Digest of reporting on advocacy against IDF Separation Order
Background
On November 19, OC Central Command Major General Yair Naveh signed an order forbidding Palestinians from traveling in Israeli vehicles. The order, which is supposed to take effect on January 19, 2007, prevents the transport of Palestinian citizens inside the West Bank without permits (except for single exceptions) in Israeli vehicles (defined also as vehicles registered in Israel, even if they do not have Israeli license plates) by Israeli citizens. In his letters to the two figures, Attorney Michael Sfard, Yesh Din's legal advisor, notes that the new order joins a list of orders issued by the OC of the Central Command that create a legal system of separation on the basis of nationality. As such, notes Attorney Sfard, the order is manifestly illegal and falls under the definition of the Crime of Apartheid according to international law. Yesh Din is taking a series of actions, along with a number of other human rights organizations, to lead to the cancellation of the Apartheid order. On December 7, the coalition published an ad on the front-page of Haaretz, announcing their refusal to cooperate with the new order.
***
Contents
Maariv op-ed: This is how you create Apartheid
Jerusalem Report: Army Directive lashed as "crime of apartheid"
NFC: “We are going to ignore the General’s order that forbids transporting Palestinians”
***
This is how you create Apartheid
The order issued by the CO Central Command, that prohibits transporting Palestinians in vehicles without special permits, is a criminal offence according to international law
Op-ed, Mooky Dagan, Maariv, December 26
The author is a member of Yesh Din’s steering committee.
The order written by OC Central Command Ya’ir Naveh, forbidding Israelis and workers in international organizations from transporting Palestinians throughout the West Bank without special permits, will go into effect on January 19. That order is another escalation in the violation of the basic human rights of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories. The order also indicates that another moral obstacle was broken. It is an order that unequivocally discriminates, on a national basis, against an entire population, because of the fact that its members were born Palestinian and hold Palestinian identity cards.
A series of human rights organizations, such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Hamoked – Center for the Defense of the Individual, Gisha, Machsom Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, Yesh Din and other organizations, are fighting this order because it is manifestly illegal, and in order to erect a moral boundary as a warning sign.
It should be stressed that the order is not directed at people who pose any security danger, but applies to the entire Palestinian civilian population.
Transporting Palestinians is part of the daily work of those organizations, which announced they would not cooperate with the order and would not ask for special permits. It is an unusual public act, where law-abiding human rights organizations are saying openly, “we do not intend to follow the law.”
Yesh Din, for instance, helps Palestinians get to police stations to file complaints. The police stations in the West Bank are located inside settlements. A Palestinian car can not enter them, and for a Palestinian alone, without the escort of an Israeli, it is almost impossible to get to a police station. So each organization has its own activities that help present Israeli society in a different light than what is familiar and common in the daily lives of Palestinians in the West Bank. The order’s taking effect will not only harm the work of the organizations. This sweeping prohibition will also place another obstacle on the path of many Israelis and Palestinians who cultivate ties and cooperation, out of the desire and hope to establish co-existence in our area.
This order is another step in the Apartheid regime Israel is actively creating in the occupied territories of the West Bank. It is a regime that completely depends on permits. This order joins a series of restrictions and regulations that prevent Palestinians from traveling on roads and reaching places designated for Israelis only.
According to international law, such discriminatory laws are considered criminal offences. Who will prevent the next step that can easily be an upgrade of the present regulation? For instance, Palestinians will have to mark themselves in some way, so that they can be identified as Palestinians. Or, an order that allows Palestinians to travel in Israeli cars, but only in the back seat. Is our memory that short?
Next June the state of Israel is going to celebrate 40 years of occupation. 40 years is long enough to identify social changes and processes. Orders, such as the one issued by the OC Central Command, are another step in the slope of corruption of Israeli society, whose impact and consequences are evident inside Israel. We must do all we can to stop this dangerous trend.
***
Army Directive lashed as "crime of apartheid"
Zachary Goelman, the Jerusalem Report, December 22
Israeli human rights organization has charged that an army ban on Israel drivers carrying Palestinian passengers in the west bank falls into the category of the "crime of apartheid", as defined by international law.
The order, issued by Maj.Gen. Yair Naveh, the head of the Central Command, becomes effective on January 19. Citing exceptional security considerations, the army claims that Naveh's directive is meant to protect and ensure public order. The Israeli human rights organization is threatening noncompliance with the order.
An employee of the Yesha Council, the settlers' representative body, who insisted on anonymity, said. "The order makes sense. It is meant to prevent Israelis from picking up Palestinian hitchhikers. It's dangerous." Very few Israelis, if any, would pick up Palestinian hitchhikers and thus the order won't cause problems for anyone but the human rights groups, the source remarked
Naveh's order stipulates that Israeli citizens may not transport "non-Israelis" – meaning Palestinians – unless the passenger is a first-degree relative or has a permit for travel and employment in Israel or inside Jewish settlements.
"As soon as the order came out, we announced we simply won't obey,'' says Yossi Wolfson, an attorney at HaMoked, the Center for the Defense of the Individual, a Jerusalem-based NPO offering legal advice to Palestinians who complain their rights have been violated by Israeli policies. Its staff of 30 Israelis and Palestinians deals with every- thing from prohibitions on the movement of individual Palestinians, home demolitions and allegedly arbitrary arrests.
Wolfson argues that Naveh's, order violates the 1973 international convention which defines the crime of apartheid as "similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa. Article 3 declares that "international criminal responsibility shall apply ... to individual's members of organization and institutions and representatives of the State," which "directly abet, encourage or cooperate in the commission of the crime of apartheid.
Rights groups say that the order harms their efforts. "We need to transport Palestinians in our cars," Wolfson insists, "when we visit them to take depositions." Another organization Yesh Din sent letters to Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Gen. Naveh, asking what happens when a "volunteer, who as part of her job escorts Palestinians who were attacked by settlers to the nearest police station in order to tile a complaint. Can she now expect on her arrival at the police station to be arrested for driving a Palestinian in a car with Israeli license plates?"
***
“We are going to ignore the General’s order that forbids transporting Palestinians”
The human rights organizations announced this in light of the decision of the OC Central Command to forbid Israelis from transporting Palestinians throughout the West Bank.
“The order creates an Apartheid regime and is manifestly illegal”
Nir Yahav, NFC [News First Class; Israeli news portal], December 7
On January 19, an order by OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Yair Naveh will go into effect, forbidding Israelis and workers of international organizations from transporting Palestinians in their vehicles throughout the West Bank. The human rights organizations announced today (Thursday, Dec. 7, 2006), they would not cooperate and ask for permits to transport Palestinians.
Yesh Din and other human rights organizations demand the order be canceled, claiming it is illegal and infringes basic rights on a national basis. The organizations said they would not cooperate with the order, will not ask for special permits and will continue to transport Palestinians who ask for their help. The organizations say “the order creates an Apartheid regime, and is manifestly illegal.”
The announcement that was published is signed by the organizations: Gisha: Center for the Legal Protection of Freedom of Movement, The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, HaMoked – Center for the Defense of the Individual, Yesh Din - Organization of Volunteers for Human Rights, Machsom Watch and Physicians for Human Rights.
Attorney Michael Sfard, Yesh Din’s legal advisor, said “it is an order that creates an Apartheid regime. I sincerely hope the General understand it crosses every moral red line and cancels the order before it takes effect, or else we will have to go to court.”
***ENDS***
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Strong preference in Palestinian & Israeli publics for comprehensive settlement
Joint Truman-Palestinian Survey Shows Strong preference among Palestinians, Israelis
For comprehensive settlement over an interim political track
Jerusalem, December 25, 2006 – A new public opinion survey published this week shows that there is a strong preference by both the Israeli and Palestinian publics for a comprehensive settlement option between the two peoples.
In the most recent joint poll of Israeli and Palestinian public opinion conducted December 11 and 16 by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, a range of optional tracks were examined for the resumption of the Israeli-Palestinian political process including the Roadmap, the Arab League (Saudi) plan, and an interim plan postponing the settlement of the refugees issue to the future. We also examined the Israeli leadership's degrees of freedom to begin negotiations with various configurations of a Palestinian government.
The findings indicate strong preference in both publics for the comprehensive settlement option with 58% of the Israelis and 81% of the Palestinians supporting this track compared to only 30% of the Israelis and 16% of the Palestinians supporting an interim track.
The joint poll further examined Israeli and Palestinian attitudes regarding a permanent settlement (along the lines of President Clinton’s package for a Palestinian-Israeli final status settlement and the Geneva Initiative) against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire in Gaza. The results document a continuing decrease in support for that permanent status package and its parameters among Israelis throughout 2006, and overall stability among Palestinians. Despite the declining trend, among Israelis there is still a majority of 52% who support these parameters as a combined overall package. Among Palestinians, 48% support the package now, compared to 44% in June 2006 and 46% in December 2005 (see attached summary table).
The Palestinian sample consisted of 1270 adults interviewed face-to-face in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 127 randomly selected locations between December 14 and 16, 2006. The margin of error is 3%. The Israeli sample includes 602 adult Israelis interviewed by phone in Hebrew Arabic or Russian between December 11 and 14, 2006. The margin of error is 4%. The poll was planned and supervised by Dr. Yaacov Shamir, the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace and the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University and Dr. Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR).
The joint survey was conducted with the support of the Ford Foundation Cairo office and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Ramallah.
For a full copy of the report, please see the attached document.
For further information:
Rebecca Zeffert, Dept. of Media Relations, the Hebrew University, tel: 02-588-1641, cell: 052-551 6692
or Orit Sulitzeanu, Hebrew University spokesperson, tel: 02-5882910, cell: 052-260 8016.
Internet site: http://media.huji.ac.il.
Rebecca Zeffert
Foreign Press Liaison
Dept. of Media Relations
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tel: +972 (0)2-588 1641
Cell: +972 (0)52 428 2661
Skype: rebeccazeffert
E-mail: rebeccaz@savion.huji.ac.il
www.huji.ac.il
http://media.huji.ac.il
For comprehensive settlement over an interim political track
Jerusalem, December 25, 2006 – A new public opinion survey published this week shows that there is a strong preference by both the Israeli and Palestinian publics for a comprehensive settlement option between the two peoples.
In the most recent joint poll of Israeli and Palestinian public opinion conducted December 11 and 16 by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, a range of optional tracks were examined for the resumption of the Israeli-Palestinian political process including the Roadmap, the Arab League (Saudi) plan, and an interim plan postponing the settlement of the refugees issue to the future. We also examined the Israeli leadership's degrees of freedom to begin negotiations with various configurations of a Palestinian government.
The findings indicate strong preference in both publics for the comprehensive settlement option with 58% of the Israelis and 81% of the Palestinians supporting this track compared to only 30% of the Israelis and 16% of the Palestinians supporting an interim track.
The joint poll further examined Israeli and Palestinian attitudes regarding a permanent settlement (along the lines of President Clinton’s package for a Palestinian-Israeli final status settlement and the Geneva Initiative) against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire in Gaza. The results document a continuing decrease in support for that permanent status package and its parameters among Israelis throughout 2006, and overall stability among Palestinians. Despite the declining trend, among Israelis there is still a majority of 52% who support these parameters as a combined overall package. Among Palestinians, 48% support the package now, compared to 44% in June 2006 and 46% in December 2005 (see attached summary table).
The Palestinian sample consisted of 1270 adults interviewed face-to-face in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 127 randomly selected locations between December 14 and 16, 2006. The margin of error is 3%. The Israeli sample includes 602 adult Israelis interviewed by phone in Hebrew Arabic or Russian between December 11 and 14, 2006. The margin of error is 4%. The poll was planned and supervised by Dr. Yaacov Shamir, the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace and the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University and Dr. Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR).
The joint survey was conducted with the support of the Ford Foundation Cairo office and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Ramallah.
For a full copy of the report, please see the attached document.
For further information:
Rebecca Zeffert, Dept. of Media Relations, the Hebrew University, tel: 02-588-1641, cell: 052-551 6692
or Orit Sulitzeanu, Hebrew University spokesperson, tel: 02-5882910, cell: 052-260 8016.
Internet site: http://media.huji.ac.il.
Rebecca Zeffert
Foreign Press Liaison
Dept. of Media Relations
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tel: +972 (0)2-588 1641
Cell: +972 (0)52 428 2661
Skype: rebeccazeffert
E-mail: rebeccaz@savion.huji.ac.il
www.huji.ac.il
http://media.huji.ac.il
Barghouthi slams Israeli new settlement proposal
PNI: Israel’s Construction of New Settlement Betrays Lack of Commitment to Peace
Ramallah, 27-12-06: The Palestinian National Initiative today condemned plans announced yesterday by the Israeli Ministry of Defence to construct a new settlement in the Jordan Valley to house settlers removed from the former settlement of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip during the ‘Disengagement’ in August 2005.
PNI General Secretary, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi MP, pointed out that this move exposes the Israeli government’s lack of commitment to peace, and that together with the ongoing construction of the Separation Wall, it is further evidence of a wider plan to annex swathes of Palestinian land to Israel, including East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley.
He also stated that this is a blow to the results of last Saturday’s meeting between President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and that it undermines the efforts of those Palestinians seeking to restart negotiations between the two sides.
Dr. Barghouthi added that the announcement, made by Deputy Prime Minister, Defence Minister and leader of the Labour party, Amir Peretz, clearly reveals the emptiness of the Labour party’s claims to support a peace process when it gives its backing to the continued annexation of Palestinian lands.
Dr. Barghouthi ended by stressing the serious threat the move poses to efforts to bring the ongoing occupation to a just and fair end by jeopardizing peace based on a two-state solution, and the challenge it presents to the international community, particularly the United States, the broker of the Road Map under which Israel committed itself to freezing all settlement expansion and to dismantling all existing settlements.
The new settlement, to be named Maskiot, will house 30 families who were evacuated when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip last year, and will eventually house 100 families. Construction began months ago, but the project only received final approval from the Defence Ministry on Monday.
Sources
Shragai, H., N. Hasson & Y. Ettinger. 26 December 2006. New settlement planned for former Gaza settlers. Haaretz.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/805829.html.
BBC. 26 December 2006. Israel Approves W Bank Settlement.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6210721.stm.
----------
Palestinian National Initiative ('Al Mubadara')
P.O. Box 1351
Ramallah
Palestine
+972-2-2985372 (Tel)
+972-2-2985917 (Fax)
+972-546-514675 (Mob)
kirsten@almubadara.org (E-mail) http://www.almubadara.org/new/english.php (Web)
Ramallah, 27-12-06: The Palestinian National Initiative today condemned plans announced yesterday by the Israeli Ministry of Defence to construct a new settlement in the Jordan Valley to house settlers removed from the former settlement of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip during the ‘Disengagement’ in August 2005.
PNI General Secretary, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi MP, pointed out that this move exposes the Israeli government’s lack of commitment to peace, and that together with the ongoing construction of the Separation Wall, it is further evidence of a wider plan to annex swathes of Palestinian land to Israel, including East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley.
He also stated that this is a blow to the results of last Saturday’s meeting between President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and that it undermines the efforts of those Palestinians seeking to restart negotiations between the two sides.
