Boycott israHell!
Бойкот на израел и печелещите от окупацията! Boycott israHell and those who profit from occupation!
Showing posts with label refugees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label refugees. Show all posts
Thursday, October 18, 2012
New challenges for refugee children
UNICEF reports on how Palestinian children fleeing conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic face new challenges at a refugee camp in Lebanon.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Palestinian Nakba: Forever a memory
Palestinians around the world are marking the anniversary of the Nakba, the catastrophe that occurred when the state of Israel was established in 1948. The scale of the devastation was overwhelming: four in five Palestinian villages inside the borders of the new state were ethnically cleansed, an act of mass dispossession accompanied by atrocities. Around 95 per cent of new Jewish communities built between 1948-1953 were established on the land of expelled, denationalised Palestinians. Referring to these refugees, Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously said that "the old will die and the young will forget". In fact, rather than "forgetting", the Nakba has become one of the central foundations for activism by Palestinians - and their supporters - around the world. Why is the Nakba such a strong framework of analysis and action? Because rather than being an isolated historical event, it is an ongoing process of dispossession and colonial settlement. Over 60 years ago, actions taken by Israel's military and policies adopted by the legislature were designed to effect the transfer of land from Palestinian to Jewish ownership, removing as many of the former as possible. Since then, right up to today, this is the same logic at work in Israel's regime over Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Just recently it was revealed that Israel had denied residency rights to 140,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, in what Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz described as a "demographic policy" whose "sole purpose is to thin out the Palestinian population". One of the mechanisms Israel used to expropriate Palestinian land was the British Mandate-era "Land (Acquisition for Public Purposes) Ordinance". In 2010, the Knesset passed an amendment to this law that "confirms state ownership of land confiscated under this law, even where it has not been used to serve the original confiscation purpose". The Nakba is not finished. The Nakba continues as Bedouin Palestinian citizens watch their homes demolished to make way for Jewish settlement and forests, and as Palestinians are kept off 77.5 per cent of the Jordan Valley, part of what Human Rights Watch has called a "a two-tier system for the two populations". This continuation of policies informed by the "spirit" of 1948 (in the words of Gideon Levy) is how Palestinians understand what is happening to a fragmented population, from al-Arakib to the hills of the West Bank. A Nakba-shaped analysis is a corrective to the discourse promoted through the official peace process, a framework of "negotiations" between "two parties" over a territorial "conflict". Liberal Zionists too, ignore the Nakba - beyond patronising displays of "empathy"; they need the Green Line of 1967 "so as to render all that lies beyond it as temporary conquest", exempting them from having to confront "the historic legacy" of the ethnic cleansing in 1948. The centrality of 1948 is being embraced as part of a language and mode of resistance by Palestinians around the world. The fight of Palestinian citizens of Israel as a discriminated, segregated minority has evolved over the years - from emphasising "rights" to challenging the very legitimacy of a Jewish state. The BDS call, endorsed and driven by Palestinians under military occupation, aims to bring an end to the injustices that began with the Nakba. This is what makes the Israeli government, and its apologists, so nervous: they know that 63 years on, contrary to Ben-Gurion's prediction, not only have subsequent generations of Palestinians remembered the Nakba, but their ongoing struggle for justice and equality is now understood and supported by growing numbers around the world. Ben White is a freelance journalist and writer, specialising in Palestine and Israel. His first book, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide, was published by Pluto Press in 2009, receiving praise from the likes of Desmond Tutu, Nur Masalha and Ghada Karmi. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. | ||
| http://english.aljazeera.net |
Friday, October 22, 2010
Free Ameer
| Every Human | ||
| To: Members in Every Human Has Rights | ||
Free Ameer Leading human rights activist from Israel, Ameer Makhoul is now entering his sixth month in jail in Israel after being accused of being a spy for Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, despite any evidence against him, without free access to lawyers and following torture under interrogation according to the Union of Arab Community Based Organisations. “My human dignity, basic human rights and constitutional rights are suffering from basic violations,” said Ameer Makhoul, who is a Palestinian citizen. Ameer goes on trial next week and so we need to get as many signatures from across the world to call for his release. Please share the link: http://www.everyhumanhasrights.org/component/content/article/107 And invite all you know to the Cause! |
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Gazans not allowed to rebuild their lives
Rami Almeghari writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 4 November 2009
Workers in Gaza remove rubble from last winter's attacks. With no construction materials being allowed into the besieged territory, much of Gaza remains devasted.
Azzam Salim used to be one of the leading construction contractors in the central Gaza Strip. Today, however, he spends most of his days idly chatting with other unemployed friends near a bank that he helped build several years ago.
"As a human first and foremost, I need to live normally like before. This situation is unprecedented -- before the siege was enforced here, I didn't have time to sit. But now things have changed, now we are professional talkers."
What prevents Salim from returning to work is the lack of raw building materials in the Gaza Strip, due to Israel's crippling Israeli blockade of the territory since June 2007. In March 2009, international donors including the US, Europe and Saudi Arabia met in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh pledging at least $4 billion to reconstruct Gaza following last winter's 22-day Israeli invasion of the territory. However, the promised funds have yet to reach Gaza as the international community continues to boycott the governing Hamas party.
"In order for us to rebuild houses, facilities, schools, mosques and other [buildings], we need basic building materials like cement, iron, aluminum, wood, plastic, etc. At the very least, we need cement and iron to start reconstruction immediately," said Salim.
According to local and international estimates, the Israeli assault on Gaza rendered tens of thousands of homes, schools, governmental buildings, mosques and other facilities either partially or completely destroyed. As a result, more than 51,000 residents are homeless.
"I used to live happily with my children in a regular house in the Jabaliya refugee camp, but now I live miserably in this tent, where even animals could not get by. We appeal for help that will rid us of this miserable life," said Mahmoud Abu Alanzain, a displaced father of three children, while in his tent in the al-Rayan refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. The tents were set up as temporary shelter after the fighting stopped.
The al-Rayan refugee camp in northern Gaza.
Hundreds of families in Gaza are in a situation similar to Abu Alanzain's. Many of those whose houses were partially or completely destroyed are now staying in newly established camps, rented apartments or with relatives or friends.
Another scene of destruction in the coastal enclave is that of the local universities. Israeli shelling targeted the Islamic University and al-Aqsa University's agricultural school.
"We in the Islamic University of Gaza have lost a significant scientific laboratory building because of the bombing by Israeli warplanes. This laboratory used to serve not only the university's tests, but also those of other sectors of the Gaza community such as the agricultural or water sectors. We used to perform needed tests for poisonous substances, checks that cannot be done, except in the university's laboratory," Dr. Kamalin Shaath, president of the Islamic University of Gaza, explained.
In recent weeks, the Hamas government undertook a widespread campaign to remove the rubble of destroyed buildings. Also, local engineers, based on the idea that need is the mother of invention, have begun using available materials like mud to rebuild some facilities.
"We have embarked on removing the ruins of knocked down buildings throughout Gaza, in an attempt to repair some of the damage, using mud. Unfortunately, our attempts have failed so far due to technical reasons. One of the main reasons is the fact that we don't have enough land space to build vertically, besides the lack of many essential raw materials such as electrical or sanitation supplies," said Dr. Yousef al-Mansi, minister of works and construction in Gaza.
Al-Mansi added that his ministry is willing to cooperate with any international body for the sake of reconstructing the war-torn Gaza Strip, but without preconditions designed to undermine Hamas' governance.
"It is unnecessary that we get cash into our hands; what is needed is that the reconstruction begins, so that the people can be housed again. We have given a chance for contractors, companies, institutions and countries to come and implement the reconstruction in coordination with us. For those who want to reconstruct, there are many clear means for them to start building, but we reject any political extortion. In the last war, we lost our children, our families and our homes; all we want is to live in dignity."
The US and European Union have boycotted Hamas since the party came to power in internationally monitored and recognized elections in 2006. They have placed demands on Hamas to recognize Israel as a "Jewish state," renounce violence and accept previously negotiated agreements.
Visibly frustrated, contractor Azzam Salim said, "I am so eager to return back to my work, it is like someone who is left in a desert without water."
Images by Rami Almeghari.
Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in the Gaza Strip.
Workers in Gaza remove rubble from last winter's attacks. With no construction materials being allowed into the besieged territory, much of Gaza remains devasted.
Azzam Salim used to be one of the leading construction contractors in the central Gaza Strip. Today, however, he spends most of his days idly chatting with other unemployed friends near a bank that he helped build several years ago.
"As a human first and foremost, I need to live normally like before. This situation is unprecedented -- before the siege was enforced here, I didn't have time to sit. But now things have changed, now we are professional talkers."
What prevents Salim from returning to work is the lack of raw building materials in the Gaza Strip, due to Israel's crippling Israeli blockade of the territory since June 2007. In March 2009, international donors including the US, Europe and Saudi Arabia met in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh pledging at least $4 billion to reconstruct Gaza following last winter's 22-day Israeli invasion of the territory. However, the promised funds have yet to reach Gaza as the international community continues to boycott the governing Hamas party.
"In order for us to rebuild houses, facilities, schools, mosques and other [buildings], we need basic building materials like cement, iron, aluminum, wood, plastic, etc. At the very least, we need cement and iron to start reconstruction immediately," said Salim.
According to local and international estimates, the Israeli assault on Gaza rendered tens of thousands of homes, schools, governmental buildings, mosques and other facilities either partially or completely destroyed. As a result, more than 51,000 residents are homeless.
"I used to live happily with my children in a regular house in the Jabaliya refugee camp, but now I live miserably in this tent, where even animals could not get by. We appeal for help that will rid us of this miserable life," said Mahmoud Abu Alanzain, a displaced father of three children, while in his tent in the al-Rayan refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. The tents were set up as temporary shelter after the fighting stopped.
The al-Rayan refugee camp in northern Gaza.
Hundreds of families in Gaza are in a situation similar to Abu Alanzain's. Many of those whose houses were partially or completely destroyed are now staying in newly established camps, rented apartments or with relatives or friends.
Another scene of destruction in the coastal enclave is that of the local universities. Israeli shelling targeted the Islamic University and al-Aqsa University's agricultural school.
"We in the Islamic University of Gaza have lost a significant scientific laboratory building because of the bombing by Israeli warplanes. This laboratory used to serve not only the university's tests, but also those of other sectors of the Gaza community such as the agricultural or water sectors. We used to perform needed tests for poisonous substances, checks that cannot be done, except in the university's laboratory," Dr. Kamalin Shaath, president of the Islamic University of Gaza, explained.
In recent weeks, the Hamas government undertook a widespread campaign to remove the rubble of destroyed buildings. Also, local engineers, based on the idea that need is the mother of invention, have begun using available materials like mud to rebuild some facilities.
"We have embarked on removing the ruins of knocked down buildings throughout Gaza, in an attempt to repair some of the damage, using mud. Unfortunately, our attempts have failed so far due to technical reasons. One of the main reasons is the fact that we don't have enough land space to build vertically, besides the lack of many essential raw materials such as electrical or sanitation supplies," said Dr. Yousef al-Mansi, minister of works and construction in Gaza.
Al-Mansi added that his ministry is willing to cooperate with any international body for the sake of reconstructing the war-torn Gaza Strip, but without preconditions designed to undermine Hamas' governance.
"It is unnecessary that we get cash into our hands; what is needed is that the reconstruction begins, so that the people can be housed again. We have given a chance for contractors, companies, institutions and countries to come and implement the reconstruction in coordination with us. For those who want to reconstruct, there are many clear means for them to start building, but we reject any political extortion. In the last war, we lost our children, our families and our homes; all we want is to live in dignity."
The US and European Union have boycotted Hamas since the party came to power in internationally monitored and recognized elections in 2006. They have placed demands on Hamas to recognize Israel as a "Jewish state," renounce violence and accept previously negotiated agreements.
Visibly frustrated, contractor Azzam Salim said, "I am so eager to return back to my work, it is like someone who is left in a desert without water."
Images by Rami Almeghari.
Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in the Gaza Strip.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Israel begins sell-off of refugees' land
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 17 August 2009
Abu Arab, 74, a refugee from the destroyed village of Saffuriya, stands in the village's surviving cemetery surrounded by the homes of a new Jewish community called Tzipori. The houses visible outside the cemetery are built on Abu Arab's parents' land. (Jonathan Cook)
Amin Muhammad Ali, a 74-year-old refugee from a destroyed Palestinian village in northern Israel, says he only feels truly at peace when he stands among his ancestors' graves.
The cemetery, surrounded on all sides by Jewish homes and farms, is a small time capsule, transporting Muhammad Ali -- known to everyone as Abu Arab -- back to the days when this place was known by an Arabic name, Saffuriya, rather than its current Hebrew name, Tzipori.
Unlike most of the Palestinian refugees forced outside Israel's borders by the 1948 war that led to the creation of the Jewish state, Abu Arab and his family fled nearby, to a neighborhood of Nazareth.
Refused the right to return to his childhood home, which was razed along with the rest of Saffuriya, he watched as the fields once owned by his parents were slowly taken over by Jewish immigrants, mostly from eastern Europe. Today only Saffuriya's cemetery remains untouched.
Despite the loss of their village, the 4,500 refugees from Saffuriya and their descendants have clung to one hope: that the Jewish newcomers could not buy their land, only lease it temporarily from the state.
According to international law, Israel holds the property of more than four million Palestinian refugees in custodianship, until a final peace deal determines whether some or all of them will be allowed back to their 400-plus destroyed Palestinian villages or are compensated for their loss.
But last week, in a violation of international law and the refugees' property rights that went unnoticed both inside Israel and abroad, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, forced through a revolutionary land reform.
The new law begins a process of creeping privatization of much of Israel's developed land, including refugee property, said Oren Yiftachel, a geographer at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva.
Netanyahu and the bill's supporters argue that the law will cut out a whole level of state bureaucracy, make land transactions simpler and more efficient and cut house prices.
In practice, it will mean that the 200 Jewish families of Tzipori will be able to buy their homes, including a new cluster of bungalows that is being completed on land next to the cemetery that belonged to Abu Arab's parents.
The privatization of Tzipori's refugee land will remove it from the control of an official known as the Custodian of Absentee Property, who is supposed to safeguard it for the refugees.
"Now the refugees will no longer have a single address -- Israel -- for our claims," said Abu Arab. "We will have to make our case individually against many hundreds of thousands of private homeowners."
He added: "Israel is like a thief who wants to hide his loot. Instead of putting the stolen goods in one box, he moves it to 700 different boxes so it cannot be found."
Netanyahu was given a rough ride by Israeli legislators over the reform, though concern about the refugees' rights was not among the reasons for their protests.
Last month, he had to pull the bill at the last minute as its defeat threatened to bring down the government. He forced it through on a second attempt last week but only after he had warned his coalition partners that they would be dismissed if they voted against it.
A broad coalition of opposition had formed to what was seen as a reversal of a central tenet of Zionism: that the territory Israel acquired in 1948 exists for the benefit not of Israelis but of Jews around the world.
