Adri Nieuwhof, The Electronic Intifada, 16 September 2009
After years of campaigning by Palestine solidarity activists to end the French transportation giant Veolia's complicity with Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, it was reported in early June that the company planned to end its involvement in an Israeli light rail project being built on occupied Palestinian land. The light rail will connect Jerusalem with several illegal West Bank settlements; Israeli settlements and the annexation of East Jerusalem are illegal under international law.
Veolia steadfastly refuses to provide information on the company's intention to pull out of the 30-year contract to operate the train and to sell its five percent stake in the City Pass Consortium. The City Pass Consortium holds the contract with the State of Israel for the construction of the light rail project. It consists of four Israeli companies and the French companies Connex (Veolia Transport subsidiary) and Alstom. The European business world has been abuzz with news of a merger between Veolia Transport and Transdev, a French bus transport company. In addition, recent news reports have mentioned the Israeli company Dan Bus Cooperative as a serious candidate to take over Veolia's role as operator of the light rail.
Contrary to Veolia's reported intention to abandon the light rail project, the company seems to be conducting business as usual with Israel. Veolia justified its work on the light rail project at length at the seventh Global Compact Annual Local Networks Forum held from 8-11 June 2009. Veolia, as participant in the UN Global Compact, is bound to the principles that businesses should support and respect the protection of international human rights within their spheres of influence, and make sure they are not complicit in human rights abuses. However, Veolia's participation in the construction and maintenance of the Jerusalem light rail are a violation of both provisions. Also, Veolia continues to advertise for jobs for the light rail's operational center in the Israeli press. Neither its attempts to justify the project at the Global Compact Forum, nor the recruitment of staff indicate the company plans to withdraw from the light rail project.
On 24 July, French newspaper France Soir reported on the possibility of a merger between Veoila and Transdev before the end of the year. Transdev is a subsidiary of Caisse de Depots et Consignations (CDC), which is a state investment bank and leading administrator of French savings deposits and retirement savings funds. Veolia and CDC will create a new transport entity, each owning 50 percent. Unless it succeeds to sell off its stake in the City Pass Consortium and the contract to operate the light rail, Veolia Transport will bring its involvement in the Israeli light rail project into the new entity.
CDC is already involved in the light rail project, not only as shareholder of Veolia and Alstom, but also through its subsidiary Egis. In 2008, Egis won a contract with the Jerusalem Transportation Master Plan to assist in the project management of the construction of three tramway lines. CDC's 50 percent control over the new transport company might allow its Egis subsidiary to tap Veolia's knowledge and experience of the light rail project.
Augustin de Romanet de Beaune, CEO of CDC, seems to be a key player in the history of the light rail. He has accumulated substantial power over the years and has built a wide network of public and private contacts and is likely involved in the talks about the merger of Veolia Transport and Transdev. In addition, it is safe to assume that De Romanet has acquired more than a passing knowledge about the light rail project and its implications for his company.
De Romanet spent most of his career in public functions. He served at the French ministries of economy, finance and industry and was deputy chief of staff to French Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin, when Raffarin visited Jerusalem in March 2005. According to The Jerusalem Post, Raffarin could not hide his satisfaction about Veolia and Alstom's involvement in the light rail on this occasion. Moreover, as general director of France's major public investor, De Romanet is member of the board of directors of several companies in which CDC holds a substantial share. This includes Dexia and Veolia Environnement.
Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), reportedly asked the French president at the time, Jacques Chirac, to intervene in the construction of the light rail in October 2005. At that point, de Romanet was Chirac's Deputy Secretary-General, through which he could influence the president's policies. Considering that the first phase of the light rail is expected to be finalized by the end of 2010 with the continued involvement of Veolia and Alstom, the only conclusion can be that Chirac did not respond to the request of the PA to intervene.
While Veolia remains silent on its alleged withdrawal from the light rail project, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on 13 September that the Israeli Dan Bus Company is buying out Veolia Transport's five percent stake in the City Pass Consortium as well as the French company's rights to operate the local Jerusalem railway, for a total of $15 million. The deal is awaiting approval from the state. According to Haaretz, it is likely that Veolia will stay involved for five years to teach Dan how to operate the train system. The Israeli business magazine Globes wrote a few days earlier that the deal might involve a broader strategic cooperation involving bus services between Dan and Veolia. Veolia operates bus services from West Jerusalem to settlements in the West Bank. By running these buses, Veolia is also directly implicated in maintaining illegal settlements in the the West Bank. It is not clear what the strategic cooperation will entail.
In spite of Veolia's intransigence, the company is no doubt concerned by the recent actions of the Norwegian government. Last week Norway's Government Global Pension Fund announced its divestment from the Israeli firm Elbit Systems, because the firm provides surveillance equipment for the wall in the occupied West Bank. Norwegian Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen said, "We do not wish to fund companies that so directly contribute to violations of international humanitarian law." The decision to divest will certainly be followed by many socially responsible investors. Indeed, it is likely only a matter of time before Norway's Government Global Pension Fund divests from Veolia and Alstom.
Adri Nieuwhof is a consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland.
Boycott israHell!
Бойкот на израел и печелещите от окупацията! Boycott israHell and those who profit from occupation!
Thursday, September 17, 2009
A turning point for the US solidarity movement
Nada Elia, The Electronic Intifada, 16 September 2009
The Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel came from those who have nothing left to lose. (Anne Paq/Activestills.org)
This weekend at the eighth annual US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation national organizers' conference held in Chicago, delegates from the approximately 300 member groups that make up the US Campaign voted in favor of an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The vote came on the heels of a presentation by Omar Barghouti and myself on behalf of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and the US Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
The proposal that "the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation should endorse the principle of cultural and academic boycotts" passed by a landslide with one abstention and not a single objection. The quasi-unanimous vote, and the deep collective breath of relief that followed, will go down in history as the moment US-based Palestine solidarity activists overcame tactical differences that had long hindered us, to finally come together to confront Israeli apartheid.
The history of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, independence and human rights is sadly one of missed opportunities. Historically, Palestinian aspirations have not been achieved due to a corrupt and feckless leadership and petty internal divisions.
But we have also learned that change will not come from above. It will and must come from the grassroots, the people, those who have nothing to lose but their prison walls, the daily humiliation of life as a refugee, a second- or third-class citizen, or a non-citizen. Representing the broadest coalition of Palestinian society, from various parts of historic Palestine as well as the global Diaspora, these Palestinians are the ones who jointly issued the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), modeled off of the same call that helped bring apartheid in South Africa to an end, giving direction to a global movement in support of this boycott call.
Mirroring the limits of the Palestinian leadership, the history of solidarity activism is blemished by opportunities missed because of fragmentation and discord, where there should have been a shared vision for the good of the Palestinian people. However, as the participants of this weekend's conference voted in favor of heeding the Palestinian call to join the global BDS movement, they finally set this country on the path to justice. Citizens, organizations and even government officials the world over, from Bangladesh to South Africa to Norway, have already responded to this Palestinian-led movement.
After resistance to comprehensive BDS measures at previous meetings these organizers with the US Campaign have now responded with an overwhelming "yes," indicating that the tide has shifted in the US. This time around, these activists are not returning to their communities to tell them that the moment to heed the Palestinian boycott call is not yet right. The complicity of silence, of unwarranted self-censorship, has finally ended, and the US can join the global chorus clamoring: "no more!"
Indeed, it is past time for those in the US concerned with justice for Palestine to learn from history and acknowledge and challenge Israeli apartheid. Apartheid in South Africa was abolished through a successful global BDS campaign, and a successful BDS campaign can put an end to Israeli apartheid. Anyone who fears that ending apartheid in Israel would "destroy" that country probably believes, or logically should believe, that South Africa was "destroyed" in 1994.
This struggle will neither be quick nor easy. While the South African call for BDS was issued from a small basement apartment in London by a handful of Black South African students in 1959, apartheid wasn't officially abolished until 1994. As the title of Nelson Mandela's autobiography declared: a long walk to freedom. But history is on our side, as more and more activists are now responding to the Palestinian call.
The precedent is there, we are not reinventing the wheel, we are borrowing a model that led South Africa to freedom. Advisors from the South African BDS movement are working with the activists for Palestinian rights, because they see the similarities in the two struggles. Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bill Fletcher Jr., to name but two prominent members of the South African BDS campaign, are also working with the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).
USACBI's wheels are in motion and there's no stopping us. We are on board the freedom train and we have endorsed the Palestinian call for BDS in all its forms. Last weekend, we bridged the gap in the US solidarity movement and I'm hopeful that the call will be propelled forward by the immense grassroots support the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has garnered over the years in this country.
Our coming together at the conference is galvanizing, as we can now respond in unison to the Palestinian call to end not just the occupation, but Israeli apartheid. It is not one moment too soon. We have nothing to lose but apartheid!
Nada Elia is an organizer with the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (http://www.usacbi.org), and a member of the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence taskforce on militarism and occupation (www.incite-national.org). She and Omar Barghouti of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel led two discussion sessions on the academic and cultural boycott at the 2009 organizers' conference of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
The Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel came from those who have nothing left to lose. (Anne Paq/Activestills.org)
This weekend at the eighth annual US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation national organizers' conference held in Chicago, delegates from the approximately 300 member groups that make up the US Campaign voted in favor of an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The vote came on the heels of a presentation by Omar Barghouti and myself on behalf of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and the US Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
The proposal that "the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation should endorse the principle of cultural and academic boycotts" passed by a landslide with one abstention and not a single objection. The quasi-unanimous vote, and the deep collective breath of relief that followed, will go down in history as the moment US-based Palestine solidarity activists overcame tactical differences that had long hindered us, to finally come together to confront Israeli apartheid.
The history of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, independence and human rights is sadly one of missed opportunities. Historically, Palestinian aspirations have not been achieved due to a corrupt and feckless leadership and petty internal divisions.
But we have also learned that change will not come from above. It will and must come from the grassroots, the people, those who have nothing to lose but their prison walls, the daily humiliation of life as a refugee, a second- or third-class citizen, or a non-citizen. Representing the broadest coalition of Palestinian society, from various parts of historic Palestine as well as the global Diaspora, these Palestinians are the ones who jointly issued the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), modeled off of the same call that helped bring apartheid in South Africa to an end, giving direction to a global movement in support of this boycott call.
Mirroring the limits of the Palestinian leadership, the history of solidarity activism is blemished by opportunities missed because of fragmentation and discord, where there should have been a shared vision for the good of the Palestinian people. However, as the participants of this weekend's conference voted in favor of heeding the Palestinian call to join the global BDS movement, they finally set this country on the path to justice. Citizens, organizations and even government officials the world over, from Bangladesh to South Africa to Norway, have already responded to this Palestinian-led movement.
After resistance to comprehensive BDS measures at previous meetings these organizers with the US Campaign have now responded with an overwhelming "yes," indicating that the tide has shifted in the US. This time around, these activists are not returning to their communities to tell them that the moment to heed the Palestinian boycott call is not yet right. The complicity of silence, of unwarranted self-censorship, has finally ended, and the US can join the global chorus clamoring: "no more!"
Indeed, it is past time for those in the US concerned with justice for Palestine to learn from history and acknowledge and challenge Israeli apartheid. Apartheid in South Africa was abolished through a successful global BDS campaign, and a successful BDS campaign can put an end to Israeli apartheid. Anyone who fears that ending apartheid in Israel would "destroy" that country probably believes, or logically should believe, that South Africa was "destroyed" in 1994.