Dr. Barghouthi added that the announcement, made by Deputy Prime Minister, Defence Minister and leader of the Labour party, Amir Peretz, clearly reveals the emptiness of the Labour party’s claims to support a peace process when it gives its backing to the continued annexation of Palestinian lands.
Dr. Barghouthi ended by stressing the serious threat the move poses to efforts to bring the ongoing occupation to a just and fair end by jeopardizing peace based on a two-state solution, and the challenge it presents to the international community, particularly the United States, the broker of the Road Map under which Israel committed itself to freezing all settlement expansion and to dismantling all existing settlements.
The new settlement, to be named Maskiot, will house 30 families who were evacuated when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip last year, and will eventually house 100 families. Construction began months ago, but the project only received final approval from the Defence Ministry on Monday.
Sources
Shragai, H., N. Hasson & Y. Ettinger. 26 December 2006. New settlement planned for former Gaza settlers. Haaretz.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/805829.html.
BBC. 26 December 2006. Israel Approves W Bank Settlement.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6210721.stm.
----------
Palestinian National Initiative ('Al Mubadara')
P.O. Box 1351
Ramallah
Palestine
+972-2-2985372 (Tel)
+972-2-2985917 (Fax)
+972-546-514675 (Mob)
kirsten@almubadara.org (E-mail) http://www.almubadara.org/new/english.php (Web)
Pray for the Little Town of Bethlehem by Dr. Rowan Williams, The Archbishop of Canterbury
The Times December 23, 2006
We mustn’t forget the plight of Arab Christians
One warning often made and systematically ignored in the hectic days before the Iraq War was that Western military action — at that time and in that way — would put Christians in the whole Middle East at risk. They would be seen as supporters of the crusading West. At the very least, some were asking, shouldn’t we have a strategy about how to handle this?
Well, we didn’t have one. And the results are now painfully adding to what was already a difficult situation for Christian communities across the region. Iraq’s Christian population is dropping by thousands every couple of months and some of their most effective leaders have been forced to emigrate. In Istanbul, the Orthodox population is a tiny remnant, and their Patriarch is told by some of the Turkish press that it’s time he left. In Egypt, where Christian-Muslim relations have been — and still are — intimate and good, attacks on Christians are notably more frequent.
As well as finding asylum difficult to get, it’s not unknown for Arab Christian families fleeing to the UK to find that their children are told in school that “they must be Muslims really” and so are hived off with Muslim children for special activities. And that simply illustrates that we, from the Government downwards, are seriously badly informed about Middle Eastern Christians.
Yet for centuries they have played a crucial role in practically all of those nations we now regard as uniformly Muslim, even Iran. They have been a reminder for both the Arab world and the West that “Arab” and “Muslim” are not the same — and that Muslim nations have a history of coping hospitably with Christians on their doorstep. As Christian populations migrate, it all fuels the myth in East and West — that Islam can’t live with other faiths and that the East-West collision is an irreconcilable clash of faiths and cultures.
Yet Christians can genuinely be part of the solution. In Lebanon, Christian communities offered the most promising schemes for lasting peace during the summer’s conflict and peace plans developed by the Maronite Church are widely acknowledged as bringing the most realistic contribution to the search for peace between warring factions.
Of course Christian communities don’t have a blameless history in the region. But they have something special to say. To the Westerner, they say: “Remember that Christianity didn’t start in England or even Rome; it’s a Middle Eastern faith.” To Muslims, they say: “Remember that Islam would not have spread as it did without the way being prepared (as the Koran itself says) by the other local religions — by Christians and Jews. Remember that there are ways of being authentically Arab, non-Western, that don’t have to be Islamic.”
These communities will survive only if fellow Christians in the West decide to pay a bit of attention. This doesn’t mean using clumsy political or military pressure to “protect” them, in ways that only reinforce the idea that they’re Western allies and so must be unreliable. That’s happened too often in the past. It means being willing to protest when they are ill-treated; to make contact with them, to set up links between local churches here and in the Middle East; to remember when we visit the region that they exist and need friends. It’s not that these Christians are being persecuted by Muslim governments on the whole. It’s a matter of rising tides of extremism, which governments are as keen to check as anyone.
Speaking up for and befriending the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East is good for them and for Muslims too; it’s a reminder of the healthier and saner relationship between the faiths that existed in many parts of the Middle East for long tracts of its complicated history.
It comes home most poignantly in the Holy Land itself. I have spent the past two days with fellow Christian leaders in Bethlehem, its Christian population down to barely a quarter. There are some disturbing signs of Muslim anti-Christian feeling, despite the consistent traditions of coexistence. But their plight is made still more intolerable by the tragic conditions created by the “security fence” that almost chokes the shrinking town — the dramatic poverty, soaring unemployment and sheer practical hardship of travelling to school, work or hospital. The sense of desperate isolation is felt by Christians more acutely than most.
Once heavily represented among the professional classes, many feel they have no choice but to leave. One Christian Palestinian friend said to me: “I never imagined that people like us would find ourselves hungry, unemployed, facing daily violence.” Some of the people who would be most helpful in making Palestinian society stronger and more democratic feel they have no future in the Holy Land: to the zealots on one side they are potential terrorists, to the zealots on the other they may be seen as infidels. And unfortunately it’s the zealots who make the running.
The first Christian believers were Middle Easterners. It’s a sobering thought that we might live to see the last native Christian believers in the region. It’s not a problem we can go on ignoring if we care about the health and stability of the Middle East; we need to confront it, not by weighing in with firepower but by making real relationships with the communities there and working at trustful contacts with those Muslims who understand their own history and want to live in a lively, varied culture.
This Christmas, pray for the little town of Bethlehem, and spare a thought for those who have been put at risk by our short-sightedness and ignorance; and ask what you might do locally to raise the profile of these brave and ancient Churches.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2516379,00.html
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Sunday, December 24, 2006
AMNESTY INTNL: Israel & the Occupied Territories -- Road to Nowhere
ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES
ROAD TO NOWHERE
1. Introduction
Six years since the outbreak of the latest intifada and the effective collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, the human rights situation in the Occupied Territories – the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem – has deteriorated to an unprecedented level. Prospects for a just and durable resolution of the conflict appear to be remote.
The undercurrent of violence, abuses of fundamental human rights and disregard for international law, which have marked the 40-year Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, have become firmly entrenched and relentless. Civilians in both Israel and the Occupied Territories have borne the brunt of the confrontations.
Some 4,000 Palestinians, most of them unarmed civilians and including some 800 children, have been killed by Israeli forces in disproportionate and reckless bombardments as well as shelling and shooting by Israeli forces into densely populated residential areas and refugee camps throughout the Occupied Territories in the past six years. In the same period some 1,100 Israelis, 700 of them civilians and including 120 children, have been killed by Palestinian armed groups in shooting attacks, suicide bombings in civilian areas and indiscriminate rocket attacks. Tens of thousands of Palestinians and thousands of Israelis have been injured, many maimed for life.
In addition to the loss of life on both sides, Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories have suffered a plethora of other human rights abuses. Israeli forces have destroyed thousands of Palestinian homes, vast areas of cultivated land and much crucial civilian infrastructure, including electricity power plants, roads, bridges and water, sewage and telephone networks. Ever increasing restrictions imposed on the movements of Palestinians and of goods, within as well as in and out of the Occupied Territories, have made any semblance of normal life impossible.
Hundreds of military checkpoints and blockades, and a fence/wall being built by Israel throughout the West Bank despite being declared unlawful by the International Court of Justice, increasingly hinder or prevent Palestinian access to their land, places of work, schools, hospitals and other medical facilities. The route of the fence/wall, the location of the military checkpoints, and closures – all of which impede the movement of Palestinians – are determined by the presence and location of Israeli settlements. These settlements were built for the exclusive use of Israeli settlers on seized Palestinian land throughout the West Bank and illegal under international law. In the Gaza Strip, the one area from which Israeli settlers have been removed, the closure imposed by Israeli forces keeps the 1.4 million inhabitants cut off and isolated from other parts of the Occupied Territories and from the rest of the world for most of the time.
These measures and restrictions, which the international community has acknowledged constitute the prime cause for the virtual collapse of the Palestinian economy in recent years, have been compounded in 2006 by the Israeli government’s decision to withhold the customs duties it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and by the decision of the international community to cut aid to the PA following the formation of a Hamas-led administration in March 2006. The consequence, as predicted, has been a sharp increase in poverty, unemployment and health problems among Palestinians, and an overall deterioration of the humanitarian situation to an unprecedented level.1 Despair and lack of hope about the foreseeable future fuel violence and the radicalization of a predominantly young Palestinian population whose prospects for employment and a normal life are virtually nil.
For full report: http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde150932006
ROAD TO NOWHERE
1. Introduction
Six years since the outbreak of the latest intifada and the effective collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, the human rights situation in the Occupied Territories – the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem – has deteriorated to an unprecedented level. Prospects for a just and durable resolution of the conflict appear to be remote.
The undercurrent of violence, abuses of fundamental human rights and disregard for international law, which have marked the 40-year Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, have become firmly entrenched and relentless. Civilians in both Israel and the Occupied Territories have borne the brunt of the confrontations.
Some 4,000 Palestinians, most of them unarmed civilians and including some 800 children, have been killed by Israeli forces in disproportionate and reckless bombardments as well as shelling and shooting by Israeli forces into densely populated residential areas and refugee camps throughout the Occupied Territories in the past six years. In the same period some 1,100 Israelis, 700 of them civilians and including 120 children, have been killed by Palestinian armed groups in shooting attacks, suicide bombings in civilian areas and indiscriminate rocket attacks. Tens of thousands of Palestinians and thousands of Israelis have been injured, many maimed for life.
In addition to the loss of life on both sides, Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories have suffered a plethora of other human rights abuses. Israeli forces have destroyed thousands of Palestinian homes, vast areas of cultivated land and much crucial civilian infrastructure, including electricity power plants, roads, bridges and water, sewage and telephone networks. Ever increasing restrictions imposed on the movements of Palestinians and of goods, within as well as in and out of the Occupied Territories, have made any semblance of normal life impossible.
Hundreds of military checkpoints and blockades, and a fence/wall being built by Israel throughout the West Bank despite being declared unlawful by the International Court of Justice, increasingly hinder or prevent Palestinian access to their land, places of work, schools, hospitals and other medical facilities. The route of the fence/wall, the location of the military checkpoints, and closures – all of which impede the movement of Palestinians – are determined by the presence and location of Israeli settlements. These settlements were built for the exclusive use of Israeli settlers on seized Palestinian land throughout the West Bank and illegal under international law. In the Gaza Strip, the one area from which Israeli settlers have been removed, the closure imposed by Israeli forces keeps the 1.4 million inhabitants cut off and isolated from other parts of the Occupied Territories and from the rest of the world for most of the time.
These measures and restrictions, which the international community has acknowledged constitute the prime cause for the virtual collapse of the Palestinian economy in recent years, have been compounded in 2006 by the Israeli government’s decision to withhold the customs duties it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and by the decision of the international community to cut aid to the PA following the formation of a Hamas-led administration in March 2006. The consequence, as predicted, has been a sharp increase in poverty, unemployment and health problems among Palestinians, and an overall deterioration of the humanitarian situation to an unprecedented level.1 Despair and lack of hope about the foreseeable future fuel violence and the radicalization of a predominantly young Palestinian population whose prospects for employment and a normal life are virtually nil.
For full report: http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde150932006
Chris Hedges: Worse than Apartheid
Israel has spent the last five months unleashing missiles, attack helicopters and jet fighters over the densely packed concrete hovels in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army has made numerous deadly incursions, and some 500 people, nearly all civilians, have been killed and 1,600 more wounded. Israel has rounded up hundreds of Palestinians, destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure, including its electrical power system and key roads and bridges, carried out huge land confiscations, demolished homes and plunged families into a crisis that has caused widespread poverty and malnutrition.
Civil society itself—and this appears to be part of the Israeli plan—is unraveling. Hamas and Fatah factions battle in the streets, despite a tenuous cease-fire, threatening civil war. And the governing Palestinian movement, Hamas, has said it will boycott early elections called by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, done with the blessing of the West in a bid to toss Hamas out of power. (Remember that Hamas, despite its repugnant politics, was democratically elected.) In recent days armed groups loyal to Abbas have seized Hamas-run ministries in what looks like a coup.
The stark reality of Gaza, however, has failed to penetrate the consciousness of most Americans, who, when they notice the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, prefer to debate the merits of the word “apartheid” in former President Jimmy Carter’s new book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” It is a sad commentary on the gutlessness of the U.S. press and the timidity of the Democratic opposition that most Americans are not aware of the catastrophic humanitarian crisis they bear so much responsibility in creating. Palestinians are not only dying, their olive trees uprooted, their farmland and homes destroyed and their aquifers taken away from them, but on many days they can’t move because of Israeli “closures” that make basic tasks, like buying food and going to the hospital, nearly impossible. These Palestinians, after decades of repression, cannot return to land from which they were expelled. The 140-plus U.N. votes to censure Israel and two Security Council resolutions—both vetoed by the United States—are blithly ignored. Is it any wonder that the Palestinians, gasping for air, rebel as the walls close in around them, as their children go hungry and as the Israelis turn up the violence?
Palestinians in Gaza live encased in a squalid, overcrowded ghetto, surrounded by the Israeli military and a massive electric fence, unable to leave or enter the strip and under daily assault. The word “apartheid,” given the wanton violence employed against the Palestinians, is tepid. This is more than apartheid. The concerted Israeli attempts to orchestrate a breakdown in law and order, to foster chaos and rampant deprivation, are on public display in the streets of Gaza City, where Palestinians walk past the rubble of the Palestinian Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of National Economy, the office of the Palestinian prime minister and a number of educational institutions that have been bombed by Israeli jets. The electricity generation plant, providing 45 percent of the electricity of the Gaza Strip, has been wiped out, and even the primitive electricity networks and transmitters that remain have been repeatedly bombed. Six bridges linking Gaza City with the central Gaza Strip have been blown up and main arteries cratered into obliteration. And the West Bank is rapidly descending into a crisis of Gaza proportions. The juxtaposition of what is happening in Gaza and what is being debated on the U.S. airwaves about a book that is little more than a basic primer on the conflict reinforces the impression most outside our gates have of Americans living in a distorted, bizarre reality of our own creation.
What do Israel and Washington believe they will gain by turning Gaza and the West Bank into a miniature version of Iraq? How do they think people who are desperate, deprived of hope, dignity and a way to make a living, under attack from one of the most technologically advanced armies on the planet, will respond? Do they believe that creating a Hobbesian nightmare for the Palestinians will blunt terrorism, curb suicide attacks and foster peace? Do they not see that the rest of the Middle East watches the slaughter in horror and rage—its angry, disenfranchised young men and women determined to overcome feelings of impotence and humiliation, even at the cost of their own lives?
And perhaps they do see and understand all this. Israel and Washington probably do get the recruiting value of this repression for Islamic militants. But these Israeli attacks, despite the rage and violence they breed against Israelis and against us, also create conditions so intolerable that Palestinians can no longer reside on their land. More than 160,000 civil servants have not received full salaries for almost nine months. These government employees support families that number more than a million Palestinians. And a United Nations report states that more than two-thirds of Palestinians are now living below the poverty line. The unemployment rate is more than 50 percent. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry says 10,000 Palestinians have emigrated in the last four months and almost 50,000 others have applied to leave.