In that spirit, Israel's founders nationalized not only the refugees' property but also vast swathes of land they confiscated from the remaining Palestinian minority who gained citizenship and now comprise a fifth of the population. By the 1970s, 93 percent of Israel's territory was in the hands of the state.
The disquiet provoked by Netanyahu's privatization came from a variety of sources: the religious right believes the law contravenes a Biblical injunction not to sell land promised by God; environmentalists are concerned that developers will tear apart the Israeli countryside; and Zionists publicly fear that oil-rich sheikhs from the Gulf will buy up the country.
Arguments from the Palestinian minority's leaders against the reform, meanwhile, were ignored -- until Hizballah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, added his voice at the weekend. In a statement, he warned that the law "validates and perpetuates the crime of land and property theft from the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Nakba."
Suhad Bishara, a lawyer from the Adalah legal center for Israel's Palestinian minority, said the law had been carefully drafted to ensure that foreigners, including wealthy sheikhs, cannot buy land inside Israel.
"Only Israeli citizens and anyone who can come to Israel under the Law of Return -- that is, any Jew -- can buy the lands on offer, so no 'foreigner' will be eligible."
Another provision in the law means that even internal refugees like Abu Arab, who has Israeli citizenship, will be prevented from buying back land that rightfully belongs to them, Bishara said.
"As is the case now in terms of leasing land," she explained, "admissibility to buy land in rural communities like Tzipori will be determined by a selection committee whose job it will be to frustrate applications from Arab citizens."
Supporters of the law have still had to allay the Jewish opposition's concerns. Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that only a tiny proportion of Israeli territory -- about four percent -- is up for privatization.
But, according to Yiftachel, who lobbied against the reform, that means about half of Israel's developed land will be available for purchase over the next few years. And he suspects privatization will not stop there.
"Once this red line has been crossed, there is nothing to stop the government passing another law next year approving the privatization of the rest of the developed areas," he said.
Bishara said among the first refugee properties that would be put on the market were those in Israel's cities, such as Jaffa, Acre, Tiberias, Haifa and Lod, followed by homes in many of the destroyed villages like Saffuriya.
She said Adalah was already preparing an appeal to the high court on behalf of the refugees, and if unsuccessful would then take the matter to international courts.
Adalah has received inquiries from hundreds of Palestinian refugees from around the world asking what they can do to stop Israel selling their properties.
"Many of them expressed an interest in suing Israel," she said.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
Abu Arab, 74, a refugee from the destroyed village of Saffuriya, stands in the village's surviving cemetery surrounded by the homes of a new Jewish community called Tzipori. The houses visible outside the cemetery are built on Abu Arab's parents' land. (Jonathan Cook)
Amin Muhammad Ali, a 74-year-old refugee from a destroyed Palestinian village in northern Israel, says he only feels truly at peace when he stands among his ancestors' graves.
The cemetery, surrounded on all sides by Jewish homes and farms, is a small time capsule, transporting Muhammad Ali -- known to everyone as Abu Arab -- back to the days when this place was known by an Arabic name, Saffuriya, rather than its current Hebrew name, Tzipori.
Unlike most of the Palestinian refugees forced outside Israel's borders by the 1948 war that led to the creation of the Jewish state, Abu Arab and his family fled nearby, to a neighborhood of Nazareth.
Refused the right to return to his childhood home, which was razed along with the rest of Saffuriya, he watched as the fields once owned by his parents were slowly taken over by Jewish immigrants, mostly from eastern Europe. Today only Saffuriya's cemetery remains untouched.
Despite the loss of their village, the 4,500 refugees from Saffuriya and their descendants have clung to one hope: that the Jewish newcomers could not buy their land, only lease it temporarily from the state.
According to international law, Israel holds the property of more than four million Palestinian refugees in custodianship, until a final peace deal determines whether some or all of them will be allowed back to their 400-plus destroyed Palestinian villages or are compensated for their loss.
But last week, in a violation of international law and the refugees' property rights that went unnoticed both inside Israel and abroad, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, forced through a revolutionary land reform.
The new law begins a process of creeping privatization of much of Israel's developed land, including refugee property, said Oren Yiftachel, a geographer at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva.
Netanyahu and the bill's supporters argue that the law will cut out a whole level of state bureaucracy, make land transactions simpler and more efficient and cut house prices.
In practice, it will mean that the 200 Jewish families of Tzipori will be able to buy their homes, including a new cluster of bungalows that is being completed on land next to the cemetery that belonged to Abu Arab's parents.
The privatization of Tzipori's refugee land will remove it from the control of an official known as the Custodian of Absentee Property, who is supposed to safeguard it for the refugees.
"Now the refugees will no longer have a single address -- Israel -- for our claims," said Abu Arab. "We will have to make our case individually against many hundreds of thousands of private homeowners."
He added: "Israel is like a thief who wants to hide his loot. Instead of putting the stolen goods in one box, he moves it to 700 different boxes so it cannot be found."
Netanyahu was given a rough ride by Israeli legislators over the reform, though concern about the refugees' rights was not among the reasons for their protests.
Last month, he had to pull the bill at the last minute as its defeat threatened to bring down the government. He forced it through on a second attempt last week but only after he had warned his coalition partners that they would be dismissed if they voted against it.
A broad coalition of opposition had formed to what was seen as a reversal of a central tenet of Zionism: that the territory Israel acquired in 1948 exists for the benefit not of Israelis but of Jews around the world.
In that spirit, Israel's founders nationalized not only the refugees' property but also vast swathes of land they confiscated from the remaining Palestinian minority who gained citizenship and now comprise a fifth of the population. By the 1970s, 93 percent of Israel's territory was in the hands of the state.
The disquiet provoked by Netanyahu's privatization came from a variety of sources: the religious right believes the law contravenes a Biblical injunction not to sell land promised by God; environmentalists are concerned that developers will tear apart the Israeli countryside; and Zionists publicly fear that oil-rich sheikhs from the Gulf will buy up the country.
Arguments from the Palestinian minority's leaders against the reform, meanwhile, were ignored -- until Hizballah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, added his voice at the weekend. In a statement, he warned that the law "validates and perpetuates the crime of land and property theft from the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Nakba."
Suhad Bishara, a lawyer from the Adalah legal center for Israel's Palestinian minority, said the law had been carefully drafted to ensure that foreigners, including wealthy sheikhs, cannot buy land inside Israel.
"Only Israeli citizens and anyone who can come to Israel under the Law of Return -- that is, any Jew -- can buy the lands on offer, so no 'foreigner' will be eligible."
Another provision in the law means that even internal refugees like Abu Arab, who has Israeli citizenship, will be prevented from buying back land that rightfully belongs to them, Bishara said.
"As is the case now in terms of leasing land," she explained, "admissibility to buy land in rural communities like Tzipori will be determined by a selection committee whose job it will be to frustrate applications from Arab citizens."
Supporters of the law have still had to allay the Jewish opposition's concerns. Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that only a tiny proportion of Israeli territory -- about four percent -- is up for privatization.
But, according to Yiftachel, who lobbied against the reform, that means about half of Israel's developed land will be available for purchase over the next few years. And he suspects privatization will not stop there.
"Once this red line has been crossed, there is nothing to stop the government passing another law next year approving the privatization of the rest of the developed areas," he said.
Bishara said among the first refugee properties that would be put on the market were those in Israel's cities, such as Jaffa, Acre, Tiberias, Haifa and Lod, followed by homes in many of the destroyed villages like Saffuriya.
She said Adalah was already preparing an appeal to the high court on behalf of the refugees, and if unsuccessful would then take the matter to international courts.
Adalah has received inquiries from hundreds of Palestinian refugees from around the world asking what they can do to stop Israel selling their properties.
"Many of them expressed an interest in suing Israel," she said.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Sheikh Jarrah residents refuse to be displaced
Marcey Gayer writing from occupied East Jerusalem, Live from Palestine, 10 July 2009
Umm Kamel's protest tent in East Jerusalem. (Marcey Gayer)
Fawzieh al-Kurd, 57, clad in black, spends her days on a promontory overlooking Tomb of Simon the Righteous in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Enduring the cold of winter and the summer's blazing sun, she relates her family's tragic story to visitors from around the world with dignity and resolve.
For 38 years al-Kurd, known to all as Umm Kamel, lived in a home with a tiled patio and garden directly above the tomb of Simon the Righteous. The neighborhood was constructed jointly by the Jordanian government and the United Nations in 1956 to provide temporary housing for 28 Palestinian refugee families who were forced to evacuate their homes during the 1948 war. In return for these homes, the families agreed not to claim further food benefits from the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA. After paying a symbolic rent of five piastres to the Jordanian government for three years, the houses were supposed to pass into the families' ownership. The residents have all the documents from that time and Umm Kamel says that in this house she and her husband Muhammad raised their five children and saw the birth of their 16 grandchildren. It was her intention to pass the house on to her descendants when she died. However, on 9 November 2008 it was all overturned. Without emotion, Umm Kamel related, "My life was blackened. I lost my home, my husband, my furniture, my future."
In the stealth of night, a specially-trained force of 500 Israeli police and border guards surrounded the neighborhood, blocking off all access and forcing any onlooker back into his home. At 3:30am they knocked brusquely on Umm Kamel's door as she was changing the urine tube for her diabetic husband. The urine tube went flying as four Israeli policewomen physically restrained her and forced her into the children's playground outside the walls of her home. The semi-paralyzed Muhammad was dragged out of the house by two burly policemen and deposited unceremoniously in the entranceway of the home of the nearest neighbors, the al-Sabbagh family, and he had a heart attack on the spot.
The women of the al-Sabbagh family ministered to Muhammad to the best of their abilities, but without medical resources they could not prevent the deterioration of his condition. They did manage to call an ambulance; however, it was not allowed to cross the police blockade. The men of the al-Sabbagh family then offered to carry the distressed man to the ambulance on their backs, but that request was also denied. Muhammad did not receive any medical attention until 10am when his sons who live in a village north of Jerusalem were permitted to enter the neighborhood and transport him to the hospital in their own car. Meanwhile, nationalist religious Jews from the Simon the Righteous compound arrived in a minivan and quickly began packing up the al-Kurd household, loading its contents into a waiting truck. With fervent singing and dancing, they rededicated the home as a Jewish household. An Israeli flag now flies from its roof.
The incident is part of Umm Kamel's long history of dispossession, dating from 1972. When she first arrived in the neighborhood in 1970 as a young bride, there was not one Jewish family there. The only Jewish-owned house, one that pre-dated the 1948 war -- when Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together in the same neighborhood -- remained unoccupied. Then the Council of Sephardic Jewry, using an Ottoman document from 1887, made claim to the area and pressured the residents to leave. While it is true that the Sephardic community has deep ties to the catacomb grave where many came to pray and ask blessings prior to 1948, some observers contend that the document is irrelevant since it only states that the Sephardic community had temporary use of the property, not ownership. Moreover, the residents' current lawyer claims that no comparable document was found in the Turkish archives in Ankara when he went there expressly to check on the document's authenticity, fortifying the assertion that the document itself is fraudulent.
The Israeli Land Registry nevertheless certified the document as valid in 1972. This decision was taken within the framework of the 1950 Law of Absentee Property, which revokes all claims of pre-1948 "absentee Arab property owners" (i.e., Palestinian refugees), while reestablishing title to property owned by Jews prior to 1948. After 10 years of acrimonious negotiation, the court recognized the land claim of the Council of Sephardic Jewry, with the residents of Sheikh Jarrah becoming its "protected tenants." The Sheikh Jarrah residents repudiated this revocation of their rights of ownership granted by the Jordanian government that was signed by their former Jewish lawyer supposedly without their prior consent. The family consequently refused to pay the rent demanded by the Council of Sephardic Jewry. Since 1982 this document has become the subject of intense litigation, with the Palestinian side continually bringing up more and more evidence to prove that the basis for accepting the Sephardic Council's claim of ownership is spurious. Saleh Abu Hussein, the residents' current lawyer, has presented the courts with records from the Registry of Property Taxes dating from 1927 indicating that Suleiman Hijazi, a Palestinian, paid the property taxes on the land and hence is its rightful owner. These documents seem impeccable, yet the court has so far refused to acknowledge them.
In the intervening years the Council of Sephardic Jewry tried to buy some of the Sheikh Jarrah houses outright, offering the residents astronomical sums for their simple homes. A few families accepted the offers and the neighborhood became sprinkled with nationalist religious settlers whose political agenda was to drive the remaining residents from their homes. The Jerusalem municipality hired a private security company to guard the Jewish homes and from a small observation post built on the crest of Nashashibi Street, a security guard armed with a submachine gun descends into the warrens and alleys of the neighborhood every half hour to check for signs of disturbance or suspicious objects. For this formerly peaceful Palestinian community, the constant surveillance is yet another intrusion into their private lives.
Meanwhile, the temporary homes built for the refugee community eventually became too small as the families grew, and the families received permits from the Jordanian government to enlarge them (Jordan administered the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, prior to Israel's occupation of the territory in 1967). Upon receiving permission from the Jordanian authorities, the al-Kurd family built a cement block appendage perpendicular to their house. In 1999, wanting to use this portion of the house as the matrimonial quarters of one of their sons, the al-Kurd family approached the Jerusalem municipality with a petition to resurface the extension with stone.
At the time they were told by an inspector working in the office that no permit was necessary as the extension's foundation already existed. However, when the improvement was completed, an inspector sent to reassess the value of the home for tax purposes delivered instead a court order requiring the family to appear at a hearing that very day regarding a structure built illegally on Jewish land. Feeling deceived, the al-Kurds nevertheless appeared in court and were ordered by the judge to seek an out-of-court settlement with the Sephardic Council. The Council offered the family several million dollars for their home, a price out of proportion to its market value. Conscious of the implications for the Palestinian people in general and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in particular, the al-Kurds refused to sell. The judge then ruled that the family had to seal the extension that they had formerly occupied and to pay fines of 28,000 shekels (the 1999 exchange rate was 4.14 shekels per US dollar) to the municipality and 120,000 shekels to the court, a sum that Umm Kamel is still paying off despite her forced eviction from the premises.
In 2001, Muhammad al-Kurd was receiving treatment in Hadassah Hospital when religious settlers using a falsified warrant broke into the sealed portion of the house and began living there. The family proceeded to sue the settler family and won; but at the time of the trial, that settler family moved out and a new one moved in, thus invalidating the results of the court procedure though continuing the illegal occupation. In July 2008, the al-Kurds received a letter from the Development Corporation for Rabbi Simon's Patrimony (Nachlat Shimon) stating that they had purchased the deed to the neighborhood from the Council of Sephardic Jewry and demanded that the al-Kurds immediately vacate the house that three generations of the family had lived in for more than 50 years. The Nachlat Shimon Corporation -- financed by American millionaire Irving Moskowitz, who has underwritten many controversial Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem -- indicated its intention to expand the study and prayer complex located in the catacombs of the original Nachlat Shimon compound. The plan was to bulldoze all the houses existing on the property and build 200 housing units complete with a shopping center for ultra-Orthodox Jewish families who would form the core of worshippers at the Tomb of Simon the Righteous.
