FEBRUARY/MARCH 2006
The
land grab....
“A group of high-ranking Israeli reserve
officers who reject the plan for the lower fence toured
the area yesterday. ‘It has no security
significance," said Colonel (res.) Shaul Arieli, who
added that "the real intent is to separate the
populations and gradually take control of the area, and
to annex them in the future to Israel. This is
nothing but a land grab.’”
Adding insult to
injury
By Nir Hasson
http://www.haaretz.com
In addition to the separation fence along the so-called
seam line in the southern Hebron Hills another low
barrier is to be erected in Palestinian lands. The
Palestinians fear this will mean that more than 3,000 of
the cave-dwelling residents in the area will find
themselves confined in an enclave.
The security reasons behind the construction of the
second fence is to prevent access by Palestinian vehicles
to a road used by settlers, and to allow closure of the
four gates to be constructed in the fence if warning of a
terror attack is received.
The original route of the separation fence now under
construction in the southern Hebron Hills pushed into
Palestinian territory east of the Green Line by as much
as eight kilometers, and was slated to encompass all
settlements in the area.
Following a High Court of Justice ruling and the cabinet
decision of February 2005, the route was changed and was
to follow the Green Line closely.
However, it still contains three enclaves that surround
three settlements near the Green Line: Eshkolot, Sansana
and Metzudot Yehuda (Beit Yatir).
The latter is near the illegal outpost known as the
Yaakov Ranch or Yatir Ranch, also included within the
confines of the fence. This outpost was established in
1996 on 3,600 dunams (900 acres) of land by Yaakov Talia,
who lives there with his family and raises sheep.
According to the Talia Sasson report, government approval
was never given for the outpost.
"It is on the list of illegal outposts," Major
Eyal Toledano of the Civil Administration, wrote to
attorney Neta Amar of Shomrei-Mishpat - Rabbis For Human
Rights, who is representing the area's Palestinian
residents. However, Toledano added that the routing of
the separation fence is supposed to encompass the lands
that are higher up, and would do so even if the ranch did
not exist.
The separation fence will force cave-dwelling residents
of the village of Jimba to give up their pasturelands.
But today the Palestinians in the area are even more
worried about the lower "internal fence" - a
concrete barrier that is 82 centimeters high and 25
kilometers long, which is being erected parallel to the
road connecting the settlement of Carmel to the Shim'a
junction.
This means that thousands of residents living in 18
villages will be pushed into the enclave located between
the separation fence and the new barrier, and they will
be cut off from the village of Yata, where their schools,
clinics and shops are located, and where the trucks
supplying them with water come from.
'Land grab'
A group of high-ranking reserve officers who reject the
plan for the lower fence toured the area yesterday.
"It has no security significance," said Colonel
(res.) Shaul Arieli, who added that "the real intent
is to separate the populations and gradually take control
of the area, and to annex them in the future to Israel.
This is nothing but a land grab."
Last week, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel
(ACRI) submitted a petition to the High Court concerning
the taking over of land as part of the internal fence
plan. This morning, Rabbis for Human Rights are to submit
another petition, including an affidavit addressing the
potential for ecological damage.
The human rights organization B'Tselem views the new
barrier as a way of going back to the old separation
fence route "by the back door." According to
the head of research for the organization, Yehezkel Lein,
"Israel wants to move ahead with settlements, while
appearing to be moving the fence out of consideration for
the Palestinians."
"The route of the fence in the area of Metzudot
Yehuda took into account that Yatir Ranch was established
legally but with construction irregularities," the
Defense Ministry responded. "The route of the
[separation] fence was significantly changed following
the cabinet decision and has moved closer to the Green
Line to minimize harm to Palestinian rights, in spite of
the limitations on defense of residents of Israel,
including the settlements of Carmel, Ma'on, Shim'a,
Sussia and Tene, which are outside the fence ... The
fence in question is a low concrete barrier, with
openings for passage of local residents ... [It] will
allow those passing through to be channeled to certain
points to allow for checks in case of an alert or
security event."
Watching the Dissolution of Palestine
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Oxford, England.