Israel, with no restraints from Washington, despite the Iraq Study Group report recommendations that the peace process be resurrected from the dead, has been given the moral license by the Bush administration to carry out what is euphemistically in Israel called “transfer” and what in other parts of the world is called ethnic cleansing. Faced with a demographic time bomb, knowing that by 2020 Jews will make up only 40 to 46 percent of the overall population of Israel, the architects of transfer, who once held the equivalent status in Israeli society of the Ku Klux Klan, have wormed their way into positions of power in the Israeli government.
Washington and Israel, I suspect, know the cost of this repression. But it is beginning to appear as though they accept it—as the price for ridding themselves of the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has installed in his Cabinet a politician who openly calls for the expulsion of the some 1.3 million Israeli Arabs who live inside Israel. Avigdor Lieberman’s “Israel Is Our Home” Party, part of Olmert’s governing coalition, proposes involuntary transfer in a region populated mostly by Arab citizens of Israel, shifting those people to a future Palestinian state that would include Gaza, parts of the West Bank and a small slice of northern Israel. All Israeli Arabs who continued to reside in the territory of transfer would automatically lose their Israeli citizenship unless they took a loyalty oath to the state and its Jewish symbols. The inclusion of Lieberman, the David Duke of Israel, into the Cabinet is an indication to most Palestinians that the worst is yet to come.
The debate over Jimmy Carter’s book, one that dishes up a fair number of Israeli myths about itself and states a reality that is acknowledged even by most Israelis, misses the point. The question is not whether Israel practices apartheid. Apartheid is a fond dream for most Palestinians. The awful question is rather will Israel be able to unleash a policy so draconian and cruel that it will obliterate a community that has lived on this land for centuries. There are other, far more loaded words for what is happening to the Palestinians. One shudders to repeat them. But unchecked, unstopped, the current wave of violence and abuse meted out to the Palestinians will echo down the corridors of history as one of the greatest moral and tactical blunders of the early part of this century, one that will boomerang on Israel and on us, bringing to our own doorsteps the evil we have allowed to be delivered to the narrow alleys and refugee camps in Gaza. When it was only apartheid, we had some hope.
Civil society itself—and this appears to be part of the Israeli plan—is unraveling. Hamas and Fatah factions battle in the streets, despite a tenuous cease-fire, threatening civil war. And the governing Palestinian movement, Hamas, has said it will boycott early elections called by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, done with the blessing of the West in a bid to toss Hamas out of power. (Remember that Hamas, despite its repugnant politics, was democratically elected.) In recent days armed groups loyal to Abbas have seized Hamas-run ministries in what looks like a coup.
The stark reality of Gaza, however, has failed to penetrate the consciousness of most Americans, who, when they notice the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, prefer to debate the merits of the word “apartheid” in former President Jimmy Carter’s new book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” It is a sad commentary on the gutlessness of the U.S. press and the timidity of the Democratic opposition that most Americans are not aware of the catastrophic humanitarian crisis they bear so much responsibility in creating. Palestinians are not only dying, their olive trees uprooted, their farmland and homes destroyed and their aquifers taken away from them, but on many days they can’t move because of Israeli “closures” that make basic tasks, like buying food and going to the hospital, nearly impossible. These Palestinians, after decades of repression, cannot return to land from which they were expelled. The 140-plus U.N. votes to censure Israel and two Security Council resolutions—both vetoed by the United States—are blithly ignored. Is it any wonder that the Palestinians, gasping for air, rebel as the walls close in around them, as their children go hungry and as the Israelis turn up the violence?
Palestinians in Gaza live encased in a squalid, overcrowded ghetto, surrounded by the Israeli military and a massive electric fence, unable to leave or enter the strip and under daily assault. The word “apartheid,” given the wanton violence employed against the Palestinians, is tepid. This is more than apartheid. The concerted Israeli attempts to orchestrate a breakdown in law and order, to foster chaos and rampant deprivation, are on public display in the streets of Gaza City, where Palestinians walk past the rubble of the Palestinian Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of National Economy, the office of the Palestinian prime minister and a number of educational institutions that have been bombed by Israeli jets. The electricity generation plant, providing 45 percent of the electricity of the Gaza Strip, has been wiped out, and even the primitive electricity networks and transmitters that remain have been repeatedly bombed. Six bridges linking Gaza City with the central Gaza Strip have been blown up and main arteries cratered into obliteration. And the West Bank is rapidly descending into a crisis of Gaza proportions. The juxtaposition of what is happening in Gaza and what is being debated on the U.S. airwaves about a book that is little more than a basic primer on the conflict reinforces the impression most outside our gates have of Americans living in a distorted, bizarre reality of our own creation.
What do Israel and Washington believe they will gain by turning Gaza and the West Bank into a miniature version of Iraq? How do they think people who are desperate, deprived of hope, dignity and a way to make a living, under attack from one of the most technologically advanced armies on the planet, will respond? Do they believe that creating a Hobbesian nightmare for the Palestinians will blunt terrorism, curb suicide attacks and foster peace? Do they not see that the rest of the Middle East watches the slaughter in horror and rage—its angry, disenfranchised young men and women determined to overcome feelings of impotence and humiliation, even at the cost of their own lives?
And perhaps they do see and understand all this. Israel and Washington probably do get the recruiting value of this repression for Islamic militants. But these Israeli attacks, despite the rage and violence they breed against Israelis and against us, also create conditions so intolerable that Palestinians can no longer reside on their land. More than 160,000 civil servants have not received full salaries for almost nine months. These government employees support families that number more than a million Palestinians. And a United Nations report states that more than two-thirds of Palestinians are now living below the poverty line. The unemployment rate is more than 50 percent. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry says 10,000 Palestinians have emigrated in the last four months and almost 50,000 others have applied to leave.
Israel, with no restraints from Washington, despite the Iraq Study Group report recommendations that the peace process be resurrected from the dead, has been given the moral license by the Bush administration to carry out what is euphemistically in Israel called “transfer” and what in other parts of the world is called ethnic cleansing. Faced with a demographic time bomb, knowing that by 2020 Jews will make up only 40 to 46 percent of the overall population of Israel, the architects of transfer, who once held the equivalent status in Israeli society of the Ku Klux Klan, have wormed their way into positions of power in the Israeli government.
Washington and Israel, I suspect, know the cost of this repression. But it is beginning to appear as though they accept it—as the price for ridding themselves of the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has installed in his Cabinet a politician who openly calls for the expulsion of the some 1.3 million Israeli Arabs who live inside Israel. Avigdor Lieberman’s “Israel Is Our Home” Party, part of Olmert’s governing coalition, proposes involuntary transfer in a region populated mostly by Arab citizens of Israel, shifting those people to a future Palestinian state that would include Gaza, parts of the West Bank and a small slice of northern Israel. All Israeli Arabs who continued to reside in the territory of transfer would automatically lose their Israeli citizenship unless they took a loyalty oath to the state and its Jewish symbols. The inclusion of Lieberman, the David Duke of Israel, into the Cabinet is an indication to most Palestinians that the worst is yet to come.
The debate over Jimmy Carter’s book, one that dishes up a fair number of Israeli myths about itself and states a reality that is acknowledged even by most Israelis, misses the point. The question is not whether Israel practices apartheid. Apartheid is a fond dream for most Palestinians. The awful question is rather will Israel be able to unleash a policy so draconian and cruel that it will obliterate a community that has lived on this land for centuries. There are other, far more loaded words for what is happening to the Palestinians. One shudders to repeat them. But unchecked, unstopped, the current wave of violence and abuse meted out to the Palestinians will echo down the corridors of history as one of the greatest moral and tactical blunders of the early part of this century, one that will boomerang on Israel and on us, bringing to our own doorsteps the evil we have allowed to be delivered to the narrow alleys and refugee camps in Gaza. When it was only apartheid, we had some hope.
Excerpt from Rolling Stone of Stiglitz interview: The True Cost of Iraq
Last year Nobel Prize-winning economist Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Bilmes estimated the total price tag for Bush’s misadventure in Mesopotamia at $2.267 trillion—a tad higher than the $350 billion to $500 billion so often discussed.
According to Stiglitz, our current thinking on the cost of the war leaves out hidden Pentagon spending, long-term budget obligations—like disability pay for the wounded, the heightened cost of oil and losses sustained by not investing the same money back into our own economy.
Below is an excerpt from a recent Rolling Stone interview with Joseph Stiglitz, and other related links.
Rolling Stone:
What’s wrong with dropping a lot of money on the Iraq war? Didn’t World War II pull America out of the Great Depression?
War is a lousy form of economic stimulus. The bang you get for the buck is very low. If we hadn’t had to fight during the Depression, we would have become a much richer country by investing the money we spent on the war. Think of the Nepalese contractors doing work in Iraq. They spend their money in Iraq or Nepal—not in America.
Because the war drove up oil prices, we are also giving more money to Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela. It follows that we are not investing that money. And instead of spending the money we have left on things that will make us wealthier, we are spending it in ways that have just the opposite effect. I don’t want to reduce this to cold, hard economics, but when you educate young people for 12 to 18 years, you’re investing a lot of money in them. If you then have them killed, maimed and debilitated, you destroy capital.
How did you arrive at the $2-trillion figure?
There were three parts to the calculations that I made with Linda Bilmes, a professor of public finance at Harvard. The first part is based on actual expenditures—the impact on the federal budget. But the budget doesn’t include a lot of expenditures we will be making in the future as a result of the war today, like paying for the health care and disability benefits of all the people who have been injured. These are lifetime expenditures, but they aren’t included in the $600 million a year the Defense Department expects to spend on Iraq. They’re just talking about the hardware of war.
The second part of our calculations estimates future expenditures to replace what we lose in the war. The budget includes spending for new ammunition, but not the wear and tear on weapons systems. Eventually the weapons must be replaced, but the administration doesn’t count that as part of the projected cost of the war.
A third important category is a little more hidden. The defense budget has gone way up, beyond the money earmarked for Iraq. You have to ask why. It’s not like the Cold War has broken out again. We infer that they are hiding a lot of the Iraq expenditures in the defense budget. We only attribute a small fraction of the increase to Iraq, but it would be hard to explain them any other way than the war.
You also examine the cost beyond the impact on the federal budget.
Yes. We look at where the budget underestimates the social cost of the war. Take disability pay. If you’re wounded, the government pays you only 20 percent of what you would have earned if you could work. The disability payment is a budget cost, but the economy misses the salary you would have been making now that you’re not able to do anything.
At least they saved taxpayers money on body armor.
Not really. Rumsfeld made the defense budget a little lower in the short term by not providing the troops with adequate body armor. But the government now has to pay for the care of vets with disabling brain and spine injuries—and society loses what their contribution would have been had they been gainfully employed. It’s a good illustration of how looking at the short-run number leads you to think the war isn’t costing all that much. It’s costing the government more, our society more and our veterans enormously more.
Another example of Rumsfeld’s budgeting is the huge bonuses we’re paying to get soldiers to re-enlist. He wanted to lessen the impact of the war on the military, so he used private contractors, who are more expensive. What he didn’t realize was that he was setting up a competition that has driven up the price of a soldier. If someone who has served his enlistment has a choice of working as a contractor for $100,000 or in the military for $25,000, what’s he going to do? Wages and bonuses had to go up. Maybe that’s a good thing—the regular military was being cheated, in a way. But it’s another cost of the war that isn’t figured into the budget.
Full interview: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/12855294/national_affairs_the_2_trillion_dollar_war
According to Stiglitz, our current thinking on the cost of the war leaves out hidden Pentagon spending, long-term budget obligations—like disability pay for the wounded, the heightened cost of oil and losses sustained by not investing the same money back into our own economy.
Below is an excerpt from a recent Rolling Stone interview with Joseph Stiglitz, and other related links.
Rolling Stone:
What’s wrong with dropping a lot of money on the Iraq war? Didn’t World War II pull America out of the Great Depression?
War is a lousy form of economic stimulus. The bang you get for the buck is very low. If we hadn’t had to fight during the Depression, we would have become a much richer country by investing the money we spent on the war. Think of the Nepalese contractors doing work in Iraq. They spend their money in Iraq or Nepal—not in America.
Because the war drove up oil prices, we are also giving more money to Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela. It follows that we are not investing that money. And instead of spending the money we have left on things that will make us wealthier, we are spending it in ways that have just the opposite effect. I don’t want to reduce this to cold, hard economics, but when you educate young people for 12 to 18 years, you’re investing a lot of money in them. If you then have them killed, maimed and debilitated, you destroy capital.
How did you arrive at the $2-trillion figure?
There were three parts to the calculations that I made with Linda Bilmes, a professor of public finance at Harvard. The first part is based on actual expenditures—the impact on the federal budget. But the budget doesn’t include a lot of expenditures we will be making in the future as a result of the war today, like paying for the health care and disability benefits of all the people who have been injured. These are lifetime expenditures, but they aren’t included in the $600 million a year the Defense Department expects to spend on Iraq. They’re just talking about the hardware of war.
The second part of our calculations estimates future expenditures to replace what we lose in the war. The budget includes spending for new ammunition, but not the wear and tear on weapons systems. Eventually the weapons must be replaced, but the administration doesn’t count that as part of the projected cost of the war.
A third important category is a little more hidden. The defense budget has gone way up, beyond the money earmarked for Iraq. You have to ask why. It’s not like the Cold War has broken out again. We infer that they are hiding a lot of the Iraq expenditures in the defense budget. We only attribute a small fraction of the increase to Iraq, but it would be hard to explain them any other way than the war.
You also examine the cost beyond the impact on the federal budget.
Yes. We look at where the budget underestimates the social cost of the war. Take disability pay. If you’re wounded, the government pays you only 20 percent of what you would have earned if you could work. The disability payment is a budget cost, but the economy misses the salary you would have been making now that you’re not able to do anything.
At least they saved taxpayers money on body armor.
Not really. Rumsfeld made the defense budget a little lower in the short term by not providing the troops with adequate body armor. But the government now has to pay for the care of vets with disabling brain and spine injuries—and society loses what their contribution would have been had they been gainfully employed. It’s a good illustration of how looking at the short-run number leads you to think the war isn’t costing all that much. It’s costing the government more, our society more and our veterans enormously more.
Another example of Rumsfeld’s budgeting is the huge bonuses we’re paying to get soldiers to re-enlist. He wanted to lessen the impact of the war on the military, so he used private contractors, who are more expensive. What he didn’t realize was that he was setting up a competition that has driven up the price of a soldier. If someone who has served his enlistment has a choice of working as a contractor for $100,000 or in the military for $25,000, what’s he going to do? Wages and bonuses had to go up. Maybe that’s a good thing—the regular military was being cheated, in a way. But it’s another cost of the war that isn’t figured into the budget.
Full interview: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/12855294/national_affairs_the_2_trillion_dollar_war
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Letter from ICAHD to diplomatic corps re. increased threat of home demolitions in Jerusalem
December 18, 2006
Dear Colleague:
On December 15, we sent you a notice about the significant increase in the number of Jerusalem Municipality demolitions in East Jerusalem. This is a particularly dangerous period because the Municipality must use up its outstanding 4 million shekel budget for home demolitions before the fiscal year-end. We know of scores of homes under threat of demolition before year end; indeed, we are witnessing a daily toll of home demolitions (already 8 this month and some 130 this year).