At this point the al-Kurds realized the enormity of the forces arrayed against them. Umm Kamel broadcast a radio appeal "to all the kind-hearted people of the world" for help. Galvanizing Palestinian civil society, many non-governmental organizations responded to her call. One of the most visible organizations was the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which agreed to post international volunteers who would maintain a constant presence at the al-Kurd premises to help Umm Kamel nonviolently defend her home. If police attempted to evict the family, the activists intended to handcuff themselves to the door with heavy metal chains that they had coiled in huge circles on the patio. In the course of half a year, more than 200 individuals from all over the world camped out on the al-Kurd's patio.
During that time, many dignitaries like Kyler Kornweiller, the political attache to the American consulate, made solidarity visits. In the evenings the Sheikh Jarrah Defense Committee organized cultural events on the al-Kurd patio. Sometimes as many as 50 persons would be seated on the patio drinking sweet tea and bitter coffee, listening to presentations by local politicians or viewing performances of traditional Palestinian dance staged by neighborhood youth. On every occasion, Muhammad al-Kurd led the evening prayers followed by Umm Kamel, who spoke eloquently of her family's long struggle. In this atmosphere thick with festivity and apprehension, the settler family occupying the extension to the al-Kurd's house rarely appeared, preferring to shutter themselves behind closed blinds.
With the arrival of winter only five ISM activists remained to defend the home. When border guards surrounded the neighborhood one night, no one shouted out to warn them. Quickly overwhelmed by the massive force, the activists did not have the time to shackle themselves to the door of the house as planned. So the elderly al-Kurd couple did not resist. Two weeks after the seizure of his home, Muhammad al-Kurd died of a massive coronary attack. His body was laid in a flag-draped coffin in the empty field where Umm Kamel now has her tent. A solemn cortege proceeded on foot to al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City where thousands of mourners attended the funeral ceremony.
Umm Kamel insider her tent. (Marcey Gayer)
Yet, Umm Kamel's story does not end here. Israeli border police attempted to destroy her protest tent on six occasions and fined her each time. Once they even came with bulldozers and pockmarked the field with huge craters to prevent a tent from being positioned there. However, neighborhood youths began filling in the holes with shovels and within two weeks another tent was erected in time for the Eid al-Adha holiday. The entire neighborhood jubilantly participated in the celebration, providing generator-powered heaters to warm the tent on that cold December evening.
Having surrounded East Jerusalem with Jewish neighborhoods to prevent Palestinian expansion, the Israeli government is now creating Jewish wedges into Palestinian neighborhoods in order to preclude the division of the city as would be required by a two-state solution. The Nachlat Shimon Corporation's plan to expand the religious complex continues, and neighborhood families are displaced one at a time. Following Umm Kamel's eviction, two other families received eviction notices. The Hanoun family consists of three brothers, their wives, and 10 children. The Gawi family has four generations under one roof, 38 members in all. Both families are slated for eviction on 19 July and their cases also have a long history of unsuccessful litigation in the Israeli court system.
Well-versed in all the convoluted legal machinations of the struggle, Maher Hanoun recalls his family's sudden eviction in 2002 and the confiscation of all its furniture in a large-scale police operation similar to that undertaken against the al-Kurd family. This occurred despite that both the Hanoun and the Gawi families paid a sum equal to the disputed rent into an escrow account while awaiting a decision by the Israeli high court regarding the ownership of the land. The families lived in rented dwellings for four years until the high court ruled that the Ottoman document supporting the Council of Sephardic Jewry's claim of ownership was without legal basis. However, the high court refused to declare a rightful owner, stating that the determination should be made by the district court, whose legal purview it is to decide on these matters. In this legal limbo, a lower court ruled that since the original lawyer for the 28 families accepted the Sephardic Council as the owner of the property on which they reside, the 1982 document is still valid, even though the high court had nullified its basis. Consequently, last August Hanoun was sentenced to prison for three months for failing to comply with an eviction order based on this outdated ruling. At the heart of the issue is whether the Israeli courts and the Nachlat Shimon Corporation can continue to treat the case as though it were just a civil issue of a tenant who refuses to pay rent to the landlord, when in reality the issue is political: the court is refusing to recognize the Palestinian families as the true owners of the land.
Meanwhile, the lives these families, who have been innocently living in their homes for 53 years and raising their children and behaving like model citizens, hang in the balance. Once again, on 17 May 2009 at the behest of the Sephardic Council and the Nachlat Shimon Corporation, the court gave the two families until noon on 19 July to voluntarily leave their homes or incur exorbitant fines. In addition, the male heads of the two families, Maher Hanoun, 51, and Abed al-Fateh Gawi, 87, face indefinite incarceration until their families leave. Knowing that neither of the families can pay the exorbitant fines and that the long-term incarceration of the fathers, especially that of the elderly Gawi, would create intolerable hardship, the Israeli litigants presume that they could coerce the families into leaving voluntarily. Hanoun contends that he feels he is about to be taken hostage and emphasizes that his home was never even officially claimed by the Sephardic Council.
Following US President Barack Obama's recent speech at the University of Cairo, international interest in this case has been mounting. In mid-June a 40-member delegation from the European Parliament visited the Hanoun family and promised to take up their cause during the very next session of parliament. The families still assert that under no circumstance will they voluntarily leave. Meanwhile, as recently as 28 June a notice from Hotza'ah Lepoal, the agency empowered to execute court orders, was delivered to the homes informing the Palestinian families that at any time they are liable to be evicted. Looking out at the troubled neighborhood from her tent, Umm Kamel averred, "Victimization lasts but an hour, but truth goes on until the Day of Judgment. I am seeking the truth."
Marcey Gayer is an Israeli-American activist residing in Tel Aviv. Information about a letter-writing campaign on behalf of the Hanoun and Gawi families can be found at: http://bit.ly/Z0er5
Umm Kamel's protest tent in East Jerusalem. (Marcey Gayer)
Fawzieh al-Kurd, 57, clad in black, spends her days on a promontory overlooking Tomb of Simon the Righteous in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Enduring the cold of winter and the summer's blazing sun, she relates her family's tragic story to visitors from around the world with dignity and resolve.
For 38 years al-Kurd, known to all as Umm Kamel, lived in a home with a tiled patio and garden directly above the tomb of Simon the Righteous. The neighborhood was constructed jointly by the Jordanian government and the United Nations in 1956 to provide temporary housing for 28 Palestinian refugee families who were forced to evacuate their homes during the 1948 war. In return for these homes, the families agreed not to claim further food benefits from the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA. After paying a symbolic rent of five piastres to the Jordanian government for three years, the houses were supposed to pass into the families' ownership. The residents have all the documents from that time and Umm Kamel says that in this house she and her husband Muhammad raised their five children and saw the birth of their 16 grandchildren. It was her intention to pass the house on to her descendants when she died. However, on 9 November 2008 it was all overturned. Without emotion, Umm Kamel related, "My life was blackened. I lost my home, my husband, my furniture, my future."
In the stealth of night, a specially-trained force of 500 Israeli police and border guards surrounded the neighborhood, blocking off all access and forcing any onlooker back into his home. At 3:30am they knocked brusquely on Umm Kamel's door as she was changing the urine tube for her diabetic husband. The urine tube went flying as four Israeli policewomen physically restrained her and forced her into the children's playground outside the walls of her home. The semi-paralyzed Muhammad was dragged out of the house by two burly policemen and deposited unceremoniously in the entranceway of the home of the nearest neighbors, the al-Sabbagh family, and he had a heart attack on the spot.
The women of the al-Sabbagh family ministered to Muhammad to the best of their abilities, but without medical resources they could not prevent the deterioration of his condition. They did manage to call an ambulance; however, it was not allowed to cross the police blockade. The men of the al-Sabbagh family then offered to carry the distressed man to the ambulance on their backs, but that request was also denied. Muhammad did not receive any medical attention until 10am when his sons who live in a village north of Jerusalem were permitted to enter the neighborhood and transport him to the hospital in their own car. Meanwhile, nationalist religious Jews from the Simon the Righteous compound arrived in a minivan and quickly began packing up the al-Kurd household, loading its contents into a waiting truck. With fervent singing and dancing, they rededicated the home as a Jewish household. An Israeli flag now flies from its roof.
The incident is part of Umm Kamel's long history of dispossession, dating from 1972. When she first arrived in the neighborhood in 1970 as a young bride, there was not one Jewish family there. The only Jewish-owned house, one that pre-dated the 1948 war -- when Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together in the same neighborhood -- remained unoccupied. Then the Council of Sephardic Jewry, using an Ottoman document from 1887, made claim to the area and pressured the residents to leave. While it is true that the Sephardic community has deep ties to the catacomb grave where many came to pray and ask blessings prior to 1948, some observers contend that the document is irrelevant since it only states that the Sephardic community had temporary use of the property, not ownership. Moreover, the residents' current lawyer claims that no comparable document was found in the Turkish archives in Ankara when he went there expressly to check on the document's authenticity, fortifying the assertion that the document itself is fraudulent.
The Israeli Land Registry nevertheless certified the document as valid in 1972. This decision was taken within the framework of the 1950 Law of Absentee Property, which revokes all claims of pre-1948 "absentee Arab property owners" (i.e., Palestinian refugees), while reestablishing title to property owned by Jews prior to 1948. After 10 years of acrimonious negotiation, the court recognized the land claim of the Council of Sephardic Jewry, with the residents of Sheikh Jarrah becoming its "protected tenants." The Sheikh Jarrah residents repudiated this revocation of their rights of ownership granted by the Jordanian government that was signed by their former Jewish lawyer supposedly without their prior consent. The family consequently refused to pay the rent demanded by the Council of Sephardic Jewry. Since 1982 this document has become the subject of intense litigation, with the Palestinian side continually bringing up more and more evidence to prove that the basis for accepting the Sephardic Council's claim of ownership is spurious. Saleh Abu Hussein, the residents' current lawyer, has presented the courts with records from the Registry of Property Taxes dating from 1927 indicating that Suleiman Hijazi, a Palestinian, paid the property taxes on the land and hence is its rightful owner. These documents seem impeccable, yet the court has so far refused to acknowledge them.
In the intervening years the Council of Sephardic Jewry tried to buy some of the Sheikh Jarrah houses outright, offering the residents astronomical sums for their simple homes. A few families accepted the offers and the neighborhood became sprinkled with nationalist religious settlers whose political agenda was to drive the remaining residents from their homes. The Jerusalem municipality hired a private security company to guard the Jewish homes and from a small observation post built on the crest of Nashashibi Street, a security guard armed with a submachine gun descends into the warrens and alleys of the neighborhood every half hour to check for signs of disturbance or suspicious objects. For this formerly peaceful Palestinian community, the constant surveillance is yet another intrusion into their private lives.
Meanwhile, the temporary homes built for the refugee community eventually became too small as the families grew, and the families received permits from the Jordanian government to enlarge them (Jordan administered the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, prior to Israel's occupation of the territory in 1967). Upon receiving permission from the Jordanian authorities, the al-Kurd family built a cement block appendage perpendicular to their house. In 1999, wanting to use this portion of the house as the matrimonial quarters of one of their sons, the al-Kurd family approached the Jerusalem municipality with a petition to resurface the extension with stone.
At the time they were told by an inspector working in the office that no permit was necessary as the extension's foundation already existed. However, when the improvement was completed, an inspector sent to reassess the value of the home for tax purposes delivered instead a court order requiring the family to appear at a hearing that very day regarding a structure built illegally on Jewish land. Feeling deceived, the al-Kurds nevertheless appeared in court and were ordered by the judge to seek an out-of-court settlement with the Sephardic Council. The Council offered the family several million dollars for their home, a price out of proportion to its market value. Conscious of the implications for the Palestinian people in general and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in particular, the al-Kurds refused to sell. The judge then ruled that the family had to seal the extension that they had formerly occupied and to pay fines of 28,000 shekels (the 1999 exchange rate was 4.14 shekels per US dollar) to the municipality and 120,000 shekels to the court, a sum that Umm Kamel is still paying off despite her forced eviction from the premises.
In 2001, Muhammad al-Kurd was receiving treatment in Hadassah Hospital when religious settlers using a falsified warrant broke into the sealed portion of the house and began living there. The family proceeded to sue the settler family and won; but at the time of the trial, that settler family moved out and a new one moved in, thus invalidating the results of the court procedure though continuing the illegal occupation. In July 2008, the al-Kurds received a letter from the Development Corporation for Rabbi Simon's Patrimony (Nachlat Shimon) stating that they had purchased the deed to the neighborhood from the Council of Sephardic Jewry and demanded that the al-Kurds immediately vacate the house that three generations of the family had lived in for more than 50 years. The Nachlat Shimon Corporation -- financed by American millionaire Irving Moskowitz, who has underwritten many controversial Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem -- indicated its intention to expand the study and prayer complex located in the catacombs of the original Nachlat Shimon compound. The plan was to bulldoze all the houses existing on the property and build 200 housing units complete with a shopping center for ultra-Orthodox Jewish families who would form the core of worshippers at the Tomb of Simon the Righteous.
At this point the al-Kurds realized the enormity of the forces arrayed against them. Umm Kamel broadcast a radio appeal "to all the kind-hearted people of the world" for help. Galvanizing Palestinian civil society, many non-governmental organizations responded to her call. One of the most visible organizations was the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which agreed to post international volunteers who would maintain a constant presence at the al-Kurd premises to help Umm Kamel nonviolently defend her home. If police attempted to evict the family, the activists intended to handcuff themselves to the door with heavy metal chains that they had coiled in huge circles on the patio. In the course of half a year, more than 200 individuals from all over the world camped out on the al-Kurd's patio.
During that time, many dignitaries like Kyler Kornweiller, the political attache to the American consulate, made solidarity visits. In the evenings the Sheikh Jarrah Defense Committee organized cultural events on the al-Kurd patio. Sometimes as many as 50 persons would be seated on the patio drinking sweet tea and bitter coffee, listening to presentations by local politicians or viewing performances of traditional Palestinian dance staged by neighborhood youth. On every occasion, Muhammad al-Kurd led the evening prayers followed by Umm Kamel, who spoke eloquently of her family's long struggle. In this atmosphere thick with festivity and apprehension, the settler family occupying the extension to the al-Kurd's house rarely appeared, preferring to shutter themselves behind closed blinds.
With the arrival of winter only five ISM activists remained to defend the home. When border guards surrounded the neighborhood one night, no one shouted out to warn them. Quickly overwhelmed by the massive force, the activists did not have the time to shackle themselves to the door of the house as planned. So the elderly al-Kurd couple did not resist. Two weeks after the seizure of his home, Muhammad al-Kurd died of a massive coronary attack. His body was laid in a flag-draped coffin in the empty field where Umm Kamel now has her tent. A solemn cortege proceeded on foot to al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City where thousands of mourners attended the funeral ceremony.