For those who haven't noticed, Israel opposes a two-state solution. It has been doing everything in its power to prevent a Palestinian state from emerging and will continue to do so as long as it can count on the complicity of its powerful friends and on abundant popular indifference. Under such circumstances, it is incumbent upon ourselves to ask why Hamas has therefore been ordered - by Israel and its same powerful friends --to accept "the two-state solution" especially when, unlike Israel, it has stated clearly and repeatedly that it would accept a Palestinian state on the lands occupied by Israel in the 1967 war, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Indeed, all of its key spokespeople have said this:Zahar, Haniye, Meshal, and Yassin and Rantisi before they were murdered.
Judea and Samaria which are, or were, the northern and southern West Bank, have been subdivided and parceled out over decades to hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers for their houses and orchards and gardens. They have been crisscrossed and circled with Jewish-only roads that bind the land, the houses and orchards and gardens, to Israel. They have been manned with guards and gunmen and tanks and blue and white Israeli flags that defend, protect and assure the settlers, their houses and orchards and gardens, that they are in fact Israelis belonging to a single Jewish state.
The settled lands with their settler families, their houses and gardens, shops and schools, clubs and cafes and pools, have been mapped and assigned, seized and secured from the Arabs in the shabby clothes in the rundown villages who live outside of, or have been forced to leave, the protected colonial zones. The projected frontiers, the future borders, depend on the disappearance of these Arabs, which is anxiously anticipated and actively encouraged. Most of the eastern perimeter of the current state is a concrete wall erasing from view that Other Side, which is unmentionable in polite company. The eastern perimeter wall will soon be the western perimeter wall because the acting Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has just announced that the rest of the unincorporated West Bank land will soon be annexed to Israel: The Jordan Valley, the West Bank's border with the state of Jordan, now to be Israel's eastern border with the state of Jordan, will also be secured by the wall and off-limits to "non-Israelis," meaning Palestinians, who will then be fully encircled in their stagnant reservations unable to access the outside world.
In the same breath as he announces this latest unilateral declaration of confiscated land for a Jewish State, Olmert announces a sanctions regime against the Palestinians of the occupied territories for refusing to believe that this land transformation in which one society is strengthened and expanded and the other is dissolved into a thousand pieces is actually the two-state solution.
Israel allots to itself first use of the natural resources, especially water, from the territory it has appropriated or surrounded. An army of thieves and wreckers has turned the remainder -- the pot-holed roads, the untended groves, the homes, the schools, the mosques and churches, the hospitals, universities, shops and remaining civil institutions -- into a series of impassable mazes, a legal no-man's-land, where travel restrictions, permits, coded IDs, passes, random searches, incursions and arbitrary accusations reduce the inhabitants into suspicious beings without names, faces, addresses or rights; a collective villain to be de-educated and de-nationalized and, one day perhaps, deported for the sake of the Israeli raison d'etre. It is becoming as difficult for travelers from abroad to visit the occupied territories as it is for the rightful inhabitants to move freely among them. It is therefore more difficult for outsiders to corroborate that the dangers they are warned against come directly from Israel, not the hapless people they have besieged. The daily threat to life and property is growing, not abating.
For those who haven't noticed, there is no sign of this process coming to an end. Instead, in addition to the bizarre demand that Hamas accept the two-state solution that Israel has categorically rejected and each day renders even more geographically impossible, another two demands are added to it: Hamas must recognize Israel and it must renounce violence. In other words, it must recognize a state whose policies and whose leaders have worked tirelessly for decades to deny, undo, renounce, prevent and reject the existence both of Palestinians and of Palestine -- not only in the present and future but also through erasing the past. Still, our media take it upon themselves to show the world a circus-mirror reality, grotesque in its distortions, in which a democratically elected government-without-a-state and its trampled, largely destitute people are made out to be holding hostage the hoodlums that are busy stomping them to death.
While they are being stomped, shot, beaten, demolished, assassinated, intimidated, robbed, despoiled, starved, uprooted, dispossessed, harassed, insulted and killed with bullets, missiles, armored bulldozers, tanks, helicopter gun-ships, cluster-bombs, fleshettes, fighter-bombers, semi-automatic submachine guns, sonic booms, tear gas, electrified fences, blockades, closures and walls, they must renounce violence so that the hoodlums won't get hurt. If they defend themselves they lose. If they complain, they are insincere; if they ask for something in return, they are untrustworthy; If they ask for a fair hearing, they are advancing an "agenda"; If they hit back randomly, they are an instrument of terror. So when the furies of the thousands of dead, tens of thousands of wounded and detained, and millions of bound and gagged rise up together in a whirlwind to protest, they will be pointed to as evidence of innate evil that must justifiably be contained, justifiably occupied, with justified indignation and bottomless financial aid.