This struggle will neither be quick nor easy. While the South African call for BDS was issued from a small basement apartment in London by a handful of Black South African students in 1959, apartheid wasn't officially abolished until 1994. As the title of Nelson Mandela's autobiography declared: a long walk to freedom. But history is on our side, as more and more activists are now responding to the Palestinian call.
The precedent is there, we are not reinventing the wheel, we are borrowing a model that led South Africa to freedom. Advisors from the South African BDS movement are working with the activists for Palestinian rights, because they see the similarities in the two struggles. Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bill Fletcher Jr., to name but two prominent members of the South African BDS campaign, are also working with the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).
USACBI's wheels are in motion and there's no stopping us. We are on board the freedom train and we have endorsed the Palestinian call for BDS in all its forms. Last weekend, we bridged the gap in the US solidarity movement and I'm hopeful that the call will be propelled forward by the immense grassroots support the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has garnered over the years in this country.
Our coming together at the conference is galvanizing, as we can now respond in unison to the Palestinian call to end not just the occupation, but Israeli apartheid. It is not one moment too soon. We have nothing to lose but apartheid!
Nada Elia is an organizer with the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (http://www.usacbi.org), and a member of the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence taskforce on militarism and occupation (www.incite-national.org). She and Omar Barghouti of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel led two discussion sessions on the academic and cultural boycott at the 2009 organizers' conference of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
1. Palestine’s peaceful struggle
2. Israeli settlement expansion in South Hebron Hills continues unabated
3. Israel authorizes building in another East Jerusalem neighborhood
4. Israeli forces raid Bil’in
5. UN: Gaza in worst condition since 1967
6. Libelled activist donates to ISM from court award
7. Why stop with Elbit?
8. Israel’s laws of persecution
9. Palestinian driver forced to unload truck despite papers
10. An open letter to Mr. Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa
____________________
1. Palestine’s peaceful struggle
Mohammed Khatib | The Nation
11 September 2009
A few weeks ago, in the dead of night, dozens of Israeli soldiers with painted faces burst violently into my home. If only they had knocked, I would have opened the door. They arrested me. My wife, Lamia, was left alone with our four children. My youngest, 3-year-old Khaled, woke up to the image of Israeli soldiers with painted faces who were taking his father away. He has not stopped crying since. A few nights
ago he woke up in terror, sobbing: “Daddy, why did you let the soldiers take me?” That’s the way our children sleep–in a constant state of fear.
Many Americans know that the Obama administration has been pushing the Israeli government to accept a freeze on settlement construction. What is not commonly known is that even as Israel negotiates with the United States, it has been taking steps, including my arrest, to crush the growing Palestinian nonviolent movement opposing Israel’s construction of settlements and the wall on Palestinian land in the West Bank.
For over five years the residents of Bil’in and other villages have been protesting against Israel’s separation wall, which cuts off our village’s land for the sake of Israeli settlement expansion. We have even taken the struggle to the courts. The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in July 2004 that the wall, where it has been built inside the West Bank, is illegal under international law,
as are all Israeli settlements. In September 2007, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the wall in Bil’in, which separates us from 50 percent of our land, is illegal according to Israeli law. The wall has yet to have moved.
The Israeli army is using more-lethal weapons and greater violence against protesters, and arresting many people, including many protest organizers. In Bil’in alone, twenty-nine residents have been arrested in the past three months. Twelve of them are children. Almost all were arrested during military raids in the middle of the night. Their detention has been extended repeatedly.
But the charges against them are baseless. As one example, I have been charged with stone throwing. I was released on bail with draconian terms only after my lawyers showed the court passport stamps proving that I was abroad at the time of the alleged offense. My friend, Adeeb Abu-Rahme, 37 years old and the father of nine, has been imprisoned for more than six weeks, though the charges against him are just as absurd.
Every Friday in Bil’in, we march to the wall in peaceful protest, along with our Israeli and international partners. Once a year we hold an international conference about the popular nonviolent struggle. Together we learn and gain inspiration. We struggle together to bring down the many walls between people that the occupation is creating. We’ve repeatedly addressed the Israeli soldiers here, telling them we
are not against them as people, but that we oppose their actions as an occupying military force.
Still, nineteen demonstrators have been killed by the Israeli army in these nonviolent demonstrations against the wall. Many have been injured, including Israeli and international activists protesting with us. Here in Bil’in we recently lost our friend Bassem Abu Rahme, who was fatally shot by soldiers in April while he was imploring them to stop shooting at demonstrators.
Several months ago we were warned by Israel’s occupation forces that they intended to crush the popular struggle.
Why has the Israeli government decided now to increase the suppression of demonstrations and to break the spirit of protest leaders? Maybe because they realize that the nonviolent struggle is spreading, that more and more villages have created popular committees that are organizing demonstrations. Perhaps the crackdown is a result of their concern and the growing international movement for the boycott of companies and businessmen such as Lev Leviev who are involved in Israel’s land grab. Or maybe they fear that the new American government could learn through our demonstrations that Israel’s wall is a means to annex land for the growing settlements, and that nonviolent Palestinian protests are being brutally suppressed.
Israel’s actions suggest that it is intimidated by people struggling for their rights in a nonviolent manner. The Israeli government seems to believe that Palestinians who struggle while partnering with Israeli activists endanger Israel’s occupation and that tearing down human walls is a dangerous act. Perhaps what the state of Israel fears most of all is the hope that people can live together based on justice and equality for all.
____________________
2. Israeli settlement expansion in South Hebron Hills continues unabated
Christian Peacemaker Teams and Operation Dove
10 September 2009
At a time when the international community is calling for a freeze on new building in settlements and the disbanding of settlement outposts, the settler community of the South Hebron Hills is continuing its expansion unabated.
Israeli settlers from the illegal settlement on Ma’on, in the South Hebron Hills area, are constructing at least five new caravans on the south-west side of the settlement. Internationals based in the nearby Palestinian village of At Tuwani first observed building preparatory work in Ma’on a few days ago. Today, as the new caravans were being built, settlers began preparatory work on a nearby hilltop for further settlement expansion. Over the past three months, internationals have also observed settlers constructing numerous new buildings in the nearby illegal Israeli outposts of Havat Ma’on (Hill 833) and Avigail.
Since its establishment in 1981, Ma’on settlement has been a source of violence towards local Palestinians. The agricultural orchards of Ma’on are cultivated on private land belonging to a family from the nearby Palestinian village of At Tuwani. By 1997, ongoing settler violence forced the Palestinian inhabitants of three nearby villages (Sarura, Humra and Kharoubeh) to abandon their homes.
The original outpost of Havat Ma’on was established in July 1999, but was dismantled in September of that year by the Israeli military. The following year, the outpost was re-established on a nearby hilltop, Hill 833, and has remained and grown since then. Avigail outpost was established in 2001.
Settlers from Ma’on and Havat Ma’on attack and harass Palestinian children from Tuba and Maghayir al Abeed traveling to and from school in At Tuwani. In 2004, following two attacks on internationals accompanying the children, the Israeli Knesset Committee for Children’s Rights affirmed the need for a military escort for the
school children. The escort continues five years later. Settlers from Avigail and Havat Ma’on outposts also regularly attack Palestinian shepherds grazing their sheep.
For photos of new buildings in Ma’on go to: http://tinyurl.com/mj9fmw
____________________
3. Israel authorizes building in another East Jerusalem neighborhood
Akiva Eldar | Ha’aretz
9 September 2009
Three days after the U.S. administration criticized the decision of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to authorize the construction of hundreds of new housing units in settlements, the Israel Lands Administration published tenders for the construction of 486 apartments in the neighborhood of Pisgat Ze’ev in East Jerusalem.
The new construction project is designated for the outer edge of the northeastern municipal boundary of Jerusalem, and will narrow the distance between the homes on the edge of the neighborhood and the nearby Palestinian communities. Bids have been solicited for construction on an overall area of 138 dunams (about 34 acres), which
was subdivided into 25 smaller tenders.
The Obama administration has made it clear on a number of occasions that it is demanding that Israel freeze settlement construction in the territories, including in East Jerusalem. Two months ago, it was reported that Netanyahu had ordered a delay in the publication of the tenders.
In October 2008, the ILA canceled the tenders, arguing that the bids received from developers were too low compared to the value of the land. Then, last month, Haaretz-TheMarker reported that the tenders would be reissued after an appeal by contractors had led to the conclusion that the official assessment of the land value had been
excessively high.
Officials at the Ministry of Housing and Construction said at the time that they would offer or development more land in the neighborhood so as to lower the price of apartments in the area.
Daniel Seidemann, the founder of Ir Amim, a non-profit organization that seeks to promote coexistence in Jerusalem, said last night that tenders of such magnitude would not be announced if they did not have the support of the prime minister. Seidemann describes the bid-taking as yet another example of a fraud that leads to creating facts on the ground even though there is talk of a freeze in settlement
construction.
According to the ILA: “The tender was issued with the approval of minister of housing, and there was no additional approval needed at the political level. It is a tender that had been published last year in October and, for technical reasons, so far only two of the 25 plots had been sold.”
Meanwhile, a source familiar with the exchanges between Israel and the U.S. on the issue of a settlement freeze told Haaretz that the Obama administration is not interested in a crisis with the government of Netanyahu on settlements.
____________________
4. Israeli forces raid Bil’in
8 September 2009
Shortly after 2:30am, the Israeli occupation forces invaded the village of Bil’in again with five Jeeps and a military truck. They came to arrest Hamaza Burnat (age 16) but he was not at home at the time. This was the second time this week that the Israeli Army raided his house.
Bil’in is a small village of 1,700 inhabitants near Ramallah in the
West Bank. For nearly three months now, the Israeli occupation forces have been conducting night raids several times a week in this village arresting more than 20 people, mainly teenagers.
On behalf of Iyad Burnat, the Head of the Popular Committee, we call on all the supporters to help us in our struggle by organizing demonstrations and sending messages to the Israeli Embassies demanding to stop these night raids in Bil’in. Our children cannot sleep at night because of sound bombs and tear gas being fired by the invading forces. This village is under curfew, we need all your help to be able
to lead a normal life again.
To view video see: http://palsolidarity.org/2009/09/8330____________________
5. UN: Gaza in worst condition since 1967
Ali Waked | YNet News
8 September 2009
A UN report published Tuesday says poverty in the Gaza Strip has deteriorated to levels unseen since 1967.
The UN trade and development agency says 90% of Gaza’s residents are currently beneath the poverty line and rates the damages caused by the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead at $4 billion, a sum it claims is three times larger than the Strip’s annual market performance.
The agency claims the operation halted all trade in the Gaza Strip, creating a deficit of around $88 million. This, in addition to material damages and loss of finances due to the siege and trade limitations later imposed on the Strip, make up the final sum.
The agency’s report claims the Strip has not been in such dire straits since 1967, and that the government has become the residents’ main force of employment.
Gaza’s production capabilities are also on a permanent downslide, the UN agency says, and its economy has been recessing for nine years.
The agency offers no solution, and says it regrets that the $4.4 billion dollars pledged to the Strip during a Sharm El-Sheikh conference has not yet reached its destination.
The conference, held in the Egyptian city in March, hosted representatives from 45 different nations. The US pledged $900 million, a third of the sum pledged during the conference.
____________________
6. Libelled activist donates to ISM from court award
ISM London
7 September 2009
ISM London wishes to thank activist Raphael Cohen for a generous donation he recently made from the funds the court awarded him after his recent libel action against a London newspaper.