Umm Kamel insider her tent. (Marcey Gayer)
Yet, Umm Kamel's story does not end here. Israeli border police attempted to destroy her protest tent on six occasions and fined her each time. Once they even came with bulldozers and pockmarked the field with huge craters to prevent a tent from being positioned there. However, neighborhood youths began filling in the holes with shovels and within two weeks another tent was erected in time for the Eid al-Adha holiday. The entire neighborhood jubilantly participated in the celebration, providing generator-powered heaters to warm the tent on that cold December evening.
Having surrounded East Jerusalem with Jewish neighborhoods to prevent Palestinian expansion, the Israeli government is now creating Jewish wedges into Palestinian neighborhoods in order to preclude the division of the city as would be required by a two-state solution. The Nachlat Shimon Corporation's plan to expand the religious complex continues, and neighborhood families are displaced one at a time. Following Umm Kamel's eviction, two other families received eviction notices. The Hanoun family consists of three brothers, their wives, and 10 children. The Gawi family has four generations under one roof, 38 members in all. Both families are slated for eviction on 19 July and their cases also have a long history of unsuccessful litigation in the Israeli court system.
Well-versed in all the convoluted legal machinations of the struggle, Maher Hanoun recalls his family's sudden eviction in 2002 and the confiscation of all its furniture in a large-scale police operation similar to that undertaken against the al-Kurd family. This occurred despite that both the Hanoun and the Gawi families paid a sum equal to the disputed rent into an escrow account while awaiting a decision by the Israeli high court regarding the ownership of the land. The families lived in rented dwellings for four years until the high court ruled that the Ottoman document supporting the Council of Sephardic Jewry's claim of ownership was without legal basis. However, the high court refused to declare a rightful owner, stating that the determination should be made by the district court, whose legal purview it is to decide on these matters. In this legal limbo, a lower court ruled that since the original lawyer for the 28 families accepted the Sephardic Council as the owner of the property on which they reside, the 1982 document is still valid, even though the high court had nullified its basis. Consequently, last August Hanoun was sentenced to prison for three months for failing to comply with an eviction order based on this outdated ruling. At the heart of the issue is whether the Israeli courts and the Nachlat Shimon Corporation can continue to treat the case as though it were just a civil issue of a tenant who refuses to pay rent to the landlord, when in reality the issue is political: the court is refusing to recognize the Palestinian families as the true owners of the land.
Meanwhile, the lives these families, who have been innocently living in their homes for 53 years and raising their children and behaving like model citizens, hang in the balance. Once again, on 17 May 2009 at the behest of the Sephardic Council and the Nachlat Shimon Corporation, the court gave the two families until noon on 19 July to voluntarily leave their homes or incur exorbitant fines. In addition, the male heads of the two families, Maher Hanoun, 51, and Abed al-Fateh Gawi, 87, face indefinite incarceration until their families leave. Knowing that neither of the families can pay the exorbitant fines and that the long-term incarceration of the fathers, especially that of the elderly Gawi, would create intolerable hardship, the Israeli litigants presume that they could coerce the families into leaving voluntarily. Hanoun contends that he feels he is about to be taken hostage and emphasizes that his home was never even officially claimed by the Sephardic Council.
Following US President Barack Obama's recent speech at the University of Cairo, international interest in this case has been mounting. In mid-June a 40-member delegation from the European Parliament visited the Hanoun family and promised to take up their cause during the very next session of parliament. The families still assert that under no circumstance will they voluntarily leave. Meanwhile, as recently as 28 June a notice from Hotza'ah Lepoal, the agency empowered to execute court orders, was delivered to the homes informing the Palestinian families that at any time they are liable to be evicted. Looking out at the troubled neighborhood from her tent, Umm Kamel averred, "Victimization lasts but an hour, but truth goes on until the Day of Judgment. I am seeking the truth."
Marcey Gayer is an Israeli-American activist residing in Tel Aviv. Information about a letter-writing campaign on behalf of the Hanoun and Gawi families can be found at: http://bit.ly/Z0er5
Thursday, July 9, 2009
The dream of returning home
Mary Pole writing from al-Buss refugee camp, Lebanon, Live from Lebanon, 7 July 2009
Fadi (center) with his three sisters, brother in-law, niece and nephew in the family's home in the al-Buss refugee camp. (Mary Pole)
Fadi looked up and pointed at the rain. "This is like our life. We hate the rain. But we can't change it so we will stay under it."
This rain appeared all the more invasive when picking lemons in winter. It is a cold, wet and miserable task, for the equivalent of $7 a day. A task only perceived to be fit for Palestinians in Lebanon. Despite Fadi's postgraduate qualification in accounting and fluency in English, he rightly pointed out, "I can't be a lawyer, I can't be a doctor ... Seventy-two jobs I can't do."
Until 2005, 72 professions were off-limits to non-Lebanese citizens, including Palestinian refugees residing in Lebanon. This includes those working in managerial positions as well as lawyers, doctors and pharmacists and skilled vocational labor. Although 50 of these professions have now been removed from this list, the legislation requiring Palestinians to obtain yearly work permits has ensured that little has changed in practice.
Fadi is from the al-Buss refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The camp's dusty tracks, conveniently marked in a grid system unlike some of the other camps, are heavily built up on either side by two- to four-story properties. Fadi's father died when he was a boy and left his mother with virtually nothing. He has worked from scratch to build a modest two-bedroom, one-story house near one of the non-manned entrances of al-Buss. In addition to several non-manned entrances there are two main entrances to exit and enter the camp which are the cause of much discontent. Residents of the camp are regularly checked upon entering and leaving by Lebanese soldiers, and cars face tighter restrictions. Fadi explained, "all the camps of Lebanon have one way to enter and another one way to exit from it. So I am not in the camps, I am in a big prison." This sense of confinement is heightened by the fact that legislation currently forbids Palestinian refugees from owning property outside the demarcated refugee camps, leaving Fadi and his neighbors little choice but to stay.
His bedroom contains three striking features. The first is a photo that hangs above the bed, the only item to adorn the bare walls aside from Quranic recitations. This photo is of Fadi overlooking his homeland, representing the only "alive dream" that his circumstances have afforded him.
He explained that "I can't have any other dreams for the future. There are no dreams for any Palestinians in Lebanon. I dream to have a good home, a good job, a good family and a good wife, but is there a way to receive my country and my homeland? We have dreams but they are dead dreams. If you lived in this way, what could you dream for your future? Would you have any dreams? I don't think so. All our dreams are dead, apart from this one dream: the alive dream to return to my home and country, this will not die."
The second immediately apparent feature of Fadi's room is a veritable library of books in English and Arabic, on subjects ranging from physics to English literature. As I admired this collection, I was reminded of Chafic, a 24-year-old I met from the neighboring Rashidieh camp outside of the southern city of Tyre. Chafic is currently studying at the Beirut Arab University. We met for a water pipe and coffee in one of the thriving nightspots of Beirut frequented by a new generation of Lebanese with money, seemingly a million miles a way from the poverty stricken camps of the south.
Chafic's father works for Fatah, the leading Palestinian political party, and has been able to save for his education. As the oldest son it is imperative that he be able to support his family. The tragedy is that despite an excellent training as an accountant, Chafic is reduced to bribing his boss and working day-and-night in order to illegally obtain a work permit. After all, his status as a Palestinian refugee prevents him from being employed as an accountant. Palestinians can learn, attend top-tier schools and universities, but are then forced to put the books back on the shelf and turn instead to other means of achieving equality and stature.
Back in al-Buss camp, he third item in Fadi's room that stands out is a gun: a 10-year-old Kalashnikov in pride of place complete with case knitted by his mother.
"I have this machine gun to save our rights in the camps. I don't want Lebanese citizenship. I want to go back to my country. I don't want to stay here. This gun protects me and all refugees from being picked up like sheep and taken to another land," he said, adding, "It's just an idea but we think it because we are a big problem for Lebanon and a big problem for Israel and for all the world. If they finished us like this there is a big problem solved. It will even solve their problem of our living near to Palestine. Our home."
It is not only the Israelis that Fadi wants to protect his family from. He remembered with anger the massacres in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the 1982 Israeli invasion. While the Israeli army surrounded the camp, members of the Lebanese Christian Phalange militia killed between 800 to 3,000 Palestinians, including women and children. This was compounded by the "Camp Wars," when Amal, the Lebanese Shia militia backed by the Syrian army, laid siege to the Palestinian refugee camps of Shatila and Bourj al-Barajneh. Fadi explained, "I will not throw my weapons down. I need them to save the refugees in Lebanon and save our lives. We are not terrorists, we have peaceful minds, but we have no choice."
Mary Pole is a 24-year-old British writer, reporter and humanitarian relief worker currently based in Kyrgyzstan. She spent two months in the Palestinian refugee camps of southern Lebanon in 2008 working with UNIPAL, a British Universities Educational Exchange program. Having studied the Palestinian refugee situation in detail during her Masters Degree in Forced Migration at Oxford, she is looking forward to returning to the Middle East to work in an advocatory capacity.
Fadi (center) with his three sisters, brother in-law, niece and nephew in the family's home in the al-Buss refugee camp. (Mary Pole)
Fadi looked up and pointed at the rain. "This is like our life. We hate the rain. But we can't change it so we will stay under it."
This rain appeared all the more invasive when picking lemons in winter. It is a cold, wet and miserable task, for the equivalent of $7 a day. A task only perceived to be fit for Palestinians in Lebanon. Despite Fadi's postgraduate qualification in accounting and fluency in English, he rightly pointed out, "I can't be a lawyer, I can't be a doctor ... Seventy-two jobs I can't do."
Until 2005, 72 professions were off-limits to non-Lebanese citizens, including Palestinian refugees residing in Lebanon. This includes those working in managerial positions as well as lawyers, doctors and pharmacists and skilled vocational labor. Although 50 of these professions have now been removed from this list, the legislation requiring Palestinians to obtain yearly work permits has ensured that little has changed in practice.
Fadi is from the al-Buss refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The camp's dusty tracks, conveniently marked in a grid system unlike some of the other camps, are heavily built up on either side by two- to four-story properties. Fadi's father died when he was a boy and left his mother with virtually nothing. He has worked from scratch to build a modest two-bedroom, one-story house near one of the non-manned entrances of al-Buss. In addition to several non-manned entrances there are two main entrances to exit and enter the camp which are the cause of much discontent. Residents of the camp are regularly checked upon entering and leaving by Lebanese soldiers, and cars face tighter restrictions. Fadi explained, "all the camps of Lebanon have one way to enter and another one way to exit from it. So I am not in the camps, I am in a big prison." This sense of confinement is heightened by the fact that legislation currently forbids Palestinian refugees from owning property outside the demarcated refugee camps, leaving Fadi and his neighbors little choice but to stay.
His bedroom contains three striking features. The first is a photo that hangs above the bed, the only item to adorn the bare walls aside from Quranic recitations. This photo is of Fadi overlooking his homeland, representing the only "alive dream" that his circumstances have afforded him.
He explained that "I can't have any other dreams for the future. There are no dreams for any Palestinians in Lebanon. I dream to have a good home, a good job, a good family and a good wife, but is there a way to receive my country and my homeland? We have dreams but they are dead dreams. If you lived in this way, what could you dream for your future? Would you have any dreams? I don't think so. All our dreams are dead, apart from this one dream: the alive dream to return to my home and country, this will not die."
The second immediately apparent feature of Fadi's room is a veritable library of books in English and Arabic, on subjects ranging from physics to English literature. As I admired this collection, I was reminded of Chafic, a 24-year-old I met from the neighboring Rashidieh camp outside of the southern city of Tyre. Chafic is currently studying at the Beirut Arab University. We met for a water pipe and coffee in one of the thriving nightspots of Beirut frequented by a new generation of Lebanese with money, seemingly a million miles a way from the poverty stricken camps of the south.
Chafic's father works for Fatah, the leading Palestinian political party, and has been able to save for his education. As the oldest son it is imperative that he be able to support his family. The tragedy is that despite an excellent training as an accountant, Chafic is reduced to bribing his boss and working day-and-night in order to illegally obtain a work permit. After all, his status as a Palestinian refugee prevents him from being employed as an accountant. Palestinians can learn, attend top-tier schools and universities, but are then forced to put the books back on the shelf and turn instead to other means of achieving equality and stature.
Back in al-Buss camp, he third item in Fadi's room that stands out is a gun: a 10-year-old Kalashnikov in pride of place complete with case knitted by his mother.
"I have this machine gun to save our rights in the camps. I don't want Lebanese citizenship. I want to go back to my country. I don't want to stay here. This gun protects me and all refugees from being picked up like sheep and taken to another land," he said, adding, "It's just an idea but we think it because we are a big problem for Lebanon and a big problem for Israel and for all the world. If they finished us like this there is a big problem solved. It will even solve their problem of our living near to Palestine. Our home."
It is not only the Israelis that Fadi wants to protect his family from. He remembered with anger the massacres in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the 1982 Israeli invasion. While the Israeli army surrounded the camp, members of the Lebanese Christian Phalange militia killed between 800 to 3,000 Palestinians, including women and children. This was compounded by the "Camp Wars," when Amal, the Lebanese Shia militia backed by the Syrian army, laid siege to the Palestinian refugee camps of Shatila and Bourj al-Barajneh. Fadi explained, "I will not throw my weapons down. I need them to save the refugees in Lebanon and save our lives. We are not terrorists, we have peaceful minds, but we have no choice."
Mary Pole is a 24-year-old British writer, reporter and humanitarian relief worker currently based in Kyrgyzstan. She spent two months in the Palestinian refugee camps of southern Lebanon in 2008 working with UNIPAL, a British Universities Educational Exchange program. Having studied the Palestinian refugee situation in detail during her Masters Degree in Forced Migration at Oxford, she is looking forward to returning to the Middle East to work in an advocatory capacity.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Sheikh Jarrah residents organize in the face of mass house evictions
Jeff Pickert writing from occupied East Jerusalem, Live from Palestine, 7 April 2009
A member of the al-Ghawe family stands beside a poster inside his threatened house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
"We are like the roots of a tree. The Israelis may cut us in places, but we will never die. We will not be transplanted from Jerusalem. I will not leave this house," Maher Hanun tells a crowded room of Palestinian community members supported by Israeli and international solidarity activists. Hanun is one of 51 residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem living in two housing units that are facing imminent eviction by Israeli authorities.
The mood is tense as more than 25 individuals pack into a small room in Hanun's house to plan how to fight the house evictions. Palestinian residents, organized under the Sheikh Jarrah Committee, have invited solidarity activists to come and support their struggle. Internationals from more than 10 countries and Israelis sit in chairs and on the floor as Hanun tells them his story. After his speech, they divide themselves into groups to cover the two threatened housing units. Both the families and the activists gathered in support are determined to stay inside the houses as long as possible when the police arrive to carry out the evictions.