Now equally worrying is the fact that the municipality has published a warning, signed by Yossi Havilio, Municipal Legal Advisor and Osnat Post, Municipal Engineer, in which it has decided to tighten the enforcement of the laws of planning and construction in the city, to fight against illegal construction that "has become a plague and destroyed the quality of life in the city." The Municipality has announced that as of today it will strengthen enforcement, use aerial photos to track infractions, confiscate tools used in illegal construction (e.g., tractors, cement mixers, generators), put court appeals on the fast track, and bring offenders to trial to the fullest extent of the law, including imprisonment. It states that it will immediately demolish illegal construction and prohibit the inhabiting of houses that have not received building permits. In serious cases, the Municipality is going to reject people’s ability to receive retroactive permission. These measures are “for the well being of the entire community, to guard the aesthetic of the city, and to respect the law.”
We understand by this warning that the Municipality is planning in the coming years a level of home demolitions, targeted almost exclusively against the Palestinian community, unknown until now. This is the first time the Municipality has published such a warning and is indicative that the coming year will be terrible for residents of East Jerusalem. Demolition of Palestinian homes has become an obsession on the part of the Israeli authorities, not only in the Occupied Territories but within Israel itself. Interior Ministry officials have recently declared their intention to carry out massive demolitions of Bedouin homes in the Negev, homes of Israeli citizens. In the past two weeks at least one entire village has been demolished. More are threatened. Interior Minister Ronny Bar-On has even stated in the Knesset that there are not enough demolitions in the Negev, although Bedouin citizens losing their homes have no legal alternative provided by the State.
Unfortunately, so many homes have been demolished by Israeli authorities in the past 40 years of Occupation (more than 18,000!) that this issue is barely newsworthy anymore. Nevertheless, for the many families who will lose their homes, this is a shattering experience. We know from experience that diplomatic pressure has been one of the few effective ways of preventing demolitions. We call on you to bring up this urgently before your governments, as well as to make overtures to the municipal and governmental authorities.
Sincerely,
Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, Action Advocacy Officer
Dr. Meir Margalit, Coordinator of Field Activities
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD)
Other Victims of Denial (A Letter to Ahmedinejad)
The following is courtesy of Tikkun Magazine:
Other Victims of Denial
by Mahmoud Al-Safadi
A Letter to the President of Iran
Mr. President, I write to you following the announcement of your intention
to organize a conference on the Holocaust in Teheran on 11-12 December, and
I sincerely hope that this letter will be brought to your attention.
First of all, allow me to introduce myself: Mahmoud Al-Safadi, a former
prisoner from occupied Jerusalem. I was released less than three months ago
from the Israeli prison where I had been locked up for eighteen years for
having been a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
and having taken an active part in resistance to the occupation during the
first Intifada. Since you were elected president, I have followed your
declarations with great interest -- in particular those relating to the
Holocaust. I respect your opposition to the American and Western
injunctions concerning the Iranian nuclear program and believe it legitimate
that you complain of the double standard that the world has with regard to
the nuclear development of certain regimes.
But I am furious about your insistence on claiming that the Holocaust never
took place and about your doubts about the number of Jews who were murdered
in the extermination and concentration camps, organized massacres, and gas
chambers, consequently denying the universal historical significance of the
Nazi period.
Allow me to say, Mr. President, with all due respect to you, that you made
these statements without really knowing the Nazi industry of death. To have
read the works of some deniers seems to be enough for you -- a little like
a man who shouts above a well and hears only the echo of his own voice. I
believe that a man in your position should not make such an enormous error,
because it could be turned against him and, worse still, his people.
Like you and millions of people in the world -- among whom, alas, are
innumerable Palestinians and Arabs -- I was also convinced that the Jews
exaggerated and lied about the Holocaust, etc., even apart from the fact
that the Zionist movement and Israel use the Holocaust to justify their
policy, first of all against my own people.
My long imprisonment provided me with the occasion to read books and
articles that our ideology and social norms made inaccessible to us outside
the prison. These documents gave me a thorough knowledge of the history of
the Nazi regime and genocide that it perpetrated. At the beginning of the
1990s, by reading articles written by the Palestinian intellectuals Edward
Said and Azmi Bishara, I discovered facts and positions which contradicted
mine and those of many Palestinians. Their writings having piqued my
curiosity and given birth inside me to the need to know more, I set about
reading accounts of survivors of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation.
These testimonies were written by people of various nationalities, Jews or
non-Jews.
The more I learned, the more I realized that the Holocaust was indeed a
historical fact and the more I became aware of the monumental dimension of
the crime committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews, other social and
national groups, and humanity in general. I discovered that Nazi Germany
aspired to found a "new world order" dominated by the "pure Aryan race"
thanks to the physical annihilation of "impure races" and the enslavement of
other nations. I discovered that various "normal" official institutions --
bureaucracies, judicial systems, medical and educational authorities,
municipalities, railroad companies, and others -- had taken part and
collaborated in the implementation of this new world order. From a
theoretical point of view, this objective, just like the victories won at
the time by the Nazi armies of occupation, threatened the existence of the
Arabs and Muslims as well.
Whatever the number of victims -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- the crime is
monumental. Any attempt to deny it deprives the denier of his own humanity
and sends him immediately to the side of torturers. Whoever denies the fact
that this human disaster really took place should not be astonished that
others deny the sufferings and persecutions inflicted on his own people by
tyrannical leaders or foreign occupiers. Ask yourself, I beg you, the
following question: were hundreds of thousands of testimonies written about
death camps, gas chambers, ghettos, and mass murders committed by the German
army, tens of thousands of works of research based on German documents,
numerous filmed sequences, some of which were shot by German soldiers --
were all these masses of evidence completely fabricated?
Can all that be summed up simply as an imperialist-Zionist plot? Are the
confessions of high-ranking Nazis officials about their personal role in the
project of extermination of whole nations only the fruit of the imagination
of some disturbed spirit?
And all these heroic deeds of the people subjected to the German occupation
-- the first among whom were Russians, Polish, and Yugoslavs -- only lies
and gross exaggerations? Could the struggle of the Soviets against Nazi
Germany be only a phantasm? The Russians continue to celebrate their
victory over Nazi Germany and remember millions of their civilian and
military compatriots who lost their lives in this struggle. Are they lying,
too?
I invite you to read historical studies and serious testimonies before
making your public statements. You divide the world in two camps: the
imperialists-Zionists, who manufactured the myth of the Holocaust, and the
adversaries of imperialism, who know the truth and uncover the plot.
Perhaps you think that the act of denying the Holocaust places you at the
vanguard of the Muslim world and that this refusal constitutes a useful tool
in the combat against American imperialism and Western hegemony. By doing
so, you actually do great disservice to popular struggles the world over.
At best, you cover your people and yourself with ridicule in the eyes of
political forces who reject imperialism but cannot take your ideas and
arguments seriously, due to the fact that you obsessively deny the existence
of an abundantly documented and studied historical period whose consequences
are still felt and discussed today.
At worst, you discourage and weaken the political, social, and intellectual
forces who, in Europe and in the United States, reject the policy of
confrontation and war carried out by George Bush, but are forced to conclude
that you, too, jeopardize the world by your declarations denying the
genocide and by your nuclear program.
Concerning the struggle of my people for their independence and their
freedom: perhaps do you regard the negation of the Holocaust as an
expression of support for the Palestinians? There, again, you are mistaken.
We fight for our existence and our rights and against the historical
injustice which was inflicted on us in 1948. We will not win our victory
and our independence by denying the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish
people, even though the forces who occupy our country today and dispossess
us are part of the Jewish people.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mahmoud Al-Safadi is a former Palestinian militant, He was imprisoned in
Israel for eighteen years and freed in 2006. The French text, a translation
from English by Gilles Berton, was published in Le Monde on 4 December 2006.
The English original was unavailable on the Net, so the English text is a translation from the French text published in Le Monde.
English translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.
Other Victims of Denial
by Mahmoud Al-Safadi
A Letter to the President of Iran
Mr. President, I write to you following the announcement of your intention
to organize a conference on the Holocaust in Teheran on 11-12 December, and
I sincerely hope that this letter will be brought to your attention.
First of all, allow me to introduce myself: Mahmoud Al-Safadi, a former
prisoner from occupied Jerusalem. I was released less than three months ago
from the Israeli prison where I had been locked up for eighteen years for
having been a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
and having taken an active part in resistance to the occupation during the
first Intifada. Since you were elected president, I have followed your
declarations with great interest -- in particular those relating to the
Holocaust. I respect your opposition to the American and Western
injunctions concerning the Iranian nuclear program and believe it legitimate
that you complain of the double standard that the world has with regard to
the nuclear development of certain regimes.
But I am furious about your insistence on claiming that the Holocaust never
took place and about your doubts about the number of Jews who were murdered
in the extermination and concentration camps, organized massacres, and gas
chambers, consequently denying the universal historical significance of the
Nazi period.
Allow me to say, Mr. President, with all due respect to you, that you made
these statements without really knowing the Nazi industry of death. To have
read the works of some deniers seems to be enough for you -- a little like
a man who shouts above a well and hears only the echo of his own voice. I
believe that a man in your position should not make such an enormous error,
because it could be turned against him and, worse still, his people.
Like you and millions of people in the world -- among whom, alas, are
innumerable Palestinians and Arabs -- I was also convinced that the Jews
exaggerated and lied about the Holocaust, etc., even apart from the fact
that the Zionist movement and Israel use the Holocaust to justify their
policy, first of all against my own people.
My long imprisonment provided me with the occasion to read books and
articles that our ideology and social norms made inaccessible to us outside
the prison. These documents gave me a thorough knowledge of the history of
the Nazi regime and genocide that it perpetrated. At the beginning of the
1990s, by reading articles written by the Palestinian intellectuals Edward
Said and Azmi Bishara, I discovered facts and positions which contradicted
mine and those of many Palestinians. Their writings having piqued my
curiosity and given birth inside me to the need to know more, I set about
reading accounts of survivors of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation.
These testimonies were written by people of various nationalities, Jews or
non-Jews.
The more I learned, the more I realized that the Holocaust was indeed a
historical fact and the more I became aware of the monumental dimension of
the crime committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews, other social and
national groups, and humanity in general. I discovered that Nazi Germany
aspired to found a "new world order" dominated by the "pure Aryan race"
thanks to the physical annihilation of "impure races" and the enslavement of
other nations. I discovered that various "normal" official institutions --
bureaucracies, judicial systems, medical and educational authorities,
municipalities, railroad companies, and others -- had taken part and
collaborated in the implementation of this new world order. From a
theoretical point of view, this objective, just like the victories won at
the time by the Nazi armies of occupation, threatened the existence of the
Arabs and Muslims as well.
Whatever the number of victims -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- the crime is
monumental. Any attempt to deny it deprives the denier of his own humanity
and sends him immediately to the side of torturers. Whoever denies the fact
that this human disaster really took place should not be astonished that
others deny the sufferings and persecutions inflicted on his own people by
tyrannical leaders or foreign occupiers. Ask yourself, I beg you, the
following question: were hundreds of thousands of testimonies written about
death camps, gas chambers, ghettos, and mass murders committed by the German
army, tens of thousands of works of research based on German documents,
numerous filmed sequences, some of which were shot by German soldiers --
were all these masses of evidence completely fabricated?
Can all that be summed up simply as an imperialist-Zionist plot? Are the
confessions of high-ranking Nazis officials about their personal role in the
project of extermination of whole nations only the fruit of the imagination
of some disturbed spirit?
And all these heroic deeds of the people subjected to the German occupation
-- the first among whom were Russians, Polish, and Yugoslavs -- only lies
and gross exaggerations? Could the struggle of the Soviets against Nazi
Germany be only a phantasm? The Russians continue to celebrate their
victory over Nazi Germany and remember millions of their civilian and
military compatriots who lost their lives in this struggle. Are they lying,
too?
I invite you to read historical studies and serious testimonies before
making your public statements. You divide the world in two camps: the
imperialists-Zionists, who manufactured the myth of the Holocaust, and the
adversaries of imperialism, who know the truth and uncover the plot.
Perhaps you think that the act of denying the Holocaust places you at the
vanguard of the Muslim world and that this refusal constitutes a useful tool
in the combat against American imperialism and Western hegemony. By doing
so, you actually do great disservice to popular struggles the world over.
At best, you cover your people and yourself with ridicule in the eyes of
political forces who reject imperialism but cannot take your ideas and
arguments seriously, due to the fact that you obsessively deny the existence
of an abundantly documented and studied historical period whose consequences
are still felt and discussed today.
At worst, you discourage and weaken the political, social, and intellectual
forces who, in Europe and in the United States, reject the policy of
confrontation and war carried out by George Bush, but are forced to conclude
that you, too, jeopardize the world by your declarations denying the
genocide and by your nuclear program.
Concerning the struggle of my people for their independence and their
freedom: perhaps do you regard the negation of the Holocaust as an
expression of support for the Palestinians? There, again, you are mistaken.
We fight for our existence and our rights and against the historical
injustice which was inflicted on us in 1948. We will not win our victory
and our independence by denying the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish
people, even though the forces who occupy our country today and dispossess
us are part of the Jewish people.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mahmoud Al-Safadi is a former Palestinian militant, He was imprisoned in
Israel for eighteen years and freed in 2006. The French text, a translation
from English by Gilles Berton, was published in Le Monde on 4 December 2006.
The English original was unavailable on the Net, so the English text is a translation from the French text published in Le Monde.
English translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.
Al Gore to MoveOn supporters
Dear MoveOn member,
I want to thank you for being a part of the See the Truth movie parties this past Saturday and for helping make them such a huge success. Tens of thousands of us came together to start mobilizing to take on the climate crisis.
I know from personal experience that the only thing which will move Washington to action is the sight of millions of people coming together and pushing for change—and we can't afford to wait any longer. That's why I'm asking you to sign this online petition to your representative, demanding immediate action to stop global warming. If you sign it, I'll personally deliver your comments to Congress in the new year.
"The new Congress must take real action to solve the climate crisis immediately."
[sign at the website URL as below]
After you've signed on, please take a moment to pass this on to your friends and family and ask them to sign on. We've bought the DVD, seen the movie and spread the word about global warming. Now we have to organize to stop it. I'm ready to push for real solutions, but I need your help.
MoveOn members have been an incredible force for good in the last few years, and you should be very proud of what you've accomplished. The challenges we face are enormous, and we know that we can't trust Washington to do the right thing without intense pressure from good folks around the country. But you've shown everyone that political will truly is a renewable resource.
I look forward to working together.
For more information on the petition, please click below:
http://pol.moveon.org/climatecrisis/?id=9637-6825852-kjNkU8Qu8tbDdGjN9Jj4OQ&t=2
Thanks for all you do,
Al Gore,
Tuesday, December 19th, 2006
PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, http://pol.moveon.org/
Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
Monday, December 18, 2006
When There's No One Left to Blame -- What Are You Going to do Now, Israel?
December 15, 2006
By VIRGINIA TILLEY
Johannesburg, South Africa
What are you going to do now, Israel?