Raph – as he’s known within the ISM – instigated legal proceedings against the Jewish Chronicle after it published a letter in November 2008 falsely claiming he had “sheltered” British suicide bombers five days before they blew up a Tel Aviv bar in 2003.
In April, Raph won the case in the high court, accepting substantial damages and an apology. The paper also paid legal costs. The weekly newspaper accepted it should never have published the letter.
This month, Raph announced to ISM London that he would donate part of his award to the ISM.
____________________
7. Why stop with Elbit?
Amira Hass | Ha’aretz
9 September 2009
The question is not why Norway divested from the defense electronics giant Elbit Systems, but why only now, and why only from that company? The country that gave the name of its capital city to what the world thought of as a peace process is still invested in companies involved in construction and development in the West Bank settlements – the principal factor in destroying any chance for peace (at least any peace other than the belligerent demand that the Palestinians say “thank you” for what Israel is willing to give them).
From the outset, instead of rebuking the Norwegian ambassador, the Foreign Ministry and Defense Minister Ehud Barak should have actually praised the citizens of Norway. Through their government pension fund, which invests oil revenues in 8,000 companies around the world for the sake of Norway’s future generations, those citizens continue to be active partners in Israeli construction in the West Bank.
Africa Israel (if its shares have not already been sold for purely economic reasons), Israeli banks that give mortgages to settlers, a Mexican company that has plants in the settlements and is a partner in mining in occupied territory, Israeli firms whose plants are in the occupied West Bank – these are just some of the over 40 Israeli and international companies that are involved in solidifying Israel’s
occupation, and in which Norway invests, according to data from the “Who Profits” project, run by the Coalition of Women for Peace.
The Norwegian Finance Ministry’s Council on Ethics, which recommended that the pension fund pull its investment from Elbit, also explained why it would divest from that company but not, say, from the U.S. company Caterpillar. Elbit, it said, developed equipment used specifically in the construction of the separation barrier, while the equipment sold by Caterpillar to the Israel Defense Forces has
legitimate uses as well, and the company should not be held responsible for it being employed in another, possibly illegal, way (namely, the wholesale destruction of Palestinian homes).
The council extended this conclusion to other companies involved in building the separation barrier that also benefited from Norwegian investment. In this way it corresponds indirectly with left-wing Norwegian activists, and with Palestinian and Israeli anti-occupation activists, providing a basis for their suspicions that the fund’s ethics guidelines have been violated. Those guidelines forbid investment in companies that “contribute to serious or systematic human-rights violations,” and are in blatant contradiction to the will or pretense of moving Israel and the Palestinians toward a just agreement.
And still, it seems that the Foreign Ministry and Barak know full well why they were so quick to issue a rebuke, and are once again trying to sow fear, forcing Norway to lower the bar it has set for itself and other countries, and blocking in advance the logical path the recommendations have paved. This is the first time a nation has adopted – actively and not just with words – the opinion of the International Court of Justice in the Hague about the separation contravention of international law.
If building the barrier is in itself illegal, it follows that so are the settlements, roads and factories serving the occupation. The Norwegian foreign minister also noted that the ICJ had ruled that it is the obligation of countries signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention to prevent that charter’s violation.
It is said that members of the ethics council are not influenced by social or political pressure. But the very creation of the council in 2004 stemmed from public pressure and struggle. We can only hope that forces within the Norwegian public continue to tell their government (even if it is replaced this month by a right-wing administration) that it is obligated not to drag them into being an accomplice.
____________________
8. Israel’s laws of persecution
Nimer Sultany | The Guardian
8 September 2009
Two cases brought before Israeli courts last week revealed the attitude of the establishment towards Palestinian Arab citizens of the state. One shows how Palestinian citizens are treated as victims of police brutality, and the second shows how they are regularly victimised because of their opposition to injustice.
In the first, a policeman who shot and killed an Arab citizen in 2006 was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. The unbearable leniency of the sentence is more evidence of the total disregard for Arab life inside Israel, where ethnicity of the victim is a de facto mitigating circumstance in the case of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Indeed, this was the only case in which any policeman or soldier was indicted
since the mass protests of October 2000, in spite of the fact that about 40 citizens were killed during this period.
The second case involved an indictment against Rawi Sultani, a 23-year-old law student, for “contact with a foreign agent” and “delivering information to the enemy”; two flawed articles in Israel’s laws comparable in their application to use of “national security” laws by authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world. The young student is a political activist of the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), a party that calls for the transformation of Israel from a Jewish state into a
state for all its citizens. Rawi is also the son of a well-known leader of the party. He is accused of having contact with another youth, who allegedly turned out to be a Hezbollah member, during a national Arab youth conference in Morocco. Allegedly, Rawi disclosed information regarding the Israeli army’s chief of staff, given their membership in the same gym. Yet the case is based on a tendentious
account of one statement of a publicly known fact regarding the chief’s membership in that gym made by the accused.
The identity of the accused, the identity of his father, the party to which they both belong, the timing of the case and the kind of charges chosen cannot be easily overlooked and give grounds to questioning the political incentives behind the indictment and the message behind it. One would be hard put to explain the extensive surveillance against leaders and activists of the NDA as revealed by this case.
Indeed, since the emergence of the NDA in the mid 1990s, it faced mounting legal and public attacks. These attacks took a stronger turn since October 2000 and culminated in the forced exile of Azmi Bishara, the leader of the NDA, who was accused with similar charges in 2007. What was supposed to be a fatal blow to the NDA and its legitimacy within the Arab minority has failed, with the party’s success in the Israeli parliamentary elections in February. However, this did not deter the establishment from mounting further attacks on the cadres of the party. Thus, we have witnessed in the last month show-arrests and interrogations of many young activists of the NDA that are reminiscent of crackdowns on pro-democracy activists in authoritarian regimes.
Its connections with the Arab world is a recurring theme of the persecution of the NDA as a party challenging the Jewishness of the state, and is the real incentive behind Rawi’s case. The NDA has, since its inception, challenged the iron cage surrounding Arab citizens following 1948. Israel has detached Arab citizens from their familial, historical, cultural and sociopolitical milieu. The legislation preventing family unification and the naturalisation of spouses of Arab citizens if they were residents of the occupied territories or other Arab countries surrounding Israel is only the most draconian example of this policy of segregation. Israeli law also defines a long list of Arab states as enemy states and prohibits Arab citizens from visiting them, and prohibits political parties from expressing support of Arab liberation struggles. In short, “national security” is broadly defined to fit the dominant ideology of the state rather than the security of citizens, regardless of their national affiliation.
Yet, as Rawi’s father correctly argues, the Palestinian citizens of Israel cannot be expected to treat the Arab world as an enemy and they cannot be held accountable for the political views or affiliations of other Arabs they meet in their travels outside Israel. Indictments such as Rawi’s aim at forcing Palestinian citizens to adopt the Zionist newspeak and refrain from connections with the Arab world and
from identifying with its legitimate cause against Israel’s continuing occupation of Arab lands.
Criminalising dissent is not unique to Israel. Many oppressive states, such as apartheid South Africa, have used it to de-legitimise parties, ideas and activities disliked by ruling elites and security apparatuses. Furthermore, persecution on grounds of “security” creates an immediate divide between Arab and Jewish citizens. In 2007, the head of Shabak, the Israeli general security agency, stated that
struggles against the Jewishness of the state, even if lawful and democratic, would be deemed subversive. The current right-wing government is seeking to condition citizenship on loyalty to Zionist ideology, a demand unparalleled in any democracy and contrary to the most basic of human rights. With this kind of attitude, it is no
wonder that young Arab men and women inside Israel are victimised because of their noble aspirations to equality and freedom.
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9. Palestinian driver forced to unload truck despite papers
Ali Waked | YNet News
10 September 2009
The driver of a truck loaded with boulders drove last Friday to the Palestinian town, Ras Tira, to deliver his truck’s contents.
He was shocked to discover that, despite having all the proper documentation for delivering the goods signed by Israel’s Coordination and Liaison Authority, IDF soldiers at the checkpoint asked him to unload the boulders so that the bed of the truck could be checked.
The separation fence splits Ras Tira from the main bloc of Palestinian towns in the West Bank, creating an enclave on the side of the fence near Qalqilya.
Ras Tira Mayor Hisham Mara’adeh told Ynet that the driver reached the entrance of the town around 6:30 am, but was detained there until 12 pm explaining the situation to the soldiers.
The driver explained to the soldiers that he had no problem unloading the boulders from the truck.
However, because of their large size, he had no way of reloading them onto the vehicle and transporting them to their final destination.
This did not seem to deter the soldiers. They insisted that he unload the rocks, and the driver ultimately gave in. He then had to order a tractor with a crane, paid for at his expense, in order to reload the weighty goods back onto the truck. Only at 3 pm did the driver and his load enter the town.
“These scenes are almost daily. When we happen upon an officer who is not nice, the life of the village, mainly residents and drivers – especially those who have to deliver a load – turn into a nightmare,” said Mara’adeh.
The mayor said that all petitions to the Coordination and Liaison Authority and to human rights organizations have failed to change the situation. Mara’adeh, who filmed the event together with the women of MachsomWatch, also said that “the soldiers bully the residents.”
The women of MachsomWatch said that this incident occurred during a period when Israel is actually easing up on checkpoint activity in honor of the Ramadan holiday.
The IDF Spokesperson declined to comment.
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10. An open letter to Mr. Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa
Haider Eid | The Palestine Chronicle
10 September 2009
Dear Mr. President,
I am writing to express my dismay and disappointment with both your attendance at the national conference of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies – a racist organization by any standards – as well as the content of your speech at that forum.
I am a naturalised South African of Palestinian origin. I spent more than five years in Johannesburg, during which I earned a PhD from the University of Johannesburg and lectured at the-then Vista University in Soweto and Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg.
I would like to take issue with the manner in which you express your support for the two-state solution: “It is a solution that fulfils the aspirations of both parties for independent homelands through two states for two peoples, Israel and an independent, adjoining, and viable state of Palestine” (emphasis mine). Allow me, Mr. President, as a resident of Gaza, to express my shock with the fact that – only 8 months after the Gaza massacre, in which 1500 civilians, including 434 children, were brutally murdered – you still believe that there are two symmetrical sides. You even call it the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict!” Was that your belief in the 1970’s and 80’s; that there were “two-sides” to the South African “conflict”? Were there two equal parties, namely White and Black, with equal claim to the land and equal historical responsibility for the-then status quo? No doubt, this sounds like a bizarre interpretation of South African history and one which we Palestinians find equally astounding when applied to our history and our reality today.
Mr. President, these words of yours are even more disturbing, given your own involvement in the commendable struggle against the brutal, anti-human apartheid system and the notion of “independent homelands” which were based on the separation of human beings. Your struggle as Black South Africans, was morally superior to apartheid because it was inclusive where apartheid focused on separation; it was embracing where apartheid focused on division; it was life-affirming where
apartheid was violent and murderous.
The South African anti-apartheid goal, adopted by anti-apartheid activists all around the world was unequivocal: the end of the racist system and ideology of apartheid. There could be no toenadering (rapprochement)with apartheid ideologues; no creation of homelands and puppet leaders: the system had to be dismantled in its entirety. Many South Africans supported by a sustained global anti-apartheid campaign, sacrificed their lives to bring down the Bantustansan euphemistically, called independent homelands by the apartheid regime. Mr. President, Steve Biko, Oliver Tambo, Chris Hani, the Mxenges, the Slovosac to mention but a few anti-apartheid heroes must have listened to the speech to the JBD and wondered what happened to the universal values and human rights espoused by the ANC.