Hamas' reward for coming to power just in time to provide all the aspiring Sharons the most perfect, served-up-on-a-silver-platter pretext for continuing their well-worn policies with a vengeance, has been for the Kadima party -- the party of the future-- to announce that it will put the Palestinians on a starvation diet for presuming to exercise their rights. Hamas' reward for verifying the smashing success of Israel's goal to destroy Fatah has been Israel's insistence that it abide by all the agreements, treaties and accords that Fatah, essentially the PA, signed but which Israel shredded page by page. With every new brick laid for the settlements, every new road paved to Ariel, Maale Adumim, Illit, Gush Etzion and beyond, with every permit denied for work, education, medical care and travel, every truck left waiting with rotting produce at Sufa and Karni, every tax and customs dollar stolen from a people interned on their own land, Israel parades its contempt for human decency and gets standing ovations in the US Congress and elsewhere.
When Osama Bin Laden opines that it is legitimate for al-Qaida to murder Americans because, as citizens in a democratic country, they are responsible for their government, "civilized" society erupts, appropriately, in indignation. When Dov Weisglass and his smug, sadistic associates advocate appalling varieties of collective punishment against Palestinians for having had the audacity to democratically replace the failed Fatah with Hamas, "civilized" society nods its head in sanctimonious approval.
For those who haven't noticed, Israel opposes a two-state solution. It also opposes a one-state and a bi-national state, a federated secular state, and the zillion interim-state solutions that have been drawn up and debated and argued over the years. It opposes them because it opposes the presence of another people on land it has claimed as the exclusive patrimony of the Jews. This has to be the starting point for effective activism against the racist and hegemonic vision that Israel is implementing and the US guaranteeing, not faraway discussions on the most ideal solution. An effective opposition must not retreat into a slumbering or sidetracked lethal indifference.
Jennifer Loewenstein is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University's Refugee Studies Centre. She has lived and worked in Gaza City, Beirut and Jerusalem and has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, where she has worked as a free-lance journalist and a human-rights activist. She can be reached at: amadea311@earthlink.net
=========================
The International Solidarity Movement
(ISM) is inviting volunteers to come to Palestine for a
conference on Joint Nonviolent Struggle in Bil'in and for
ISM's Spring campaign
The Bil'in Conference will take place February 20 &
21, 2006.
ISM's spring campaign will take place between March 1st
and April 23rd, 2006.
Come for a week, a month or two months. Volunteer
training sessions will take place every Sunday and
Monday.
ISM needs volunteers to support Bil'in and other west
bank village's nonviolent resistance. We also need
volunteers to serve as human rights monitors in the
Hebron neighborhood of Tel Rumeida, where Palestinian
children are harassed on their way to school daily by
settlers, and in the small village of Qawawis, where
shepherds and farmers face regular intimidation from
soldiers and the occupants of three surrounding hilltop
settlements. Last but not least we need volunteers in the
ISM media office doing support work for activists out in
the field.
For the last year our West Bank village of Bil'in has
campaigned nonviolently to save our land chaining
ourselves to olive trees, locking ourselves to tree
roots, lying in front of bulldozers, and tyng our hands
together in front of jeeps. We even established the first
Palestinian outpost on our land beyond the wall, 100
meters from several Israeli settlements also built on our
land. The Israeli soldiers have responded with violence -
tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets, live ammunition,
arrests, beatings and curfews. Still, some days we reach
our goal.
The media paints a confusing picture as to who are the
victims and who are the aggressors here. Focusing on
armed Palestinian resistance, the media portrays the
conflict as a struggle between two armies. But there is
really only one army (Israel's) against one people (the
Palestinians) and we want the world to see this.
According to the fourth Geneva Convention as an occupied
people we have the right to resist Israeli occupation
under international law, even by violent means. However,
when we use nonviolent resistance, Israel's weapons lose
their power. When I face a soldier with nothing in my
hand, the soldier is forced not to use his weapon. If he
uses it, he shows the world that we are being attacked
for opposing the theft of our land. When we protest
peacefully, we are equal because we cancel out the
soldier's power.
