off town from town, village from village, is tighter than ever. The economic situation is becoming increasingly desparate. Illegal Israeli settlements continue to be built. Few of our friends and partners have much hope for justice and peace breaking in during the near term.
MCC's partners continue to do marvels under exceedingly difficult conditions. The Center for Agricultural Services completed an agricultural road in Sammu' which will help 40 farmers reach their fields. The Union of Agricultural Work Committees distributed 800 boxes of MCC canned turkey meat to farmers engaged in land reclamation as part of a food for work program. The Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees completed a road connecting Deir Ibziya with Sufa and Bala'en, after construction on the road between Deir Ibziya and Ein Qinya was halted by the Israeli military.
One year has passed since the failed Camp David II summit. While Israel and the US placed the blame squarely on the Palestinians, the reality of the summit was much different. Robert Malley, former adviser to President Clinton on Arab-Israeli affairs, has published a piece with Hussein Agha in the New York Review of Books which places much of the blame for the summit's failure on former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Meanwhile, Gush Shalom has made available maps of the Israeli proposal, maps which clearly demonstrate why no Palestinian could have accepted what was on the table at Camp David. The maps can be accessed at: http://www.gush-shalom.org/
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Akiva Eldar, outlines the official PLO version of why Camp David failed. The second, by veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, is a stinging
description of Ehud Barak as a "peace criminal." Finally, we include a joint Palestinian-Israeli declaration calling for an end to bloodshed and the occupation.
1. What went wrong at Camp David - the official PLO version
Akiva Eldar
Haaretz, 24 July 2001
Members of the panel of experts working alongside the Palestinian negotiating team, who have American passports in their possession that open Israel Defense Forces roadblocks, have embarked in recent weeks on a round of appearances throughout Israel. They lecture at living room meetings in homes in Herzliya and meet with forums of confused intellectuals in Jerusalem.
The questions repeat themselves: There is always someone who will ask why Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat reacted with such violence to the very generous proposals of former prime minister Ehud Barak? Had they really been prepared to accept Barak's proposal for an exchange of territories? And how could a pointed question about the right of return fail to be asked?
The young Palestinians, among them a legal adviser from New York and a doctoral student in law from Oxford, pull out an answer -in excellent English - to every question.
When Barak embarked on a spate of attacks against Arafat under the heading "I exposed his true face," the members of the Palestinian panel decided that this time they would not neglect Israeli public opinion. Under the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) logo, they collected the typical questions asked by Israeli listeners and next to them detailed the Palestinian positions and their version of Camp David and the events that snowballed from it.
Their version, especially concerning the map that Barak proposed there, is quite close to the one that Robert Malley, former U.S. president Bill Clinton's special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs, is now publishing in the world press (to Clinton's displeasure).
1. Why did the Palestinians reject the Camp David Peace Proposal?
For a true and lasting peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, there must be two viable and independent states living as equal neighbors. Israel's Camp David proposal, which was never set forth in writing, denied the Palestinian state viability and independence by dividing Palestinian territory into four separate cantons entirely surrounded, and therefore controlled, by Israel.The Camp David proposal also denied Palestinians control over their own borders, airspace and water resources while legitimizing and expanding illegal Israeli colonies in
Palestinian territory. Israel's Camp David proposal presented a 're-packaging' of military occupation, not an end to military occupation.
2. Didn't Israel's proposal give the Palestinians almost all of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967?
No. Israel sought to annex almost 9 percent of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in exchange offered only 1 percent of Israel's own territory. In addition, Israel sought control over an additional 10 percent of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the form of a "long-term lease." However, the issue is not one of percentages - the issue is one of viability and independence.In a prison for example, 95 percent of the prison compound is ostensibly for the prisoners - cells, cafeterias, gym and medical facilities -but the remaining 5 percent is all that is needed for the prison guards to maintain control over the prisoner population. Similarly, the Camp David proposal, while admittedly making Palestinian prison cells larger, failed to end Israeli control over the Palestinian population.
3. Did the Palestinians accept the idea of a land swap?
The Palestinians were (and are) prepared to consider any idea that is consistent with a fair peace based on international law and equality of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. The Palestinians did consider the idea of a land swap but proposed that such land swap must be based on a one-to-one ratio, with land of equal value and in areas adjacent to the border with Palestine and in the same vicinity as the lands to be annexed by Israel. However, Israel's Camp David proposal of a nine-to-one land swap (in Israel's favor) was viewed as so unfair as to seriously undermine belief in Israel's commitment to a fair territorial compromise.
4. How did Israel's proposal envision the territory of a Palestinian state?
Israel's proposal divided Palestine into four separate cantons surrounded by Israel: the Northern West Bank, the Central West Bank, the Southern West Bank and Gaza. Going from any one area to another would require crossing Israeli sovereign territory and consequently subject movement of Palestinians within their own country to Israeli control. Not only would such restrictions apply to the movement of people, but also to the movement of goods, in effect subjecting the Palestinian economy to Israeli control. Lastly, the Camp David proposal would have left Israel in control over all Palestinian borders, thereby allowing Israel to control not only internal movement of people and goods but international movement as well. Such a Palestinian state would have had less sovereignty and viability than the Bantustans created by the South African apartheid government.
5. How did Israel's proposal address Palestinian East Jerusalem?
The Camp David Proposal required Palestinians to give up any claim to the occupied portion of Jerusalem. The proposal would have forced recognition of Israel's annexation of all of Arab East Jerusalem. Talks after Camp David suggested that Israel was prepared to allow Palestinians sovereignty over isolated Palestinian neighborhoods in the heart of East Jerusalem, however such neighborhoods would remain surrounded by illegal Israeli colonies and would remain separated not only from each other but also from the rest of the Palestinian state. In effect, such a proposal would create Palestinian ghettos in the heart of Jerusalem.
6. Why didn't the Palestinians ever present a comprehensive permanent settlement proposal of their own in response to Barak's proposals?
The comprehensive settlement to the conflict is embodied in United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338, as was accepted by both sides at the Madrid Summit in 1991 and later in the Oslo Accords of 1993. The purpose of the negotiations is to implement these UN [Security Council] resolutions (which call for an Israeli withdrawal from land occupied by force by Israel in 1967) and reach agreement on final status issues. On a number of occasions since Camp David - especially at the Taba talks - the Palestinian negotiating team presented its concept for the resolution of the key permanent status issues. It is important to keep in mind, however, that Israel and the Palestinians are differently situated. Israel seeks broad concessions from the Palestinians. Israel has not offered a single concession involving its own territory and rights. The Palestinians, on the other hand, seek to establish a viable, sovereign state on their own territory, to provide for the withdrawal of Israeli military forces and colonies (which are universally recognized as illegal), and to secure the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes they were forced to flee in 1948. Although Palestinian negotiators have been willing to accommodate legitimate Israeli needs within that context, particularly with respect to security and refugees, it is up to Israel to define these needs and to suggest the narrowest possible means of addressing them.
7. Why did the peace process fall apart just as it was making real progress toward a permanent agreement?
Palestinians entered the peace process on the understanding that (1) it would deliver concrete improvements to their lives during the interim period, (2) that the interim period would be relatively short in duration - i.e., five years, and (3) that a permanent agreement would implement United Nations [Security Council] Resolutions 242 and 338. But the peace process delivered none of these things. Instead, Palestinians suffered more burdensome restrictions on their movement and a serious decline in their economic situation. Israeli colonies expanded at an unprecedented pace and the West Bank and Gaza Strip became more fragmented with the construction of settler "by-pass" roads and the proliferation of Israeli military checkpoints. Deadlines were repeatedly missed in the implementation of agreements. In sum, Palestinians simply did not experience any "progress" in terms of their daily lives.
However, what decisively undermined Palestinian support for the peace process was the way Israel presented its proposal. Prior to entering into the first negotiations on permanent status issues, Prime Minister Barak publicly and repeatedly threatened Palestinians that his "offer" would be Israel's best and final offer and if not accepted, Israel would seriously consider "unilateral separation" (a euphemism for imposing a settlement rather than negotiating one). Palestinians felt that they had been betrayed by Israel who had committed itself at the beginning of the Oslo process to ending its occupation of Palestinian lands in accordance with Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.
8. Doesn't the violence which erupted following Camp David prove that Palestinians do not really want to live in peace with Israel?
Palestinians recognized Israel's right to exist in 1988 and reiterated this recognition on several occasions including Madrid in 1991 and the Oslo Accords in September, 1993. Nevertheless, Israel has yet to explicitly and formally recognize Palestine's right to exist. The Palestinian people waited patiently since the Madrid Conference in 1991 for their freedom and independence despite Israel's incessant policy of creating facts on the ground by building colonies in occupied territory (Israeli housing units in Occupied Palestinian Territory - not including East Jerusalem - increased by 52 percent since the signing of the Oslo Accords and the settler population, including those in East Jerusalem, more than doubled). The Palestinians do indeed wish to live at peace with Israel but peace with Israel must be a fair peace not an unfair peace imposed by a stronger party over a weaker party.
9. Doesn't the failure of Camp David prove that the Palestinians are just not prepared to compromise?
The Palestinians have indeed compromised. In the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians recognized Israeli sovereignty over 78 percent of historic Palestine (23 percent more than Israel was granted pursuant to the 1947 UN Partition Plan) on the assumption that the Palestinians would be able to exercise sovereignty over the remaining 22 percent. The overwhelming majority of Palestinians accepted this compromise but this extremely generous compromise was ignored at Camp David and the Palestinians were asked to "compromise the compromise" and make further concessions in favor of Israel. Though the Palestinians can continue to make compromises, no people can be expected to compromise fundamental rights or the viability of their state.
10. Have the Palestinians abandoned the two-state solution and do they now insist on all of historic Palestine?
The current situation has undoubtedly hardened positions on both sides, with extremists in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories claiming all of historic Palestine.
Nevertheless, there is no evidence that the Palestinian Authority or the majority of Palestinians have abandoned the two-state solution. The two-state solution, however, is most seriously threatened by the on-going construction of Israeli colonies and bypass roads aimed at incorporating the Occupied Palestinian Territories into Israel. Without a halt to such construction, a two-state solution may simply be impossible to implement already prompting a number of Palestinian academics and intellectuals to argue that Israel will never allow the Palestinians to have a viable state and Palestinians should instead focus their efforts on obtaining equal rights as Israeli citizens.
11. Isn't it unreasonable for the Palestinians to demand the unlimited right of return to Israel of all Palestinian refugees?
The refugees were never seriously discussed at Camp David because Prime Minister Barak declared that Israel bore no responsibility for the refugee problem or its solution. Obviously, there can be no comprehensive solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict without resolving one of its key components: the plight of the Palestinian refugees.
There is a clearly recognized right under international law that non-combatants who flee during a conflict have the right to return after the conflict is over. But an Israeli recognition of the Palestinian right of return does not mean that all refugees will exercise that right. What is needed in addition to such recognition is the concept of choice. Many refugees may opt for (i) resettlement in third countries, (ii) resettlement in a newly independent Palestine (though they originate from that part of Palestine which became Israel) or (iii) normalization of their legal status in the host country where they currently reside. In addition, the right of return may be implemented in phases so as to address Israel's demographic concerns.
2. The Peace Criminal
Uri Avnery
Gush Shalom, 21 July 2001
Everybody knows who is a war criminal. For example, somebody who kills prisoners-of-war or massacres a civilian population (or allows others to do this) is one.
The time has come to define who is a peace criminal: somebody who kills peace and thereby makes war inevitable. Golda Meir, for example, in the early 70s, killed the chances for peace with Egypt and caused the Yom Kippur war, in which 2000 Israelis and countless others died.
Ehud Barak is such a peace criminal. He brought about the failure of the Camp David summit and its consequence, primarily the present intifada, in which hundred have already died. This
might well lead to a general war, in which thousands will perish.
If there were an International Court for Peace Crimes, Ehud Barak would be indicted on two counts:
Count 1: The accused pressured Arafat and Clinton into agreeing to the summit and brought about its failure by presenting to it an ultimatum of unacceptable proposals.