The people living in these housing units, belonging to the al-Ghawe and Hanun families, are due to be forcibly removed from their homes this week, as the papers from the Israeli court they were served with are valid between 15 and 22 March. The courts have justified these evictions by saying that the land that the houses are built on is disputed. Yet, the houses were built under a joint construction project by the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956, 11 years before Israel occupied East Jerusalem. The houses were given to the families, both made refugees in 1948 after Palestinians living in what became the state of Israel were expelled and dispossessed during what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Now these families are threatened with another Nakba. Israeli settlers that have moved into Sheikh Jarrah have falsified documents claiming ownership of the land. The Hanun and al-Ghawe families have presented their legitimate documents and an Israeli judge has not yet ruled on the legality of these papers. Yet the eviction orders are still proceeding, even though no official decision has been reached as to whom the Israeli courts recognize as the true owners.
Both the Hanun and al-Ghawe families were forcibly evicted once before in 2002, after which they lived in tents for four months within sight of their former homes. This traumatic experience stands out as a vivid memory even for the children of the families. As they brace themselves to be evicted for the second time, the distress and apprehension in both households is clearly noticeable. Family members have spent many sleepless nights waiting for the police, never knowing exactly which night they will come. Women in the al-Ghawe residence often recount how their small children were thrown from a second floor window by police when they were evicted the last time.
A banner reading "stop ethnic cleansing" hangs in front of one of the houses slated for eviction.
In addition to the al-Ghawe and Hanun families, 25 other households are also threatened with eviction in Sheikh Jarrah, though official orders have not yet been issued by Israeli courts. In November 2008, the al-Kurd family was evicted from their home in the middle of the night despite widespread public support and diplomatic pressure from American and European diplomats on the Israelis to halt the eviction order. The al-Kurd family has erected a protest tent in the middle of Sheikh Jarrah from where they continue to demand the right to return to their homes. The Israeli police have destroyed the tent five times on the grounds that it is an "illegal structure" even though it is built on private Palestinian property.
Now, with the threat of removal again hanging over their heads, community members of Sheikh Jarrah are organizing. "Stop ethnic cleansing" is their main message to the Israeli authorities and the broader international community. These words can be seen on posters hung in the windows of neighborhood shops, on large banners over the entrances to the al-Ghawe and Hanun residences, as well as the T-shirts that organizers have distributed in the community.
This past week has seen a buzz of activity in the neighborhood. The Sheikh Jarrah Committee, supported by the Coalition for Jerusalem, the International Solidarity Movement, and other human rights organizations, have utilized a myriad of tactics to fight the eviction orders. Throughout the week, dignitaries from foreign nations, journalists, consular representatives from numerous European countries, and even Knesset members have all visited the homes and the protest tent to express their support for the residents of Sheikh Jarrah. The committee has held press conferences, demonstrations outside of court hearings and drafted statements condemning the orders.
The community also attempted to host an event as part of the Jerusalem Capital of Arab Culture festival at the protest tent on 23 March. Israeli authorities have banned the festival in occupied East Jerusalem, yet organizers have continued to defy the ban in order to celebrate Jerusalem's rich Palestinian heritage. Sheikh Jarrah residents also gathered to protest the impending house evictions in addition to the increased repression of Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem. Police violently prevented Sheikh Jarrah residents from praying in front of the tent in conjunction with the festival. Participants were badly beaten and eight people were arrested. The following week, another resident was arrested by police inside the tent for refusing to take down a Palestinian flag hanging inside.
The Sheikh Jarrah Committee members view their struggle against eviction as part of a larger struggle against Palestinian dispossession from East Jerusalem. The nearby neighborhoods of Silwan, Beit Hanina and Shufat refugee camp are also facing large-scale house demolitions and evictions. In the al-Bustaan neighborhood of Silwan alone, 88 houses are slated for demolition. Al-Bustaan residents have erected a protest tent similar to the one in Sheikh Jarrah, and this model of resistance seems to be spreading.
For now, the families and supporting activists wait for the police to come each night. They take shifts to make sure someone is up in each house to alarm the community when the Israeli authorities arrive. Some of the family members have removed all of their furniture in anticipation of the coming raids, but they continue to sleep on mats in the floor. The message is clear: they will not go quietly in the face of this injustice.
All images by Jeff Pickert.
Jeff Pickert is an American who has been working in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem for the past four months.
A member of the al-Ghawe family stands beside a poster inside his threatened house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
"We are like the roots of a tree. The Israelis may cut us in places, but we will never die. We will not be transplanted from Jerusalem. I will not leave this house," Maher Hanun tells a crowded room of Palestinian community members supported by Israeli and international solidarity activists. Hanun is one of 51 residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem living in two housing units that are facing imminent eviction by Israeli authorities.
The mood is tense as more than 25 individuals pack into a small room in Hanun's house to plan how to fight the house evictions. Palestinian residents, organized under the Sheikh Jarrah Committee, have invited solidarity activists to come and support their struggle. Internationals from more than 10 countries and Israelis sit in chairs and on the floor as Hanun tells them his story. After his speech, they divide themselves into groups to cover the two threatened housing units. Both the families and the activists gathered in support are determined to stay inside the houses as long as possible when the police arrive to carry out the evictions.
The people living in these housing units, belonging to the al-Ghawe and Hanun families, are due to be forcibly removed from their homes this week, as the papers from the Israeli court they were served with are valid between 15 and 22 March. The courts have justified these evictions by saying that the land that the houses are built on is disputed. Yet, the houses were built under a joint construction project by the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956, 11 years before Israel occupied East Jerusalem. The houses were given to the families, both made refugees in 1948 after Palestinians living in what became the state of Israel were expelled and dispossessed during what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Now these families are threatened with another Nakba. Israeli settlers that have moved into Sheikh Jarrah have falsified documents claiming ownership of the land. The Hanun and al-Ghawe families have presented their legitimate documents and an Israeli judge has not yet ruled on the legality of these papers. Yet the eviction orders are still proceeding, even though no official decision has been reached as to whom the Israeli courts recognize as the true owners.
Both the Hanun and al-Ghawe families were forcibly evicted once before in 2002, after which they lived in tents for four months within sight of their former homes. This traumatic experience stands out as a vivid memory even for the children of the families. As they brace themselves to be evicted for the second time, the distress and apprehension in both households is clearly noticeable. Family members have spent many sleepless nights waiting for the police, never knowing exactly which night they will come. Women in the al-Ghawe residence often recount how their small children were thrown from a second floor window by police when they were evicted the last time.
A banner reading "stop ethnic cleansing" hangs in front of one of the houses slated for eviction.
In addition to the al-Ghawe and Hanun families, 25 other households are also threatened with eviction in Sheikh Jarrah, though official orders have not yet been issued by Israeli courts. In November 2008, the al-Kurd family was evicted from their home in the middle of the night despite widespread public support and diplomatic pressure from American and European diplomats on the Israelis to halt the eviction order. The al-Kurd family has erected a protest tent in the middle of Sheikh Jarrah from where they continue to demand the right to return to their homes. The Israeli police have destroyed the tent five times on the grounds that it is an "illegal structure" even though it is built on private Palestinian property.
Now, with the threat of removal again hanging over their heads, community members of Sheikh Jarrah are organizing. "Stop ethnic cleansing" is their main message to the Israeli authorities and the broader international community. These words can be seen on posters hung in the windows of neighborhood shops, on large banners over the entrances to the al-Ghawe and Hanun residences, as well as the T-shirts that organizers have distributed in the community.
This past week has seen a buzz of activity in the neighborhood. The Sheikh Jarrah Committee, supported by the Coalition for Jerusalem, the International Solidarity Movement, and other human rights organizations, have utilized a myriad of tactics to fight the eviction orders. Throughout the week, dignitaries from foreign nations, journalists, consular representatives from numerous European countries, and even Knesset members have all visited the homes and the protest tent to express their support for the residents of Sheikh Jarrah. The committee has held press conferences, demonstrations outside of court hearings and drafted statements condemning the orders.
The community also attempted to host an event as part of the Jerusalem Capital of Arab Culture festival at the protest tent on 23 March. Israeli authorities have banned the festival in occupied East Jerusalem, yet organizers have continued to defy the ban in order to celebrate Jerusalem's rich Palestinian heritage. Sheikh Jarrah residents also gathered to protest the impending house evictions in addition to the increased repression of Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem. Police violently prevented Sheikh Jarrah residents from praying in front of the tent in conjunction with the festival. Participants were badly beaten and eight people were arrested. The following week, another resident was arrested by police inside the tent for refusing to take down a Palestinian flag hanging inside.
The Sheikh Jarrah Committee members view their struggle against eviction as part of a larger struggle against Palestinian dispossession from East Jerusalem. The nearby neighborhoods of Silwan, Beit Hanina and Shufat refugee camp are also facing large-scale house demolitions and evictions. In the al-Bustaan neighborhood of Silwan alone, 88 houses are slated for demolition. Al-Bustaan residents have erected a protest tent similar to the one in Sheikh Jarrah, and this model of resistance seems to be spreading.
For now, the families and supporting activists wait for the police to come each night. They take shifts to make sure someone is up in each house to alarm the community when the Israeli authorities arrive. Some of the family members have removed all of their furniture in anticipation of the coming raids, but they continue to sleep on mats in the floor. The message is clear: they will not go quietly in the face of this injustice.
All images by Jeff Pickert.
Jeff Pickert is an American who has been working in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem for the past four months.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Iraq's Palestinian refugees back at square one
Iraq's Palestinian refugees back at square one
Anaheed Al-Hardan writing from Syria, Live from Palestine
"Word is that the Palestinians will be hosted in tent-camps in the afterlife," al-Tanf refugee camp, January 2007. (J. Wreford/UNHCR)
When images and news of the new border tent-camps that the Palestinian refugees from Iraq fled to after the US invasion began to spread through Arabic-language media, a concurrent anecdote began to circulate: "Word is that the Palestinians will even be hosted in tent-camps in the afterlife." The nightmare of the approximately 25,000 to 30,000 Palestinians whose families sought refuge in Iraq in 1948 is but the latest manifestation of the ongoing tragedy of Palestinian stateless refugeehood. This is a story of multiple uprootings and dispossessions since 1948 by both Israel as well as Arab host states that have turned what is known as the Nakba of 1948 into a persistent and ever-present condition that has led to, and allowed for, multiple post-1948 Nakbas.
The central reason for this condition has been the lack of a resolution and restitution for the Nakba of 1948, leaving the Palestinians refugees in a peculiar hereditary refugee-stateless politico-legal status. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that it was supposed to be both transitional as well as temporary whereas after six decades it seems to have become an ad infinitum status. Their right to return to their homeland has thus far been withheld by Israel, under whose territorial jurisdiction their homeland now lies. At the same time, Israel by definition and in praxis ethnically excludes the indigenous inhabitants of the land on which it was established. The Palestinian refugees are therefore simultaneously stateless, denied their homeland as well as the right to return. Since 1948, this reality has left the Palestinians expelled beyond the borders of historic Palestine vulnerable to the fate and at times even whims of their Arab host-states as they have nowhere to return to.
During my extended doctoral fieldwork stay in Damascus, Syria, I met and interviewed a group of Palestinian refugee women from Iraq whose memory of the Nakba was painstakingly present. "In short, we are back at 1948," as Suhaila, one of my interviewees, explained. Like her sister Suhaila, Umm Nawras is also considered one of the more "fortunate" Palestinian refugees from Iraq owing to her legal right of abode in Syria. This right is based on her citizenship from her deceased husband's country in a time when the world has closed all doors in the faces of Palestinians who hold refugee travel documents from Iraq despite the onslaught to which they have been subjected in the new reality of US-occupied Iraq.
Umm Nawras's fortune, however, is entirely relative to and perhaps quite telling of the calamity that has befallen the Palestinians from Iraq when one takes into consideration that she fled Baghdad a widow and the sole carer for her two young children after the double kidnapping and murder of her husband and her brother as well as the repeated raids and threats by militias on the Palestinian housing complex in al-Durra, Baghdad, where she lived. The story, however, does not end here, as a large number of her immediate family -- including her elderly mother and two of her married brothers and their families -- now live in tents in al-Tanf camp as they await third country resettlement because they cannot go back to Iraq, enter a neighboring state or return to their place of origin.
From Palestine to Iraq
Umm Nawras generously invited me to her home where I was introduced to Suhaila as well as Amira, their nine-months-pregnant sister-in-law. Amira is a current resident of al-Tanf camp who was given temporary permission to enter Syria in order to give birth and then return to her tent home in al-Tanf as there are no medical facilities in the camp. The family histories of these women are similar to many Palestinians refugees from Iraq.
Like most Palestinian refugees in Iraq, their families were originally from villages in the Haifa district that were ethnically cleansed between May and July 1948 and later wiped off the face of the earth. Furthermore, their families too had first sought refuge in the Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarm areas in the West areas before the retreating Iraqi army withdrew with approximately 5,000 refugees in 1949. However, unlike the fate of the villages of most of the refugees who found themselves in Iraq, Umm Nawras and Suhaila's families hail from a village that was not demolished owing to its architectural appeal to some in the unit that occupied it: Ayn Hawd today is an "artists' colony." The implications and injustice of 1948 could not be crueler, especially when some of the original inhabitants of Ayn Hawd as well as their descendants are languishing in tent-camps yet again.
"When they first brought them to Iraq from Palestine, they put them in Basra, in a place they used to call al-Shuaybah camp," Umm Nawras explained, referring to where her family, alongside the rest of the new Palestinian arrivals, were first placed in Iraq. Shuaybah was an abandoned British military barrack in the desert south of Basra where the Palestinians were placed under military jurisdiction. Two years later they came under civil jurisdiction and their welfare was relegated to the newly-created Refugee Affairs Department of the Ministry of Interior. They were issued Iraqi travel documents for Palestinian refugees and allowed equal access to health, education and public sector employment. These conditions were generally consistent, with a few exceptions during the various regime changes of Iraq's post-independence history.
Under civil jurisdiction, the Palestinians were moved between Mosul, Basra and Baghdad, although the overwhelming majority then, as in 2003, were placed in the capital. In Baghdad, the Palestinians were housed in various public buildings until most were placed in complexes: al-Baladiyyat and al-Durra in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Some families did remain in the various public buildings and the more affluent rented at their own expense. Later on, the housing issue would be one of the main catalysts of Iraqi resentment toward Palestinians that exploded after 2003 due to their perceived preferential treatment under Saddam Hussein's regime.
"I came of age in [the area of] al-Za'faraniyya where we used to live in huge blind peoples' homes ... It was a huge complex with many rooms; it had huge halls around which every family was allocated a room," Umm Nawras told me after I probed about life in pre-2003 Iraq. "I remember that whenever we would write our postal address, we would write: the former blind peoples' homes, the Palestinians' houses." In the late 1980s, the women's families were allocated a private apartment in the purpose-built al-Durra complex and shared the fate of other residents of the country who lived through the Iran-Iraq war and later the UN-imposed siege after the first Gulf War.