Though Bil'in sits inside the West Bank, 2 miles east of
the Green Line, Israel is building its Wall on our land,
seizing 57% of our village's land to expand two
settlements. We have depended on this land to feed our
families for generations.
The leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad participated in
two protests here, marching in nonviolent demonstrations
with Israeli activists. Hamas leader Hassan Youssef told
the Israeli newspaper Haaretz Daily that if they see that
this kind of demonstration can end Israel's occupation,
and then they will do it. So we in Bil'in and other
villages chose nonviolent resistance to show that it can
end the occupation.
We will continue to try and touch the soldiers' humanity.
There will never be security for any of us unless the
Israeli people respect our rights to this land, end the
occupation, and let us achieve our freedom.
But we need help. If the Palestinian people saw more
support from the international community, from ordinary
people and governments, many more would choose this path.
We hope that the power of people who believe in peace
between these two peoples will prevail.
-Mohammed Khatib, member of the popular committee against
the wall in Bil'in
For more information on joining the ISM see: "Join
us in Palestine":
www.palsolidarity.org/main/join/
Women`s
Organization for Political Prisoners (WOFPP)
P.O. Box 31811,
Tel Aviv
Tel.
+972-3-5227124
Fax:
+972-3-5299771
E-mail: trn1@zahav.net.il
Newsletter January 2006
Hasharon Prison
There are 106 Palestinian
political women prisoners in Hasharon at the present.
Now in wintertime it is
very cold in the cells. The prisoners cannot use their
heaters because of lack of electric power. Some of the
women have only two blankets instead of the six actually
permitted,because the procedure of bringing them is too
complicated due to the twisted prison bureaucracy.
The women living on the
first and second floor are still suffering from the
wetness dripping into the rooms. The month of January was
particularly cold and rainy.
The food is practically
inedible: it is very bad and dirty and sometimes even
rotten. Therefore they have to buy most of their food in
the canteen. The families are not allowed to bring any
foodstuff.
When family visits are
taking place, the visiting room is extremely crowded
because about fifteen families are there at the same
time.
The dental care is
totally inadequate. Even when complaining of acute
problems the women have to wait up to six months.
At the end of December
the sports equipment provided by The Palestinian
Authority on
The women are very
concerned by rumours the prison authorities are spreading
that some women or all the women will be transferred
either back to Neve Tirtza or to some other jail.
On
On 22 December 2005, Nivin
Shweiky, 20 years old, from Hebron , Shifaa
elQudsy, 22 years old, from Tulkarem, Arij
Bader and 'Aisha Sabihat, 21 years old, from
Jenin, appeared before the Parole Board to request early
release. Only 'Aisha Sahihat, was granted early
release, and she was released on
On
Before the court session
started, dozens of peace activists, invited by WOFPP,
demonstrated in front of the court building asking to
release Manal and all the political prisoners.
New Prisoners
Etaf 'Alyan, 42
years old, from Ramallah, mother of a 16 months old baby,
a previous longtime prisoner who had been released in
1997, was re-arrested in1998 and held in
administrative detention. She was arrested again on
Fathia Birawi from
'Asira Shamalyia, Ramallah District, was detained in
December 2005.
Neve Tirza Prison
There are four women
political prisoners in Neve Tirza at present.
The recreation time is
limited to two or even one and a half hours, depending on
the arbitrary decision of the wardens.
The families are not
allowed to bring material for handicraft.
The women suffer from
fungus on their skin which does not heal in spite of
treatment, due to dampness and the lack of air and sun.
The WOFPP lawyer, Taghrid
Jahshan, who met some prisoners in the visiting room said
that she could hardly discern the face of the woman she
was talking to because the glass partition was so dirty.
This is obviously also a great discomfort for the
families when visiting their relative.
On 22 December, Tali
Fahima was sentenced to three years in prison. She
had been arrested on
Taghrid, the lawyer of
WOFPP, who has asked to meet Tali Fahima in Neve
Tirtza did not get the permission to visit her, but was
not given any reason for the refusal.
New Profile Movement for the
Civil-ization of Israeli Society
www.newprofile.org
from: tirtza tauber