Count 2: The accused spread the lie that he had offered Arafat “everything he asked for” and that Arafat rejected it. By spreading this lie, the accused destroyed the Israeli peace camp which
believed him, brought the extreme right to power, prepared the ground for a “national unity” based on the lie and almost obliterated any real opposition.
At the Barak trial, evidence will be produced to show that he proposed at Camp David the formal annexation of 10% of the West Bank area (“settlement blocs”) and informal annexation of
another 10% (Jordan valley etc.), with the rest of the territory cut up into enclaves and cut off from the neighboring countries (Egypt and Jordan); that he pretended to “give up” East Jerusalem but without giving the Palestinians full sovereignty there, and especially not over the compound of the mosques (“Temple Mount”); that he did not agree to any compromise on the refugees; and that he demanded that the Palestinians declare this to be “the end of the conflict”.
Until now, Barak’s blind admirers have fervently denied these facts. But this week a witness appeared who could decide the outcome of the trial. He is a neutral and objective eye-witness,
whose integrity cannot be doubted by any judge: Robert Malley, personal assistant to President Clinton on the Middle East, who took part in all the Camp David deliberations. He will testify
to the following facts, among others:
0 Before the summit, Barak reneged on his promise to transfer to the Palestinian Authority the village of Abu Dis and two other villages near Jerusalem, in spite of the fact that Clinton
personally conveyed this promise to Arafat. Also, Barak refused to honor Israel’s obligations under the previous agreements: the third withdrawal from most of the West Bank areas, the release of Palestinian prisoners etc. Because of this, Clinton was furious with Barak on several occasions.
0 Before the summit, Barak continued to enlarge the settlements and build by-pass roads at a furious pace, thus destroying any vestige of Palestinian trust in his intentions.
0 Before and during the summit, the Palestinians not only gave up 78% of Mandatory Palestine, but also agreed to the annexation to Israel of “settlement blocs” and the Jewish neighborhoods built in occupied East Jerusalem. They also agreed to the principle that the Right of Return should be implemented without prejudicing the demographic and security interests of Israel. No other Arab government has ever agreed to similar concessions.
In exchange for the settlement blocs, Barak offered the Palestinians areas amounting to one ninth of the territory to be annexed, a ratio of 1 to 9, without specifying where
0 During the course of the summit, Barak did not submit any proposal in writing nor specify the details of his oral proposals, and, most importantly, did not disclose either to Arafat or even to Clinton his ideas for a final settlement. In return, Arafat, too, did not submit any proposals, so that in practice there was no negotiation at all.
0 Clinton agreed with Arafat that Barak is “politically inept, frustrating and devoid of personal contact warmth”, but believed, in spite of this, that Barak wanted peace. Arafat believed that Barak did not want peace; he only wanted to convince the world that the Palestinians don’t want peace. As a matter of fact, since the summit and until now, Barak’s main boast has been that he “unmasked Arafat”.
0 Clinton has broken his word to Arafat. Before the summit, he promised that if it fails, he would not blame the Palestinians. Only on this condition did Arafat agree to come to the
conference, which took place without proper preparation. After the failure, Clinton put the sole blame on Arafat, in order to help Barak in his eelection campaign.
When Barak’s admirers were compelled to admit that the story about “the generous Camp David offers” is a legend, they fell back to another line: “True, at Camp David no reasonable offers were made, but later, at the Taba meeting in January 2001, much more generous offers were made. These met all Palestinian demands, but were nevertheless rejected by them. At Taba the Israeli negotiators also submitted a map that reduced further the areas that Barak wanted to annex.”
Here are some of the answers:
0 If Barak really wanted to make much more “generous” offers, why did he not make them at Camp David, even when he realized that the summit was about to break down?
0 The failure of the summit caused the outbreak of the intifada, as we (and, it now appears, the Americans, too) prophesied. From that moment on, the political reality on the Palestinian side changed completely, hundreds were killed, and it became much more difficult for Arafat to convince his public opinion to halt the uprising without getting an important political achievement in advance.
0 The Taba proposals were never put to paper, and until this very moment it is not clear what was proposed, who proposed what and on whose authority. Barak, of course, repudiated everything the next day.
0 In the meantime, the election campaign had started in Israel and all the polls showed that Barak was about to be defeated by a landslide. How could Arafat make sweeping concessions to a man who, almost certainly, would lose power within two months? Especially since Barak did not reveal the proposals to his own public?
0 Arafat did not reject the Taba proposals, but declares even now that they must serve as a basis for any future negotiations, while Barak himself proclaims that the Taba proposals are null
and void.
At the end of the trial, the question will remain: Did the accused, Barak, sincerely intend to reach a peace agreement, and only a mixture of arrogance, ignorance and political stupidity
prevented him from achieving this (as Clinton believes, according to Malley), or did he, from the beginning, not have any such intention, but only intended to convince the world that he wanted peace while Arafat wants to throw Israel into the sea?
It’s up to the judges to decide that.
3. Joint Israeli-Palestinian Declaration:
NO TO BLOODSHED, NO TO OCCUPATION
YES TO NEGOTIATIONS, YES TO PEACE
"We, the undersigned Israelis and Palestinians, are meeting in the most difficult of circumstances for both our peoples. We come together to call for an end to bloodshed, an end to occupation, an urgent return to negotiations and the realization of peace between our peoples. We refuse to comply with the ongoing deterioration in our situation, with the growing list of victims, the suffering and the real possibility that we may all be drowned in a sea of mutual
hostility.
"We hereby raise our voices and implore all people of goodwill to return to sanity, to re-discover compassion, humanity, and critical judgment and to reject the unbearable ease of the descent into
fear, hatred, and calls for revenge.
"In spite of everything we still believe in the humanity of the other side, that we have a partner for peace and that a negotiated solution to the conflict between our peoples is possible.
Mistakes have been made on all sides, the trading of accusations and pointing of fingers is not a policy and is no substitute for serious engagement.
"The impression that exists in both communities that 'time is on our side' is illusory. The passage of time benefits only those who do not believe in peace. The longer we wait, the more innocent
blood will be spilt, the greater will be the suffering and hope will be further eroded. We must move urgently to re-build our partnership, to end the de-humanization of the other, and to revive the option of a just peace that holds out promise for our respective futures.
"The way forward lies in international legitimacy and the implementation of UNSCR 242 and 338 leading to a 2-State solution based on the 1967 borders, Israel and Palestine living side by side, with their respective capitals in Jerusalem. Solutions can be found to all outstanding issues that should be fair and just to both sides and should not undermine the sovereignty of the
Palestinian and Israeli states as determined by their respective citizens, and embodying the aspirations to statehood of both peoples, Jewish and Palestinian. This solution should build on
the progress made between November 1999 and January 2001.
"The immediate need is for the full and accurate implementation of the Recommendations of the Mitchell Committee, including: the cessation of violence, a total freeze on settlement activity, the
implementation of outstanding agreements and a return to negotiations. This process needs to be monitored by an objective third party.
"We see it as our duty to work together and each of us in their own communities, to put a halt to the deterioration in our relations, to rebuild trust, belief and the hope for peace."
2 August 2001
On July 26, we (we in this case being Alain and Sonia Epp Weaver, MCC Palestine country representatives) returned to Jerusalem after two months in the US on home leave. While difficult to believe, the situation in the occupied territories has worsened over the past two months. The siege which cuts off town from town, village from village, is tighter than ever. The economic situation is becoming increasingly desparate. Illegal Israeli settlements continue to be built. Few of our friends and partners have much hope for justice and peace breaking in during the near term.
MCC's partners continue to do marvels under exceedingly difficult conditions. The Center for Agricultural Services completed an agricultural road in Sammu' which will help 40 farmers reach their fields. The Union of Agricultural Work Committees distributed 800 boxes of MCC canned turkey meat to farmers engaged in land reclamation as part of a food for work program. The Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees completed a road connecting Deir Ibziya with Sufa and Bala'en, after construction on the road between Deir Ibziya and Ein Qinya was halted by the Israeli military.
One year has passed since the failed Camp David II summit. While Israel and the US placed the blame squarely on the Palestinians, the reality of the summit was much different. Robert Malley, former adviser to President Clinton on Arab-Israeli affairs, has published a piece with Hussein Agha in the New York Review of Books which places much of the blame for the summit's failure on former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Meanwhile, Gush Shalom has made available maps of the Israeli proposal, maps which clearly demonstrate why no Palestinian could have accepted what was on the table at Camp David. The maps can be accessed at: http://www.gush-shalom.org/
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Akiva Eldar, outlines the official PLO version of why Camp David failed. The second, by veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, is a stinging
description of Ehud Barak as a "peace criminal." Finally, we include a joint Palestinian-Israeli declaration calling for an end to bloodshed and the occupation.
1. What went wrong at Camp David - the official PLO version
Akiva Eldar
Haaretz, 24 July 2001
Members of the panel of experts working alongside the Palestinian negotiating team, who have American passports in their possession that open Israel Defense Forces roadblocks, have embarked in recent weeks on a round of appearances throughout Israel. They lecture at living room meetings in homes in Herzliya and meet with forums of confused intellectuals in Jerusalem.
The questions repeat themselves: There is always someone who will ask why Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat reacted with such violence to the very generous proposals of former prime minister Ehud Barak? Had they really been prepared to accept Barak's proposal for an exchange of territories? And how could a pointed question about the right of return fail to be asked?
The young Palestinians, among them a legal adviser from New York and a doctoral student in law from Oxford, pull out an answer -in excellent English - to every question.
When Barak embarked on a spate of attacks against Arafat under the heading "I exposed his true face," the members of the Palestinian panel decided that this time they would not neglect Israeli public opinion. Under the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) logo, they collected the typical questions asked by Israeli listeners and next to them detailed the Palestinian positions and their version of Camp David and the events that snowballed from it.
Their version, especially concerning the map that Barak proposed there, is quite close to the one that Robert Malley, former U.S. president Bill Clinton's special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs, is now publishing in the world press (to Clinton's displeasure).
1. Why did the Palestinians reject the Camp David Peace Proposal?
For a true and lasting peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, there must be two viable and independent states living as equal neighbors. Israel's Camp David proposal, which was never set forth in writing, denied the Palestinian state viability and independence by dividing Palestinian territory into four separate cantons entirely surrounded, and therefore controlled, by Israel.The Camp David proposal also denied Palestinians control over their own borders, airspace and water resources while legitimizing and expanding illegal Israeli colonies in
Palestinian territory. Israel's Camp David proposal presented a 're-packaging' of military occupation, not an end to military occupation.
2. Didn't Israel's proposal give the Palestinians almost all of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967?
No. Israel sought to annex almost 9 percent of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in exchange offered only 1 percent of Israel's own territory. In addition, Israel sought control over an additional 10 percent of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the form of a "long-term lease." However, the issue is not one of percentages - the issue is one of viability and independence.In a prison for example, 95 percent of the prison compound is ostensibly for the prisoners - cells, cafeterias, gym and medical facilities -but the remaining 5 percent is all that is needed for the prison guards to maintain control over the prisoner population. Similarly, the Camp David proposal, while admittedly making Palestinian prison cells larger, failed to end Israeli control over the Palestinian population.
3. Did the Palestinians accept the idea of a land swap?
The Palestinians were (and are) prepared to consider any idea that is consistent with a fair peace based on international law and equality of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. The Palestinians did consider the idea of a land swap but proposed that such land swap must be based on a one-to-one ratio, with land of equal value and in areas adjacent to the border with Palestine and in the same vicinity as the lands to be annexed by Israel. However, Israel's Camp David proposal of a nine-to-one land swap (in Israel's favor) was viewed as so unfair as to seriously undermine belief in Israel's commitment to a fair territorial compromise.
4. How did Israel's proposal envision the territory of a Palestinian state?
Israel's proposal divided Palestine into four separate cantons surrounded by Israel: the Northern West Bank, the Central West Bank, the Southern West Bank and Gaza. Going from any one area to another would require crossing Israeli sovereign territory and consequently subject movement of Palestinians within their own country to Israeli control. Not only would such restrictions apply to the movement of people, but also to the movement of goods, in effect subjecting the Palestinian economy to Israeli control. Lastly, the Camp David proposal would have left Israel in control over all Palestinian borders, thereby allowing Israel to control not only internal movement of people and goods but international movement as well. Such a Palestinian state would have had less sovereignty and viability than the Bantustans created by the South African apartheid government.