Now that three small boys have been killed by assassins' bullets, and a Hamas judge dragged from his car and murdered, perhaps you are pleased. The Palestinians are finally succumbing to your plots, you think. The long-planned bottle has finally been sealed, in which the "drunken cockroaches" can only crawl around, shooting each other.
Maybe you are sitting back in your national chair, rubbing your hands together in triumph, watching the Palestinians finally turn on each other, slowly becoming what you always claimed they were. Maybe you are repelled, secure in your sense of superiority.
But have you thought about what you are you going to do, if Palestinian leadership you despise finally disintegrates?
You have brought them to this pass, of course. You worked for decades to achieve exactly this. You bribed, terrorized, expelled, maimed or killed their leadership, banned or killed their visionaries and philosophers, fanned and funded Hamas against Fatah or Fatah against Hamas, trashed their democracy, stole their money, walled them in, put them on a "diet", derided their claims, and lied about their history to the world and to yourself.
But what are you going to do, Israel, if five million Palestinians are finally living leaderless under your sovereignty? What will you do, when they lose their capacity to negotiate with you? Have you thought that, within the territory you control, they are as many as you? And that now you are destroying their unified voice? Have you thought about what will happen to you if they truly lose that voice?
Maybe you really believe that, if you only feed Fatah money and guns, Fatah will reclaim power from the Hamas and restore the craven puppet Palestinian government of your dreams. Maybe you actually believe that Fatah can revive the wreck of Oslo, step out of the rubble of PA offices, and reclaim the driver's seat of the Palestinian nation as before. Maybe you are telling yourself that, with just a few more inter-factional scuffles and assassinations and little more starvation, the entire Palestinian people will turn on Hamas and eject it from power in favor of grinning Mr. Abbas.
But why would you believe all this, when the only other test-case, Iraq, is in ruins and the US and UK are desperately trying to flee?
Do you really still live so deeply in your own fantasies that you believe Palestinian resistance is just the product of bad or obdurate leadership? That no collective memory of expulsion and dispossession sustains the spirit of collective resistance that will always and inevitably transcend that leadership? Do you really believe that, if only you can crush or co-opt Hamas and Fatah, five million people will simply disappear forever from your world--trail off across the Jordanian or Egyptian borders into the endless desert, clutching clothes, kids, and tarnished mementos, in some great reprise of 1948?
Do you actually think that, if the international community finally lets you off the hook of negotiating with the people you have dispossessed and discredited, you will somehow walk free at last, your crimes against them forgotten?
We know you are still pursuing the old, fatal, futile fantasy: finally to redeem the Zionist dream by demolishing Palestinian nationalism. To break Palestinian national unity on the rocks of occupation. To reduce the Palestinians to Indians on reservations who decline into despair, alcoholism and emigration. To make them irrelevant to you.
But here is news for you, Israel. The Native Americans haven't given up to this day. Damaged and reduced as they are, they know their history and remember their grievances. They are marginal only because they are one percent of the US population. The Palestinians are five-million strong, equal to you in numbers. And they live within your borders. When their leadership ruins itself, bashing each other like rams fighting to the death, they will finally turn their five million pairs of burning eyes on you, for you will be the only power left over them. And you will be defenseless, because your paper shelter - your Fatah or PA quislings - will be damaged goods, cracked vessels, discredited, gone. And it will then be you and those you have disenfranchised - you and the Palestinians, in one state, with no Oslo or Road Map myth to protect you. And by then, they will truly hate you.
Then perhaps it will dawn on you what you have done, when the disintegration of Palestinian national unity spreads out like a tsunami through the Middle East, meeting up with the tsunami spreading out from Iraq, to lay the region waste and rebound on you.
Watching you create this catastrophe for yourself, we think you are simply suicidal. We could just watch, but your road to ruin promises too much suffering to too many people. Still, to avert your unilateral suicide pact with the Palestinians, to whom can we turn?
We could appeal to Hamas at last to mobilize the rank and file, who alone have the capacity to launch civil disobedience on the mass scale necessary to paralyse Israel's iron fist, but Hamas has no experience with this method, and now its statesmen are cornered by the guns you gave to Fatah thugs.
We could appeal to the leader of the Fatah thugs, Mr. Abbas, shuffling at the feet of Israeli power, to find some spine. Or to the ubiquitous Mr. Erekat, who never had a political vision in his life, to develop one overnight.
We could appeal to the Fatah thugs to reject Mr. Abbas and Mr. Erekat and the fat cement contracts you gave them to build the Wall that imprisons them, and seek a high road they have never glimpsed.
We could appeal to the microscopic PFLP and DFLP, clutching their old programs too stale to chew and consumed by their acrid, decades-old bitterness and rivalry with Fatah, to lift their heads at long last beyond the old and new grievances.
We could appeal to the US, but no one bothers to do that.
We could appeal to the EU, but no one bothers to do that, either.
We could appeal to the world, but it only stands aghast.
We could appeal to the world media, but it is frozen with its ass in the air.
We can only appeal to you, Israel. To think what you are doing, if not to care.
For you are crafting your own destruction.
You have been so effective in this great national project because you work from experience. Even the most courageous, principled, and sensible people, as you learned, cannot withstand a concentration camp indefinitely. At some point, as the Holocaust historians have tracked with such pathos, humanity breaks down. Individual heroism may survive as memoirs, but order, humanity, and finally human feeling decays into factional squabbles and man's inhumanity to man. You learned all too well and bitterly how this cauldron can melt down the very fabric of a society and shatter people. The lesson is burned, literally, into your national memory. And you are bringing those lessons to bear, attempting to purge Zionism's tragedy by bringing Gaza to ruin.
But if you actually reap the chaos you are crafting for the Palestinians, you will find that no one else is responsible for these five million civilians except you.
So what will you do, Israel, with five million people living under your rule, when you can no longer pretend to the world that you intend to negotiate with them? What will you do with people you detest, and who finally utterly detest you, when visions of coexistence have finally failed? You will be the only sovereign power over them. You will be able neither to digest them nor to vomit them out. And they will stare at you.
And we will stare at you, too.
Because there will be no one left to blame, and no one to take care of them, except you.
* Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, a US citizen working in South Africa, and author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (University of Michigan Press and Manchester University Press, 2005). She can be reached at tilley@hws.edu.
By VIRGINIA TILLEY
Johannesburg, South Africa
What are you going to do now, Israel?
Now that three small boys have been killed by assassins' bullets, and a Hamas judge dragged from his car and murdered, perhaps you are pleased. The Palestinians are finally succumbing to your plots, you think. The long-planned bottle has finally been sealed, in which the "drunken cockroaches" can only crawl around, shooting each other.
Maybe you are sitting back in your national chair, rubbing your hands together in triumph, watching the Palestinians finally turn on each other, slowly becoming what you always claimed they were. Maybe you are repelled, secure in your sense of superiority.
But have you thought about what you are you going to do, if Palestinian leadership you despise finally disintegrates?
You have brought them to this pass, of course. You worked for decades to achieve exactly this. You bribed, terrorized, expelled, maimed or killed their leadership, banned or killed their visionaries and philosophers, fanned and funded Hamas against Fatah or Fatah against Hamas, trashed their democracy, stole their money, walled them in, put them on a "diet", derided their claims, and lied about their history to the world and to yourself.
But what are you going to do, Israel, if five million Palestinians are finally living leaderless under your sovereignty? What will you do, when they lose their capacity to negotiate with you? Have you thought that, within the territory you control, they are as many as you? And that now you are destroying their unified voice? Have you thought about what will happen to you if they truly lose that voice?
Maybe you really believe that, if you only feed Fatah money and guns, Fatah will reclaim power from the Hamas and restore the craven puppet Palestinian government of your dreams. Maybe you actually believe that Fatah can revive the wreck of Oslo, step out of the rubble of PA offices, and reclaim the driver's seat of the Palestinian nation as before. Maybe you are telling yourself that, with just a few more inter-factional scuffles and assassinations and little more starvation, the entire Palestinian people will turn on Hamas and eject it from power in favor of grinning Mr. Abbas.
But why would you believe all this, when the only other test-case, Iraq, is in ruins and the US and UK are desperately trying to flee?
Do you really still live so deeply in your own fantasies that you believe Palestinian resistance is just the product of bad or obdurate leadership? That no collective memory of expulsion and dispossession sustains the spirit of collective resistance that will always and inevitably transcend that leadership? Do you really believe that, if only you can crush or co-opt Hamas and Fatah, five million people will simply disappear forever from your world--trail off across the Jordanian or Egyptian borders into the endless desert, clutching clothes, kids, and tarnished mementos, in some great reprise of 1948?
Do you actually think that, if the international community finally lets you off the hook of negotiating with the people you have dispossessed and discredited, you will somehow walk free at last, your crimes against them forgotten?
We know you are still pursuing the old, fatal, futile fantasy: finally to redeem the Zionist dream by demolishing Palestinian nationalism. To break Palestinian national unity on the rocks of occupation. To reduce the Palestinians to Indians on reservations who decline into despair, alcoholism and emigration. To make them irrelevant to you.
But here is news for you, Israel. The Native Americans haven't given up to this day. Damaged and reduced as they are, they know their history and remember their grievances. They are marginal only because they are one percent of the US population. The Palestinians are five-million strong, equal to you in numbers. And they live within your borders. When their leadership ruins itself, bashing each other like rams fighting to the death, they will finally turn their five million pairs of burning eyes on you, for you will be the only power left over them. And you will be defenseless, because your paper shelter - your Fatah or PA quislings - will be damaged goods, cracked vessels, discredited, gone. And it will then be you and those you have disenfranchised - you and the Palestinians, in one state, with no Oslo or Road Map myth to protect you. And by then, they will truly hate you.
Then perhaps it will dawn on you what you have done, when the disintegration of Palestinian national unity spreads out like a tsunami through the Middle East, meeting up with the tsunami spreading out from Iraq, to lay the region waste and rebound on you.
Watching you create this catastrophe for yourself, we think you are simply suicidal. We could just watch, but your road to ruin promises too much suffering to too many people. Still, to avert your unilateral suicide pact with the Palestinians, to whom can we turn?
We could appeal to Hamas at last to mobilize the rank and file, who alone have the capacity to launch civil disobedience on the mass scale necessary to paralyse Israel's iron fist, but Hamas has no experience with this method, and now its statesmen are cornered by the guns you gave to Fatah thugs.
We could appeal to the leader of the Fatah thugs, Mr. Abbas, shuffling at the feet of Israeli power, to find some spine. Or to the ubiquitous Mr. Erekat, who never had a political vision in his life, to develop one overnight.
We could appeal to the Fatah thugs to reject Mr. Abbas and Mr. Erekat and the fat cement contracts you gave them to build the Wall that imprisons them, and seek a high road they have never glimpsed.
We could appeal to the microscopic PFLP and DFLP, clutching their old programs too stale to chew and consumed by their acrid, decades-old bitterness and rivalry with Fatah, to lift their heads at long last beyond the old and new grievances.
We could appeal to the US, but no one bothers to do that.
We could appeal to the EU, but no one bothers to do that, either.
We could appeal to the world, but it only stands aghast.
We could appeal to the world media, but it is frozen with its ass in the air.
We can only appeal to you, Israel. To think what you are doing, if not to care.
For you are crafting your own destruction.
You have been so effective in this great national project because you work from experience. Even the most courageous, principled, and sensible people, as you learned, cannot withstand a concentration camp indefinitely. At some point, as the Holocaust historians have tracked with such pathos, humanity breaks down. Individual heroism may survive as memoirs, but order, humanity, and finally human feeling decays into factional squabbles and man's inhumanity to man. You learned all too well and bitterly how this cauldron can melt down the very fabric of a society and shatter people. The lesson is burned, literally, into your national memory. And you are bringing those lessons to bear, attempting to purge Zionism's tragedy by bringing Gaza to ruin.
But if you actually reap the chaos you are crafting for the Palestinians, you will find that no one else is responsible for these five million civilians except you.
So what will you do, Israel, with five million people living under your rule, when you can no longer pretend to the world that you intend to negotiate with them? What will you do with people you detest, and who finally utterly detest you, when visions of coexistence have finally failed? You will be the only sovereign power over them. You will be able neither to digest them nor to vomit them out. And they will stare at you.
And we will stare at you, too.
Because there will be no one left to blame, and no one to take care of them, except you.
* Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, a US citizen working in South Africa, and author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (University of Michigan Press and Manchester University Press, 2005). She can be reached at tilley@hws.edu.
Call for Cultural Boycott
Call for cultural boycott-John Berger, Brian Eno , Arundhati Roy ea
Press release, with added personal remarks by John Berger
Ramallah December 15, 2006
http://www.pacbi.org/announcements_more.php?id=415_0_5_0_M
[Original title: John Berger and 93 other authors, film-makers, musicians and performers call for a cultural boycott of Israel]
[see also http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1972654,00.html
PACBI is pleased to announce that in a letter that appears in today’s Guardian, the 94, including the renowned author John Berger; UK musicians and song-writers Brian Eno and Leon Rosselson; filmmakers Sophie Fiennes, Elia Suleiman and Haim Bresheeth; documentary maker Jenny Morgan; singer Reem Kelani; writers Arundhati Roy, Ahdaf Soueif, and Eduardo Galeano, call on their colleagues not to visit, exhibit or perform in Israel.