Comrade Jacob (if I may),
I would like to brief you on the nature of the powerful party, i.e.Israel – with whom your post-apartheid government still, amazingly, maintains exceptional diplomatic and economic ties.
Unlike the new post-apartheid South Africa, which you helped to create, in the State of Israel all human beings are NOT equal. There are fundamental artificially created and selectively rewarded a level of of citizens in the state. Israel defines itself as a Jewish State. It, therefore, creates a bizarre distinction between “nationality” and “citizenship.” Almost 22% of the citizens of Israel are Palestinians who are excluded from such a definition. Israel thus, by definition is NOT the state of its citizens, but rather that of “The Jewish People”, most of whom, like the members of JBD whom you were addressing, have no birthright connection to it. The question which begs an answer is what the status of those Palestinian citizens in a Jewish state is? The answer is, as every single – to use a word you must abhor “non-white” South African knows: Racism.
The delegates at the national conference of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, Jewish, but at the same time, South African citizens “enjoy full rights” in Israel, rights that apartheid Israel denies to us, the indigenous people of this land. They also call us “Israeli Arabs”, “Jerusalem residents”, “Arabs of the territories”, not to mention the refugees living in the Diaspora, whose mere mention
always spoils any party, and whose right to return and compensation is sanctioned by International Law (UNGA resolution 194).
Israeli nationality, therefore, is non-existent. Instead, there is Jewish Nationality”. To make such a bizarre term comprehensible, think of “White Nationality” as opposed to South African. In your speech before the JBD, you state very eloquently that “(m)uch as we are conscious of who we are culturally and otherwise, it must not take away the national identity, as we should be South Africans first”.
The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crimes of Apartheid, Article 2, Part 3, clearly defines apartheid as:
“[a]ny legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work…
the right to education, the right to leave and return to their country the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence.”
This definition, in its entirety, clearly applies not only to the Palestinian people residing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but also those living in Israel itself. This is precisely the reason that the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Territories, a fellow South African, John Dugard, concluded that “the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid appears to be violated by many practices”.
If you were born to Palestinian parents living in Israel – a fate you have been spared, Mr. President – you too would be denied the rights of “Jewish Nationality” and been forced to submit to institutionalized inferiority or choose to resist it.
Furthermore, ICSPCA (quoted above), Article 2, Part 4, makes it crystal clear that:
“[t]he term ‘the crime of apartheid’,’ shall apply to “any measures including legislative measure, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate measures and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups The expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof..”
Comrade Jacob, the word apartheid never appears once in your speech before the JBD! A listener would never know that you were speaking to an audience who actively support apartheid in another country.
Did you know that racist laws used to forbid Black property ownership in white areas in apartheid South Africa are in force in apartheid Israel? Indigenous Palestinian citizens of Israel are not only prohibited from living on land owned by “Jewish institutions”, but are also not allowed by force of “law” to reside in any areas designated “Jewish” either.
I, myself, Mr. President, a resident of Gaza, like so many Palestinians, have legal title to my parents’ land in Israel, but have no “legal” right to it because my parents’ property, like that of millions of other Palestinians’, was taken away from us and given over to Jewish ownership. The facts are that Jews owned only 7% of
Palestine before 1948; today 93% is considered “state land” and can only be owned by Jews or Israel.
This is only one example, Comrade Jacob, of the nature of the state your government deems “democratic”and “friendly” despite its past strategic ties with apartheid SA. In your presidential campaign, you were quoted singing “kill the Boer!” And yet, in your speech, you “unequivocally” condemn “all forms of violence from whatever quarter”, particularly where civilians are targeted!
I fail to understand this contradiction. Is this a reflection of the difference between comrade Jacob and President Zuma? Do you, as president, think that Palestinians have no right to resist their occupation and dispossession? You even equate our resistance with the War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity committed by the Israeli Occupation forces in the West Bank and, in particular, in Gaza.
Is it too much, comrade Jacob, for us, representatives of Palestinian Civil Society organizations to ask your government to sever all diplomatic ties with apartheid Israel, and endorses not to say lead the growing global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel? Is that really too much to ask a democratic post-apartheid South Africa for?
Is this the embodiment of Fanon’s prophecy about the “Pitfalls of National (Racial?) Consciousness?” Is it because the Black Middle class which your government represents and which has taken power from the White Middle class is underdeveloped? Fanon, whom you must have read while on the run from the apartheid police, says that this national middle class “has practically no economic power, and in any case it is in no way commensurate with the bourgeoisie of the mother country which it hopes to replace.” Is this why you are prepared to kowtow to the South African Jewish community which “has been called one of the most tightly-knit in the world, overwhelmingly united in its support for Israel?”
Your government, Mr. President, turns a blind eye to the war crimes of its own citizens against Palestinians. The South African war criminal David Benjamin was allowed to freely move around South Africa and share his tactics of support and defence for the Israeli Occupation Forces in its recent onslaught against the Gaza Strip with impunity. There are seventy other South Africans that are known to have links with the destruction of the Israeli Occupation Forces who enjoy the same impunity. It is left to individuals and civil society organizations in South Africa to take action against these criminals that should rightly be the task of the government.
Your post-apartheid government, Mr. President, unashamedly, supports the two-state solution: one for Palestinians (Muslim and Christians), and one for Jews. In other words, you support the re-birth of Bantustans, albeit in the Middle East this time. The two-state solution is a racist solution, comrade Jacob. If you did not accept it
for yourselves in South Africa, why force it on Palestinians instead of supporting us as we demand the right to our homeland every single inch of it?
Mr. President,
A politics based on narrow-minded, selfish pragmatism was rejected by all anti-apartheid forces, locally and internationally during the years of the anti-apartheid struggle. What was promoted, instead, was adherence to universal principles of equality and dignity.
I truly hope you will reconsider. I know that it is my constitutional right as a citizen of the New South Africa – which I am proud of – to address you directly. I do so to express my deep disagreement and dissatisfaction with your government’s Middle East policy and its continued support for the apartheid policies of the Israeli government, given that this support undermines and actively harms the
Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination.Sincerely,
Professor Haidar Eid
Gaza, Palestine
- Dr. Haidar Eid is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, Al-Aqsa University, Gaza Strip, Palestine. Dr. Eid is a founding member of the One Democratic State Group (ODSG) and a member of Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
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2. Israeli settlement expansion in South Hebron Hills continues unabated
3. Israel authorizes building in another East Jerusalem neighborhood
4. Israeli forces raid Bil’in
5. UN: Gaza in worst condition since 1967
6. Libelled activist donates to ISM from court award
7. Why stop with Elbit?
8. Israel’s laws of persecution
9. Palestinian driver forced to unload truck despite papers
10. An open letter to Mr. Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa
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1. Palestine’s peaceful struggle
Mohammed Khatib | The Nation
11 September 2009
A few weeks ago, in the dead of night, dozens of Israeli soldiers with painted faces burst violently into my home. If only they had knocked, I would have opened the door. They arrested me. My wife, Lamia, was left alone with our four children. My youngest, 3-year-old Khaled, woke up to the image of Israeli soldiers with painted faces who were taking his father away. He has not stopped crying since. A few nights
ago he woke up in terror, sobbing: “Daddy, why did you let the soldiers take me?” That’s the way our children sleep–in a constant state of fear.
Many Americans know that the Obama administration has been pushing the Israeli government to accept a freeze on settlement construction. What is not commonly known is that even as Israel negotiates with the United States, it has been taking steps, including my arrest, to crush the growing Palestinian nonviolent movement opposing Israel’s construction of settlements and the wall on Palestinian land in the West Bank.
For over five years the residents of Bil’in and other villages have been protesting against Israel’s separation wall, which cuts off our village’s land for the sake of Israeli settlement expansion. We have even taken the struggle to the courts. The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in July 2004 that the wall, where it has been built inside the West Bank, is illegal under international law,
as are all Israeli settlements. In September 2007, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the wall in Bil’in, which separates us from 50 percent of our land, is illegal according to Israeli law. The wall has yet to have moved.
The Israeli army is using more-lethal weapons and greater violence against protesters, and arresting many people, including many protest organizers. In Bil’in alone, twenty-nine residents have been arrested in the past three months. Twelve of them are children. Almost all were arrested during military raids in the middle of the night. Their detention has been extended repeatedly.
But the charges against them are baseless. As one example, I have been charged with stone throwing. I was released on bail with draconian terms only after my lawyers showed the court passport stamps proving that I was abroad at the time of the alleged offense. My friend, Adeeb Abu-Rahme, 37 years old and the father of nine, has been imprisoned for more than six weeks, though the charges against him are just as absurd.
Every Friday in Bil’in, we march to the wall in peaceful protest, along with our Israeli and international partners. Once a year we hold an international conference about the popular nonviolent struggle. Together we learn and gain inspiration. We struggle together to bring down the many walls between people that the occupation is creating. We’ve repeatedly addressed the Israeli soldiers here, telling them we
are not against them as people, but that we oppose their actions as an occupying military force.
Still, nineteen demonstrators have been killed by the Israeli army in these nonviolent demonstrations against the wall. Many have been injured, including Israeli and international activists protesting with us. Here in Bil’in we recently lost our friend Bassem Abu Rahme, who was fatally shot by soldiers in April while he was imploring them to stop shooting at demonstrators.
Several months ago we were warned by Israel’s occupation forces that they intended to crush the popular struggle.
Why has the Israeli government decided now to increase the suppression of demonstrations and to break the spirit of protest leaders? Maybe because they realize that the nonviolent struggle is spreading, that more and more villages have created popular committees that are organizing demonstrations. Perhaps the crackdown is a result of their concern and the growing international movement for the boycott of companies and businessmen such as Lev Leviev who are involved in Israel’s land grab. Or maybe they fear that the new American government could learn through our demonstrations that Israel’s wall is a means to annex land for the growing settlements, and that nonviolent Palestinian protests are being brutally suppressed.
Israel’s actions suggest that it is intimidated by people struggling for their rights in a nonviolent manner. The Israeli government seems to believe that Palestinians who struggle while partnering with Israeli activists endanger Israel’s occupation and that tearing down human walls is a dangerous act. Perhaps what the state of Israel fears most of all is the hope that people can live together based on justice and equality for all.
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2. Israeli settlement expansion in South Hebron Hills continues unabated
Christian Peacemaker Teams and Operation Dove
10 September 2009
At a time when the international community is calling for a freeze on new building in settlements and the disbanding of settlement outposts, the settler community of the South Hebron Hills is continuing its expansion unabated.
Israeli settlers from the illegal settlement on Ma’on, in the South Hebron Hills area, are constructing at least five new caravans on the south-west side of the settlement. Internationals based in the nearby Palestinian village of At Tuwani first observed building preparatory work in Ma’on a few days ago. Today, as the new caravans were being built, settlers began preparatory work on a nearby hilltop for further settlement expansion. Over the past three months, internationals have also observed settlers constructing numerous new buildings in the nearby illegal Israeli outposts of Havat Ma’on (Hill 833) and Avigail.