5. How did Israel's proposal address Palestinian East Jerusalem?
The Camp David Proposal required Palestinians to give up any claim to the occupied portion of Jerusalem. The proposal would have forced recognition of Israel's annexation of all of Arab East Jerusalem. Talks after Camp David suggested that Israel was prepared to allow Palestinians sovereignty over isolated Palestinian neighborhoods in the heart of East Jerusalem, however such neighborhoods would remain surrounded by illegal Israeli colonies and would remain separated not only from each other but also from the rest of the Palestinian state. In effect, such a proposal would create Palestinian ghettos in the heart of Jerusalem.
6. Why didn't the Palestinians ever present a comprehensive permanent settlement proposal of their own in response to Barak's proposals?
The comprehensive settlement to the conflict is embodied in United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338, as was accepted by both sides at the Madrid Summit in 1991 and later in the Oslo Accords of 1993. The purpose of the negotiations is to implement these UN [Security Council] resolutions (which call for an Israeli withdrawal from land occupied by force by Israel in 1967) and reach agreement on final status issues. On a number of occasions since Camp David - especially at the Taba talks - the Palestinian negotiating team presented its concept for the resolution of the key permanent status issues. It is important to keep in mind, however, that Israel and the Palestinians are differently situated. Israel seeks broad concessions from the Palestinians. Israel has not offered a single concession involving its own territory and rights. The Palestinians, on the other hand, seek to establish a viable, sovereign state on their own territory, to provide for the withdrawal of Israeli military forces and colonies (which are universally recognized as illegal), and to secure the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes they were forced to flee in 1948. Although Palestinian negotiators have been willing to accommodate legitimate Israeli needs within that context, particularly with respect to security and refugees, it is up to Israel to define these needs and to suggest the narrowest possible means of addressing them.
7. Why did the peace process fall apart just as it was making real progress toward a permanent agreement?
Palestinians entered the peace process on the understanding that (1) it would deliver concrete improvements to their lives during the interim period, (2) that the interim period would be relatively short in duration - i.e., five years, and (3) that a permanent agreement would implement United Nations [Security Council] Resolutions 242 and 338. But the peace process delivered none of these things. Instead, Palestinians suffered more burdensome restrictions on their movement and a serious decline in their economic situation. Israeli colonies expanded at an unprecedented pace and the West Bank and Gaza Strip became more fragmented with the construction of settler "by-pass" roads and the proliferation of Israeli military checkpoints. Deadlines were repeatedly missed in the implementation of agreements. In sum, Palestinians simply did not experience any "progress" in terms of their daily lives.
However, what decisively undermined Palestinian support for the peace process was the way Israel presented its proposal. Prior to entering into the first negotiations on permanent status issues, Prime Minister Barak publicly and repeatedly threatened Palestinians that his "offer" would be Israel's best and final offer and if not accepted, Israel would seriously consider "unilateral separation" (a euphemism for imposing a settlement rather than negotiating one). Palestinians felt that they had been betrayed by Israel who had committed itself at the beginning of the Oslo process to ending its occupation of Palestinian lands in accordance with Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.
8. Doesn't the violence which erupted following Camp David prove that Palestinians do not really want to live in peace with Israel?
Palestinians recognized Israel's right to exist in 1988 and reiterated this recognition on several occasions including Madrid in 1991 and the Oslo Accords in September, 1993. Nevertheless, Israel has yet to explicitly and formally recognize Palestine's right to exist. The Palestinian people waited patiently since the Madrid Conference in 1991 for their freedom and independence despite Israel's incessant policy of creating facts on the ground by building colonies in occupied territory (Israeli housing units in Occupied Palestinian Territory - not including East Jerusalem - increased by 52 percent since the signing of the Oslo Accords and the settler population, including those in East Jerusalem, more than doubled). The Palestinians do indeed wish to live at peace with Israel but peace with Israel must be a fair peace not an unfair peace imposed by a stronger party over a weaker party.
9. Doesn't the failure of Camp David prove that the Palestinians are just not prepared to compromise?
The Palestinians have indeed compromised. In the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians recognized Israeli sovereignty over 78 percent of historic Palestine (23 percent more than Israel was granted pursuant to the 1947 UN Partition Plan) on the assumption that the Palestinians would be able to exercise sovereignty over the remaining 22 percent. The overwhelming majority of Palestinians accepted this compromise but this extremely generous compromise was ignored at Camp David and the Palestinians were asked to "compromise the compromise" and make further concessions in favor of Israel. Though the Palestinians can continue to make compromises, no people can be expected to compromise fundamental rights or the viability of their state.
10. Have the Palestinians abandoned the two-state solution and do they now insist on all of historic Palestine?
The current situation has undoubtedly hardened positions on both sides, with extremists in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories claiming all of historic Palestine.
Nevertheless, there is no evidence that the Palestinian Authority or the majority of Palestinians have abandoned the two-state solution. The two-state solution, however, is most seriously threatened by the on-going construction of Israeli colonies and bypass roads aimed at incorporating the Occupied Palestinian Territories into Israel. Without a halt to such construction, a two-state solution may simply be impossible to implement already prompting a number of Palestinian academics and intellectuals to argue that Israel will never allow the Palestinians to have a viable state and Palestinians should instead focus their efforts on obtaining equal rights as Israeli citizens.
11. Isn't it unreasonable for the Palestinians to demand the unlimited right of return to Israel of all Palestinian refugees?
The refugees were never seriously discussed at Camp David because Prime Minister Barak declared that Israel bore no responsibility for the refugee problem or its solution. Obviously, there can be no comprehensive solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict without resolving one of its key components: the plight of the Palestinian refugees.
There is a clearly recognized right under international law that non-combatants who flee during a conflict have the right to return after the conflict is over. But an Israeli recognition of the Palestinian right of return does not mean that all refugees will exercise that right. What is needed in addition to such recognition is the concept of choice. Many refugees may opt for (i) resettlement in third countries, (ii) resettlement in a newly independent Palestine (though they originate from that part of Palestine which became Israel) or (iii) normalization of their legal status in the host country where they currently reside. In addition, the right of return may be implemented in phases so as to address Israel's demographic concerns.
2. The Peace Criminal
Uri Avnery
Gush Shalom, 21 July 2001
Everybody knows who is a war criminal. For example, somebody who kills prisoners-of-war or massacres a civilian population (or allows others to do this) is one.
The time has come to define who is a peace criminal: somebody who kills peace and thereby makes war inevitable. Golda Meir, for example, in the early 70s, killed the chances for peace with Egypt and caused the Yom Kippur war, in which 2000 Israelis and countless others died.
Ehud Barak is such a peace criminal. He brought about the failure of the Camp David summit and its consequence, primarily the present intifada, in which hundred have already died. This
might well lead to a general war, in which thousands will perish.
If there were an International Court for Peace Crimes, Ehud Barak would be indicted on two counts:
Count 1: The accused pressured Arafat and Clinton into agreeing to the summit and brought about its failure by presenting to it an ultimatum of unacceptable proposals.
Count 2: The accused spread the lie that he had offered Arafat “everything he asked for” and that Arafat rejected it. By spreading this lie, the accused destroyed the Israeli peace camp which
believed him, brought the extreme right to power, prepared the ground for a “national unity” based on the lie and almost obliterated any real opposition.
At the Barak trial, evidence will be produced to show that he proposed at Camp David the formal annexation of 10% of the West Bank area (“settlement blocs”) and informal annexation of
another 10% (Jordan valley etc.), with the rest of the territory cut up into enclaves and cut off from the neighboring countries (Egypt and Jordan); that he pretended to “give up” East Jerusalem but without giving the Palestinians full sovereignty there, and especially not over the compound of the mosques (“Temple Mount”); that he did not agree to any compromise on the refugees; and that he demanded that the Palestinians declare this to be “the end of the conflict”.
Until now, Barak’s blind admirers have fervently denied these facts. But this week a witness appeared who could decide the outcome of the trial. He is a neutral and objective eye-witness,
whose integrity cannot be doubted by any judge: Robert Malley, personal assistant to President Clinton on the Middle East, who took part in all the Camp David deliberations. He will testify
to the following facts, among others:
0 Before the summit, Barak reneged on his promise to transfer to the Palestinian Authority the village of Abu Dis and two other villages near Jerusalem, in spite of the fact that Clinton
personally conveyed this promise to Arafat. Also, Barak refused to honor Israel’s obligations under the previous agreements: the third withdrawal from most of the West Bank areas, the release of Palestinian prisoners etc. Because of this, Clinton was furious with Barak on several occasions.
0 Before the summit, Barak continued to enlarge the settlements and build by-pass roads at a furious pace, thus destroying any vestige of Palestinian trust in his intentions.
0 Before and during the summit, the Palestinians not only gave up 78% of Mandatory Palestine, but also agreed to the annexation to Israel of “settlement blocs” and the Jewish neighborhoods built in occupied East Jerusalem. They also agreed to the principle that the Right of Return should be implemented without prejudicing the demographic and security interests of Israel. No other Arab government has ever agreed to similar concessions.
In exchange for the settlement blocs, Barak offered the Palestinians areas amounting to one ninth of the territory to be annexed, a ratio of 1 to 9, without specifying where
0 During the course of the summit, Barak did not submit any proposal in writing nor specify the details of his oral proposals, and, most importantly, did not disclose either to Arafat or even to Clinton his ideas for a final settlement. In return, Arafat, too, did not submit any proposals, so that in practice there was no negotiation at all.
0 Clinton agreed with Arafat that Barak is “politically inept, frustrating and devoid of personal contact warmth”, but believed, in spite of this, that Barak wanted peace. Arafat believed that Barak did not want peace; he only wanted to convince the world that the Palestinians don’t want peace. As a matter of fact, since the summit and until now, Barak’s main boast has been that he “unmasked Arafat”.
0 Clinton has broken his word to Arafat. Before the summit, he promised that if it fails, he would not blame the Palestinians. Only on this condition did Arafat agree to come to the
conference, which took place without proper preparation. After the failure, Clinton put the sole blame on Arafat, in order to help Barak in his eelection campaign.
When Barak’s admirers were compelled to admit that the story about “the generous Camp David offers” is a legend, they fell back to another line: “True, at Camp David no reasonable offers were made, but later, at the Taba meeting in January 2001, much more generous offers were made. These met all Palestinian demands, but were nevertheless rejected by them. At Taba the Israeli negotiators also submitted a map that reduced further the areas that Barak wanted to annex.”
Here are some of the answers:
0 If Barak really wanted to make much more “generous” offers, why did he not make them at Camp David, even when he realized that the summit was about to break down?
0 The failure of the summit caused the outbreak of the intifada, as we (and, it now appears, the Americans, too) prophesied. From that moment on, the political reality on the Palestinian side changed completely, hundreds were killed, and it became much more difficult for Arafat to convince his public opinion to halt the uprising without getting an important political achievement in advance.
0 The Taba proposals were never put to paper, and until this very moment it is not clear what was proposed, who proposed what and on whose authority. Barak, of course, repudiated everything the next day.
0 In the meantime, the election campaign had started in Israel and all the polls showed that Barak was about to be defeated by a landslide. How could Arafat make sweeping concessions to a man who, almost certainly, would lose power within two months? Especially since Barak did not reveal the proposals to his own public?
0 Arafat did not reject the Taba proposals, but declares even now that they must serve as a basis for any future negotiations, while Barak himself proclaims that the Taba proposals are null
and void.
At the end of the trial, the question will remain: Did the accused, Barak, sincerely intend to reach a peace agreement, and only a mixture of arrogance, ignorance and political stupidity
prevented him from achieving this (as Clinton believes, according to Malley), or did he, from the beginning, not have any such intention, but only intended to convince the world that he wanted peace while Arafat wants to throw Israel into the sea?
It’s up to the judges to decide that.