The letter comes after the August 2006 statement issued by Palestinian filmmakers, artists, writers, and other cultural workers calling for a cultural boycott of Israel. The statement can be viewed at:
http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=315_0_1_0_C
Full list of signatures as of 13th December:
Aguirre, Carmen, (dramatist)
Al Bayati, Hana (film-maker)
Alcalay, Ammiel, (poet)
Alkadhi, Rheim (artist)
Aziz, Sylvat (artist)
Benner, Ron (artist)
Berger, John (writer and artist)
Beverley, John (writer)
Bove, Paul (editor and writer)
Bresheeth, Haim (film-maker)
Brittain, Victoria (writer)
Budney, Jen (curator)
Cameron, Lindsley (author)
Carew, Keggie (artist)
Casana, Manuel Molins (dramatist)
Chanan, Michael (writer and film-maker)
Chirot, David-Baptiste (artist/writer)
Chrysakis,. Thanos (composer)
Courtney, Andrew (artist)
Cox, Molly Hankwitz (artist and writer)
Creativity commons collective
D’Agostino, Ornella (choreographer)
Davis, Matt (musician)
Deane, Raymond (musician)
Deutsch, Stephen (composer)
Dibb, Mike (film maker)
Donoghue, Ben (film maker)
Eno, Brian (musician)
Erfanian, Eshrat (artist)
Fiennes, Sophie (film-maker)
Fisher, Jean (writer)
Frere, Jane (video artist)
Fried, Klaus (film maker)
Galeano, Eduardo (writer)
Ghaibah, Anas (TV director)
Ghossein, Mirene (writer and editor)
Gill, Rajdeep Singh (curator)
Gordon, Avery (writer)
Greyson, John (film-maker)
Guillen, Maria Munoz (dancer)
Halama, Henry (artist)
Hamka, Nada (artist)
Hashemi, Gita (artist)
Hassan, Jamelie (artist)
Huleileh, Serene (dancer/choreographer)
Humm, Maggie (writer)
Hussien, Reham (translator)
James, Rob (writer)
Jenik, Adriene (media artist)
Jimeno, Dolores (writer)
Joly, Magdalene (dancer and musician)
Kelani, Reem (singer)
Karabelia, Vassia (art historian)
Kauff, Tarak (writer)
Kaya, Mircan (musician)
Knupp, Rainer (movement artist)
Kukovec, Dunja (art historian)
Kumar, Vinod (writer)
Lane, Joel (poet)
Levidow, Les (writer and musician)
Loshitzky, Yosefa (writer)
Lozano, Rian (curator)
Malinowitz, Harriet (writer)
Marlat, Daphne (writer)
Masri, Hala (theatre coordinator)
Matelli, Federica (curator)
McCaughey, Peter (artist)
Metcalfe, Rohelia Hamilton (Film-maker)
Miyoshi, Masao (writer)
Montagnino, Carlo (artist)
Morgan, Jenny (film-maker)
Muntadas, Antoni (artist0
Naguib, Fabiola Nabil (curator)
Neufeldt, Brigitte (artist)
Nunez, Alejandra Perez (sound artist)
Ostrow, Saul (critic/curator)
Pangbourne, Annabelle (composer)
Parker, Cornelia (artist)
Pennell, Miranda (film-maker)
Radhakrishnan, R (writer)
Rosselson, Leon (song writer and author)
Roy, Arundhati (novelist)
Rubin, Andrew (writer)
Salloum, Jayce (artist)
Sampaio, Miriam (artist)
Samuel, Julian (novelist)
Sances, Jos (artist)
Saraste, Leena (photographer)
Sarlin, Paige (film-maker)
Scordìa, Cinzia (performer0
Serra, Toni /Abu Ali (videomaker)
Shammas, Anton (novelist and film-maker)
Shibli, Ahlam (artist)
Shiri, Keith (curator)
Simons, Patrick (composer)
Smith, John (artist-film-maker)
Solt, John (poet)
Somes-Charlton, Chris (director)
Soueif, Ahdaf (novelist)
Staikou, Evi (artist)
Suleiman, Elia (film maker)
Sureda, Joseph Ramis (dancer)
Szpakowski, Michael (composer)
Tres (artist)
Tudela, Ana Navarrete (artist)
Valldosera, Eulalia (artist)
Van Zwanenberg, Roger (publisher)
Walkley, Ron (architect)
Ward, David (composer)
Younghusband, Gene (media theorist)
Zangana, Haifa (novelist)
From John Berger:
I would like to make a few personal remarks about this world-wide appeal to teachers, intellectuals and artists to join the cultural boycott of the state of Israel, as called for by over a hundred Palestinian academics and artists, and - very importantly - also by a number of Israeli public figures, who outspokenly oppose their country’s illegal occupation of the Palestine territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Their call is attached, together with my After Guernica drawing. I hope you will feel able to add your signature, to the attached letter, which we intend to publish in national newspapers.
The boycott is an active protest against two forms of exclusion which have persisted, despite many other forms of protestations, for over sixty years - for almost three generations.
During this period the state of Israel has consistently excluded itself from any international obligation to heed UN resolutions or the judgement of any international court. To date, it has defied 246 Security Council Resolutions!
As a direct consequence seven million Palestinians have been excluded from the right to live as they wish on land internationally acknowledged to be theirs; and now increasingly, with every week that passes, they are being excluded from their right to any future at all as a nation.
As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances. A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way. (In white South Africa yesterday and in Israel today, the immorality was, or is being, coded into a form of racist apartheid).
Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it itself risks to become exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such. A boycott is directed against a policy and the institutions which support that policy either actively or tacitly. Its aim is not to reject, but to bring about change.
How to apply a cultural boycott? A boycott of goods is a simpler proposition, but in this case it would probably be less effective, and speed is of the essence, because the situation is deteriorating every month (which is precisely why some of the most powerful world political leaders, hoping for the worst, keep silent.).
How to apply a boycott? For academics it’s perhaps a little clearer - a question of declining invitations from state institutions and explaining why. For invited actors, musicians, jugglers or poets it can be more complicated. I’m convinced, in any case, that its application should not be systematised; it has to come from a personal choice based on a personal assessment.
For instance. An important mainstream Israeli publisher today is asking to publish three of my books. I intend to apply the boycott with an explanation. There exist, however, a few small, marginal Israeli publishers who expressly work to encourage exchanges and bridges between Arabs and Israelis, and if one of them should ask to publish something of mine, I would unhesitatingly agree and furthermore waive aside any question of author’s royalties. I don’t ask other writers supporting the boycott to come necessarily to exactly the same conclusion. I simply offer an example.
What is important is that we make our chosen protests together, and that we speak out, thus breaking the silence of connivance maintained by those who claim to represent us, and thus ourselves representing, briefly by our common action, the incalculable number of people who have been appalled by recent events but lack the opportunity of making their sense of outrage effective.
John Berger
Press release, with added personal remarks by John Berger
Ramallah December 15, 2006
http://www.pacbi.org/announcements_more.php?id=415_0_5_0_M
[Original title: John Berger and 93 other authors, film-makers, musicians and performers call for a cultural boycott of Israel]
[see also http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1972654,00.html
PACBI is pleased to announce that in a letter that appears in today’s Guardian, the 94, including the renowned author John Berger; UK musicians and song-writers Brian Eno and Leon Rosselson; filmmakers Sophie Fiennes, Elia Suleiman and Haim Bresheeth; documentary maker Jenny Morgan; singer Reem Kelani; writers Arundhati Roy, Ahdaf Soueif, and Eduardo Galeano, call on their colleagues not to visit, exhibit or perform in Israel.
The letter comes after the August 2006 statement issued by Palestinian filmmakers, artists, writers, and other cultural workers calling for a cultural boycott of Israel. The statement can be viewed at:
http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=315_0_1_0_C
Full list of signatures as of 13th December:
Aguirre, Carmen, (dramatist)
Al Bayati, Hana (film-maker)
Alcalay, Ammiel, (poet)
Alkadhi, Rheim (artist)
Aziz, Sylvat (artist)
Benner, Ron (artist)
Berger, John (writer and artist)
Beverley, John (writer)
Bove, Paul (editor and writer)
Bresheeth, Haim (film-maker)
Brittain, Victoria (writer)
Budney, Jen (curator)
Cameron, Lindsley (author)
Carew, Keggie (artist)
Casana, Manuel Molins (dramatist)
Chanan, Michael (writer and film-maker)
Chirot, David-Baptiste (artist/writer)
Chrysakis,. Thanos (composer)
Courtney, Andrew (artist)
Cox, Molly Hankwitz (artist and writer)
Creativity commons collective
D’Agostino, Ornella (choreographer)
Davis, Matt (musician)
Deane, Raymond (musician)
Deutsch, Stephen (composer)
Dibb, Mike (film maker)
Donoghue, Ben (film maker)
Eno, Brian (musician)
Erfanian, Eshrat (artist)
Fiennes, Sophie (film-maker)
Fisher, Jean (writer)
Frere, Jane (video artist)
Fried, Klaus (film maker)
Galeano, Eduardo (writer)
Ghaibah, Anas (TV director)
Ghossein, Mirene (writer and editor)
Gill, Rajdeep Singh (curator)
Gordon, Avery (writer)
Greyson, John (film-maker)
Guillen, Maria Munoz (dancer)
Halama, Henry (artist)
Hamka, Nada (artist)
Hashemi, Gita (artist)
Hassan, Jamelie (artist)
Huleileh, Serene (dancer/choreographer)
Humm, Maggie (writer)
Hussien, Reham (translator)
James, Rob (writer)
Jenik, Adriene (media artist)
Jimeno, Dolores (writer)
Joly, Magdalene (dancer and musician)
Kelani, Reem (singer)
Karabelia, Vassia (art historian)
Kauff, Tarak (writer)
Kaya, Mircan (musician)
Knupp, Rainer (movement artist)
Kukovec, Dunja (art historian)
Kumar, Vinod (writer)
Lane, Joel (poet)
Levidow, Les (writer and musician)
Loshitzky, Yosefa (writer)
Lozano, Rian (curator)
Malinowitz, Harriet (writer)
Marlat, Daphne (writer)
Masri, Hala (theatre coordinator)
Matelli, Federica (curator)
McCaughey, Peter (artist)
Metcalfe, Rohelia Hamilton (Film-maker)
Miyoshi, Masao (writer)
Montagnino, Carlo (artist)
Morgan, Jenny (film-maker)
Muntadas, Antoni (artist0
Naguib, Fabiola Nabil (curator)
Neufeldt, Brigitte (artist)
Nunez, Alejandra Perez (sound artist)
Ostrow, Saul (critic/curator)
Pangbourne, Annabelle (composer)
Parker, Cornelia (artist)
Pennell, Miranda (film-maker)
Radhakrishnan, R (writer)
Rosselson, Leon (song writer and author)
Roy, Arundhati (novelist)
Rubin, Andrew (writer)
Salloum, Jayce (artist)
Sampaio, Miriam (artist)
Samuel, Julian (novelist)
Sances, Jos (artist)
Saraste, Leena (photographer)
Sarlin, Paige (film-maker)
Scordìa, Cinzia (performer0
Serra, Toni /Abu Ali (videomaker)
Shammas, Anton (novelist and film-maker)
Shibli, Ahlam (artist)
Shiri, Keith (curator)
Simons, Patrick (composer)
Smith, John (artist-film-maker)
Solt, John (poet)
Somes-Charlton, Chris (director)
Soueif, Ahdaf (novelist)
Staikou, Evi (artist)
Suleiman, Elia (film maker)
Sureda, Joseph Ramis (dancer)
Szpakowski, Michael (composer)
Tres (artist)
Tudela, Ana Navarrete (artist)
Valldosera, Eulalia (artist)
Van Zwanenberg, Roger (publisher)
Walkley, Ron (architect)
Ward, David (composer)
Younghusband, Gene (media theorist)
Zangana, Haifa (novelist)
From John Berger:
I would like to make a few personal remarks about this world-wide appeal to teachers, intellectuals and artists to join the cultural boycott of the state of Israel, as called for by over a hundred Palestinian academics and artists, and - very importantly - also by a number of Israeli public figures, who outspokenly oppose their country’s illegal occupation of the Palestine territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Their call is attached, together with my After Guernica drawing. I hope you will feel able to add your signature, to the attached letter, which we intend to publish in national newspapers.
The boycott is an active protest against two forms of exclusion which have persisted, despite many other forms of protestations, for over sixty years - for almost three generations.
During this period the state of Israel has consistently excluded itself from any international obligation to heed UN resolutions or the judgement of any international court. To date, it has defied 246 Security Council Resolutions!
As a direct consequence seven million Palestinians have been excluded from the right to live as they wish on land internationally acknowledged to be theirs; and now increasingly, with every week that passes, they are being excluded from their right to any future at all as a nation.
As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances. A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way. (In white South Africa yesterday and in Israel today, the immorality was, or is being, coded into a form of racist apartheid).
Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it itself risks to become exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such. A boycott is directed against a policy and the institutions which support that policy either actively or tacitly. Its aim is not to reject, but to bring about change.
How to apply a cultural boycott? A boycott of goods is a simpler proposition, but in this case it would probably be less effective, and speed is of the essence, because the situation is deteriorating every month (which is precisely why some of the most powerful world political leaders, hoping for the worst, keep silent.).
How to apply a boycott? For academics it’s perhaps a little clearer - a question of declining invitations from state institutions and explaining why. For invited actors, musicians, jugglers or poets it can be more complicated. I’m convinced, in any case, that its application should not be systematised; it has to come from a personal choice based on a personal assessment.
For instance. An important mainstream Israeli publisher today is asking to publish three of my books. I intend to apply the boycott with an explanation. There exist, however, a few small, marginal Israeli publishers who expressly work to encourage exchanges and bridges between Arabs and Israelis, and if one of them should ask to publish something of mine, I would unhesitatingly agree and furthermore waive aside any question of author’s royalties. I don’t ask other writers supporting the boycott to come necessarily to exactly the same conclusion. I simply offer an example.
What is important is that we make our chosen protests together, and that we speak out, thus breaking the silence of connivance maintained by those who claim to represent us, and thus ourselves representing, briefly by our common action, the incalculable number of people who have been appalled by recent events but lack the opportunity of making their sense of outrage effective.
John Berger
Monday, December 11, 2006
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Some short films to watch online
Watch THE IRON WALL:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4866316426876380615
Watch CLOSED (UNOCHA on OPT humanitarian crisis):
http://www.ochaopt.org/?module=displaysection§ion_id=117&format=html
Watch BREAKING THE SILENCE (IDF soldiers' testimonies) (& others at same Youtube site): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37MFa7ZKQWo
Watch THE UNRECOGNIZED (about Negev Bedouin and Israeli discrimination/ethnocracy):
http://www.theunrecognized.org/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4866316426876380615
Watch CLOSED (UNOCHA on OPT humanitarian crisis):
http://www.ochaopt.org/?module=displaysection§ion_id=117&format=html
Watch BREAKING THE SILENCE (IDF soldiers' testimonies) (& others at same Youtube site): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37MFa7ZKQWo
Watch THE UNRECOGNIZED (about Negev Bedouin and Israeli discrimination/ethnocracy):
http://www.theunrecognized.org/
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Israeli wall separates Palestinian farmers from land
2006-12-04
Farmers cannot easily hire labourers or bring in agriculture specialists to check on their greenhouses.
________________________________________
JAYYOUS, West Bank - Jayyous's farmers are used to surveying their land from their commanding hilltop village in the northern West Bank. But for many, gazing is now all they can do.
Farmers cannot easily hire labourers or bring in agriculture specialists to check on their greenhouses.
________________________________________
JAYYOUS, West Bank - Jayyous's farmers are used to surveying their land from their commanding hilltop village in the northern West Bank. But for many, gazing is now all they can do.
Israel’s West Bank barrier has separated the village of Jayyous from 9,500 of its 13,600 dunums (a dunum is 1,000 square metres) of land, and the Israeli authorities have denied them permits to access it.
“In the beginning, they gave permits to pass through gates in the barrier to 90 per cent of the people here, including children,” said Mustafa Samha, 27, a psychologist whose father has been barred from his land. “But after six months they began reducing the number of people they gave permits to.”
Samha says about three-quarters of Jayyous’s 3,000 inhabitants depend on farming, but the number of permits issued has declined. “Now they have stopped giving them to farmers’ sons. If a farmer has 50 dunums of land he needs help to work it all. On his own he can only work about 10 to 15 dunums of land. This is stealing.”
Israel says it must have the barrier to prevent suicide attacks on Israelis by Palestinian militants. But the price paid for the wall by Palestinian farmers is high: more than 60 per cent of farming families do not have access to their land west of the barrier, according to a survey carried out by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Jerusalem in early November.
Human rights campaigners say that complex land ownership legislation – some dating back to the Ottoman Empire that ended with the First World War – makes it difficult for Palestinians to prove to the Israeli authorities that they own their land, and then obtain a permit to go to it. “At places like Jayyous, people are increasingly being denied access to their land, and the reason given is increasingly a lack of ties to the land rather than security,” said Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, an advocacy officer at the Israeli Commission Against House Demolitions, a campaigning group.
Risk of land confiscation
Palestinian farmers who do not cultivate their land risk having it confiscated because, under Ottoman law, landowners who do not cultivate their land for three consecutive years, forfeit it to the authorities.