Post-US invasion Iraq
"After the fall of the regime [in 2003], we lived on but of course it was difficult for us to come to terms with the idea that the regime had fallen and that the country was falling apart," Umm Nawras explained. She added, "We lived on as there was no other option but to live on. The material circumstances improved a little when compared to how things were before, meaning that the sanctions were no longer there." Suhaila added to her sister's thoughts by explaining that "during the first year after the fall of the [former] regime, we weren't affected at all." "A year later," Umm Nawras continued, "we would hear a Palestinian was kidnapped here, a Palestinian was killed there. It was happening both randomly and sparsely -- it wasn't a continuous and a targeted onslaught. So those of us who were in different areas weren't necessarily affected by these distant events."
In fact, as early as July 2003, the United Nations Higher Committee for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that some 1,000 Palestinian families in Baghdad, or some 4,000 individuals, had already been internally displaced and lived in makeshift camps in the city after they were forcibly evicted from their houses by landlords who saw the general lawlessness that engulfed the country as an opportunity to reclaim their property. Human Rights Watch reported that as early as late March 2003, fleeing Palestinians were already stuck on the Jordan-Iraq border. In a one-off concession, they were admitted to a camp in the beginning of May that was established near al-Ruwaished in the Jordanian desert in internment-like conditions.
"It began in earnest in 2005, and by 2006 things simply exploded," Suhaila added. "In 2005 the state itself began to target Palestinians, they put Palestinian men on TV and blamed them for bombings."
Before meeting the women, I interviewed the director of the Committee for the Relief of Palestinians from Iraq. During our interview, the director also noted Suhaila's account of the impact of the actions of powerful actors in post-invasion Iraq on Palestinian refugees. After a bombing in May 2005, the notorious al-Dib Brigade of the militia-infested Ministry of Interior (MOI) raided al-Baladiyyat and arrested four men, including three brothers. They were later paraded on TV with visible signs of torture and made a public confession with regards to their responsibility for the bombing.
"People started looking at us differently," Suhaila said, referring to the storm that swept the Palestinians. "The general perception was that you [Palestinians] live amongst us and dare to bomb us?" Referring to the introduction of a residency permit system for the Palestinian refugees by the powerful MOI, Suhaila explained that "it was during that same time that the Immigration and Passports Department [of the MOI] began to demand residency permits from us. First, they demanded a renewal on a monthly basis and then increased it two months and in the end it was three months. It involved a lengthy bureaucratic process in which we had to sit out and wait in the sun while we were out there as an easy [Palestinian] target. It was a way in which they could register all the young men firstly and foremost." Amira added that "In the end we stopped taking the risk of renewing our residency permits -- the journey to the ministry was dangerous and it was in the dangerous Green Zone. I saw with my own eyes how they would use this opportunity to register the names of the young men."
The MOI-initiated persecution had thus far been carried out on a wave of resentment of Palestinians for their perceived Saddam loyalty as well as former regime benefaction. The bombing of the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra in February 2006 added a new dimension to the fate of the Palestinians as sectarianism now openly came to the fore. Thus, Palestinians were seen as former benefactors of the regime and Saddam loyalists, but moreover, they were now also seen as "Sunnis" or recently-arrived terrorists responsible for atrocities like the al-Askari bombing or a combination of both. It was shortly after this pivotal bombing that armed militia men came to Amira's sister's house in Madina al-Hurriyya and explicitly threatened to rape her daughter if she didn't leave her house immediately.
It was after Samarra too that Umm Nawras's husband and brother were rounded up from their place of work in a privately-owned mill factory by militia men patrolling the area under the guise of "economic security." The militia men, self-proclaimed members of the Jaish al-Mahdi militia, released the Shia factory owner whom they had threatened to blow up alongside his factory after he had attempted to intervene on their behalf. Umm Nawras's husband and brother were summarily executed. "We didn't know these details for eight days," Suhaila told me as she tried to explain the extent of the family's torment. The family spent the next eight days mediating with what seems to have been criminal offices that operated under the banner of the Jaish al-Mahdi militia. "Part of their demands was a formal televised apology from the Palestinian Authority's foreign minister for a demonstration in which the recently killed [Musab] al-Zarqawi was proclaimed as the martyr of the Islamic nation." She added, "But they had already killed them by then, these were just all excuses, it was a coincidence that their kidnapping had coincided with his death and this demonstration."
"After what happened we were overwhelmed by a pressing need to leave Baghdad," Umm Nawras explained. "My husband and my brother were killed and so members of my extended family began fearing for their men as well -- so did our neighbors. Everyone knew that they were innocent and that their murder was therefore solely based on their identity cards. Jordan didn't accept any Palestinians -- Ruwaished camp was closed at this stage. So how were we supposed to leave? Syria didn't allow any Palestinians in as well and this is how al-Tanf camp was eventually established [in 2006]."
It appears that the kidnapping and killing of the men was the beginning of the infiltration of al-Durra and the targeting of its Palestinian inhabitants by elements of the same militias who went on criminal rampages. Umm Nawras remarked that "shortly after what happened [to us] al-Durra was raided, and during those raids they would yell, 'You Palestinians, you takfiriyyin [those who denounce a Shia person for blasphemy], leave, get out of here, you Saddamists, what are you still doing here?' The men began sitting at home [for fear of being killed] and the women would run the errands."
"The presence of the militias got deeper [in al-Durra] after what happened," Suhaila explained. Amira added that "They would put an X on people's homes meaning that if you didn't leave within a day or two you would be killed." The final straw for Umm Nawras and Suhaila was the kidnapping of their Palestinian neighbor who had gone to settle his business accounts with his associates as a precursor to leaving Baghdad. His kidnappers called his family and demanded a $50,000 ransom which the family could not deliver. After managing to raise some $13,000, the kidnappers took the money and disappeared. The family eventually fled Baghdad without being able to locate their son's corpse.
I asked Amira about her last months in Baghdad, when her family fled al-Durra and opted to stay with relatives in what they thought would be a safer area, al-Baladiyyat. "They started attacking us with mortar rockets because it was a big and strong area and they therefore couldn't just enter it [like they entered other areas] ... So they began to shell us instead. Three or four days after our arrival in al-Baldiyyat we were bombarded with unbelievable ferocity. That day a rocket directly hit my sister's brother-in-law ... and immediately killed him."
In search of a second refuge
By 2006, fleeing to the border was the only option for Palestinians who couldn't otherwise afford forged passports, and this is where the tale of the border camps begins. Amira described the experience, stating that "Imagine that you lived a normal life and then you were put in a tent all of a sudden. The elderly Palestinians, like my father and my mother, used to live a very basic life in Palestine; they didn't even have electricity, yet they found the experience of living in tents very difficult [in 1948]. So how can the same repeated experience be for someone who is used to a life in which there are computers and the Internet and universities?"
After I asked her about the possibility of being resettled in a country as far away as Brazil, like some in al-Ruwaished camp eventually were, Amira replied, "My priority is a house, I want a house first and foremost. I will give birth soon and my son may die from the wind or from the snow or from fire because all the tents are next to each other. This has happened before, and is very likely to happen during winter; there was a time when 50 tents burned down and after that you start from zero all over again." I asked if an Arab country would be a better option because of the cultural affinity and to be closer to kin and family, to which she answered, "We in fact argue over this a lot in the camp." Amira added, "during their first year in al-Tanf, they [the residents] used to prefer being resettled in an Arab country, but after all the bitterness they have lived through -- sometimes the UNHCR would only come once every two months, you feel like no one cares about you, and not a single Arab country has opened its borders. They can at least take those who are skilled and can benefit their country. So when a country like Chile that is very far away offers to admit Palestinians, the resentment towards Arab states deepens."
"I don't want a house or anything," Suhaila explained. "I just want citizenship, a document which forces others to respect me." Amira agreed to this, and highlighted that defining characteristic of Palestinian stateless-refugeehood, that "the problem [is also] of needing a document with which you can travel and with which you can be respected. Because, in the end, what is a [Palestinian refugee] travel document [worth]?"
Before I leave, I ask the sisters about the prospect of being allowed to go back to Ayn Hawd. Suhaila immediately exclaimed, "I wish!" and then quickly added, "but they would never allow us."
The names of interviewees in this article have been changed for their safety.
Anaheed Al-Hardan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Trinity College (University of Dublin) where she is researching memories of the 1948 Nakba. She can be reached at alhardaa A T tcd D O T ie.
Anaheed Al-Hardan writing from Syria, Live from Palestine
"Word is that the Palestinians will be hosted in tent-camps in the afterlife," al-Tanf refugee camp, January 2007. (J. Wreford/UNHCR)
When images and news of the new border tent-camps that the Palestinian refugees from Iraq fled to after the US invasion began to spread through Arabic-language media, a concurrent anecdote began to circulate: "Word is that the Palestinians will even be hosted in tent-camps in the afterlife." The nightmare of the approximately 25,000 to 30,000 Palestinians whose families sought refuge in Iraq in 1948 is but the latest manifestation of the ongoing tragedy of Palestinian stateless refugeehood. This is a story of multiple uprootings and dispossessions since 1948 by both Israel as well as Arab host states that have turned what is known as the Nakba of 1948 into a persistent and ever-present condition that has led to, and allowed for, multiple post-1948 Nakbas.
The central reason for this condition has been the lack of a resolution and restitution for the Nakba of 1948, leaving the Palestinians refugees in a peculiar hereditary refugee-stateless politico-legal status. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that it was supposed to be both transitional as well as temporary whereas after six decades it seems to have become an ad infinitum status. Their right to return to their homeland has thus far been withheld by Israel, under whose territorial jurisdiction their homeland now lies. At the same time, Israel by definition and in praxis ethnically excludes the indigenous inhabitants of the land on which it was established. The Palestinian refugees are therefore simultaneously stateless, denied their homeland as well as the right to return. Since 1948, this reality has left the Palestinians expelled beyond the borders of historic Palestine vulnerable to the fate and at times even whims of their Arab host-states as they have nowhere to return to.
During my extended doctoral fieldwork stay in Damascus, Syria, I met and interviewed a group of Palestinian refugee women from Iraq whose memory of the Nakba was painstakingly present. "In short, we are back at 1948," as Suhaila, one of my interviewees, explained. Like her sister Suhaila, Umm Nawras is also considered one of the more "fortunate" Palestinian refugees from Iraq owing to her legal right of abode in Syria. This right is based on her citizenship from her deceased husband's country in a time when the world has closed all doors in the faces of Palestinians who hold refugee travel documents from Iraq despite the onslaught to which they have been subjected in the new reality of US-occupied Iraq.
Umm Nawras's fortune, however, is entirely relative to and perhaps quite telling of the calamity that has befallen the Palestinians from Iraq when one takes into consideration that she fled Baghdad a widow and the sole carer for her two young children after the double kidnapping and murder of her husband and her brother as well as the repeated raids and threats by militias on the Palestinian housing complex in al-Durra, Baghdad, where she lived. The story, however, does not end here, as a large number of her immediate family -- including her elderly mother and two of her married brothers and their families -- now live in tents in al-Tanf camp as they await third country resettlement because they cannot go back to Iraq, enter a neighboring state or return to their place of origin.
From Palestine to Iraq
Umm Nawras generously invited me to her home where I was introduced to Suhaila as well as Amira, their nine-months-pregnant sister-in-law. Amira is a current resident of al-Tanf camp who was given temporary permission to enter Syria in order to give birth and then return to her tent home in al-Tanf as there are no medical facilities in the camp. The family histories of these women are similar to many Palestinians refugees from Iraq.
Like most Palestinian refugees in Iraq, their families were originally from villages in the Haifa district that were ethnically cleansed between May and July 1948 and later wiped off the face of the earth. Furthermore, their families too had first sought refuge in the Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarm areas in the West areas before the retreating Iraqi army withdrew with approximately 5,000 refugees in 1949. However, unlike the fate of the villages of most of the refugees who found themselves in Iraq, Umm Nawras and Suhaila's families hail from a village that was not demolished owing to its architectural appeal to some in the unit that occupied it: Ayn Hawd today is an "artists' colony." The implications and injustice of 1948 could not be crueler, especially when some of the original inhabitants of Ayn Hawd as well as their descendants are languishing in tent-camps yet again.
"When they first brought them to Iraq from Palestine, they put them in Basra, in a place they used to call al-Shuaybah camp," Umm Nawras explained, referring to where her family, alongside the rest of the new Palestinian arrivals, were first placed in Iraq. Shuaybah was an abandoned British military barrack in the desert south of Basra where the Palestinians were placed under military jurisdiction. Two years later they came under civil jurisdiction and their welfare was relegated to the newly-created Refugee Affairs Department of the Ministry of Interior. They were issued Iraqi travel documents for Palestinian refugees and allowed equal access to health, education and public sector employment. These conditions were generally consistent, with a few exceptions during the various regime changes of Iraq's post-independence history.
Under civil jurisdiction, the Palestinians were moved between Mosul, Basra and Baghdad, although the overwhelming majority then, as in 2003, were placed in the capital. In Baghdad, the Palestinians were housed in various public buildings until most were placed in complexes: al-Baladiyyat and al-Durra in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Some families did remain in the various public buildings and the more affluent rented at their own expense. Later on, the housing issue would be one of the main catalysts of Iraqi resentment toward Palestinians that exploded after 2003 due to their perceived preferential treatment under Saddam Hussein's regime.
"I came of age in [the area of] al-Za'faraniyya where we used to live in huge blind peoples' homes ... It was a huge complex with many rooms; it had huge halls around which every family was allocated a room," Umm Nawras told me after I probed about life in pre-2003 Iraq. "I remember that whenever we would write our postal address, we would write: the former blind peoples' homes, the Palestinians' houses." In the late 1980s, the women's families were allocated a private apartment in the purpose-built al-Durra complex and shared the fate of other residents of the country who lived through the Iran-Iraq war and later the UN-imposed siege after the first Gulf War.
Post-US invasion Iraq
"After the fall of the regime [in 2003], we lived on but of course it was difficult for us to come to terms with the idea that the regime had fallen and that the country was falling apart," Umm Nawras explained. She added, "We lived on as there was no other option but to live on. The material circumstances improved a little when compared to how things were before, meaning that the sanctions were no longer there." Suhaila added to her sister's thoughts by explaining that "during the first year after the fall of the [former] regime, we weren't affected at all." "A year later," Umm Nawras continued, "we would hear a Palestinian was kidnapped here, a Palestinian was killed there. It was happening both randomly and sparsely -- it wasn't a continuous and a targeted onslaught. So those of us who were in different areas weren't necessarily affected by these distant events."
In fact, as early as July 2003, the United Nations Higher Committee for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that some 1,000 Palestinian families in Baghdad, or some 4,000 individuals, had already been internally displaced and lived in makeshift camps in the city after they were forcibly evicted from their houses by landlords who saw the general lawlessness that engulfed the country as an opportunity to reclaim their property. Human Rights Watch reported that as early as late March 2003, fleeing Palestinians were already stuck on the Jordan-Iraq border. In a one-off concession, they were admitted to a camp in the beginning of May that was established near al-Ruwaished in the Jordanian desert in internment-like conditions.