3. Joint Israeli-Palestinian Declaration:
NO TO BLOODSHED, NO TO OCCUPATION
YES TO NEGOTIATIONS, YES TO PEACE
"We, the undersigned Israelis and Palestinians, are meeting in the most difficult of circumstances for both our peoples. We come together to call for an end to bloodshed, an end to occupation, an urgent return to negotiations and the realization of peace between our peoples. We refuse to comply with the ongoing deterioration in our situation, with the growing list of victims, the suffering and the real possibility that we may all be drowned in a sea of mutual
hostility.
"We hereby raise our voices and implore all people of goodwill to return to sanity, to re-discover compassion, humanity, and critical judgment and to reject the unbearable ease of the descent into
fear, hatred, and calls for revenge.
"In spite of everything we still believe in the humanity of the other side, that we have a partner for peace and that a negotiated solution to the conflict between our peoples is possible.
Mistakes have been made on all sides, the trading of accusations and pointing of fingers is not a policy and is no substitute for serious engagement.
"The impression that exists in both communities that 'time is on our side' is illusory. The passage of time benefits only those who do not believe in peace. The longer we wait, the more innocent
blood will be spilt, the greater will be the suffering and hope will be further eroded. We must move urgently to re-build our partnership, to end the de-humanization of the other, and to revive the option of a just peace that holds out promise for our respective futures.
"The way forward lies in international legitimacy and the implementation of UNSCR 242 and 338 leading to a 2-State solution based on the 1967 borders, Israel and Palestine living side by side, with their respective capitals in Jerusalem. Solutions can be found to all outstanding issues that should be fair and just to both sides and should not undermine the sovereignty of the
Palestinian and Israeli states as determined by their respective citizens, and embodying the aspirations to statehood of both peoples, Jewish and Palestinian. This solution should build on
the progress made between November 1999 and January 2001.
"The immediate need is for the full and accurate implementation of the Recommendations of the Mitchell Committee, including: the cessation of violence, a total freeze on settlement activity, the
implementation of outstanding agreements and a return to negotiations. This process needs to be monitored by an objective third party.
"We see it as our duty to work together and each of us in their own communities, to put a halt to the deterioration in our relations, to rebuild trust, belief and the hope for peace."
Friday, May 11
MCC Palestine Update #22
MCC Palestine Update #22
In conversations over the past couple of months with Palestinian partners and other international workers, the conviction is continually raised that the situation could not get worse. This must reflect a desperate wish rather than reality, because things do seem to keep getting worse. The past two weeks have seen horrific killings: the shell which killed four-month old Iman Hijo in Khan Younis refugee camps while in her mother's arms; Yossi Ishran and Kobi Mendel, two Israeli teenagers from the settlement of Tekoa' bludgeoned to death; eighteen-year-old Kifah Zu'rub who died from wounds received when settlers in the Mawasi region in the Gush Katif bloc of settlements west of Khan Younis unleashed their dogs on him as he returned home from school. Over 410 Palestinians and nearly 80 Israeli Jews have been killed since September 28, 2000. The perpetuation of the occupation is clearly not bringing peace and security, either to Palestinians or to Israelis.
More than ever your prayers and action for justice and peace are needed. MCC has produced worship and advocacy resources for personal and congregational use. These materials are now available on MCC's website at the following URL: http://www.mcc.org/middleeast/worship.html Feel free to copy, pass around, plagiarize, etc.
We (Alain and Sonia Epp Weaver and children) will be out of the country on home leave for the coming two months. The Palestine updates will be suspended during this time. The following websites are useful sources of regularly updated information and comment on the situation in Palestine/Israel:
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/
http://www.arij.org/
http://www.hdip.org/
http://www.pchrgaza.org/
http://www.lawsociety.org/
http://www.sabeel.org/
http://www.rapprochement.org/
Below you will find an interview with the Rev. Naim Ateek, director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. If you would like additional comments by Israeli journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy, please contact J. Daryl Byler in the MCC Washington Office (jdb@mcc.org).
Alain Epp Weaver, MCC Jerusalem Office
1. Palestine Report Interview: Rev. Naim Ateek
Palestine Report, 9 May 2001
This week Palestine Report Online interviews director of Sabeel Reverend Naim Ateek on the role of Palestinian and international Christians in the Aqsa Intifada.
PR: How do you see the role of Palestinian Christians in the ongoing Intifada?
Ateek: I see it in a number of ways, both locally and internationally. Locally, I think there have been a number of voices from the Christian community speaking out against the Israeli oppression. This was done through public speeches, through statements from churches and from other non-church organizations, and some of it has been carried out in the media. A person like Archmandrite Atallah Hanna has played a very significant role expressing the voice of the Christian community, especially regionally. I went with him to Morocco to meet with a group of foreign ministers and he has played a significant role in expressing the solidarity between Christians and Muslims and the importance of justice for Palestinians and the fact that Israel is not ready to honor United Nations resolutions. Internationally, I think a number of us have gone out, attending conferences, educating people, updating them on the situation, asking for a greater advocacy, helping people interpret the situation correctly. I think also that there have been a number of Christians getting together, not only by themselves, but also with Muslims and Jews, to strategize. In addition, I think that by and large (although I obviously cannot speak for all Christians and how Christians feel), many Christians know that if they are faithful to the Gospel, any resistance to injustice has to be done through non-violent action. I think that there has been a number of us who have been talking about the importance of nonviolent action and a non-violent resistance. The basic thing that I need to emphasize here is that we as a Christian community cannot sit back and watch things happen. Involvement is very important but our involvement is not in the area of an armed struggle, but in doing whatever we can non-violently towards the ending of the occupation. What all of us agree on is that the occupation must end.
PR: How do you view the Intifada in general? Would you prefer that the entire Intifada were non-violent?
Ateek: Let me begin with the premise that resisting injustice is a legitimate thing for any nation or any people who are living under oppression. I think the world community has legitimized rebellion. Whether we like it or not, resistance usually takes on the form of an armed struggle. Hopefully, there is also a resistance that is done non-violently. Now, this doesn't mean that all Christians believe in non-violence. But thank God there have always been Christians who believe that non-violence is the way to go. I believe that the Intifada is important and the Intifada is legitimate because Israel is not willing to give up its injustice and its control over all of Palestine and implement United Nations resolutions. I would like, personally, that [the Intifada] is conducted on more nonviolent terms. I believe that we will get greater support from the world community, including many Israelis, if we strengthen nonviolent action. There are also Palestinians who do feel uncomfortable with armed resistance, although the general feeling is that armed struggle is a quicker way. Unfortunately, the price is also very high, not only the physical price, but also the psychological, which remains within the community for many years. I am not saying that non-violent resistance does not have its price. It is also costly, but it is somehow the more human way of doing things, I think.
PR: I wanted to ask you about the growing dispute in the Bethlehem area between the local Christian communities and the armed fighters. There were reports in Ha'aretz that Christians were speaking out against the fighters coming into their neighborhoods and firing at the Israeli settlements, after which the Israeli military strikes hard at the neighborhood. It seems that this there has been some name-calling and leaflet-writing in both directions and I wonder if you could give us some perspective on that.
Ateek: I have not read these reports, but I can give you some perspective. I don't think it is right for anyone to shoot between the houses. I don't think this is the right way of resisting. If these people want to resist, they have to know how to do it and they have to do it in an organized way and not jeopardize the lives of civilians. If it is their choice to have armed resistance, they have to be much more mature and organized. I do think there is legitimate criticism there. There are all kinds of other things they can do. I think it is right for us to say to these people, to whoever it is, "Please think about it. If your family is there, would you do it? Think about it in the right way and don't add to the suffering of our people." We are already suffering from all kinds of things.
PR: Some people would say that making such a public outcry about the fighters shooting from certain neighborhoods will only create divisions in the Palestinian people, to be exploited by Israel.
Ateek: I would say that any honest criticism done with integrity is much needed. I think this is a very healthy thing. I would be very upset if we didn't like what is happening and we kept our mouths shut. I think part of the health of the community is to say clearly that this action is unacceptable and must stop. I think that kind of debate in the community, although it might be exploited here and there (and usually there is always exploitation of these things), is a healthier community that really speaks out against injustices. Obviously, it has to be done in the right way, in the right spirit, to the right people and once it is done that way, it will not cause friction in the community.
-Published 9/5/01 (c)Palestine Report
In conversations over the past couple of months with Palestinian partners and other international workers, the conviction is continually raised that the situation could not get worse. This must reflect a desperate wish rather than reality, because things do seem to keep getting worse. The past two weeks have seen horrific killings: the shell which killed four-month old Iman Hijo in Khan Younis refugee camps while in her mother's arms; Yossi Ishran and Kobi Mendel, two Israeli teenagers from the settlement of Tekoa' bludgeoned to death; eighteen-year-old Kifah Zu'rub who died from wounds received when settlers in the Mawasi region in the Gush Katif bloc of settlements west of Khan Younis unleashed their dogs on him as he returned home from school. Over 410 Palestinians and nearly 80 Israeli Jews have been killed since September 28, 2000. The perpetuation of the occupation is clearly not bringing peace and security, either to Palestinians or to Israelis.
More than ever your prayers and action for justice and peace are needed. MCC has produced worship and advocacy resources for personal and congregational use. These materials are now available on MCC's website at the following URL: http://www.mcc.org/middleeast/worship.html Feel free to copy, pass around, plagiarize, etc.
We (Alain and Sonia Epp Weaver and children) will be out of the country on home leave for the coming two months. The Palestine updates will be suspended during this time. The following websites are useful sources of regularly updated information and comment on the situation in Palestine/Israel:
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/
http://www.arij.org/
http://www.hdip.org/
http://www.pchrgaza.org/
http://www.lawsociety.org/
http://www.sabeel.org/
http://www.rapprochement.org/
Below you will find an interview with the Rev. Naim Ateek, director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. If you would like additional comments by Israeli journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy, please contact J. Daryl Byler in the MCC Washington Office (jdb@mcc.org).
Alain Epp Weaver, MCC Jerusalem Office
1. Palestine Report Interview: Rev. Naim Ateek
Palestine Report, 9 May 2001
This week Palestine Report Online interviews director of Sabeel Reverend Naim Ateek on the role of Palestinian and international Christians in the Aqsa Intifada.
PR: How do you see the role of Palestinian Christians in the ongoing Intifada?
Ateek: I see it in a number of ways, both locally and internationally. Locally, I think there have been a number of voices from the Christian community speaking out against the Israeli oppression. This was done through public speeches, through statements from churches and from other non-church organizations, and some of it has been carried out in the media. A person like Archmandrite Atallah Hanna has played a very significant role expressing the voice of the Christian community, especially regionally. I went with him to Morocco to meet with a group of foreign ministers and he has played a significant role in expressing the solidarity between Christians and Muslims and the importance of justice for Palestinians and the fact that Israel is not ready to honor United Nations resolutions. Internationally, I think a number of us have gone out, attending conferences, educating people, updating them on the situation, asking for a greater advocacy, helping people interpret the situation correctly. I think also that there have been a number of Christians getting together, not only by themselves, but also with Muslims and Jews, to strategize. In addition, I think that by and large (although I obviously cannot speak for all Christians and how Christians feel), many Christians know that if they are faithful to the Gospel, any resistance to injustice has to be done through non-violent action. I think that there has been a number of us who have been talking about the importance of nonviolent action and a non-violent resistance. The basic thing that I need to emphasize here is that we as a Christian community cannot sit back and watch things happen. Involvement is very important but our involvement is not in the area of an armed struggle, but in doing whatever we can non-violently towards the ending of the occupation. What all of us agree on is that the occupation must end.
PR: How do you view the Intifada in general? Would you prefer that the entire Intifada were non-violent?
Ateek: Let me begin with the premise that resisting injustice is a legitimate thing for any nation or any people who are living under oppression. I think the world community has legitimized rebellion. Whether we like it or not, resistance usually takes on the form of an armed struggle. Hopefully, there is also a resistance that is done non-violently. Now, this doesn't mean that all Christians believe in non-violence. But thank God there have always been Christians who believe that non-violence is the way to go. I believe that the Intifada is important and the Intifada is legitimate because Israel is not willing to give up its injustice and its control over all of Palestine and implement United Nations resolutions. I would like, personally, that [the Intifada] is conducted on more nonviolent terms. I believe that we will get greater support from the world community, including many Israelis, if we strengthen nonviolent action. There are also Palestinians who do feel uncomfortable with armed resistance, although the general feeling is that armed struggle is a quicker way. Unfortunately, the price is also very high, not only the physical price, but also the psychological, which remains within the community for many years. I am not saying that non-violent resistance does not have its price. It is also costly, but it is somehow the more human way of doing things, I think.