“We’re seeing some farmers preferring to farm at a loss rather than risking losing their land,” said Godfrey-Goldstein.
Jayyous’s produce of olives and citrus fruits has plummeted from 9 million kilos a year, to less than 5 million kilos since the barrier was completed in 2002, farmers say.
The barrier’s impact goes beyond simply barring farmers from their land, according to Abdellatif Khaled, whose family owns 70 dunums of land and who has a permit to get to it. He told IRIN that thousands of olive trees south of Jayyous remain unharvested because traditional routes have been blocked by the barrier, turning a 100 metre walk, into a trek of more than 10km to get through the nearest gate. “There is now no road to get to the trees so farmers have to carry all the olives on their shoulders,” Khaled said.
In addition, because access through the gates near Jayyous is restricted to village residents only, farmers cannot easily hire labourers or bring in agriculture specialists to check on their greenhouses, he said. As a result, those labourers who do have permission, can ask for a greater share in the profits.
“Traditionally, farmers could employ labourers to harvest their land and pay them a third of the crop. These days, it is the labourer who takes the majority of the crop,” said Khaled.
Little point in working the land
“As a result, there is now little point in working the land and many people who could have a permit don’t bother. Although the number of people who are refused permits fluctuates around 60 per cent, in reality 99.9 per cent of Palestinians do not get to the land.”
A number of West Bank communities openly oppose the barrier. Bil’in, to the north-west of Ramallah, has become internationally known for its Friday demonstrations, which involve Palestinians and activists from Israel and abroad, and almost always end in clashes with the Israeli military.
“We have a strong legal case against the Israelis and the media exposure helps,” said Ashraf, a 22-year-old Palestinian demonstrator who refused to give his name.
In a statement to IRIN, the Israeli military said landowners whose land is along the route of the barrier itself would remain the owners, and would receive a one-off compensation payment from the Israeli government as well as an annual rental fee from them as they would not be able to use their land.
In its statement, the Israeli military said those unhappy with the barrier’s route, could launch legal challenges. Legal petitions have been submitted to Israel’s Supreme Court, some of which have led to changes in the route.
However, the municipality of al-Khader - a village of about 10,000 inhabitants near Bethlehem – lost its case after receiving a letter from the Israeli authorities informing it that the barrier would separate it from 77 percent of its land.
“All we got from the court was a pedestrian tunnel under the wall to be controlled by soldiers,” said Adnan Sbeih, the mayor of al-Khader. His own family’s land will be covered with concrete after being chosen as a site for a new Israeli military base. “Everyone in al-Khader works on the grape vines,” he said. “What will we do now?”
Israel began building an eight-metre high, 703km-long concrete barrier through the West Bank in the occupied Palestinian territories in 2002. To date, some 670km of it has been completed. When the barrier is completed, about 10 per cent of the West Bank will be inside Israel.
In July 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague ruled that the barrier’s route, which weaves around the western border of the majority occupied territory was illegal under international humanitarian and human rights law, because it ‘gravely’ infringes on a number of rights of Palestinians living in the West Bank.
© IRIN
Monday, December 04, 2006
AIC APPEAL re. AHMAD ABU HANNYA'S DETENTION
An Israeli military court approved the extension of Ahmad Abu Hannya’s administration detention until 14 May 2007, by which time Ahmad, an Alternative Information Center (AIC) staff member, will have been imprisoned for two years.Ahmad, coordinator of the AIC youth group in Bethlehem, was detained at a checkpoint on his way to work on 18 May 2005 and placed in administrative detention, which is imprisonment without trial or charges. As with all of the approximately 600 Palestinian administrative detainees currently being held by Israel, Ahmad and his attorney are not even permitted to know the evidence against him.
As Ahmad stated before the military court, “They tell me that I am a danger to the security of the region. Yet for years I have worked with Israelis. I have Israeli friends. I always emphasise the fact that on this land it is possible to live in peace. How am I dangerous exactly?”
Ahmad has been adopted as an appeal case by Amnesty International, and is supported by the American National Lawyers Guild. The continuing detention of Ahmad and so many other Palestinians blatantly violates international law, which permits administrative detention only as an exceptional and highly regulated measure. Administrative detention violates the fundamental right to liberty and due process, and is used by Israel as a tool to oppress political activists in Palestine who struggle non-violently against the Israeli occupation and for a just peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
We do not know the secret evidence that Israel claims to have against Ahmad. We do know, however, that Ahmad has worked with progressive Israelis and Palestinians since 1998 on behalf of human rights and fundamental freedoms of all peoples in the area. Ahmad has a demonstrated commitment to a just peace and joint life for Palestinians and Israelis in the region.
We urge you to continue advocating with the Israeli authorities and join us in demanding Ahmad’s unconditional release from administrative detention! The Israeli authorities must release Ahmad or charge him with a recognisable criminal offence and in accordance with internationally accepted standards for a fair trial. Despite these difficult circumstances, Ahmad has not given up hope for a just peace in the region and neither has the AIC. Please join us in working for this better future.
ADDRESSES
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
Kiryat Ben Gurion
Jerusalem 91919
Israel
Fax: +972 2 670 5475 or +972 2 566 4838
Email: pm_eng@pmo.gov.il
Menahem Mazuz
Attorney General
Ministry of Justice
29 Salah Adin Street
Jerusalem
Fax: +972 2 628 5438 or +972 2 627 4481
Brigadier General Avihai Mandelblit
Judge Advocate General
6 David Elazar Street
Tel Aviv
Fax: 972 3 569 4370
Email: arbel@mail.idf.il
As Ahmad begins his nineteenth month in prison, we further urge you to write him letters of solidarity:
Ahmad Abu Hannya
ID 917755720
Prisoner number 3186/05
Ktziot Detention Camp 01771
Military Post
Letters may also be sent by email to: connie@alt-info.org . Please write “For Ahmad Abu Hannya” in the subject line.
Additional information about Ahmad may be found on the website of the Alternative Information Center: www.alternativenews.org.
As Ahmad stated before the military court, “They tell me that I am a danger to the security of the region. Yet for years I have worked with Israelis. I have Israeli friends. I always emphasise the fact that on this land it is possible to live in peace. How am I dangerous exactly?”
Ahmad has been adopted as an appeal case by Amnesty International, and is supported by the American National Lawyers Guild. The continuing detention of Ahmad and so many other Palestinians blatantly violates international law, which permits administrative detention only as an exceptional and highly regulated measure. Administrative detention violates the fundamental right to liberty and due process, and is used by Israel as a tool to oppress political activists in Palestine who struggle non-violently against the Israeli occupation and for a just peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
We do not know the secret evidence that Israel claims to have against Ahmad. We do know, however, that Ahmad has worked with progressive Israelis and Palestinians since 1998 on behalf of human rights and fundamental freedoms of all peoples in the area. Ahmad has a demonstrated commitment to a just peace and joint life for Palestinians and Israelis in the region.
We urge you to continue advocating with the Israeli authorities and join us in demanding Ahmad’s unconditional release from administrative detention! The Israeli authorities must release Ahmad or charge him with a recognisable criminal offence and in accordance with internationally accepted standards for a fair trial. Despite these difficult circumstances, Ahmad has not given up hope for a just peace in the region and neither has the AIC. Please join us in working for this better future.
ADDRESSES
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
Kiryat Ben Gurion
Jerusalem 91919
Israel
Fax: +972 2 670 5475 or +972 2 566 4838
Email: pm_eng@pmo.gov.il
Menahem Mazuz
Attorney General
Ministry of Justice
29 Salah Adin Street
Jerusalem
Fax: +972 2 628 5438 or +972 2 627 4481
Brigadier General Avihai Mandelblit
Judge Advocate General
6 David Elazar Street
Tel Aviv
Fax: 972 3 569 4370
Email: arbel@mail.idf.il
As Ahmad begins his nineteenth month in prison, we further urge you to write him letters of solidarity:
Ahmad Abu Hannya
ID 917755720
Prisoner number 3186/05
Ktziot Detention Camp 01771
Military Post
Letters may also be sent by email to: connie@alt-info.org . Please write “For Ahmad Abu Hannya” in the subject line.
Additional information about Ahmad may be found on the website of the Alternative Information Center: www.alternativenews.org.
Friday, December 01, 2006
LAILA EL-HADDAD: In Limbo in Arish
Dear friends,
its been a while since I've written, mainly because I have taken to updating my blog, which I know many of you read.
But I've decided to take this opportunity to also update you on our situation by email.
As many of you know Yousuf and I, along with my parents, left the US to Gaza nearly 3 weeks ago. For two of those weeks, we have been stuck 50 km from the Rafah Crossing, in the face of an ongoing Israeli-imposed closure of the passage.
We are staying in the Egyptian border town of Al-Arish, but for the past two days, we were literally stuck on the Egyptian side of the crossing itself, waiting to be let through, after we-and thousands of others, recieved word about the imminent (temporary) opening of the crossing, which has been shut down by Israel since late June. It has only been opened for 20 days since that time.
We stood and we waited and we cried and we returned back to Egypt Wednesday, and again Thursday.
It was anguish. Anguish and misery and desperation personfied in every woman, man and child.
One hour turned into two, then three, then five, as we stood shielding our eyes from the piercing midday sun on Wednesday, when we were told the Crossing would be opening for a few hours.
Some wailed in exhaustion, others fainted, still others cracked dry humor, trying to pass the time. We stood, thousands of us, packed together elbow to elbow like cattle, penned in between steel barriers on one end, and riot-geared Egyptian security guards on the perimeter, who were given orders not to allow anyone through until they hear otherwise from the Israelis-and to respond with force if anyone dared.
Many of the people had been waiting for more than two weeks to cross back into Gaza, sometimes making the trip to the crossing several times a day upon receiving word of its imminent opening.
"We have been waiting for 15 days now. Only god knows when it will open-today, tomorrow, the day after?" said 57-year-old Abu Yousuf Barghut, his shrapnel-riddled arm trembling by his side.
His tearful wife, Aisha, added: "God knows we only went to seek treatment for him and to come right back. And now we are stuck and waiting us in Gaza are my four children. This is the most basic of rights-to be able to return to our homes, and we are even denied that."
"The only way anyone will actually pay attention to our plight is if one of us dies here, and even then, I'm not sure the world will care," stammered one young man, Isam Shaksu, his eye heavily bandaged after having received an corneal implantation in Jordan.
In July, seven Palestinians waiting to be let into Gaza from Egypt died waiting to cross Rafah.
The Crossing is Gaza's gateway to the world-and the only passagway in and out of the area for 1.4 million Palestinians. Without it, Palestinian cannot seek medical treatment unavailable in Gaza; cannot re-unite with family members or attend universities or jobs abroad; and those on the outside cannot return home. There is simply no other way into Gaza for residents of the the Strip: our only airport's runway was destroyed in 2001, and Israel denies us access to other borders passages through Israel or the West Bank.
After the hours and the sun, one would have thought the black steel gates ahead of us were the gates to Heaven, but in fact they only led to more masses, more waiting, more hell.
There is something you feel as you stand there, and sometimes squatted, for hours at a time, waiting to be let through the Egyptian side of Rafah Crossing. It is something of your humanity slowing drifting away. It is gradual, but unmistakable.
And you are never quite the same again.
There were mixed Israeli orders-first to open the crossing for three days, starting Wedneday, yesterday; then breaking news at 11pm retracted that order, and by Wednesday morning, another about-face saying that the border would in fact be opened. By the time we arrived, it was 11am, and already somewhere around 2000 has amassed in front of the gates. And no one was budging.
Yousuf waited along with us, asking incessantly "When would the crossing open??", and begging me to pose the same quetion to the Egyptian officers manning it. Everytime he'd see the gate budge open he would get excited and yell "Its open!! Its open!!". And everyone would heave a heavy sigh.
When we finally did make it inside the "Second sector" of the Egyptian side, the relief was overwhelming-we had moved 50 metres!! And we could wait another four hours if it meant we'd finally be allowed through. But instead we faced yet another uncertain wait; it was like some sadistic game with no certain ending.
As we waited, we saw members of the Palestinian athletic teams heading to the Asian games after a two week delay.
We also saw Ismail Haniya on his way out to his Arab tour. He stopped to mingle with the desperate crowds, some hailing him, some complaining about how long they had waited.
We finally learned that the crossing had been closed this entire time, and the Egyptians were only allowing people through to give them some hope to cling on to-and to prevent the masses from rioting, which has happened before.
We thought once he'd passed, we'd be allowed through. But it is then we learned that Mahmud Zahar had crossed earlier that morning-carrying suitcases full of $20 million .
The European Monitors-whom the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights have accused of contributing to the strangulation of Gaza- were not pleased. How could he not declare the money, and how could he have the audacity to try and bring in money to feed his peole in the first place??
They filed a "complaint" with the Israelis, who immediately told them to shut down the crossing, without giving a reason, leaving thousands-including Yousuf, my parents and I, stranded.
My mother and Yousuf had gone ahead of my father and I-and our bags-into the terminal, and Yousuf fell asleep in the mosque. It was then that the officers had informed us the crossing was no longer operational-and everyone who was inside, even those who had already made it as far as the Palestinian side, would have to go back.
we pleaded with an Egyptian Officer: "It took us 6 hours to get as far the inside of the terminal, please let us through".
"Big deal-it took me ten hours to get here from Cairo," he retorted, as I reminded myself they get paid a measly 180 Egyptian pounds a month and couldn't care less.
Another officer was more sympathetic.
"What you lot have to understand is that no one gives a damn what happens to you-you could sit here and suffocate for all they care. You are simply not human enough for them to care."
When is it that we lost our humanity, I wondered? And when is it that the humanity and desperation of a people, waiting desperately to be let through to their homes, was less important than the call of duty? And that a government was made to choose between feeding their own people, or giving them passage to their homes?
Inside the terminal, the scenes were dizzying. Already disoriented form lack of sleep and little food, I looked around in awe. It was nothing short of an interment camp, and I lost myself somewhere between the silent anguish of old men, aching, teary eyed-women on the verge of collapse, and children, some strewn across the floor in exhaustion, others who were sick, in wheelchairs, wailing...
We returned to Arish, exhausted and sleep deprived, only to find that all of the apartments were occupied by returning passengers. The only flat we found was one without hot water and leaky ceiling pipes, but we couldn't care less. By 9pm we were all out.
The next morning, we left again to the border-where we had left our suitcases-despite word from taxi drivers that the crossing would not open. We waited again, this time for only 5 hours, until we decided it was an exercise in futility.
Everyone was looking for answers-some answers, any answers. When would the crossing open? Was there hope it would open today? If so, what time? Should we wait, should we return to Arish? Nobody knew.
Every now and then someone would make a call to some secondary source they knew in Gaza or on the border, and rumors would spread like wildfire across the masses. "At noon-they say at noon there is a possibility it will open! Patience, patience!".
And then we wait some more.
One man, frustrated, took his bags and began to push them back on a trolley and out through the throngs of exhausted passengers.
"Where the hell do you think you're going??" bellowed one of the Egyptian officers.
"To Jerusalem! Where do you think??" he snapped.
It was nearing the end of our long day, and overcome by exhaustion, we didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
A friend in the UN told me the Europeans had left their posts after yesterday's "incidents" and thus the Palestinian side of the crossing has shut down indefinitely now.