"It began in earnest in 2005, and by 2006 things simply exploded," Suhaila added. "In 2005 the state itself began to target Palestinians, they put Palestinian men on TV and blamed them for bombings."
Before meeting the women, I interviewed the director of the Committee for the Relief of Palestinians from Iraq. During our interview, the director also noted Suhaila's account of the impact of the actions of powerful actors in post-invasion Iraq on Palestinian refugees. After a bombing in May 2005, the notorious al-Dib Brigade of the militia-infested Ministry of Interior (MOI) raided al-Baladiyyat and arrested four men, including three brothers. They were later paraded on TV with visible signs of torture and made a public confession with regards to their responsibility for the bombing.
"People started looking at us differently," Suhaila said, referring to the storm that swept the Palestinians. "The general perception was that you [Palestinians] live amongst us and dare to bomb us?" Referring to the introduction of a residency permit system for the Palestinian refugees by the powerful MOI, Suhaila explained that "it was during that same time that the Immigration and Passports Department [of the MOI] began to demand residency permits from us. First, they demanded a renewal on a monthly basis and then increased it two months and in the end it was three months. It involved a lengthy bureaucratic process in which we had to sit out and wait in the sun while we were out there as an easy [Palestinian] target. It was a way in which they could register all the young men firstly and foremost." Amira added that "In the end we stopped taking the risk of renewing our residency permits -- the journey to the ministry was dangerous and it was in the dangerous Green Zone. I saw with my own eyes how they would use this opportunity to register the names of the young men."
The MOI-initiated persecution had thus far been carried out on a wave of resentment of Palestinians for their perceived Saddam loyalty as well as former regime benefaction. The bombing of the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra in February 2006 added a new dimension to the fate of the Palestinians as sectarianism now openly came to the fore. Thus, Palestinians were seen as former benefactors of the regime and Saddam loyalists, but moreover, they were now also seen as "Sunnis" or recently-arrived terrorists responsible for atrocities like the al-Askari bombing or a combination of both. It was shortly after this pivotal bombing that armed militia men came to Amira's sister's house in Madina al-Hurriyya and explicitly threatened to rape her daughter if she didn't leave her house immediately.
It was after Samarra too that Umm Nawras's husband and brother were rounded up from their place of work in a privately-owned mill factory by militia men patrolling the area under the guise of "economic security." The militia men, self-proclaimed members of the Jaish al-Mahdi militia, released the Shia factory owner whom they had threatened to blow up alongside his factory after he had attempted to intervene on their behalf. Umm Nawras's husband and brother were summarily executed. "We didn't know these details for eight days," Suhaila told me as she tried to explain the extent of the family's torment. The family spent the next eight days mediating with what seems to have been criminal offices that operated under the banner of the Jaish al-Mahdi militia. "Part of their demands was a formal televised apology from the Palestinian Authority's foreign minister for a demonstration in which the recently killed [Musab] al-Zarqawi was proclaimed as the martyr of the Islamic nation." She added, "But they had already killed them by then, these were just all excuses, it was a coincidence that their kidnapping had coincided with his death and this demonstration."
"After what happened we were overwhelmed by a pressing need to leave Baghdad," Umm Nawras explained. "My husband and my brother were killed and so members of my extended family began fearing for their men as well -- so did our neighbors. Everyone knew that they were innocent and that their murder was therefore solely based on their identity cards. Jordan didn't accept any Palestinians -- Ruwaished camp was closed at this stage. So how were we supposed to leave? Syria didn't allow any Palestinians in as well and this is how al-Tanf camp was eventually established [in 2006]."
It appears that the kidnapping and killing of the men was the beginning of the infiltration of al-Durra and the targeting of its Palestinian inhabitants by elements of the same militias who went on criminal rampages. Umm Nawras remarked that "shortly after what happened [to us] al-Durra was raided, and during those raids they would yell, 'You Palestinians, you takfiriyyin [those who denounce a Shia person for blasphemy], leave, get out of here, you Saddamists, what are you still doing here?' The men began sitting at home [for fear of being killed] and the women would run the errands."
"The presence of the militias got deeper [in al-Durra] after what happened," Suhaila explained. Amira added that "They would put an X on people's homes meaning that if you didn't leave within a day or two you would be killed." The final straw for Umm Nawras and Suhaila was the kidnapping of their Palestinian neighbor who had gone to settle his business accounts with his associates as a precursor to leaving Baghdad. His kidnappers called his family and demanded a $50,000 ransom which the family could not deliver. After managing to raise some $13,000, the kidnappers took the money and disappeared. The family eventually fled Baghdad without being able to locate their son's corpse.
I asked Amira about her last months in Baghdad, when her family fled al-Durra and opted to stay with relatives in what they thought would be a safer area, al-Baladiyyat. "They started attacking us with mortar rockets because it was a big and strong area and they therefore couldn't just enter it [like they entered other areas] ... So they began to shell us instead. Three or four days after our arrival in al-Baldiyyat we were bombarded with unbelievable ferocity. That day a rocket directly hit my sister's brother-in-law ... and immediately killed him."
In search of a second refuge
By 2006, fleeing to the border was the only option for Palestinians who couldn't otherwise afford forged passports, and this is where the tale of the border camps begins. Amira described the experience, stating that "Imagine that you lived a normal life and then you were put in a tent all of a sudden. The elderly Palestinians, like my father and my mother, used to live a very basic life in Palestine; they didn't even have electricity, yet they found the experience of living in tents very difficult [in 1948]. So how can the same repeated experience be for someone who is used to a life in which there are computers and the Internet and universities?"
After I asked her about the possibility of being resettled in a country as far away as Brazil, like some in al-Ruwaished camp eventually were, Amira replied, "My priority is a house, I want a house first and foremost. I will give birth soon and my son may die from the wind or from the snow or from fire because all the tents are next to each other. This has happened before, and is very likely to happen during winter; there was a time when 50 tents burned down and after that you start from zero all over again." I asked if an Arab country would be a better option because of the cultural affinity and to be closer to kin and family, to which she answered, "We in fact argue over this a lot in the camp." Amira added, "during their first year in al-Tanf, they [the residents] used to prefer being resettled in an Arab country, but after all the bitterness they have lived through -- sometimes the UNHCR would only come once every two months, you feel like no one cares about you, and not a single Arab country has opened its borders. They can at least take those who are skilled and can benefit their country. So when a country like Chile that is very far away offers to admit Palestinians, the resentment towards Arab states deepens."
"I don't want a house or anything," Suhaila explained. "I just want citizenship, a document which forces others to respect me." Amira agreed to this, and highlighted that defining characteristic of Palestinian stateless-refugeehood, that "the problem [is also] of needing a document with which you can travel and with which you can be respected. Because, in the end, what is a [Palestinian refugee] travel document [worth]?"
Before I leave, I ask the sisters about the prospect of being allowed to go back to Ayn Hawd. Suhaila immediately exclaimed, "I wish!" and then quickly added, "but they would never allow us."
The names of interviewees in this article have been changed for their safety.
Anaheed Al-Hardan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Trinity College (University of Dublin) where she is researching memories of the 1948 Nakba. She can be reached at alhardaa A T tcd D O T ie.
Ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem
Ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem
Dr. Marcy Newman writing from occupied East Jerusalem,
Live from Palestine,
10 March 2009
An Israeli flag hangs from a Palestinian home in Silwan taken over by Israeli settlers.
Last week when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held a press conference in Ramallah with Mahmoud Abbas, whose term as Palestinian Authority president officially expired on 9 January, a Washington Post reporter questioned her about the 143 Palestinian homes in Jerusalem that Israel intends to demolish in the coming weeks. She responded: "clearly, this kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into under the roadmap." While some hailed this remark as a condemnation of Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing project, it appeared to many on the ground as callous and flippant.
Since the press conference, the number of Palestinian homes Israeli occupation forces intend to level has increased from 143 to 179. It seems that the number of homes and families who will be forced from their homes, and many from their villages entirely, increases every day. Just this past week in the East Jerusalem area, 88 homes in al-Bustan, 55 homes in Shufat refugee camp, 35 Bedouin homes on the Jerusalem-Jericho Road, and 66 homes in al-Isawiyya were slated for destruction, affecting more than 2,000 Palestinians, most of whom have lived there for generations. Ras al-Amoud, al-Abasiyya, Sheikh Jarrah and Ras Khamis appear to be next on the list of targeted areas. The affected families see this method of adding new neighborhoods to the demolition list every day as a means of making it more difficult to challenge and protest these eviction orders.
I recently visited the al-Bustan neighborhood of Silwan, one of the many slated for demolition any day now. The roads into the valley where al-Bustan lies were all closed to Palestinian cars with border police blocking off almost every street. Like many neighborhoods in Jerusalem, the homes reflect a mixture of architectural styles from the Ottoman era to the present, although the Israeli government contends that these homes have been built "illegally" because they have not been granted permission to be built in the first place, a permission that is next to
impossible for Palestinians regardless of whether they have an Israeli residency ID or citizenship. Such is the logic of colonialism and ethnic cleansing in Palestine over the last 61 years. And accordingly, a number of Israeli colonists have been confiscating and taking over homes and buildings to pave the way for the wholesale seizure of Palestinian neighborhoods.
It is this history of ethnic cleansing, particularly that of the catastrophe of 1948 when three-quarters of the indigenous Palestinian population were forced from their land and property, an event termed the Nakba, that fuels the solidarity work among Palestinians in Jerusalem. Following the lead of Umm Kamel al-Kurd who put up a tent near her home in Sheikh Jarrah after she was forcibly removed from her home four months ago, other neighborhoods in Jerusalem facing a similar fate have set up such tents as spaces for organizing and encouraging others to stand in solidarity with each neighborhood. Such tents exist now on the Mount of Olives and in Ras Khamis. One of the organizers of the solidarity tent in al-Bustan, Ahmed Siam, told me "We will not let history repeat itself. We learned from history. We will not leave our land like we did in 1948. If they come and kill my son, I will not leave. This is our land. Even if they kill me and only my blood remains, it will remain on this land." The 7,000 residents of the area intend to fight for their right to stay on their land rather than see it turned into a new, illegal Israeli colony.
The Silwan community is resisting this widespread confiscation of their land – for the purposes of a tourist destination called "the city of David" as well as Jewish-only colonies already surrounding it – by remaining steadfast and staying on their land as member of the al-Bustan Neighborhood Committee Fakhre Abu Diab stated in a letter written to Clinton: "If the Israeli eviction and demolition orders are implanted it will be a catastrophe for our families, children and
elders who will suffer the most. In the face of this destruction we are refusing the municipality's plans and we will not leave our lands and houses nor our community under any circumstances."
Already the elders and children, in particular, are bearing the brunt of the trauma from the news of this latest catastrophe or Nakba. In the heart of al-Bustan the winding, narrow alleyways with homes tightly packed inside remind one of Palestinian refugee camps. The al-Qadi family who has lived down one of these alleys for 25 years, and in this neighborhood for generations, includes seven children, none of whom have attended school since the orders for their home's demolition were issued by the Israeli occupation authorities. This is indicative of
most families in al-Bustan. They explained to me that they are afraid to send their children to school because at any time they could be forcibly removed from our homes while the children are gone. Ironically, they told me, that two days ago the municipality opened a new school in their neighborhood, but they see this as part of the plan by the Israeli occupation authorities.
As the children suffer without their ability to go to school, so do the elderly. Like many families in al-Bustan, the Bedran family has lived here for centuries. Indeed, many of the houses lining the valley were built in the 1870s. Abed and Fatima Bedran built their home in 1980 on land their family has lived on for centuries; like most Palestinian families they built a new home to accommodate their expanding family. Abed, who is 82 years old, suffered from a stroke and is now bedridden after hearing the news of their eviction and house demolition orders for their neighborhood. They, too, refuse to flee their home.
These are just two of the families resisting the latest Nakba in Palestine, individuals who refuse to become Palestine's latest refugees. But the latest ethnic cleansing and colonization plans are not limited to Jerusalem. The number of homes scheduled for demolition in all of Palestine is growing every day. While the focus is on East Jerusalem in much of the international media, this week Palestinians in villages near Nablus and Hebron have also received orders to evacuate their homes. In al-Aqraba and Burin near Nablus, Palestinians are being
forced to abandon 20 homes and barns by 26 March. As with the homes in East Jerusalem, some of these pre-date the 1967 colonization of the West Bank. Likewise, in al-Baqaa, near Hebron, eight homes are scheduled to be destroyed in a village whose lands have already been stolen for the purposes of illegal colonies and Jewish-only roads. Dozens of Palestinians will become homeless once their homes are confiscated. And in the village of Nilin near Ramallah, Israeli
occupation authorities are in the process of expropriating 35.5 acres of land.
Although most of these families are separated by hundreds of checkpoints and established colonies, what the residents of these villages have in common is their steadfast determination to remain in their homes. From Nablus to Jerusalem to Hebron to Nilin they see their most potent means of resistance as remaining in their homes, refusing to live in a constant state of catastrophe, always on the brink of becoming the next refugees. Jawad Abu Ramoz, the son of a refugee from Hebron who fled to Silwan in 1948, is one of the thousands of Palestinians in al-Bustan who rejects a return to the fate of their parents and grandparents, literally and metaphorically.
All images by Marcy Newman.
Dr. Marcy Newman is Associate Professor of English at An Najah National
University in Nablus, Palestine. Her writing may be found at bodyontheline.wordpress.com.
Dr. Marcy Newman writing from occupied East Jerusalem,
Live from Palestine,
10 March 2009
An Israeli flag hangs from a Palestinian home in Silwan taken over by Israeli settlers.
Last week when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held a press conference in Ramallah with Mahmoud Abbas, whose term as Palestinian Authority president officially expired on 9 January, a Washington Post reporter questioned her about the 143 Palestinian homes in Jerusalem that Israel intends to demolish in the coming weeks. She responded: "clearly, this kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into under the roadmap." While some hailed this remark as a condemnation of Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing project, it appeared to many on the ground as callous and flippant.
Since the press conference, the number of Palestinian homes Israeli occupation forces intend to level has increased from 143 to 179. It seems that the number of homes and families who will be forced from their homes, and many from their villages entirely, increases every day. Just this past week in the East Jerusalem area, 88 homes in al-Bustan, 55 homes in Shufat refugee camp, 35 Bedouin homes on the Jerusalem-Jericho Road, and 66 homes in al-Isawiyya were slated for destruction, affecting more than 2,000 Palestinians, most of whom have lived there for generations. Ras al-Amoud, al-Abasiyya, Sheikh Jarrah and Ras Khamis appear to be next on the list of targeted areas. The affected families see this method of adding new neighborhoods to the demolition list every day as a means of making it more difficult to challenge and protest these eviction orders.