PR: I wanted to ask you about the growing dispute in the Bethlehem area between the local Christian communities and the armed fighters. There were reports in Ha'aretz that Christians were speaking out against the fighters coming into their neighborhoods and firing at the Israeli settlements, after which the Israeli military strikes hard at the neighborhood. It seems that this there has been some name-calling and leaflet-writing in both directions and I wonder if you could give us some perspective on that.
Ateek: I have not read these reports, but I can give you some perspective. I don't think it is right for anyone to shoot between the houses. I don't think this is the right way of resisting. If these people want to resist, they have to know how to do it and they have to do it in an organized way and not jeopardize the lives of civilians. If it is their choice to have armed resistance, they have to be much more mature and organized. I do think there is legitimate criticism there. There are all kinds of other things they can do. I think it is right for us to say to these people, to whoever it is, "Please think about it. If your family is there, would you do it? Think about it in the right way and don't add to the suffering of our people." We are already suffering from all kinds of things.
PR: Some people would say that making such a public outcry about the fighters shooting from certain neighborhoods will only create divisions in the Palestinian people, to be exploited by Israel.
Ateek: I would say that any honest criticism done with integrity is much needed. I think this is a very healthy thing. I would be very upset if we didn't like what is happening and we kept our mouths shut. I think part of the health of the community is to say clearly that this action is unacceptable and must stop. I think that kind of debate in the community, although it might be exploited here and there (and usually there is always exploitation of these things), is a healthier community that really speaks out against injustices. Obviously, it has to be done in the right way, in the right spirit, to the right people and once it is done that way, it will not cause friction in the community.
-Published 9/5/01 (c)Palestine Report
Saturday, April 28
MCC Palestine Update #21
MCC Palestine Update #21
"There is no escape from the solution of justice"--Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, April 2001
While Msgr. Sabbah is certainly correct in the eschatological sense that there is no escape from the solution of justice, for Palestinians in the occupied territories at present there is no escape from the Israeli siege. The siege has devastated the Palestinian economy. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics this past week announced the results of a survey which indicated that 64.2% of Palestinian households are now under the poverty level (55.7% in the West Bank, 81.4% in the Gaza Strip). 52% of households have encountered major obstacles in accessing health care because of the siege. 10.7% of households have lost all means of income, while 49.2% of households have lost 50% of their income. For the full results of the survey, look at http://www.pcbs.org/english/press_r/impact_p.htm.
Below are three pieces. The first two, by Israeli Jewish peace activist Jeff Halper and Palestinian advocate of nonviolence Ghassan Andoni (also director of MCC partner organization, Palestinian Center for Rapprochement), use sarcasm to good effect to undermine Israeli propoganda concerning the situation in the occupied territories. The final piece, by Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy, tells the story of a young infant shot in the head by Israeli border police.
1. How to Start an Uprising
Jeff Halper,* April 2001
First, you create great expectations. Handshakes on the White House lawn. A rhetoric of peace ("No more war. No more bloodshed"). Elections, giving them a flag of their own. Then secret meetings, summit meetings, dinners, retreats, peace treaties, interim agreements, promises, tantalizing benefits held before hungry eyes. More handshakes, more "gestures."
Then you create a framework of peace that guarantees you negotiating superiority. Take out international law, human rights covenants, UN resolutions, and for good measure enlist your
strategically, the strongest power in the world, the one who supplies you with all your arms, as the "mediator."
Then, as you talk peace in Oslo, Washington, Paris, Cairo, the Wye Plantation, Stockholm, Amman, Camp David, Sharm, you "create facts" on the ground that ensure your continued control and prejudice the negotiations altogether. You exploit the last seven years since the signing of the Oslo Accords to:
1. Dismember the West Bank into "Areas A, B and C," giving the Palestinian Authority full control of only 18% of the land while retaining control over 61%; divide tiny Gaza into "yellow, white, blue and green areas," giving 6,000 settlers control of 40% of the territory and confining 1,000,000 Palestinians to the rest; and completely sever East Jerusalem from the wider Palestinian society;
2. Expropriate 200 square kilometers of farm and pasture land from its Palestinian owners for your own exclusive settlements, highways and infrastructure;
3. Uproot some 80,000 olive and fruit trees that are in the way of your construction projects, thereby impoverishing their owners and making them casual day workers in your labor market -provided they can get access to your labor market;
4. Add some 30 new settlements, including whole cities like Kiryat Sefer and Tel Zion, to the dozens of settlements that already exist in the Occupied Territories over which negotiations are taking place, and construct 90,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem and the settlements exclusively for your own population;
5. Demolish more than 1200 homes of the people with whom you are negotiating peace;
6. Double your settler population across the 1967 border to 400,000, 90% of which you have already decided will remain under your sovereignty even though you haven't negotiated that with the other side yet;
7. Begin construction of 480 kms of massive highways and "by-pass" roads serving your settlements while dissecting the future territory of your peace partner into tiny disconnected islands, thereby preventing the emergence of another viable and competing economy next door;
8. Impose a permanent "closure" to prevent those whose lands you took from finding employment in your own economy, because you have discovered that workers from Rumania and Thailand are cheaper and more docile. While you're at it, you also exclude them from entering Jerusalem, the site of their holiest places;
9. Exploit their natural resources, unilaterally and illegally drawing, for example, 25% of your country's water from your neighbors' aquifers while leaving them thirsty for months on end;
10. Vandalize their countryside and environment, burying its fragile historic landscape under your massive settlements and highways and turning it into a disposal site for your industrial and urban wastes.
Next, you wait until your occupation has become irreversible and all-encompassing, until you've integrated your two economies under your control, the electrical grids, the highway and urban
infrastructure, until you've completely absorbed your partner's economy and society into your own. Then you announce that your concept of peace is "separation," and you lock your neighbors into a few small islands, taking away any hope they have for a better future, for a real country and identity of their own. You keep tightening your control, restricting their life space, humiliating and harassing them - until the uprising finally explodes.
Then you tell your story to the world: how you tried to negotiate, how "generous" you had been, how you wanted peace, and how disappointed you feel that "they" let you down. How "they" met your good intentions with stones, how "they" are not partners for peace, how "they" are not yet ready for peace. And so, until they agree to end their violence against you and return to the same negotiating table that allowed you to construct your matrix of control in the first place, you resort to force – defensive force, of course, since "they" are the aggressors. The most up- to-date American weapon systems, snipers, closures until starvation, clearing thousands of acres of agricultural land, destruction of hundreds of houses.... Until they get the message.
* Jeff Halper teaches anthropology at Ben Gurion University in Israel. He is co-ordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and is editor of the critical Israeli-Palestinian magazine NEWS FROM WITHIN, published by the Alternative Information Center.
2. A course to overcome Violence in the Middle East
Ghassan Andoni
Palestinian Center for Rapprochement
In following what many Israelis and supporters of Israel write about the current crisis in the Middle East, I get the impression that Israel is running an intensive disciplinary course 101. The students,
against their will, are 4 million Palestinians. The course outline is:
Pragmatism: how to find for your self another road if the main road is blocked; how to find for yourself a different piece of land if yours is expropriated; how to find for yourself a different country if yours is taken for someone else; how to be thankful and hopeful if your home is bombarded, your brother is shot dead, your family is starving, and your life is controlled by a teenager in uniform and a gun; how to serve in order to live; how to accept all offers regardless.
Non-violence: how wonderful it is to be a victim; how to be able to see the good side of the solider who destroyed your home; how to blame yourself for the cold blood killing of your dears; how to die quietly and at the same time be the shield that protect the ones who killed you; how to provide the excuse for the ones who torture you; how to control your anger and pain.
Obedience: how to blindly follow military orders; how to uproot your trees if the authority decides on their removal; how to demolish your home and save the army the headache of doing so; how to
serve the masters who decided to take your home and live on your land; how to accept control and dictates without questioning them; how to stay indoors in times of curfews; how to starve silently; how to protect the ones who attack you; how to turn the left cheek; how to offer your coat as well; how to convince your self that God created men/women as masters and slaves; how to remove No
from your dictionary.
Obedience Lab: you will be provided with a wide range of examples to what will happen if you are disobedient.
Experiment 1: you will experience massive bombardment of civilian residential areas. Equipment needed: tanks, choppers, and heavy machine guns.
Experiment 2: High Tech assassinations. Smart missiles will be used to destroy people who exceeded a certain level in disobeying orders. Booby trap assassinations: exploding bombs in peoples cars, telephone boxes, and cement blocks. You need to learn how not to call it an act of terror.
Experiment 3: collective punishment. A wide variety of experiments are available: curfews, road blockades, checkpoints, economic siege, indiscriminate shooting etc.
Our labs are different from other because you will be always the subject. You will experience them all being on the recipient side.
Voluntary work: in this course you will learn how to adjust to the needs, state of mind, and reactions of your masters. How to give voluntarily before it is taken by force; how to relinquish your rights voluntarily before you are forced to do so; how to leave the country voluntarily before Zeevi (Gandhi) replaces Sharon. [NOTE: Rehavam Zeevi, nicknamed "Gandhi," is a proponent of transfer and a minister in Ariel Sharon's government.]
By passing this course successfully, and if you manage to survive then you need to take course 102 and we will make sure that you will not pass it alive. You already know the golden rule: the only
good Arab is the dead Arab.
First part of this course is offered by Prof. Ehud Barak; currently offered by prof. Sharon; to register in course 102 please check with Prof. Zeevi (Gandhi).
3. They shoot babies, don't they?
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, 27 April 2001
Nothing can bring a smile to Amani's face. Not even the three new dolls - one pink, one yellow and one green - that she got as a present from her parents, who received their baby daughter as a gift when she was released from the hospital a few days ago and brought home. Amani goes around the house wearing festive clothes, also new - a red suit and shiny sandals - providing a sharp contrast to the poverty all around.Amani doesn't cry, and she doesn't laugh. Her big blue eyes are wide open and her smooth golden tresses cascade down the right side of her head; the left side is bare and bald, furrowed by three scars - a large arc of stitches on her forehead and two smaller scars below. Most of the time, Amani clings to her mother. She makes the occasional sortie into the living room, but quickly scurries back to her mother's arms, constantly enshrouded in silence. Even when her father picks her up and gives her a hug, she stretches out her arms toward her mother; she wants to go back to her.
Maybe it's because of the memory of that day, that terrible day, on which her father took her on his shoulders and the whole family walked innocently and tranquilly to the clinic in the city. Until the soldiers shot them.
Amani Gnaim is one year and nine months old. She was shot in the head by Border Policemen, at appallingly close range, it appears. If her father, who carried Amani on his shoulders on that bitter day, is to be believed, the troops fired a few rounds at his family as they walked along the side of the road. If we believe the spokeswoman for the Border Police, her organization knows nothing about any such a shocking incident of fire being opened at short range on a family. But the scars on Amani's head tell a story, and provide crushing, painful proof that is more convincing than a thousand testimonies and denials.
The turrets of Israeli tanks concealed on the ridge threaten those who use the road that ascends from Bethlehem to the village of Al Khader. Palestinians throwing stones and hurling Molotov cocktails, as well as snipers, threaten the Tunnel Road, "the settlers' highway," which runs below, in the valley. A Palestinian youngster wearing a black shirt labeled "Labor Party Youth" shows us the way to Amani's home, at the far end of a narrow alley. His friend walks on crutches. According to the data of Abd al-Ahmar, a field worker for the Palestinian Human Rights Group, 1,350 residents of Bethlehem, nearly all of them civilians, have been wounded since the start of the current Intifada; 95 of them are under the age of 18. Amani is the youngest to be wounded so far. In the past few weeks, she has also suffered from a severe throat inflammation, probably caused by the tear gas grenades the Israeli soldiers fire here occasionally.