Since its establishment in 1981, Ma’on settlement has been a source of violence towards local Palestinians. The agricultural orchards of Ma’on are cultivated on private land belonging to a family from the nearby Palestinian village of At Tuwani. By 1997, ongoing settler violence forced the Palestinian inhabitants of three nearby villages (Sarura, Humra and Kharoubeh) to abandon their homes.
The original outpost of Havat Ma’on was established in July 1999, but was dismantled in September of that year by the Israeli military. The following year, the outpost was re-established on a nearby hilltop, Hill 833, and has remained and grown since then. Avigail outpost was established in 2001.
Settlers from Ma’on and Havat Ma’on attack and harass Palestinian children from Tuba and Maghayir al Abeed traveling to and from school in At Tuwani. In 2004, following two attacks on internationals accompanying the children, the Israeli Knesset Committee for Children’s Rights affirmed the need for a military escort for the
school children. The escort continues five years later. Settlers from Avigail and Havat Ma’on outposts also regularly attack Palestinian shepherds grazing their sheep.
For photos of new buildings in Ma’on go to: http://tinyurl.com/mj9fmw
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3. Israel authorizes building in another East Jerusalem neighborhood
Akiva Eldar | Ha’aretz
9 September 2009
Three days after the U.S. administration criticized the decision of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to authorize the construction of hundreds of new housing units in settlements, the Israel Lands Administration published tenders for the construction of 486 apartments in the neighborhood of Pisgat Ze’ev in East Jerusalem.
The new construction project is designated for the outer edge of the northeastern municipal boundary of Jerusalem, and will narrow the distance between the homes on the edge of the neighborhood and the nearby Palestinian communities. Bids have been solicited for construction on an overall area of 138 dunams (about 34 acres), which
was subdivided into 25 smaller tenders.
The Obama administration has made it clear on a number of occasions that it is demanding that Israel freeze settlement construction in the territories, including in East Jerusalem. Two months ago, it was reported that Netanyahu had ordered a delay in the publication of the tenders.
In October 2008, the ILA canceled the tenders, arguing that the bids received from developers were too low compared to the value of the land. Then, last month, Haaretz-TheMarker reported that the tenders would be reissued after an appeal by contractors had led to the conclusion that the official assessment of the land value had been
excessively high.
Officials at the Ministry of Housing and Construction said at the time that they would offer or development more land in the neighborhood so as to lower the price of apartments in the area.
Daniel Seidemann, the founder of Ir Amim, a non-profit organization that seeks to promote coexistence in Jerusalem, said last night that tenders of such magnitude would not be announced if they did not have the support of the prime minister. Seidemann describes the bid-taking as yet another example of a fraud that leads to creating facts on the ground even though there is talk of a freeze in settlement
construction.
According to the ILA: “The tender was issued with the approval of minister of housing, and there was no additional approval needed at the political level. It is a tender that had been published last year in October and, for technical reasons, so far only two of the 25 plots had been sold.”
Meanwhile, a source familiar with the exchanges between Israel and the U.S. on the issue of a settlement freeze told Haaretz that the Obama administration is not interested in a crisis with the government of Netanyahu on settlements.
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4. Israeli forces raid Bil’in
8 September 2009
Shortly after 2:30am, the Israeli occupation forces invaded the village of Bil’in again with five Jeeps and a military truck. They came to arrest Hamaza Burnat (age 16) but he was not at home at the time. This was the second time this week that the Israeli Army raided his house.
Bil’in is a small village of 1,700 inhabitants near Ramallah in the
West Bank. For nearly three months now, the Israeli occupation forces have been conducting night raids several times a week in this village arresting more than 20 people, mainly teenagers.
On behalf of Iyad Burnat, the Head of the Popular Committee, we call on all the supporters to help us in our struggle by organizing demonstrations and sending messages to the Israeli Embassies demanding to stop these night raids in Bil’in. Our children cannot sleep at night because of sound bombs and tear gas being fired by the invading forces. This village is under curfew, we need all your help to be able
to lead a normal life again.
To view video see: http://palsolidarity.org/2009/09/8330____________________
5. UN: Gaza in worst condition since 1967
Ali Waked | YNet News
8 September 2009
A UN report published Tuesday says poverty in the Gaza Strip has deteriorated to levels unseen since 1967.
The UN trade and development agency says 90% of Gaza’s residents are currently beneath the poverty line and rates the damages caused by the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead at $4 billion, a sum it claims is three times larger than the Strip’s annual market performance.
The agency claims the operation halted all trade in the Gaza Strip, creating a deficit of around $88 million. This, in addition to material damages and loss of finances due to the siege and trade limitations later imposed on the Strip, make up the final sum.
The agency’s report claims the Strip has not been in such dire straits since 1967, and that the government has become the residents’ main force of employment.
Gaza’s production capabilities are also on a permanent downslide, the UN agency says, and its economy has been recessing for nine years.
The agency offers no solution, and says it regrets that the $4.4 billion dollars pledged to the Strip during a Sharm El-Sheikh conference has not yet reached its destination.
The conference, held in the Egyptian city in March, hosted representatives from 45 different nations. The US pledged $900 million, a third of the sum pledged during the conference.
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6. Libelled activist donates to ISM from court award
ISM London
7 September 2009
ISM London wishes to thank activist Raphael Cohen for a generous donation he recently made from the funds the court awarded him after his recent libel action against a London newspaper.
Raph – as he’s known within the ISM – instigated legal proceedings against the Jewish Chronicle after it published a letter in November 2008 falsely claiming he had “sheltered” British suicide bombers five days before they blew up a Tel Aviv bar in 2003.
In April, Raph won the case in the high court, accepting substantial damages and an apology. The paper also paid legal costs. The weekly newspaper accepted it should never have published the letter.
This month, Raph announced to ISM London that he would donate part of his award to the ISM.
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7. Why stop with Elbit?
Amira Hass | Ha’aretz
9 September 2009
The question is not why Norway divested from the defense electronics giant Elbit Systems, but why only now, and why only from that company? The country that gave the name of its capital city to what the world thought of as a peace process is still invested in companies involved in construction and development in the West Bank settlements – the principal factor in destroying any chance for peace (at least any peace other than the belligerent demand that the Palestinians say “thank you” for what Israel is willing to give them).
From the outset, instead of rebuking the Norwegian ambassador, the Foreign Ministry and Defense Minister Ehud Barak should have actually praised the citizens of Norway. Through their government pension fund, which invests oil revenues in 8,000 companies around the world for the sake of Norway’s future generations, those citizens continue to be active partners in Israeli construction in the West Bank.
Africa Israel (if its shares have not already been sold for purely economic reasons), Israeli banks that give mortgages to settlers, a Mexican company that has plants in the settlements and is a partner in mining in occupied territory, Israeli firms whose plants are in the occupied West Bank – these are just some of the over 40 Israeli and international companies that are involved in solidifying Israel’s
occupation, and in which Norway invests, according to data from the “Who Profits” project, run by the Coalition of Women for Peace.
The Norwegian Finance Ministry’s Council on Ethics, which recommended that the pension fund pull its investment from Elbit, also explained why it would divest from that company but not, say, from the U.S. company Caterpillar. Elbit, it said, developed equipment used specifically in the construction of the separation barrier, while the equipment sold by Caterpillar to the Israel Defense Forces has
legitimate uses as well, and the company should not be held responsible for it being employed in another, possibly illegal, way (namely, the wholesale destruction of Palestinian homes).
The council extended this conclusion to other companies involved in building the separation barrier that also benefited from Norwegian investment. In this way it corresponds indirectly with left-wing Norwegian activists, and with Palestinian and Israeli anti-occupation activists, providing a basis for their suspicions that the fund’s ethics guidelines have been violated. Those guidelines forbid investment in companies that “contribute to serious or systematic human-rights violations,” and are in blatant contradiction to the will or pretense of moving Israel and the Palestinians toward a just agreement.
And still, it seems that the Foreign Ministry and Barak know full well why they were so quick to issue a rebuke, and are once again trying to sow fear, forcing Norway to lower the bar it has set for itself and other countries, and blocking in advance the logical path the recommendations have paved. This is the first time a nation has adopted – actively and not just with words – the opinion of the International Court of Justice in the Hague about the separation contravention of international law.
If building the barrier is in itself illegal, it follows that so are the settlements, roads and factories serving the occupation. The Norwegian foreign minister also noted that the ICJ had ruled that it is the obligation of countries signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention to prevent that charter’s violation.
It is said that members of the ethics council are not influenced by social or political pressure. But the very creation of the council in 2004 stemmed from public pressure and struggle. We can only hope that forces within the Norwegian public continue to tell their government (even if it is replaced this month by a right-wing administration) that it is obligated not to drag them into being an accomplice.
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8. Israel’s laws of persecution
Nimer Sultany | The Guardian
8 September 2009
Two cases brought before Israeli courts last week revealed the attitude of the establishment towards Palestinian Arab citizens of the state. One shows how Palestinian citizens are treated as victims of police brutality, and the second shows how they are regularly victimised because of their opposition to injustice.
In the first, a policeman who shot and killed an Arab citizen in 2006 was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. The unbearable leniency of the sentence is more evidence of the total disregard for Arab life inside Israel, where ethnicity of the victim is a de facto mitigating circumstance in the case of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Indeed, this was the only case in which any policeman or soldier was indicted
since the mass protests of October 2000, in spite of the fact that about 40 citizens were killed during this period.
The second case involved an indictment against Rawi Sultani, a 23-year-old law student, for “contact with a foreign agent” and “delivering information to the enemy”; two flawed articles in Israel’s laws comparable in their application to use of “national security” laws by authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world. The young student is a political activist of the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), a party that calls for the transformation of Israel from a Jewish state into a
state for all its citizens. Rawi is also the son of a well-known leader of the party. He is accused of having contact with another youth, who allegedly turned out to be a Hezbollah member, during a national Arab youth conference in Morocco. Allegedly, Rawi disclosed information regarding the Israeli army’s chief of staff, given their membership in the same gym. Yet the case is based on a tendentious
account of one statement of a publicly known fact regarding the chief’s membership in that gym made by the accused.
The identity of the accused, the identity of his father, the party to which they both belong, the timing of the case and the kind of charges chosen cannot be easily overlooked and give grounds to questioning the political incentives behind the indictment and the message behind it. One would be hard put to explain the extensive surveillance against leaders and activists of the NDA as revealed by this case.
Indeed, since the emergence of the NDA in the mid 1990s, it faced mounting legal and public attacks. These attacks took a stronger turn since October 2000 and culminated in the forced exile of Azmi Bishara, the leader of the NDA, who was accused with similar charges in 2007. What was supposed to be a fatal blow to the NDA and its legitimacy within the Arab minority has failed, with the party’s success in the Israeli parliamentary elections in February. However, this did not deter the establishment from mounting further attacks on the cadres of the party. Thus, we have witnessed in the last month show-arrests and interrogations of many young activists of the NDA that are reminiscent of crackdowns on pro-democracy activists in authoritarian regimes.
Its connections with the Arab world is a recurring theme of the persecution of the NDA as a party challenging the Jewishness of the state, and is the real incentive behind Rawi’s case. The NDA has, since its inception, challenged the iron cage surrounding Arab citizens following 1948. Israel has detached Arab citizens from their familial, historical, cultural and sociopolitical milieu. The legislation preventing family unification and the naturalisation of spouses of Arab citizens if they were residents of the occupied territories or other Arab countries surrounding Israel is only the most draconian example of this policy of segregation. Israeli law also defines a long list of Arab states as enemy states and prohibits Arab citizens from visiting them, and prohibits political parties from expressing support of Arab liberation struggles. In short, “national security” is broadly defined to fit the dominant ideology of the state rather than the security of citizens, regardless of their national affiliation.