I recently visited the al-Bustan neighborhood of Silwan, one of the many slated for demolition any day now. The roads into the valley where al-Bustan lies were all closed to Palestinian cars with border police blocking off almost every street. Like many neighborhoods in Jerusalem, the homes reflect a mixture of architectural styles from the Ottoman era to the present, although the Israeli government contends that these homes have been built "illegally" because they have not been granted permission to be built in the first place, a permission that is next to
impossible for Palestinians regardless of whether they have an Israeli residency ID or citizenship. Such is the logic of colonialism and ethnic cleansing in Palestine over the last 61 years. And accordingly, a number of Israeli colonists have been confiscating and taking over homes and buildings to pave the way for the wholesale seizure of Palestinian neighborhoods.
It is this history of ethnic cleansing, particularly that of the catastrophe of 1948 when three-quarters of the indigenous Palestinian population were forced from their land and property, an event termed the Nakba, that fuels the solidarity work among Palestinians in Jerusalem. Following the lead of Umm Kamel al-Kurd who put up a tent near her home in Sheikh Jarrah after she was forcibly removed from her home four months ago, other neighborhoods in Jerusalem facing a similar fate have set up such tents as spaces for organizing and encouraging others to stand in solidarity with each neighborhood. Such tents exist now on the Mount of Olives and in Ras Khamis. One of the organizers of the solidarity tent in al-Bustan, Ahmed Siam, told me "We will not let history repeat itself. We learned from history. We will not leave our land like we did in 1948. If they come and kill my son, I will not leave. This is our land. Even if they kill me and only my blood remains, it will remain on this land." The 7,000 residents of the area intend to fight for their right to stay on their land rather than see it turned into a new, illegal Israeli colony.
The Silwan community is resisting this widespread confiscation of their land – for the purposes of a tourist destination called "the city of David" as well as Jewish-only colonies already surrounding it – by remaining steadfast and staying on their land as member of the al-Bustan Neighborhood Committee Fakhre Abu Diab stated in a letter written to Clinton: "If the Israeli eviction and demolition orders are implanted it will be a catastrophe for our families, children and
elders who will suffer the most. In the face of this destruction we are refusing the municipality's plans and we will not leave our lands and houses nor our community under any circumstances."
Already the elders and children, in particular, are bearing the brunt of the trauma from the news of this latest catastrophe or Nakba. In the heart of al-Bustan the winding, narrow alleyways with homes tightly packed inside remind one of Palestinian refugee camps. The al-Qadi family who has lived down one of these alleys for 25 years, and in this neighborhood for generations, includes seven children, none of whom have attended school since the orders for their home's demolition were issued by the Israeli occupation authorities. This is indicative of
most families in al-Bustan. They explained to me that they are afraid to send their children to school because at any time they could be forcibly removed from our homes while the children are gone. Ironically, they told me, that two days ago the municipality opened a new school in their neighborhood, but they see this as part of the plan by the Israeli occupation authorities.
As the children suffer without their ability to go to school, so do the elderly. Like many families in al-Bustan, the Bedran family has lived here for centuries. Indeed, many of the houses lining the valley were built in the 1870s. Abed and Fatima Bedran built their home in 1980 on land their family has lived on for centuries; like most Palestinian families they built a new home to accommodate their expanding family. Abed, who is 82 years old, suffered from a stroke and is now bedridden after hearing the news of their eviction and house demolition orders for their neighborhood. They, too, refuse to flee their home.
These are just two of the families resisting the latest Nakba in Palestine, individuals who refuse to become Palestine's latest refugees. But the latest ethnic cleansing and colonization plans are not limited to Jerusalem. The number of homes scheduled for demolition in all of Palestine is growing every day. While the focus is on East Jerusalem in much of the international media, this week Palestinians in villages near Nablus and Hebron have also received orders to evacuate their homes. In al-Aqraba and Burin near Nablus, Palestinians are being
forced to abandon 20 homes and barns by 26 March. As with the homes in East Jerusalem, some of these pre-date the 1967 colonization of the West Bank. Likewise, in al-Baqaa, near Hebron, eight homes are scheduled to be destroyed in a village whose lands have already been stolen for the purposes of illegal colonies and Jewish-only roads. Dozens of Palestinians will become homeless once their homes are confiscated. And in the village of Nilin near Ramallah, Israeli
occupation authorities are in the process of expropriating 35.5 acres of land.
Although most of these families are separated by hundreds of checkpoints and established colonies, what the residents of these villages have in common is their steadfast determination to remain in their homes. From Nablus to Jerusalem to Hebron to Nilin they see their most potent means of resistance as remaining in their homes, refusing to live in a constant state of catastrophe, always on the brink of becoming the next refugees. Jawad Abu Ramoz, the son of a refugee from Hebron who fled to Silwan in 1948, is one of the thousands of Palestinians in al-Bustan who rejects a return to the fate of their parents and grandparents, literally and metaphorically.
All images by Marcy Newman.
Dr. Marcy Newman is Associate Professor of English at An Najah National
University in Nablus, Palestine. Her writing may be found at bodyontheline.wordpress.com.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Palestinians in Lebanon: A Forgotten People
Palestinians in Lebanon: A Forgotten People
By Andrew Lee Butters / Beirut Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009
SHATTERED LIVES: Families live among ruins, with little hope of ever leaving
Photograph for TIME by Kate Brooks
he ancient hills of Lebanon hold little charm for Abdullah Sulhani and his family. Though they live just a bus ride away from some of the most pleasant countryside on the eastern Mediterranean, they don't dare go out for a picnic or family day trip. This is an exaggerated reading of the risks of living in Lebanon — a turbulent country no doubt, but one which, when not a war zone, is the vacation destination of choice for the Arab world. Sulhani, 85, is Palestinian, though, and his family lives in Shatila, an impoverished refugee camp on the edge of Beirut. Many Lebanese eat, drink and dance away memories of the violent past. But in the dank, swastika-graffitied alleyways of the camps, where four generations of Palestinians have come of age, there's little chance of forgetting. For most of the 220,000 Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon, time has stopped.
More Related
* Fatah and Hamas: Heading for a Showdown in Lebanon
* The Link Between Lebanon and Gaza
* Beirut Finally Routs Bin Laden’s Allies
Sulhani fled his home in Galilee for Beirut in 1948 — the year Israel was founded. Since then, there have been six wars and dozens of violent upheavals in Lebanon, and more often than not Sulhani's family has been caught in the middle. Abdullah's 59-year-old daughter Ahlam is still picking shrapnel out of wounds she received from artillery fire in 1975. The family survived the infamous Shatila massacre of 1982 by sheer luck, fleeing from Lebanese militiamen almost as soon as the slaughter began. When they returned afterwards, most of their neighbors were dead, and there was a body in the living-room closet. One of Ahlam's brothers was later shot in the head by a sniper while washing his hands in their entryway. Their building has been destroyed five times. They keep rebuilding because there's nowhere else to go. (Read "Fatah and Hamas: Heading for a Showdown in Lebanon".)
The recent Israeli operation in Gaza refocused attention on the plight of the thousands of ordinary Palestinians caught between Islamic militant group Hamas and Israel's overwhelming military force. But the Palestinians living in the territories of Gaza and the West Bank aren't the only ones trapped. Like many Palestinians forced from their homes after Israel's birth, Sulhani still has his old house keys. Tax records from the British mandate of Palestine are stored carefully in a schoolgirl's plastic binder. But while a 1948 United Nations resolution calls for Palestinians' "right to return," all who have seriously thought about peace in the Middle East know that Israel will never accept the 4.6 million Palestinian refugees registered with the United Nations in places such as Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank. Such a demographic tidal wave would sink the Jewish state.
That leaves families such as the Sulhanis caught between a past they can't escape and a future they struggle to shape, renting out the top floors of their building — which technically they don't even own. Like the rest of the 400,000-odd Palestinians in Lebanon, they cannot legally buy a house or apartment and remain barred from some 70 professions. Lebanon's fragile sectarian political system, balanced between Christians and Muslims, has been unable or unwilling to absorb so many Muslim refugees. So neither Sulhani, nor his children, nor his grandchildren, nor his great-grandchildren have Lebanese citizenship, despite the fact that all but the family patriarch were born on Lebanese soil. "My life in this country has been one heartbreak after another," says daughter Ahlam. "I have no good memories."
Jihadi Breeding Grounds
Younger generations have acquired traumas of their own. Nahr al-Bared was once the most pleasant Palestinian camp in Lebanon, located near the northern city of Tripoli where a cold mountain stream meets the sea, and surrounded by orange orchards and banana plantations. Now it is a miniature Stalingrad on the Mediterranean. An uprising in the summer of 2007 by an insurgent jihadist group, Fatah al-Islam, reduced Nahr al-Bared to rubble and made its 31,000 residents homeless. Though most Fatah al-Islam members were not Palestinians but foreign Arabs from places such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, the lawlessness of the camps — which lie outside the authority of the Lebanese state — make them excellent incubators for extremist groups. And the concrete jungle of Nahr al-Bared was the perfect urban-warfare environment. Just 300 jihadis held their own against more than 11,000 Lebanese army troops for four months.
By Andrew Lee Butters / Beirut Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009
SHATTERED LIVES: Families live among ruins, with little hope of ever leaving
Photograph for TIME by Kate Brooks
he ancient hills of Lebanon hold little charm for Abdullah Sulhani and his family. Though they live just a bus ride away from some of the most pleasant countryside on the eastern Mediterranean, they don't dare go out for a picnic or family day trip. This is an exaggerated reading of the risks of living in Lebanon — a turbulent country no doubt, but one which, when not a war zone, is the vacation destination of choice for the Arab world. Sulhani, 85, is Palestinian, though, and his family lives in Shatila, an impoverished refugee camp on the edge of Beirut. Many Lebanese eat, drink and dance away memories of the violent past. But in the dank, swastika-graffitied alleyways of the camps, where four generations of Palestinians have come of age, there's little chance of forgetting. For most of the 220,000 Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon, time has stopped.
More Related
* Fatah and Hamas: Heading for a Showdown in Lebanon
* The Link Between Lebanon and Gaza
* Beirut Finally Routs Bin Laden’s Allies
Sulhani fled his home in Galilee for Beirut in 1948 — the year Israel was founded. Since then, there have been six wars and dozens of violent upheavals in Lebanon, and more often than not Sulhani's family has been caught in the middle. Abdullah's 59-year-old daughter Ahlam is still picking shrapnel out of wounds she received from artillery fire in 1975. The family survived the infamous Shatila massacre of 1982 by sheer luck, fleeing from Lebanese militiamen almost as soon as the slaughter began. When they returned afterwards, most of their neighbors were dead, and there was a body in the living-room closet. One of Ahlam's brothers was later shot in the head by a sniper while washing his hands in their entryway. Their building has been destroyed five times. They keep rebuilding because there's nowhere else to go. (Read "Fatah and Hamas: Heading for a Showdown in Lebanon".)
The recent Israeli operation in Gaza refocused attention on the plight of the thousands of ordinary Palestinians caught between Islamic militant group Hamas and Israel's overwhelming military force. But the Palestinians living in the territories of Gaza and the West Bank aren't the only ones trapped. Like many Palestinians forced from their homes after Israel's birth, Sulhani still has his old house keys. Tax records from the British mandate of Palestine are stored carefully in a schoolgirl's plastic binder. But while a 1948 United Nations resolution calls for Palestinians' "right to return," all who have seriously thought about peace in the Middle East know that Israel will never accept the 4.6 million Palestinian refugees registered with the United Nations in places such as Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank. Such a demographic tidal wave would sink the Jewish state.
That leaves families such as the Sulhanis caught between a past they can't escape and a future they struggle to shape, renting out the top floors of their building — which technically they don't even own. Like the rest of the 400,000-odd Palestinians in Lebanon, they cannot legally buy a house or apartment and remain barred from some 70 professions. Lebanon's fragile sectarian political system, balanced between Christians and Muslims, has been unable or unwilling to absorb so many Muslim refugees. So neither Sulhani, nor his children, nor his grandchildren, nor his great-grandchildren have Lebanese citizenship, despite the fact that all but the family patriarch were born on Lebanese soil. "My life in this country has been one heartbreak after another," says daughter Ahlam. "I have no good memories."
Jihadi Breeding Grounds
Younger generations have acquired traumas of their own. Nahr al-Bared was once the most pleasant Palestinian camp in Lebanon, located near the northern city of Tripoli where a cold mountain stream meets the sea, and surrounded by orange orchards and banana plantations. Now it is a miniature Stalingrad on the Mediterranean. An uprising in the summer of 2007 by an insurgent jihadist group, Fatah al-Islam, reduced Nahr al-Bared to rubble and made its 31,000 residents homeless. Though most Fatah al-Islam members were not Palestinians but foreign Arabs from places such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, the lawlessness of the camps — which lie outside the authority of the Lebanese state — make them excellent incubators for extremist groups. And the concrete jungle of Nahr al-Bared was the perfect urban-warfare environment. Just 300 jihadis held their own against more than 11,000 Lebanese army troops for four months.
Friday, February 27, 2009
What is and Where is Palestine?
What and Where is Palestine
Historic Palestine is located in the Middle East, in a region bordering Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. Part of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire until 1918, it was then occupied by Britain until 1948. The Palestinians refused the UN plan to partition their homeland into a Jewish and a Palestinian state, but in 1948 the establishment of the state of Israel was unilaterally declared. By 1949, the Nakba (“catastrophe”) had resulted in the ethnic cleansing of two thirds of the Palestinian population and the Israeli occupation of 78 per cent of the land. The West Bank and Gaza Strip have been under an illegal Israeli military rule since they were occupied in the 1967 war, and today are referred to as the “Palestinian Occupied Territories”. East Jerusalem was also annexed illegally by Israel in 1967. For 60 years the Palestinians have been denied the right to self-determination and statehood.
The refugee issue
About 800,000 Palestinians were forced into exile in 1948-9 and during the June 1967 war a further 325,000 Palestinians became refugees. Under UN Resolution 194, the Palestinians have the right to return to their homes, but Israel has always refused to implement the Resolution. Today over 6 million Palestinians live as refugees, hundreds of thousands of whom still live in overcrowded refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, and in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.Life under occupation The past 40 years have seen the establishment of over 200 illegal Israeli settlements, housing nearly 500,000 settlers, within the Occupied Territories. The ‘separation barrier’ in the West Bank, construction of which was started in 2002, cuts deep into Palestinian land and, along with the “settler only” roads, cuts off many communities from water supplies, hospitals and their agricultural land. The residents face severe travel restrictions and for many it is impossible to enter Jerusalem or to travel abroad. This treatment of the Palestinians, both within Israel and in the Occupied Territories, is widely recognised as a system akin to the Apartheid regime of South Africa.
Palestinians are continually under attack from the Israeli occupying forces and are increasingly harassed by settlers, who attack farmers and steal their land. Collective punishments, such as prolonged curfews and house demolitons are frequently imposed. The Palestinians who remained in what is today the state of Israel, as non-Jewish members of a Jewish country, also face discrimation in all areas of Palestine and are considered to be second class citizens.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)