The photograph of a shahid - martyr - Rami Yihyeh Mussa, who was 16 when he was killed on April 17 in shelling by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), hangs at the entrance to the neighborhood grocery store. The rusting remains of an old car lie on the road leading to the house: it served as a makeshift Palestinian barrier to the IDF jeeps that hurtle through the area from the Tunnel Road in pursuit of stone-throwers. Al Khader, which lies on the outskirts of Bethlehem, is under Israeli security control, but is a hotbed of unrest and violence. The improvised roadblock of the local residents has been shunted to the side of the road; it can no longer stop the progress of any jeep.The home of the Gnaim family is on the second floor, above the village blacksmith's shop, and the way to it passes through the shop, between iron bars, soldering irons and two sooty workers. This is a house of poverty: two rooms for seven souls, the plaster on the walls peeling. The family has lived here for 17 years. Nawal the mother, Mohammed the father and their five children: Amal, 14; Yusuf, 12; Mahmoud, 10; Omar, 8; and Amani, the baby. Mohammed was a construction worker in the settlement of Beit El, but has been out of work since the Intifada erupted more than six months ago. What do they live on? "We make do." It's the same answer you get in all the poverty-stricken homes of Palestinians. Neighbor women with their children sit on the floor: they have come to congratulate Amani on her almost- healthy return home from the hospital.
On Sunday, April 8, Amani's sore throat worsened and her temperature went up. Her parents decided to take her to the clinic run by Dr. Ali in Bethlehem. They had been to see him a few times, and he has said that the little girl was suffering from the effects of the tear gas, but it was her rising temperature that worried the parents. They left the house at about 2 P.M. - Nawal, Mohammed and their two children, Mahmoud and Amani. They walked down the alley and reached the main road, which is flanked on both sides by vineyards and overlooks the Tunnel Road. It's usually dangerous here, between the flying stones and the flying bullets, but Mohammed says they thought it was quiet, as quiet as on Sunday of this week, when we walked the same road with Mohammed to reconstruct the events.
Two Border Police jeeps swooped down on them. Mohammed says they stopped a short distance from the family. There were six men in the jeeps; five emerged, and suddenly opened fire. That is what Mohammed says. Amani, whom he was carrying, began to bleed, Mahmoud and Nawal were also wounded lightly, the boy in his arm, the mother in the back. Mohammed says a few bullets whistled between his legs. They were rubber bullets, he says. His wife and son lay down on the sidewalk, he himself rushed the bleeding Amani to an ambulance that was parked below, where the Palestinian ambulances are always parked, ready for any incident that may occur - and does, in this violence-prone place.
Mohammed recalls that as he began to run with his daughter, he shouted at the Border Policemen, "Why did you do it?" - but they only smiled, perhaps in embarrassment, and sped off in their jeeps. According to Mohammed, there was no one else but them on the sidewalk at the time of the incident. "They saw that they shot a baby girl. There was no way they couldn't have seen that."
The Palestinian ambulance rushed Amani and her family to the Al-Husseini Hospital in Beit Jala, which borders on Jerusalem. That night, Amani was transferred to Al-Muqassed Hospital in East erusalem. A fractured skull, the doctors said. She underwent surgery. Her brother Mahmoud remained at Al-Husseini with his uncle. Amani was in intensive care for five days, and then spent another three days in the ward before being released. The doctors said it would be some time before it became clear whether permanent damage had been done. On May 5, her parents will take her for a follow-up examination. "I could identify them out of a million people," Mohammed says of those who shot his daughter. And an elderly woman neighbor interjects, "Who do you want to identify, and what for? There's plenty of them who do plenty of things. "Amani came home on Saturday. Says Nawal, the mother, with unabashed pride: "People ask her who shot her and she says the army. She's a smart girl." Mohammed: "Look how they treat our children. They shoot them and they laugh. In Hebron, they destroyed a whole neighborhood, the Abu Sneina neighborhood, because of a Jewish baby girl, and they refused to bury her until they avenged her death. We are simple people, we did nothing. All we did was to take our girl to the clinic. We didn't want to hurt anyone. I don't understand how the soldiers don't go crazy after they do something like that."
Here is a photograph of Amani from before the incident: a sweet little girl in the local studio, Disney figures in the background. She's holding a sweet in her hand - it looks like she has a strong grip. Here is Amani after the incident: with her head shaved and the stitches and the scars that will heal.
The spokeswoman for the Border Police, Chief Inspector Liat Perl: "The Border Police confirms the fact that there were severe disturbances that day in Al Khader, in which dozens of locals threw irebombs and stones at Border Police forces at the site. Because of the intensity of the events, the forces had to make use of means to disperse the mob. We have no knowledge of citizens who were urt and we are sorry if that in fact happened."
"There is no escape from the solution of justice"--Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, April 2001
While Msgr. Sabbah is certainly correct in the eschatological sense that there is no escape from the solution of justice, for Palestinians in the occupied territories at present there is no escape from the Israeli siege. The siege has devastated the Palestinian economy. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics this past week announced the results of a survey which indicated that 64.2% of Palestinian households are now under the poverty level (55.7% in the West Bank, 81.4% in the Gaza Strip). 52% of households have encountered major obstacles in accessing health care because of the siege. 10.7% of households have lost all means of income, while 49.2% of households have lost 50% of their income. For the full results of the survey, look at http://www.pcbs.org/english/press_r/impact_p.htm.
Below are three pieces. The first two, by Israeli Jewish peace activist Jeff Halper and Palestinian advocate of nonviolence Ghassan Andoni (also director of MCC partner organization, Palestinian Center for Rapprochement), use sarcasm to good effect to undermine Israeli propoganda concerning the situation in the occupied territories. The final piece, by Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy, tells the story of a young infant shot in the head by Israeli border police.
1. How to Start an Uprising
Jeff Halper,* April 2001
First, you create great expectations. Handshakes on the White House lawn. A rhetoric of peace ("No more war. No more bloodshed"). Elections, giving them a flag of their own. Then secret meetings, summit meetings, dinners, retreats, peace treaties, interim agreements, promises, tantalizing benefits held before hungry eyes. More handshakes, more "gestures."
Then you create a framework of peace that guarantees you negotiating superiority. Take out international law, human rights covenants, UN resolutions, and for good measure enlist your
strategically, the strongest power in the world, the one who supplies you with all your arms, as the "mediator."
Then, as you talk peace in Oslo, Washington, Paris, Cairo, the Wye Plantation, Stockholm, Amman, Camp David, Sharm, you "create facts" on the ground that ensure your continued control and prejudice the negotiations altogether. You exploit the last seven years since the signing of the Oslo Accords to:
1. Dismember the West Bank into "Areas A, B and C," giving the Palestinian Authority full control of only 18% of the land while retaining control over 61%; divide tiny Gaza into "yellow, white, blue and green areas," giving 6,000 settlers control of 40% of the territory and confining 1,000,000 Palestinians to the rest; and completely sever East Jerusalem from the wider Palestinian society;
2. Expropriate 200 square kilometers of farm and pasture land from its Palestinian owners for your own exclusive settlements, highways and infrastructure;
3. Uproot some 80,000 olive and fruit trees that are in the way of your construction projects, thereby impoverishing their owners and making them casual day workers in your labor market -provided they can get access to your labor market;
4. Add some 30 new settlements, including whole cities like Kiryat Sefer and Tel Zion, to the dozens of settlements that already exist in the Occupied Territories over which negotiations are taking place, and construct 90,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem and the settlements exclusively for your own population;
5. Demolish more than 1200 homes of the people with whom you are negotiating peace;
6. Double your settler population across the 1967 border to 400,000, 90% of which you have already decided will remain under your sovereignty even though you haven't negotiated that with the other side yet;
7. Begin construction of 480 kms of massive highways and "by-pass" roads serving your settlements while dissecting the future territory of your peace partner into tiny disconnected islands, thereby preventing the emergence of another viable and competing economy next door;
8. Impose a permanent "closure" to prevent those whose lands you took from finding employment in your own economy, because you have discovered that workers from Rumania and Thailand are cheaper and more docile. While you're at it, you also exclude them from entering Jerusalem, the site of their holiest places;
9. Exploit their natural resources, unilaterally and illegally drawing, for example, 25% of your country's water from your neighbors' aquifers while leaving them thirsty for months on end;
10. Vandalize their countryside and environment, burying its fragile historic landscape under your massive settlements and highways and turning it into a disposal site for your industrial and urban wastes.
Next, you wait until your occupation has become irreversible and all-encompassing, until you've integrated your two economies under your control, the electrical grids, the highway and urban
infrastructure, until you've completely absorbed your partner's economy and society into your own. Then you announce that your concept of peace is "separation," and you lock your neighbors into a few small islands, taking away any hope they have for a better future, for a real country and identity of their own. You keep tightening your control, restricting their life space, humiliating and harassing them - until the uprising finally explodes.
Then you tell your story to the world: how you tried to negotiate, how "generous" you had been, how you wanted peace, and how disappointed you feel that "they" let you down. How "they" met your good intentions with stones, how "they" are not partners for peace, how "they" are not yet ready for peace. And so, until they agree to end their violence against you and return to the same negotiating table that allowed you to construct your matrix of control in the first place, you resort to force – defensive force, of course, since "they" are the aggressors. The most up- to-date American weapon systems, snipers, closures until starvation, clearing thousands of acres of agricultural land, destruction of hundreds of houses.... Until they get the message.
* Jeff Halper teaches anthropology at Ben Gurion University in Israel. He is co-ordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and is editor of the critical Israeli-Palestinian magazine NEWS FROM WITHIN, published by the Alternative Information Center.
2. A course to overcome Violence in the Middle East
Ghassan Andoni
Palestinian Center for Rapprochement
In following what many Israelis and supporters of Israel write about the current crisis in the Middle East, I get the impression that Israel is running an intensive disciplinary course 101. The students,
against their will, are 4 million Palestinians. The course outline is:
Pragmatism: how to find for your self another road if the main road is blocked; how to find for yourself a different piece of land if yours is expropriated; how to find for yourself a different country if yours is taken for someone else; how to be thankful and hopeful if your home is bombarded, your brother is shot dead, your family is starving, and your life is controlled by a teenager in uniform and a gun; how to serve in order to live; how to accept all offers regardless.
Non-violence: how wonderful it is to be a victim; how to be able to see the good side of the solider who destroyed your home; how to blame yourself for the cold blood killing of your dears; how to die quietly and at the same time be the shield that protect the ones who killed you; how to provide the excuse for the ones who torture you; how to control your anger and pain.
Obedience: how to blindly follow military orders; how to uproot your trees if the authority decides on their removal; how to demolish your home and save the army the headache of doing so; how to
serve the masters who decided to take your home and live on your land; how to accept control and dictates without questioning them; how to stay indoors in times of curfews; how to starve silently; how to protect the ones who attack you; how to turn the left cheek; how to offer your coat as well; how to convince your self that God created men/women as masters and slaves; how to remove No
from your dictionary.
Obedience Lab: you will be provided with a wide range of examples to what will happen if you are disobedient.
Experiment 1: you will experience massive bombardment of civilian residential areas. Equipment needed: tanks, choppers, and heavy machine guns.
Experiment 2: High Tech assassinations. Smart missiles will be used to destroy people who exceeded a certain level in disobeying orders. Booby trap assassinations: exploding bombs in peoples cars, telephone boxes, and cement blocks. You need to learn how not to call it an act of terror.
Experiment 3: collective punishment. A wide variety of experiments are available: curfews, road blockades, checkpoints, economic siege, indiscriminate shooting etc.
Our labs are different from other because you will be always the subject. You will experience them all being on the recipient side.
Voluntary work: in this course you will learn how to adjust to the needs, state of mind, and reactions of your masters. How to give voluntarily before it is taken by force; how to relinquish your rights voluntarily before you are forced to do so; how to leave the country voluntarily before Zeevi (Gandhi) replaces Sharon. [NOTE: Rehavam Zeevi, nicknamed "Gandhi," is a proponent of transfer and a minister in Ariel Sharon's government.]
By passing this course successfully, and if you manage to survive then you need to take course 102 and we will make sure that you will not pass it alive. You already know the golden rule: the only
good Arab is the dead Arab.