Rice is scheduled to come for talks with Abbas and Israel today, to discuss extending the "truce" to the West Bank, and re-implenting the lost Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA), which she one brokered one year ago this month. IT was supposed to hand over control over Rafah, among other crossings, to Palestinians. The year has come and gone, and all of our crossings, our air, our water, and our lives, remain under Israeli control.
And so now, we return to square one. Back in Arish, waiting, as ever, for the border to open.
--
Laila M. El-Haddad
its been a while since I've written, mainly because I have taken to updating my blog, which I know many of you read.
But I've decided to take this opportunity to also update you on our situation by email.
As many of you know Yousuf and I, along with my parents, left the US to Gaza nearly 3 weeks ago. For two of those weeks, we have been stuck 50 km from the Rafah Crossing, in the face of an ongoing Israeli-imposed closure of the passage.
We are staying in the Egyptian border town of Al-Arish, but for the past two days, we were literally stuck on the Egyptian side of the crossing itself, waiting to be let through, after we-and thousands of others, recieved word about the imminent (temporary) opening of the crossing, which has been shut down by Israel since late June. It has only been opened for 20 days since that time.
We stood and we waited and we cried and we returned back to Egypt Wednesday, and again Thursday.
It was anguish. Anguish and misery and desperation personfied in every woman, man and child.
One hour turned into two, then three, then five, as we stood shielding our eyes from the piercing midday sun on Wednesday, when we were told the Crossing would be opening for a few hours.
Some wailed in exhaustion, others fainted, still others cracked dry humor, trying to pass the time. We stood, thousands of us, packed together elbow to elbow like cattle, penned in between steel barriers on one end, and riot-geared Egyptian security guards on the perimeter, who were given orders not to allow anyone through until they hear otherwise from the Israelis-and to respond with force if anyone dared.
Many of the people had been waiting for more than two weeks to cross back into Gaza, sometimes making the trip to the crossing several times a day upon receiving word of its imminent opening.
"We have been waiting for 15 days now. Only god knows when it will open-today, tomorrow, the day after?" said 57-year-old Abu Yousuf Barghut, his shrapnel-riddled arm trembling by his side.
His tearful wife, Aisha, added: "God knows we only went to seek treatment for him and to come right back. And now we are stuck and waiting us in Gaza are my four children. This is the most basic of rights-to be able to return to our homes, and we are even denied that."
"The only way anyone will actually pay attention to our plight is if one of us dies here, and even then, I'm not sure the world will care," stammered one young man, Isam Shaksu, his eye heavily bandaged after having received an corneal implantation in Jordan.
In July, seven Palestinians waiting to be let into Gaza from Egypt died waiting to cross Rafah.
The Crossing is Gaza's gateway to the world-and the only passagway in and out of the area for 1.4 million Palestinians. Without it, Palestinian cannot seek medical treatment unavailable in Gaza; cannot re-unite with family members or attend universities or jobs abroad; and those on the outside cannot return home. There is simply no other way into Gaza for residents of the the Strip: our only airport's runway was destroyed in 2001, and Israel denies us access to other borders passages through Israel or the West Bank.
After the hours and the sun, one would have thought the black steel gates ahead of us were the gates to Heaven, but in fact they only led to more masses, more waiting, more hell.
There is something you feel as you stand there, and sometimes squatted, for hours at a time, waiting to be let through the Egyptian side of Rafah Crossing. It is something of your humanity slowing drifting away. It is gradual, but unmistakable.
And you are never quite the same again.
There were mixed Israeli orders-first to open the crossing for three days, starting Wedneday, yesterday; then breaking news at 11pm retracted that order, and by Wednesday morning, another about-face saying that the border would in fact be opened. By the time we arrived, it was 11am, and already somewhere around 2000 has amassed in front of the gates. And no one was budging.
Yousuf waited along with us, asking incessantly "When would the crossing open??", and begging me to pose the same quetion to the Egyptian officers manning it. Everytime he'd see the gate budge open he would get excited and yell "Its open!! Its open!!". And everyone would heave a heavy sigh.
When we finally did make it inside the "Second sector" of the Egyptian side, the relief was overwhelming-we had moved 50 metres!! And we could wait another four hours if it meant we'd finally be allowed through. But instead we faced yet another uncertain wait; it was like some sadistic game with no certain ending.
As we waited, we saw members of the Palestinian athletic teams heading to the Asian games after a two week delay.
We also saw Ismail Haniya on his way out to his Arab tour. He stopped to mingle with the desperate crowds, some hailing him, some complaining about how long they had waited.
We finally learned that the crossing had been closed this entire time, and the Egyptians were only allowing people through to give them some hope to cling on to-and to prevent the masses from rioting, which has happened before.
We thought once he'd passed, we'd be allowed through. But it is then we learned that Mahmud Zahar had crossed earlier that morning-carrying suitcases full of $20 million .
The European Monitors-whom the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights have accused of contributing to the strangulation of Gaza- were not pleased. How could he not declare the money, and how could he have the audacity to try and bring in money to feed his peole in the first place??
They filed a "complaint" with the Israelis, who immediately told them to shut down the crossing, without giving a reason, leaving thousands-including Yousuf, my parents and I, stranded.
My mother and Yousuf had gone ahead of my father and I-and our bags-into the terminal, and Yousuf fell asleep in the mosque. It was then that the officers had informed us the crossing was no longer operational-and everyone who was inside, even those who had already made it as far as the Palestinian side, would have to go back.
we pleaded with an Egyptian Officer: "It took us 6 hours to get as far the inside of the terminal, please let us through".
"Big deal-it took me ten hours to get here from Cairo," he retorted, as I reminded myself they get paid a measly 180 Egyptian pounds a month and couldn't care less.
Another officer was more sympathetic.
"What you lot have to understand is that no one gives a damn what happens to you-you could sit here and suffocate for all they care. You are simply not human enough for them to care."
When is it that we lost our humanity, I wondered? And when is it that the humanity and desperation of a people, waiting desperately to be let through to their homes, was less important than the call of duty? And that a government was made to choose between feeding their own people, or giving them passage to their homes?
Inside the terminal, the scenes were dizzying. Already disoriented form lack of sleep and little food, I looked around in awe. It was nothing short of an interment camp, and I lost myself somewhere between the silent anguish of old men, aching, teary eyed-women on the verge of collapse, and children, some strewn across the floor in exhaustion, others who were sick, in wheelchairs, wailing...
We returned to Arish, exhausted and sleep deprived, only to find that all of the apartments were occupied by returning passengers. The only flat we found was one without hot water and leaky ceiling pipes, but we couldn't care less. By 9pm we were all out.
The next morning, we left again to the border-where we had left our suitcases-despite word from taxi drivers that the crossing would not open. We waited again, this time for only 5 hours, until we decided it was an exercise in futility.
Everyone was looking for answers-some answers, any answers. When would the crossing open? Was there hope it would open today? If so, what time? Should we wait, should we return to Arish? Nobody knew.
Every now and then someone would make a call to some secondary source they knew in Gaza or on the border, and rumors would spread like wildfire across the masses. "At noon-they say at noon there is a possibility it will open! Patience, patience!".
And then we wait some more.
One man, frustrated, took his bags and began to push them back on a trolley and out through the throngs of exhausted passengers.
"Where the hell do you think you're going??" bellowed one of the Egyptian officers.
"To Jerusalem! Where do you think??" he snapped.
It was nearing the end of our long day, and overcome by exhaustion, we didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
A friend in the UN told me the Europeans had left their posts after yesterday's "incidents" and thus the Palestinian side of the crossing has shut down indefinitely now.
Rice is scheduled to come for talks with Abbas and Israel today, to discuss extending the "truce" to the West Bank, and re-implenting the lost Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA), which she one brokered one year ago this month. IT was supposed to hand over control over Rafah, among other crossings, to Palestinians. The year has come and gone, and all of our crossings, our air, our water, and our lives, remain under Israeli control.
And so now, we return to square one. Back in Arish, waiting, as ever, for the border to open.
--
Laila M. El-Haddad
APARTHEID: Israelis adopt what South Africa dropped.
By JOHN DUGARD; 29 Nov. 2006
EXCERPT: Following the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, one might expect a similarly concerted international effort united in opposition to Israel's abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians. Instead one finds an international community divided between the West and the rest of the world. The Security Council is prevented from taking action because of the U.S. veto and European Union abstinence. And the United States and the European Union, acting in collusion with the United Nations and the Russian Federation, have in effect imposed economic sanctions on the Palestinian people for having, by democratic means, elected a government deemed unacceptable to Israel and the West. Forgotten is the commitment to putting an end to occupation, colonization and apartheid.
Former President Jimmy Carter's new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," is igniting controversy for its allegation that Israel practices a form of apartheid. As a South African and former anti-apartheid advocate who visits the Palestinian territories regularly to assess the human rights situation for the U.N. Human Rights Council, the comparison to South African apartheid is of special interest to me. On the face of it, the two regimes are very different. Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial discrimination that the white minority in South Africa employed to maintain power over the black majority. It was characterized by the denial of political rights to blacks, the fragmentation of the country into white areas and black areas (called Bantustans) and by the imposition on blacks of restrictive measures designed to achieve white superiority, racial separation and white security.
The "pass system," which sought to prevent the free movement of blacks and to restrict their entry to the cities, was rigorously enforced. Blacks were forcibly "relocated," and they were denied access to most public amenities and to many forms of employment. The system was enforced by a brutal security apparatus in which torture played a significant role.
The Palestinian territories — East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza — have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Although military occupation is tolerated and regulated by international law, it is considered an undesirable regime that should be ended as soon as possible. The United Nations for nearly 40 years has condemned Israel's military occupation, together with colonialism and apartheid, as contrary to the international public order.
In principle, the purpose of military occupation is different from that of apartheid. It is not designed as a long-term oppressive regime but as an interim measure that maintains law and order in a territory following an armed conflict and pending a peace settlement. But this is not the nature of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Since 1967 Israel has imposed its control over the Palestinian territories in the manner of a colonizing power, under the guise of occupation. It has permanently seized the territories' most desirable parts — the holy sites in East Jerusalem, Hebron and Bethlehem and the fertile agricultural lands along the western border and in the Jordan Valley — and settled its own Jewish "colonists" throughout the land.
Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories has many features of colonization. At the same time it has many of the worst characteristics of apartheid. The West Bank has been fragmented into three areas -north (Jenin and Nablus), center (Ramallah) and south (Hebron) - which increasingly resemble the Bantustans of South Africa.
Restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by a rigid permit system enforced by some 520 checkpoints and roadblocks resemble, but in severity go well beyond, apartheid's "pass system." And the security apparatus is reminiscent of that of apartheid, with more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons and frequent allegations of torture and cruel treatment.
Many aspects of Israel's occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel's large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites.
Following the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, one might expect a similarly concerted international effort united in opposition to Israel's abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians. Instead one finds an international community divided between the West and the rest of the world. The Security Council is prevented from taking action because of the U.S. veto and European Union abstinence. And the United States and the European Union, acting in collusion with the United Nations and the Russian Federation, have in effect imposed economic sanctions on the Palestinian people for having, by democratic means, elected a government deemed unacceptable to Israel and the West. Forgotten is the commitment to putting an end to occupation, colonization and apartheid.
In these circumstances, the United States should not be surprised if the rest of the world begins to lose faith in its commitment to human rights. Some Americans — rightly — complain that other countries are unconcerned about Sudan's violence-torn Darfur region and similar situations in the world. But while the United States itself maintains a double standard with respect to Palestine it cannot expect cooperation from others in the struggle for human rights.
John Dugard is a South African law professor teaching in the Netherlands. He is currently Special Rapporteur on Palestine to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
EXCERPT: Following the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, one might expect a similarly concerted international effort united in opposition to Israel's abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians. Instead one finds an international community divided between the West and the rest of the world. The Security Council is prevented from taking action because of the U.S. veto and European Union abstinence. And the United States and the European Union, acting in collusion with the United Nations and the Russian Federation, have in effect imposed economic sanctions on the Palestinian people for having, by democratic means, elected a government deemed unacceptable to Israel and the West. Forgotten is the commitment to putting an end to occupation, colonization and apartheid.
Former President Jimmy Carter's new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," is igniting controversy for its allegation that Israel practices a form of apartheid. As a South African and former anti-apartheid advocate who visits the Palestinian territories regularly to assess the human rights situation for the U.N. Human Rights Council, the comparison to South African apartheid is of special interest to me. On the face of it, the two regimes are very different. Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial discrimination that the white minority in South Africa employed to maintain power over the black majority. It was characterized by the denial of political rights to blacks, the fragmentation of the country into white areas and black areas (called Bantustans) and by the imposition on blacks of restrictive measures designed to achieve white superiority, racial separation and white security.
The "pass system," which sought to prevent the free movement of blacks and to restrict their entry to the cities, was rigorously enforced. Blacks were forcibly "relocated," and they were denied access to most public amenities and to many forms of employment. The system was enforced by a brutal security apparatus in which torture played a significant role.
The Palestinian territories — East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza — have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Although military occupation is tolerated and regulated by international law, it is considered an undesirable regime that should be ended as soon as possible. The United Nations for nearly 40 years has condemned Israel's military occupation, together with colonialism and apartheid, as contrary to the international public order.
In principle, the purpose of military occupation is different from that of apartheid. It is not designed as a long-term oppressive regime but as an interim measure that maintains law and order in a territory following an armed conflict and pending a peace settlement. But this is not the nature of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Since 1967 Israel has imposed its control over the Palestinian territories in the manner of a colonizing power, under the guise of occupation. It has permanently seized the territories' most desirable parts — the holy sites in East Jerusalem, Hebron and Bethlehem and the fertile agricultural lands along the western border and in the Jordan Valley — and settled its own Jewish "colonists" throughout the land.
Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories has many features of colonization. At the same time it has many of the worst characteristics of apartheid. The West Bank has been fragmented into three areas -north (Jenin and Nablus), center (Ramallah) and south (Hebron) - which increasingly resemble the Bantustans of South Africa.
Restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by a rigid permit system enforced by some 520 checkpoints and roadblocks resemble, but in severity go well beyond, apartheid's "pass system." And the security apparatus is reminiscent of that of apartheid, with more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons and frequent allegations of torture and cruel treatment.
Many aspects of Israel's occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel's large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites.
Following the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, one might expect a similarly concerted international effort united in opposition to Israel's abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians. Instead one finds an international community divided between the West and the rest of the world. The Security Council is prevented from taking action because of the U.S. veto and European Union abstinence. And the United States and the European Union, acting in collusion with the United Nations and the Russian Federation, have in effect imposed economic sanctions on the Palestinian people for having, by democratic means, elected a government deemed unacceptable to Israel and the West. Forgotten is the commitment to putting an end to occupation, colonization and apartheid.
In these circumstances, the United States should not be surprised if the rest of the world begins to lose faith in its commitment to human rights. Some Americans — rightly — complain that other countries are unconcerned about Sudan's violence-torn Darfur region and similar situations in the world. But while the United States itself maintains a double standard with respect to Palestine it cannot expect cooperation from others in the struggle for human rights.
John Dugard is a South African law professor teaching in the Netherlands. He is currently Special Rapporteur on Palestine to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
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