Yet, as Rawi’s father correctly argues, the Palestinian citizens of Israel cannot be expected to treat the Arab world as an enemy and they cannot be held accountable for the political views or affiliations of other Arabs they meet in their travels outside Israel. Indictments such as Rawi’s aim at forcing Palestinian citizens to adopt the Zionist newspeak and refrain from connections with the Arab world and
from identifying with its legitimate cause against Israel’s continuing occupation of Arab lands.
Criminalising dissent is not unique to Israel. Many oppressive states, such as apartheid South Africa, have used it to de-legitimise parties, ideas and activities disliked by ruling elites and security apparatuses. Furthermore, persecution on grounds of “security” creates an immediate divide between Arab and Jewish citizens. In 2007, the head of Shabak, the Israeli general security agency, stated that
struggles against the Jewishness of the state, even if lawful and democratic, would be deemed subversive. The current right-wing government is seeking to condition citizenship on loyalty to Zionist ideology, a demand unparalleled in any democracy and contrary to the most basic of human rights. With this kind of attitude, it is no
wonder that young Arab men and women inside Israel are victimised because of their noble aspirations to equality and freedom.
____________________
9. Palestinian driver forced to unload truck despite papers
Ali Waked | YNet News
10 September 2009
The driver of a truck loaded with boulders drove last Friday to the Palestinian town, Ras Tira, to deliver his truck’s contents.
He was shocked to discover that, despite having all the proper documentation for delivering the goods signed by Israel’s Coordination and Liaison Authority, IDF soldiers at the checkpoint asked him to unload the boulders so that the bed of the truck could be checked.
The separation fence splits Ras Tira from the main bloc of Palestinian towns in the West Bank, creating an enclave on the side of the fence near Qalqilya.
Ras Tira Mayor Hisham Mara’adeh told Ynet that the driver reached the entrance of the town around 6:30 am, but was detained there until 12 pm explaining the situation to the soldiers.
The driver explained to the soldiers that he had no problem unloading the boulders from the truck.
However, because of their large size, he had no way of reloading them onto the vehicle and transporting them to their final destination.
This did not seem to deter the soldiers. They insisted that he unload the rocks, and the driver ultimately gave in. He then had to order a tractor with a crane, paid for at his expense, in order to reload the weighty goods back onto the truck. Only at 3 pm did the driver and his load enter the town.
“These scenes are almost daily. When we happen upon an officer who is not nice, the life of the village, mainly residents and drivers – especially those who have to deliver a load – turn into a nightmare,” said Mara’adeh.
The mayor said that all petitions to the Coordination and Liaison Authority and to human rights organizations have failed to change the situation. Mara’adeh, who filmed the event together with the women of MachsomWatch, also said that “the soldiers bully the residents.”
The women of MachsomWatch said that this incident occurred during a period when Israel is actually easing up on checkpoint activity in honor of the Ramadan holiday.
The IDF Spokesperson declined to comment.
____________________
10. An open letter to Mr. Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa
Haider Eid | The Palestine Chronicle
10 September 2009
Dear Mr. President,
I am writing to express my dismay and disappointment with both your attendance at the national conference of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies – a racist organization by any standards – as well as the content of your speech at that forum.
I am a naturalised South African of Palestinian origin. I spent more than five years in Johannesburg, during which I earned a PhD from the University of Johannesburg and lectured at the-then Vista University in Soweto and Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg.
I would like to take issue with the manner in which you express your support for the two-state solution: “It is a solution that fulfils the aspirations of both parties for independent homelands through two states for two peoples, Israel and an independent, adjoining, and viable state of Palestine” (emphasis mine). Allow me, Mr. President, as a resident of Gaza, to express my shock with the fact that – only 8 months after the Gaza massacre, in which 1500 civilians, including 434 children, were brutally murdered – you still believe that there are two symmetrical sides. You even call it the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict!” Was that your belief in the 1970’s and 80’s; that there were “two-sides” to the South African “conflict”? Were there two equal parties, namely White and Black, with equal claim to the land and equal historical responsibility for the-then status quo? No doubt, this sounds like a bizarre interpretation of South African history and one which we Palestinians find equally astounding when applied to our history and our reality today.
Mr. President, these words of yours are even more disturbing, given your own involvement in the commendable struggle against the brutal, anti-human apartheid system and the notion of “independent homelands” which were based on the separation of human beings. Your struggle as Black South Africans, was morally superior to apartheid because it was inclusive where apartheid focused on separation; it was embracing where apartheid focused on division; it was life-affirming where
apartheid was violent and murderous.
The South African anti-apartheid goal, adopted by anti-apartheid activists all around the world was unequivocal: the end of the racist system and ideology of apartheid. There could be no toenadering (rapprochement)with apartheid ideologues; no creation of homelands and puppet leaders: the system had to be dismantled in its entirety. Many South Africans supported by a sustained global anti-apartheid campaign, sacrificed their lives to bring down the Bantustansan euphemistically, called independent homelands by the apartheid regime. Mr. President, Steve Biko, Oliver Tambo, Chris Hani, the Mxenges, the Slovosac to mention but a few anti-apartheid heroes must have listened to the speech to the JBD and wondered what happened to the universal values and human rights espoused by the ANC.
Comrade Jacob (if I may),
I would like to brief you on the nature of the powerful party, i.e.Israel – with whom your post-apartheid government still, amazingly, maintains exceptional diplomatic and economic ties.
Unlike the new post-apartheid South Africa, which you helped to create, in the State of Israel all human beings are NOT equal. There are fundamental artificially created and selectively rewarded a level of of citizens in the state. Israel defines itself as a Jewish State. It, therefore, creates a bizarre distinction between “nationality” and “citizenship.” Almost 22% of the citizens of Israel are Palestinians who are excluded from such a definition. Israel thus, by definition is NOT the state of its citizens, but rather that of “The Jewish People”, most of whom, like the members of JBD whom you were addressing, have no birthright connection to it. The question which begs an answer is what the status of those Palestinian citizens in a Jewish state is? The answer is, as every single – to use a word you must abhor “non-white” South African knows: Racism.
The delegates at the national conference of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, Jewish, but at the same time, South African citizens “enjoy full rights” in Israel, rights that apartheid Israel denies to us, the indigenous people of this land. They also call us “Israeli Arabs”, “Jerusalem residents”, “Arabs of the territories”, not to mention the refugees living in the Diaspora, whose mere mention
always spoils any party, and whose right to return and compensation is sanctioned by International Law (UNGA resolution 194).
Israeli nationality, therefore, is non-existent. Instead, there is Jewish Nationality”. To make such a bizarre term comprehensible, think of “White Nationality” as opposed to South African. In your speech before the JBD, you state very eloquently that “(m)uch as we are conscious of who we are culturally and otherwise, it must not take away the national identity, as we should be South Africans first”.
The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crimes of Apartheid, Article 2, Part 3, clearly defines apartheid as:
“[a]ny legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work…
the right to education, the right to leave and return to their country the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence.”
This definition, in its entirety, clearly applies not only to the Palestinian people residing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but also those living in Israel itself. This is precisely the reason that the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Territories, a fellow South African, John Dugard, concluded that “the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid appears to be violated by many practices”.
If you were born to Palestinian parents living in Israel – a fate you have been spared, Mr. President – you too would be denied the rights of “Jewish Nationality” and been forced to submit to institutionalized inferiority or choose to resist it.
Furthermore, ICSPCA (quoted above), Article 2, Part 4, makes it crystal clear that:
“[t]he term ‘the crime of apartheid’,’ shall apply to “any measures including legislative measure, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate measures and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups The expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof..”
Comrade Jacob, the word apartheid never appears once in your speech before the JBD! A listener would never know that you were speaking to an audience who actively support apartheid in another country.
Did you know that racist laws used to forbid Black property ownership in white areas in apartheid South Africa are in force in apartheid Israel? Indigenous Palestinian citizens of Israel are not only prohibited from living on land owned by “Jewish institutions”, but are also not allowed by force of “law” to reside in any areas designated “Jewish” either.
I, myself, Mr. President, a resident of Gaza, like so many Palestinians, have legal title to my parents’ land in Israel, but have no “legal” right to it because my parents’ property, like that of millions of other Palestinians’, was taken away from us and given over to Jewish ownership. The facts are that Jews owned only 7% of
Palestine before 1948; today 93% is considered “state land” and can only be owned by Jews or Israel.
This is only one example, Comrade Jacob, of the nature of the state your government deems “democratic”and “friendly” despite its past strategic ties with apartheid SA. In your presidential campaign, you were quoted singing “kill the Boer!” And yet, in your speech, you “unequivocally” condemn “all forms of violence from whatever quarter”, particularly where civilians are targeted!
I fail to understand this contradiction. Is this a reflection of the difference between comrade Jacob and President Zuma? Do you, as president, think that Palestinians have no right to resist their occupation and dispossession? You even equate our resistance with the War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity committed by the Israeli Occupation forces in the West Bank and, in particular, in Gaza.
Is it too much, comrade Jacob, for us, representatives of Palestinian Civil Society organizations to ask your government to sever all diplomatic ties with apartheid Israel, and endorses not to say lead the growing global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel? Is that really too much to ask a democratic post-apartheid South Africa for?
Is this the embodiment of Fanon’s prophecy about the “Pitfalls of National (Racial?) Consciousness?” Is it because the Black Middle class which your government represents and which has taken power from the White Middle class is underdeveloped? Fanon, whom you must have read while on the run from the apartheid police, says that this national middle class “has practically no economic power, and in any case it is in no way commensurate with the bourgeoisie of the mother country which it hopes to replace.” Is this why you are prepared to kowtow to the South African Jewish community which “has been called one of the most tightly-knit in the world, overwhelmingly united in its support for Israel?”
Your government, Mr. President, turns a blind eye to the war crimes of its own citizens against Palestinians. The South African war criminal David Benjamin was allowed to freely move around South Africa and share his tactics of support and defence for the Israeli Occupation Forces in its recent onslaught against the Gaza Strip with impunity. There are seventy other South Africans that are known to have links with the destruction of the Israeli Occupation Forces who enjoy the same impunity. It is left to individuals and civil society organizations in South Africa to take action against these criminals that should rightly be the task of the government.
Your post-apartheid government, Mr. President, unashamedly, supports the two-state solution: one for Palestinians (Muslim and Christians), and one for Jews. In other words, you support the re-birth of Bantustans, albeit in the Middle East this time. The two-state solution is a racist solution, comrade Jacob. If you did not accept it
for yourselves in South Africa, why force it on Palestinians instead of supporting us as we demand the right to our homeland every single inch of it?
Mr. President,
A politics based on narrow-minded, selfish pragmatism was rejected by all anti-apartheid forces, locally and internationally during the years of the anti-apartheid struggle. What was promoted, instead, was adherence to universal principles of equality and dignity.
I truly hope you will reconsider. I know that it is my constitutional right as a citizen of the New South Africa – which I am proud of – to address you directly. I do so to express my deep disagreement and dissatisfaction with your government’s Middle East policy and its continued support for the apartheid policies of the Israeli government, given that this support undermines and actively harms the
Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination.Sincerely,
Professor Haidar Eid
Gaza, Palestine
- Dr. Haidar Eid is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, Al-Aqsa University, Gaza Strip, Palestine. Dr. Eid is a founding member of the One Democratic State Group (ODSG) and a member of Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
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Friday, September 11, 2009
Join the 2009 Olive Harvest Campaign
****please distribute widely****
With rapidly escalating levels of settler violence in the West Bank, the International Solidarity Movement is issuing an urgent call for volunteers to participate in the 2009 Olive Harvest Campaign.