First part of this course is offered by Prof. Ehud Barak; currently offered by prof. Sharon; to register in course 102 please check with Prof. Zeevi (Gandhi).
3. They shoot babies, don't they?
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, 27 April 2001
Nothing can bring a smile to Amani's face. Not even the three new dolls - one pink, one yellow and one green - that she got as a present from her parents, who received their baby daughter as a gift when she was released from the hospital a few days ago and brought home. Amani goes around the house wearing festive clothes, also new - a red suit and shiny sandals - providing a sharp contrast to the poverty all around.Amani doesn't cry, and she doesn't laugh. Her big blue eyes are wide open and her smooth golden tresses cascade down the right side of her head; the left side is bare and bald, furrowed by three scars - a large arc of stitches on her forehead and two smaller scars below. Most of the time, Amani clings to her mother. She makes the occasional sortie into the living room, but quickly scurries back to her mother's arms, constantly enshrouded in silence. Even when her father picks her up and gives her a hug, she stretches out her arms toward her mother; she wants to go back to her.
Maybe it's because of the memory of that day, that terrible day, on which her father took her on his shoulders and the whole family walked innocently and tranquilly to the clinic in the city. Until the soldiers shot them.
Amani Gnaim is one year and nine months old. She was shot in the head by Border Policemen, at appallingly close range, it appears. If her father, who carried Amani on his shoulders on that bitter day, is to be believed, the troops fired a few rounds at his family as they walked along the side of the road. If we believe the spokeswoman for the Border Police, her organization knows nothing about any such a shocking incident of fire being opened at short range on a family. But the scars on Amani's head tell a story, and provide crushing, painful proof that is more convincing than a thousand testimonies and denials.
The turrets of Israeli tanks concealed on the ridge threaten those who use the road that ascends from Bethlehem to the village of Al Khader. Palestinians throwing stones and hurling Molotov cocktails, as well as snipers, threaten the Tunnel Road, "the settlers' highway," which runs below, in the valley. A Palestinian youngster wearing a black shirt labeled "Labor Party Youth" shows us the way to Amani's home, at the far end of a narrow alley. His friend walks on crutches. According to the data of Abd al-Ahmar, a field worker for the Palestinian Human Rights Group, 1,350 residents of Bethlehem, nearly all of them civilians, have been wounded since the start of the current Intifada; 95 of them are under the age of 18. Amani is the youngest to be wounded so far. In the past few weeks, she has also suffered from a severe throat inflammation, probably caused by the tear gas grenades the Israeli soldiers fire here occasionally.
The photograph of a shahid - martyr - Rami Yihyeh Mussa, who was 16 when he was killed on April 17 in shelling by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), hangs at the entrance to the neighborhood grocery store. The rusting remains of an old car lie on the road leading to the house: it served as a makeshift Palestinian barrier to the IDF jeeps that hurtle through the area from the Tunnel Road in pursuit of stone-throwers. Al Khader, which lies on the outskirts of Bethlehem, is under Israeli security control, but is a hotbed of unrest and violence. The improvised roadblock of the local residents has been shunted to the side of the road; it can no longer stop the progress of any jeep.The home of the Gnaim family is on the second floor, above the village blacksmith's shop, and the way to it passes through the shop, between iron bars, soldering irons and two sooty workers. This is a house of poverty: two rooms for seven souls, the plaster on the walls peeling. The family has lived here for 17 years. Nawal the mother, Mohammed the father and their five children: Amal, 14; Yusuf, 12; Mahmoud, 10; Omar, 8; and Amani, the baby. Mohammed was a construction worker in the settlement of Beit El, but has been out of work since the Intifada erupted more than six months ago. What do they live on? "We make do." It's the same answer you get in all the poverty-stricken homes of Palestinians. Neighbor women with their children sit on the floor: they have come to congratulate Amani on her almost- healthy return home from the hospital.
On Sunday, April 8, Amani's sore throat worsened and her temperature went up. Her parents decided to take her to the clinic run by Dr. Ali in Bethlehem. They had been to see him a few times, and he has said that the little girl was suffering from the effects of the tear gas, but it was her rising temperature that worried the parents. They left the house at about 2 P.M. - Nawal, Mohammed and their two children, Mahmoud and Amani. They walked down the alley and reached the main road, which is flanked on both sides by vineyards and overlooks the Tunnel Road. It's usually dangerous here, between the flying stones and the flying bullets, but Mohammed says they thought it was quiet, as quiet as on Sunday of this week, when we walked the same road with Mohammed to reconstruct the events.
Two Border Police jeeps swooped down on them. Mohammed says they stopped a short distance from the family. There were six men in the jeeps; five emerged, and suddenly opened fire. That is what Mohammed says. Amani, whom he was carrying, began to bleed, Mahmoud and Nawal were also wounded lightly, the boy in his arm, the mother in the back. Mohammed says a few bullets whistled between his legs. They were rubber bullets, he says. His wife and son lay down on the sidewalk, he himself rushed the bleeding Amani to an ambulance that was parked below, where the Palestinian ambulances are always parked, ready for any incident that may occur - and does, in this violence-prone place.
Mohammed recalls that as he began to run with his daughter, he shouted at the Border Policemen, "Why did you do it?" - but they only smiled, perhaps in embarrassment, and sped off in their jeeps. According to Mohammed, there was no one else but them on the sidewalk at the time of the incident. "They saw that they shot a baby girl. There was no way they couldn't have seen that."
The Palestinian ambulance rushed Amani and her family to the Al-Husseini Hospital in Beit Jala, which borders on Jerusalem. That night, Amani was transferred to Al-Muqassed Hospital in East erusalem. A fractured skull, the doctors said. She underwent surgery. Her brother Mahmoud remained at Al-Husseini with his uncle. Amani was in intensive care for five days, and then spent another three days in the ward before being released. The doctors said it would be some time before it became clear whether permanent damage had been done. On May 5, her parents will take her for a follow-up examination. "I could identify them out of a million people," Mohammed says of those who shot his daughter. And an elderly woman neighbor interjects, "Who do you want to identify, and what for? There's plenty of them who do plenty of things. "Amani came home on Saturday. Says Nawal, the mother, with unabashed pride: "People ask her who shot her and she says the army. She's a smart girl." Mohammed: "Look how they treat our children. They shoot them and they laugh. In Hebron, they destroyed a whole neighborhood, the Abu Sneina neighborhood, because of a Jewish baby girl, and they refused to bury her until they avenged her death. We are simple people, we did nothing. All we did was to take our girl to the clinic. We didn't want to hurt anyone. I don't understand how the soldiers don't go crazy after they do something like that."
Here is a photograph of Amani from before the incident: a sweet little girl in the local studio, Disney figures in the background. She's holding a sweet in her hand - it looks like she has a strong grip. Here is Amani after the incident: with her head shaved and the stitches and the scars that will heal.
The spokeswoman for the Border Police, Chief Inspector Liat Perl: "The Border Police confirms the fact that there were severe disturbances that day in Al Khader, in which dozens of locals threw irebombs and stones at Border Police forces at the site. Because of the intensity of the events, the forces had to make use of means to disperse the mob. We have no knowledge of citizens who were urt and we are sorry if that in fact happened."
Tuesday, April 17
MCC Palestine Update #20
MCC Palestine Update #20
Introduction
Easter celebrations have come and gone in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, the restoration of our broken, human bodies is hard to discern in Jerusalem and in Palestine/Israel generally. The violence of the occupation continues harsher than ever: most sobering were the demolitions of lines of homes in refugee camps in Khan Younis and Rafah. Palestinians, one should add, also use violence.
A day in the occupied territories, however, is enough to convince anyone that the violence is not balanced, and the contending parties are not of equal strength. Israel aims to solidify its occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by force, while Palestinians desperately search for ways--and more and more Palestinians are becoming convinced that only nonviolent methods will be effective--to combat the siege under which they live. Violence clearly will not bring Israelis security; nor will it bring Palestinians the liberation they long for.
Please pray that Israelis may be graced with the wisdom to act justly and in accordance with international law and resolutions; pray that Palestinians may be graced with the strength and determination to resist the occupation nonviolently.
This update contains news about MCC projects along with an opinion piece which debunks the enduring myth that Palestinians foolishly rejected a generous offer by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti outlines Palestinian objections to Barak's proposals.
Two other opinion pieces are available upon request to the MCC Washington Office (jdb@mcc.org). The first is a reflection by MCC peace development worker Ed Nyce on a trip to Hebron. In the other, Amira Hass of Ha'aretz newspaper suggests that Israel is squandering an opportunity to have peace.
MCC Project News
An MCC partner, the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement, organized a series of nonviolent protests in Bethlehem, Atara north of Ramallah, and in the Nablus-Salfit area. The protests involved marches on checkpoints and the attempted dismantling of dirt barricades blocking the entrances to villages. In two of the demonstrations, Israeli peace activists joined Palestinians in a show of nonviolent resistance.
In 1997 MCC supported renovations to the Hope Flower (Amal al-Zuhur) kindergarten in the Aida refugee camp next to Bethlehem. This week MCC received word that Israeli shells had pierced through the kindergarten's walls, causing significant structural damage. A visit demonstrated that more than one wall will have to be replaced. The shelling occurred during the daylight hours while children were in the building; fortunately, only one girl was injured (in the abdomen). A bullet hole in the kindergarten's lone slide provided a chilling picture.
1. Why Palestinians could not accept Barak's proposal
Dr Mustafa Barghouti
Palestine Monitor, 16 April 2001
Time and again Palestinians are accused by the Israeli government of bringing the conflict of the past six months upon themselves by refusing to accept the "generous offers" made by Barak at Camp David. For some people, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer at Camp David of 94 percent of the West Bank sounded more than generous, revolutionary even, and Palestinians were castigated and called "inflexible," and "unreasonable" for refusing to go that extra step and make a compromise. The fact that Barak offered more than any previous Israeli leader is unimportant but if we examine what was offered and what the reality of these offers was on the ground, a clear picture begins to emerge. The offers proposed by Barak made the possibility of a viable Palestinian state an impossibility.
The first issue we have to examine is that of the generous territorial offer. It was said that Palestinians were offered eventual control of 95 - 96% of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS). However, after analysis it becomes obvious that this is far from the reality. For example if the actual territory offered was calculated, it transpires that the Palestinians would control of much less than the claimed percentages. This difference arises because Israel's "total" does not include Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, the Jordan Valley or settlements in its computations.
Furthermore, the discussion about 'this percent' versus 'that percent' does not address the main issues for the Palestinians. Most importantly, it ignores international law and the rights conferred upon the Palestinians, and effectively serves to push these legal frameworks aside. Without a commitment to these frameworks any settlement will be an Israeli dictated agreement.
The second issue overlooked in the discussion of why Palestinians rejected the Camp David proposals, can be referred to as "compromising the compromise". The 1947 United Nations General Assembly resolution 181, from which Israel derives its legitimacy, provided 45% of historical Palestine for the Palestinian state. The demands of UN Resolution 242 for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders means a Palestinian state would be founded on 22% of the area of historic Palestine. In their acceptance of Oslo, Palestinians accepted a 2 state solution. This is a compromise of over half of the area that was originally assigned to them. As Kofi Anan asked - is it acceptable by international standards to appropriate land by force?
UN resolution 242 stipulates that Israel has to withdraw from the lands it occupied, clearly indicating that no land can be illegally occupied. UN resolution 338 reaffirms this. For the sake of peace and in hope of building a state, Palestinians are accepting this initial compromise, but any further compromise would undermine the "continuing and unqualified Palestinian right to self- determination" that the European Union, Berlin declaration of March 1999 affirmed, as well as the restricting the potential for the establishment of a sovereign, viable, prosperous, contiguous and democratic state.
The third reason for the rejection by the Palestinian negotiators to of the less than "generous" offer from Barak stems from the continued illegal occupation, confiscation and expropriation of Palestinian land. Israel has already confiscated a large portion of the West Bank for its ever- growing illegal settlement blocks. This violation of international law restricts the viability of a Palestinian state. The settlements, the system of highways and by-pass roads linking the illegal settlements to Israel proper, industrial parks, the web of closed military areas, army bases and internal checkpoints all occupy large tracts of land. Passages from one area to the other are also controlled by Israel
The West Bank and Gaza Strip have been transformed into 64 clusters of townships that imprison over three million Palestinians, a people held hostage for the sake of 450,000 illegal settlers. The confiscation of Palestinian land has been a systematic pattern of Barak, Sharon and other Israeli leaders, in order to increase the number of Jewish citizens in the Occupies Territories.