The olive tree is a national symbol for Palestinians. As thousands of olive trees have been bulldozed, uprooted and burned by the Israeli military and settlers, harvesting has become more than a source of livelihood; it has become a form of resistance. The olive harvest is an annual affirmation of Palestinians' historical, spiritual and economic connection to their land, and a rejection of Israeli efforts
to seize it.
Palestinian communities are inviting internationals to support and show solidarity with this resistance by working in the olive groves with them. By doing so, activists can reduce the risk of extreme violence from Israeli settlers or army through non-violent intervention and documentation.
The campaign will begin on the 3rd of October and run for approximately 6-8 weeks, depending on the size of the harvest. We ask that volunteers commit at least 2 weeks of their time.
Training:
The ISM will be holding mandatory two day training sessions every Friday and Saturday (see: http://palsolidarity.org/join). Please contact palreports@gmail.com for further information.
Ongoing campaigns:
In addition to the olive harvest, there will also be other opportunities to participate in grass-roots, non-violent resistance in Palestine. In occupied East Jerusalem, ISM activists have been staying with the Hanoun and Ghawe families, prior and post their evictions. We will continue to support the initiatives of the families who face evictions or demolitions in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan and other Palestinian neighborhoods in resisting the ethnic cleansing of occupied East
Jerusalem (see: http://palsolidarity.org/tag/east-jerusalem).
ISM has been active in the village of Ni'lin, supporting its non-violent resistance to construction of the Apartheid Wall that annexes much of its land. Since May 2008, Ni’lin has been demonstrating and the Israeli military suppression of their unarmed protests has led to the death of 5 Palestinians and critical injury of an ISM activist
(see: http://palsolidarity.org/tag/nilin).
In Bil’in, ISM has once again taken an apartment to participate in prevention of arrests and the ongoing night raids. Since the beginning of the summer, Israeli forces have been invading and arresting in the village of Bil’in, known for its creative resistance to the Apartheid Wall and construction of settlements on village lands (see: http://palsolidarity.org/tag/bilin).
Additionally, ISM maintains a presence in Hebron and Susiya. Work in these areas includes solidarity visits, farmer accompaniment and response to settler violence (see: http://palsolidarity.org/tag/hebron and http://palsolidarity.org/tag/susiya).
Come! Bear witness to the suffering, courage and generosity of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. Experiencing the situation for yourself is vital to adequately convey the reality of life in Palestine to your home communities and to re-frame the debate in a way that will expose Israel's apartheid policies; creeping ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem as well as collective punishment and genocidal practices in Gaza.
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PLEASE FORWARD THIS UPDATE WIDELY
DONATE @ http://palsolidarity.org/donate
WEBSITE: http://palsolidarity.org
YOUTUBE: http://youtube.com/user/ISMPalestine
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FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/pages/International-Solidarity-Movement/56674479144
With rapidly escalating levels of settler violence in the West Bank, the International Solidarity Movement is issuing an urgent call for volunteers to participate in the 2009 Olive Harvest Campaign.
The olive tree is a national symbol for Palestinians. As thousands of olive trees have been bulldozed, uprooted and burned by the Israeli military and settlers, harvesting has become more than a source of livelihood; it has become a form of resistance. The olive harvest is an annual affirmation of Palestinians' historical, spiritual and economic connection to their land, and a rejection of Israeli efforts
to seize it.
Palestinian communities are inviting internationals to support and show solidarity with this resistance by working in the olive groves with them. By doing so, activists can reduce the risk of extreme violence from Israeli settlers or army through non-violent intervention and documentation.
The campaign will begin on the 3rd of October and run for approximately 6-8 weeks, depending on the size of the harvest. We ask that volunteers commit at least 2 weeks of their time.
Training:
The ISM will be holding mandatory two day training sessions every Friday and Saturday (see: http://palsolidarity.org/join). Please contact palreports@gmail.com for further information.
Ongoing campaigns:
In addition to the olive harvest, there will also be other opportunities to participate in grass-roots, non-violent resistance in Palestine. In occupied East Jerusalem, ISM activists have been staying with the Hanoun and Ghawe families, prior and post their evictions. We will continue to support the initiatives of the families who face evictions or demolitions in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan and other Palestinian neighborhoods in resisting the ethnic cleansing of occupied East
Jerusalem (see: http://palsolidarity.org/tag/east-jerusalem).
ISM has been active in the village of Ni'lin, supporting its non-violent resistance to construction of the Apartheid Wall that annexes much of its land. Since May 2008, Ni’lin has been demonstrating and the Israeli military suppression of their unarmed protests has led to the death of 5 Palestinians and critical injury of an ISM activist
(see: http://palsolidarity.org/tag/nilin).
In Bil’in, ISM has once again taken an apartment to participate in prevention of arrests and the ongoing night raids. Since the beginning of the summer, Israeli forces have been invading and arresting in the village of Bil’in, known for its creative resistance to the Apartheid Wall and construction of settlements on village lands (see: http://palsolidarity.org/tag/bilin).
Additionally, ISM maintains a presence in Hebron and Susiya. Work in these areas includes solidarity visits, farmer accompaniment and response to settler violence (see: http://palsolidarity.org/tag/hebron and http://palsolidarity.org/tag/susiya).
Come! Bear witness to the suffering, courage and generosity of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. Experiencing the situation for yourself is vital to adequately convey the reality of life in Palestine to your home communities and to re-frame the debate in a way that will expose Israel's apartheid policies; creeping ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem as well as collective punishment and genocidal practices in Gaza.
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
PLEASE FORWARD THIS UPDATE WIDELY
DONATE @ http://palsolidarity.org/donate
WEBSITE: http://palsolidarity.org
YOUTUBE: http://youtube.com/user/ISMPalestine
TWITTER: http://twitter.com/ismpalestine
FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/pages/International-Solidarity-Movement/56674479144
Thursday, September 10, 2009
ISRAEL DESTROYS GAZA BOATS AND LIVES
GAZA CITY, occupied Gaza Strip (IPS) - Until last Monday, Omar and Khaled al-Habil were the owners of a 20 meter fishing trawler staffed by five or six fishermen at a time, but employing around 18 in cycles. But that morning the vessel came under heavy Israeli navy machine-gun fire, and then shelling. The trawler caught fire.
"It's destroyed, completely destroyed," says al-Habil.
"They had left early in the morning and headed north," al-Habil said, of the crew of five fishermen that morning, including his son Adham al-Habil. He says the boat was well within a three-mile limit set by Israel.
"There were other fishing boats with them. The boat was about a kilometer out off Gaza's coast, and was at the southern end of Sudaniya (a coastal region of Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza)."
An Israeli navy spokesperson reportedly said the boat "violated security boundaries off the coast of the Gaza Strip" and was "out of the permitted fishing zone." She said the boats failed to respond to warning shots.
Khaled al-Habil recalls differently.
"An Israeli navy boat approached them and opened fire. It was chaos. The firing was intense; it lasted 15 or 20 minutes. The fishing boat stopped, but the Israelis kept shooting. Finally, the Israelis shot a mortar at the boat. All the fishermen jumped into the water."
His son Adham al-Habil sustained burns from the fire, which broke out most likely as a result of the mortar shelling.
A charred hole on the front right-hand side of the boat marks where the mortar hit and exited. From that point down, the deck is blackened with soot. The metal steering wheel is all that remains of the cabin.
"Other fishermen came to help. They towed my boat back to Gaza port," said al-Habil. Once there, it took fire-fighters more than 20 minutes to put out the fires.
Palestinian fishers have the right to fish as far as 20 nautical miles from the coast of Gaza, but Israeli authorities have over the years unilaterally reduced that limit to three miles. The more abundant catches are found past six miles.
The Palestinian fishing industry, employing more than 3,500, has been devastated by Israeli attacks on fishing boats, confiscation of boats and equipment, and the abduction of Palestinian fishers.
Under the Israeli-led siege, with the complicity of Egypt, Gaza is starved of basic goods to enable a functioning economy and society. This includes replacement parts for missing or broken fishing equipment.
While a reported 95 percent of Gaza's industries have shut down due to the siege, many unemployed Palestinians have turned to fishing, unviable as it is.
The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) August 2009 report details the devolution of the fishing industry.
OCHA cites the fishing catch for the month of April for the past three years. In 2007, fishers hauled in 292 tons. In 2008, the catch was 154 tons, and in 2009 it was reduced to 79 tons.
Reduced to fishing along the coast, many of the fish are caught in waters contaminated by the 80 million liters of raw or partially-treated sewage pumped daily into the sea "as a result of lack of maintenance and upgrading of the wastewater infrastructure," OCHA notes.
And now al-Habil does not have a fishing vessel at all.
This was not the first problem for his now destroyed boat. On 4 June, Israeli gunboats abducted six fishers and seized al-Habil's boat three miles off the northern coast of Gaza, holding it for 45 days before returning it. Al-Habil found equipment missing and significant damage done to the engine and cables.
On 18 November, 2008, Israeli gunboats surrounded three Palestinian fishing boats, including al-Habil's boat, seven miles off the coast of central Gaza, and took all 15 fishers on board, as well as three international solidarity activists. The Israelis kept the boats until 27 November.
"It's not just my boat. Every day the Israelis are attacking us: if not a trawler, then a small boat, or on land."
Palestinian fisher Muhammed al-Attar was killed by Israeli shelling off northern Gaza 27 August. Head of emergency services Dr Muawiyah Hassanein said al-Attar was decapitated by the blast.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) reports that 12-year-old Mohammed Bassam Aashour was seriously injured by a gunshot to his head 14 August when Israeli gunboats fired on Palestinian fishing boats near Rafah coast.
Khaled al-Habil is just one among many Palestinian fishers whose livelihoods have been wrecked. The father of 13 children lives with his family in a cramped 400 square meter apartment. His only source of income has been destroyed.
"I want a good lawyer," he says, "and I want to take this to court."
All rights reserved, IPS -- Inter Press Service (2009). Total or partial publication, retransmission or sale forbidden.
"It's destroyed, completely destroyed," says al-Habil.
"They had left early in the morning and headed north," al-Habil said, of the crew of five fishermen that morning, including his son Adham al-Habil. He says the boat was well within a three-mile limit set by Israel.
"There were other fishing boats with them. The boat was about a kilometer out off Gaza's coast, and was at the southern end of Sudaniya (a coastal region of Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza)."
An Israeli navy spokesperson reportedly said the boat "violated security boundaries off the coast of the Gaza Strip" and was "out of the permitted fishing zone." She said the boats failed to respond to warning shots.
Khaled al-Habil recalls differently.
"An Israeli navy boat approached them and opened fire. It was chaos. The firing was intense; it lasted 15 or 20 minutes. The fishing boat stopped, but the Israelis kept shooting. Finally, the Israelis shot a mortar at the boat. All the fishermen jumped into the water."
His son Adham al-Habil sustained burns from the fire, which broke out most likely as a result of the mortar shelling.
A charred hole on the front right-hand side of the boat marks where the mortar hit and exited. From that point down, the deck is blackened with soot. The metal steering wheel is all that remains of the cabin.