Unable to successfully transfer the native Palestinian population from these areas, Israel has restricted them to tiny enclaves through a series of measures designed to restrict Arab growth. Israel has exploited Palestinian land, water, and natural resources and continues to have sovereignty over them in addition to the concerted effort made to separate the Palestinian people from their land and thereby denying Palestinians a viable state.
The illegal annexation of East Jerusalem is a perfect example of Israeli policy towards Palestinians. Instead of permitting Palestinians sovereignty over the 1967 areas, with Israel maintaining control over West Jerusalem, Israel has used various administrative measures including denial and removal of residency rights and house demolitions to once more transfer people from the area. As experts point out, "63.5 square kilometers -- 90 percent of the land annexed by Israel as "East Jerusalem" -- in fact belonged to 28 Palestinian West bank villages, which suddenly found themselves part of an "indivisible," "historic" and "sacred" Jewish city"
Israeli settlements cut East Jerusalem into clusters, huge areas land have been annexed to serve the needs of settlers and settlements, and only some civil affairs are under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Accepting any Israeli control of the occupied territories negatively affects the quality of the Palestinian state and would transform areas of Palestinian Authority into clusters of Bantustans, as well as legitimize and reward Israel for illegally occupying and annexing land, and changing facts on the ground in violation of international law, in fact under international law these actions can be regarded as war crimes.
The fourth and equally important reason for the rejection of the Camp David offer can be attributed to the lack of settlement of the refugee issue. Most Palestinians are realistic about the possibility of a compromise. Nonetheless, the fate of over 3.7 million Palestinian refugees registered by the United Nations and about 2 million others unregistered is of utmost concern to Palestinians. The issue at stake is the acknowledgement of the right of return, as well as Israel's culpability in the creation of the refugee problem, and the application of the United Nations Resolution 194. Paragraph 11 states: "...the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date... compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return."
The right of every human who has been dispossessed of land and forced to flee was not even mentioned in Camp David. They did not accept to discuss the return of refugees at the level of interim agreement - they chose instead to force a full and complete acceptance of a final solution without any right of future discussion and obliterate any right these millions of Palestinians have.
The Israeli government tried to bargain away the right of refugees as well as sovereignty of Jerusalem and the Muslim Holy site of Al Aqsa mosque for an entity that is not even a feasible state. Israel wanted to achieve the termination of the conflict without tangible compromises or resolving the basic issues. Their intransigence at the negotiating table has led to the rejection of the Camp David settlement and now they accuse the Palestinians of not wanting peace. Israel must be ready to accept and acknowledge that it is illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip and must withdraw after 34 years of a long and terrible military occupation and that the settlements, illegal in international law and viewed as such by the world, must be removed. Israel must accept international legitimacy and the application of international standards. What we have witnessed in the past 6-months is the culmination of violations of international law and human rights.
When one looks at the West Bank and Gaza Strip, even without indulging in conspiracy theories, one gets the impression that Labour and Likud were alternating to practically implement a process of Judaization through the systematic transfer of an Israeli civilian population into the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Through illegal settlement, the continuing expropriation and confiscation of Palestinian land, and Bantustanisation of a peoples homeland, Israel is destroying the potential for peace, a peace that is based on international law, - a compromise, that Israel is unwilling to make.
Introduction
Easter celebrations have come and gone in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, the restoration of our broken, human bodies is hard to discern in Jerusalem and in Palestine/Israel generally. The violence of the occupation continues harsher than ever: most sobering were the demolitions of lines of homes in refugee camps in Khan Younis and Rafah. Palestinians, one should add, also use violence.
A day in the occupied territories, however, is enough to convince anyone that the violence is not balanced, and the contending parties are not of equal strength. Israel aims to solidify its occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by force, while Palestinians desperately search for ways--and more and more Palestinians are becoming convinced that only nonviolent methods will be effective--to combat the siege under which they live. Violence clearly will not bring Israelis security; nor will it bring Palestinians the liberation they long for.
Please pray that Israelis may be graced with the wisdom to act justly and in accordance with international law and resolutions; pray that Palestinians may be graced with the strength and determination to resist the occupation nonviolently.
This update contains news about MCC projects along with an opinion piece which debunks the enduring myth that Palestinians foolishly rejected a generous offer by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti outlines Palestinian objections to Barak's proposals.
Two other opinion pieces are available upon request to the MCC Washington Office (jdb@mcc.org). The first is a reflection by MCC peace development worker Ed Nyce on a trip to Hebron. In the other, Amira Hass of Ha'aretz newspaper suggests that Israel is squandering an opportunity to have peace.
MCC Project News
An MCC partner, the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement, organized a series of nonviolent protests in Bethlehem, Atara north of Ramallah, and in the Nablus-Salfit area. The protests involved marches on checkpoints and the attempted dismantling of dirt barricades blocking the entrances to villages. In two of the demonstrations, Israeli peace activists joined Palestinians in a show of nonviolent resistance.
In 1997 MCC supported renovations to the Hope Flower (Amal al-Zuhur) kindergarten in the Aida refugee camp next to Bethlehem. This week MCC received word that Israeli shells had pierced through the kindergarten's walls, causing significant structural damage. A visit demonstrated that more than one wall will have to be replaced. The shelling occurred during the daylight hours while children were in the building; fortunately, only one girl was injured (in the abdomen). A bullet hole in the kindergarten's lone slide provided a chilling picture.
1. Why Palestinians could not accept Barak's proposal
Dr Mustafa Barghouti
Palestine Monitor, 16 April 2001
Time and again Palestinians are accused by the Israeli government of bringing the conflict of the past six months upon themselves by refusing to accept the "generous offers" made by Barak at Camp David. For some people, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer at Camp David of 94 percent of the West Bank sounded more than generous, revolutionary even, and Palestinians were castigated and called "inflexible," and "unreasonable" for refusing to go that extra step and make a compromise. The fact that Barak offered more than any previous Israeli leader is unimportant but if we examine what was offered and what the reality of these offers was on the ground, a clear picture begins to emerge. The offers proposed by Barak made the possibility of a viable Palestinian state an impossibility.
The first issue we have to examine is that of the generous territorial offer. It was said that Palestinians were offered eventual control of 95 - 96% of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS). However, after analysis it becomes obvious that this is far from the reality. For example if the actual territory offered was calculated, it transpires that the Palestinians would control of much less than the claimed percentages. This difference arises because Israel's "total" does not include Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, the Jordan Valley or settlements in its computations.
Furthermore, the discussion about 'this percent' versus 'that percent' does not address the main issues for the Palestinians. Most importantly, it ignores international law and the rights conferred upon the Palestinians, and effectively serves to push these legal frameworks aside. Without a commitment to these frameworks any settlement will be an Israeli dictated agreement.
The second issue overlooked in the discussion of why Palestinians rejected the Camp David proposals, can be referred to as "compromising the compromise". The 1947 United Nations General Assembly resolution 181, from which Israel derives its legitimacy, provided 45% of historical Palestine for the Palestinian state. The demands of UN Resolution 242 for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders means a Palestinian state would be founded on 22% of the area of historic Palestine. In their acceptance of Oslo, Palestinians accepted a 2 state solution. This is a compromise of over half of the area that was originally assigned to them. As Kofi Anan asked - is it acceptable by international standards to appropriate land by force?
UN resolution 242 stipulates that Israel has to withdraw from the lands it occupied, clearly indicating that no land can be illegally occupied. UN resolution 338 reaffirms this. For the sake of peace and in hope of building a state, Palestinians are accepting this initial compromise, but any further compromise would undermine the "continuing and unqualified Palestinian right to self- determination" that the European Union, Berlin declaration of March 1999 affirmed, as well as the restricting the potential for the establishment of a sovereign, viable, prosperous, contiguous and democratic state.
The third reason for the rejection by the Palestinian negotiators to of the less than "generous" offer from Barak stems from the continued illegal occupation, confiscation and expropriation of Palestinian land. Israel has already confiscated a large portion of the West Bank for its ever- growing illegal settlement blocks. This violation of international law restricts the viability of a Palestinian state. The settlements, the system of highways and by-pass roads linking the illegal settlements to Israel proper, industrial parks, the web of closed military areas, army bases and internal checkpoints all occupy large tracts of land. Passages from one area to the other are also controlled by Israel
The West Bank and Gaza Strip have been transformed into 64 clusters of townships that imprison over three million Palestinians, a people held hostage for the sake of 450,000 illegal settlers. The confiscation of Palestinian land has been a systematic pattern of Barak, Sharon and other Israeli leaders, in order to increase the number of Jewish citizens in the Occupies Territories.
Unable to successfully transfer the native Palestinian population from these areas, Israel has restricted them to tiny enclaves through a series of measures designed to restrict Arab growth. Israel has exploited Palestinian land, water, and natural resources and continues to have sovereignty over them in addition to the concerted effort made to separate the Palestinian people from their land and thereby denying Palestinians a viable state.
The illegal annexation of East Jerusalem is a perfect example of Israeli policy towards Palestinians. Instead of permitting Palestinians sovereignty over the 1967 areas, with Israel maintaining control over West Jerusalem, Israel has used various administrative measures including denial and removal of residency rights and house demolitions to once more transfer people from the area. As experts point out, "63.5 square kilometers -- 90 percent of the land annexed by Israel as "East Jerusalem" -- in fact belonged to 28 Palestinian West bank villages, which suddenly found themselves part of an "indivisible," "historic" and "sacred" Jewish city"
Israeli settlements cut East Jerusalem into clusters, huge areas land have been annexed to serve the needs of settlers and settlements, and only some civil affairs are under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Accepting any Israeli control of the occupied territories negatively affects the quality of the Palestinian state and would transform areas of Palestinian Authority into clusters of Bantustans, as well as legitimize and reward Israel for illegally occupying and annexing land, and changing facts on the ground in violation of international law, in fact under international law these actions can be regarded as war crimes.
The fourth and equally important reason for the rejection of the Camp David offer can be attributed to the lack of settlement of the refugee issue. Most Palestinians are realistic about the possibility of a compromise. Nonetheless, the fate of over 3.7 million Palestinian refugees registered by the United Nations and about 2 million others unregistered is of utmost concern to Palestinians. The issue at stake is the acknowledgement of the right of return, as well as Israel's culpability in the creation of the refugee problem, and the application of the United Nations Resolution 194. Paragraph 11 states: "...the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date... compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return."
The right of every human who has been dispossessed of land and forced to flee was not even mentioned in Camp David. They did not accept to discuss the return of refugees at the level of interim agreement - they chose instead to force a full and complete acceptance of a final solution without any right of future discussion and obliterate any right these millions of Palestinians have.
The Israeli government tried to bargain away the right of refugees as well as sovereignty of Jerusalem and the Muslim Holy site of Al Aqsa mosque for an entity that is not even a feasible state. Israel wanted to achieve the termination of the conflict without tangible compromises or resolving the basic issues. Their intransigence at the negotiating table has led to the rejection of the Camp David settlement and now they accuse the Palestinians of not wanting peace. Israel must be ready to accept and acknowledge that it is illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip and must withdraw after 34 years of a long and terrible military occupation and that the settlements, illegal in international law and viewed as such by the world, must be removed. Israel must accept international legitimacy and the application of international standards. What we have witnessed in the past 6-months is the culmination of violations of international law and human rights.
When one looks at the West Bank and Gaza Strip, even without indulging in conspiracy theories, one gets the impression that Labour and Likud were alternating to practically implement a process of Judaization through the systematic transfer of an Israeli civilian population into the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Through illegal settlement, the continuing expropriation and confiscation of Palestinian land, and Bantustanisation of a peoples homeland, Israel is destroying the potential for peace, a peace that is based on international law, - a compromise, that Israel is unwilling to make.
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