"Other fishermen came to help. They towed my boat back to Gaza port," said al-Habil. Once there, it took fire-fighters more than 20 minutes to put out the fires.
Palestinian fishers have the right to fish as far as 20 nautical miles from the coast of Gaza, but Israeli authorities have over the years unilaterally reduced that limit to three miles. The more abundant catches are found past six miles.
The Palestinian fishing industry, employing more than 3,500, has been devastated by Israeli attacks on fishing boats, confiscation of boats and equipment, and the abduction of Palestinian fishers.
Under the Israeli-led siege, with the complicity of Egypt, Gaza is starved of basic goods to enable a functioning economy and society. This includes replacement parts for missing or broken fishing equipment.
While a reported 95 percent of Gaza's industries have shut down due to the siege, many unemployed Palestinians have turned to fishing, unviable as it is.
The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) August 2009 report details the devolution of the fishing industry.
OCHA cites the fishing catch for the month of April for the past three years. In 2007, fishers hauled in 292 tons. In 2008, the catch was 154 tons, and in 2009 it was reduced to 79 tons.
Reduced to fishing along the coast, many of the fish are caught in waters contaminated by the 80 million liters of raw or partially-treated sewage pumped daily into the sea "as a result of lack of maintenance and upgrading of the wastewater infrastructure," OCHA notes.
And now al-Habil does not have a fishing vessel at all.
This was not the first problem for his now destroyed boat. On 4 June, Israeli gunboats abducted six fishers and seized al-Habil's boat three miles off the northern coast of Gaza, holding it for 45 days before returning it. Al-Habil found equipment missing and significant damage done to the engine and cables.
On 18 November, 2008, Israeli gunboats surrounded three Palestinian fishing boats, including al-Habil's boat, seven miles off the coast of central Gaza, and took all 15 fishers on board, as well as three international solidarity activists. The Israelis kept the boats until 27 November.
"It's not just my boat. Every day the Israelis are attacking us: if not a trawler, then a small boat, or on land."
Palestinian fisher Muhammed al-Attar was killed by Israeli shelling off northern Gaza 27 August. Head of emergency services Dr Muawiyah Hassanein said al-Attar was decapitated by the blast.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) reports that 12-year-old Mohammed Bassam Aashour was seriously injured by a gunshot to his head 14 August when Israeli gunboats fired on Palestinian fishing boats near Rafah coast.
Khaled al-Habil is just one among many Palestinian fishers whose livelihoods have been wrecked. The father of 13 children lives with his family in a cramped 400 square meter apartment. His only source of income has been destroyed.
"I want a good lawyer," he says, "and I want to take this to court."
All rights reserved, IPS -- Inter Press Service (2009). Total or partial publication, retransmission or sale forbidden.
Racist measures against Palestinians in Israel lead to strike call
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 9 September 2009
The increasingly harsh political climate in Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government has prompted the leadership of the country's 1.3 million Arab citizens to call for the first general strike in several years.
The one-day stoppage is due to take place on 1 October, a date heavy with symbolism because it marks the anniversary of another general strike, in 2000 at the start of the second Palestinian intifada, when 13 Arab demonstrators were shot dead by Israeli police.
The Arab leadership said it was responding to a string of what it called "racist" government measures that cast the Arab minority, a fifth of the population, as enemies of the state.
"In recent months, there has been a parallel situation of racist policies in the parliament and greater condoning of violence towards Arab citizens by the police and courts," said Jafar Farah, the head of Mossawa, an Arab advocacy group in Israel. "This attitude is feeding down to the streets."
Confrontations between the country's Arab minority and Netanyahu's coalition, formed in the spring, surfaced almost immediately over a set of controversial legal measures.
The proposed bills outlawed the commemoration of the Nakba, or catastrophe, the word used by Palestinians for their dispossession in 1948; required citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a Zionist state; and banned political demands for ending Israel's status as a Jewish state. Following widespread outcries, the bills were either watered down or dropped.
But simmering tensions came to a boil again late last month when the education minister, Gideon Saar, presented educational reforms to mark the start of the new school year.
He confirmed plans to drop the word "Nakba" from Arabic textbooks and announced his intention to launch classes on Jewish heritage and Zionism. He also said he would tie future budgets for schools to their success in persuading pupils to perform military or national service.
Arab citizens are generally exempted from military service, although officials have recently been trying to push civilian national service in its place.
Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab member of the parliament, denounced the linking of budgets to national service, saying that Saar "must understand that he is the education minister, not the defense minister."
The separate Arab education system is in need of thousands of more classrooms and is massively underfunded -- up to nine times more is spent on a Jewish pupil than an Arab one, according to surveys. Research published by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem last month showed that Jewish schools received five times more than Arab schools for special education classes.
Netanyau, who accompanied Saar on a tour of schools last week, appeared to give his approval to the proposed reforms: "We advocate education that stresses values, Zionism and a love of the land."
Barakeh also accused government ministers of competing to promote measures hostile to the Arab minority. "Anyone seeking fame finds it in racist whims against Arabs -- the ministers of infrastructure, education, transportation, whoever."
Barakeh was referring to a raft of recent proposals.
Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister and leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, announced last month that training for the diplomatic service would be open only to candidates who had completed national service.
Of the foreign ministry's 980 employees only 15 are Arab, a pattern reflected across the civil service sector according to Sikkuy, a rights and coexistence organization.
The housing minister, Ariel Atias, has demanded communal segregation between Jewish and Arab citizens and instituted a drive to make the Galilee, where most Arab citizens live, "more Jewish."
The interior minister, Eli Yishai, has approved a wave of house demolitions, most controversially in the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm in Wadi Ara, where a commercial district has been twice bulldozed in recent weeks.
The transport minister, Israel Katz, has insisted that road signs include place names only as they are spelt in Hebrew, thereby erasing the Arabic names of communities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa and Nazareth.
Arab legislators have come under repeated verbal attack from members of the government. Last month, the infrastructures minister, Uzi Landau, refused to meet Taleb al-Sana, the head of the United Arab List party, on parliamentary business, justifying the decision on the grounds that Arab MPs were "working constantly here and abroad to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish state."
Shortly afterwards, al-Sana and his colleague Ahmed Tibi, the deputy speaker of parliament, attended Fatah's congress in Bethlehem, prompting Lieberman to declare: "Our central problem is not the Palestinians, but Ahmed Tibi and his ilk -- they are more dangerous than Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad combined."
Tibi responded: "When Lieberman, the foreign minister, says that, ordinary Israelis understand that he is calling for me to be killed as a terrorist. It is the most dangerous incitement."
Israel's annual Democracy Index poll, published last month, showed that 53 percent of Israeli Jews supported moves to encourage Arab citizens to leave.
Farah said the strike date had been selected to coincide with the anniversary of the deaths of 13 Arab citizens in October 2000 to highlight both the failure to prosecute any of the policemen involved and the continuing official condoning of violence against Arab citizens by police and Jewish citizens.
Some 27 Arab citizens have been killed by the police in unexplained circumstances since the October deaths, Farah said, with only one conviction. Last week, Shahar Mizrahi, an undercover officer, was given a 15-month sentence for shooting Mahmoud Ghanaim in the head from point-blank range. The judge called Mizrahi's actions "reckless."
This week, in another controversial case, Shai Dromi, a Negev rancher, received six months community service after shooting dead a Bedouin intruder, Khaled al-Atrash, as the latter fled.
Farah said the regard in which Arab citizens were held by the government was illustrated by a comment from the public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, in June. During an inspection of police officers working undercover as drug addicts, the minister praised one for looking like a "real dirty Arab."
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.
The increasingly harsh political climate in Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government has prompted the leadership of the country's 1.3 million Arab citizens to call for the first general strike in several years.
The one-day stoppage is due to take place on 1 October, a date heavy with symbolism because it marks the anniversary of another general strike, in 2000 at the start of the second Palestinian intifada, when 13 Arab demonstrators were shot dead by Israeli police.
The Arab leadership said it was responding to a string of what it called "racist" government measures that cast the Arab minority, a fifth of the population, as enemies of the state.
"In recent months, there has been a parallel situation of racist policies in the parliament and greater condoning of violence towards Arab citizens by the police and courts," said Jafar Farah, the head of Mossawa, an Arab advocacy group in Israel. "This attitude is feeding down to the streets."
Confrontations between the country's Arab minority and Netanyahu's coalition, formed in the spring, surfaced almost immediately over a set of controversial legal measures.
The proposed bills outlawed the commemoration of the Nakba, or catastrophe, the word used by Palestinians for their dispossession in 1948; required citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a Zionist state; and banned political demands for ending Israel's status as a Jewish state. Following widespread outcries, the bills were either watered down or dropped.
But simmering tensions came to a boil again late last month when the education minister, Gideon Saar, presented educational reforms to mark the start of the new school year.
He confirmed plans to drop the word "Nakba" from Arabic textbooks and announced his intention to launch classes on Jewish heritage and Zionism. He also said he would tie future budgets for schools to their success in persuading pupils to perform military or national service.
Arab citizens are generally exempted from military service, although officials have recently been trying to push civilian national service in its place.
Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab member of the parliament, denounced the linking of budgets to national service, saying that Saar "must understand that he is the education minister, not the defense minister."
The separate Arab education system is in need of thousands of more classrooms and is massively underfunded -- up to nine times more is spent on a Jewish pupil than an Arab one, according to surveys. Research published by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem last month showed that Jewish schools received five times more than Arab schools for special education classes.
Netanyau, who accompanied Saar on a tour of schools last week, appeared to give his approval to the proposed reforms: "We advocate education that stresses values, Zionism and a love of the land."
Barakeh also accused government ministers of competing to promote measures hostile to the Arab minority. "Anyone seeking fame finds it in racist whims against Arabs -- the ministers of infrastructure, education, transportation, whoever."
Barakeh was referring to a raft of recent proposals.
Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister and leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, announced last month that training for the diplomatic service would be open only to candidates who had completed national service.
Of the foreign ministry's 980 employees only 15 are Arab, a pattern reflected across the civil service sector according to Sikkuy, a rights and coexistence organization.
The housing minister, Ariel Atias, has demanded communal segregation between Jewish and Arab citizens and instituted a drive to make the Galilee, where most Arab citizens live, "more Jewish."
The interior minister, Eli Yishai, has approved a wave of house demolitions, most controversially in the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm in Wadi Ara, where a commercial district has been twice bulldozed in recent weeks.
The transport minister, Israel Katz, has insisted that road signs include place names only as they are spelt in Hebrew, thereby erasing the Arabic names of communities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa and Nazareth.
Arab legislators have come under repeated verbal attack from members of the government. Last month, the infrastructures minister, Uzi Landau, refused to meet Taleb al-Sana, the head of the United Arab List party, on parliamentary business, justifying the decision on the grounds that Arab MPs were "working constantly here and abroad to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish state."
Shortly afterwards, al-Sana and his colleague Ahmed Tibi, the deputy speaker of parliament, attended Fatah's congress in Bethlehem, prompting Lieberman to declare: "Our central problem is not the Palestinians, but Ahmed Tibi and his ilk -- they are more dangerous than Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad combined."
Tibi responded: "When Lieberman, the foreign minister, says that, ordinary Israelis understand that he is calling for me to be killed as a terrorist. It is the most dangerous incitement."
Israel's annual Democracy Index poll, published last month, showed that 53 percent of Israeli Jews supported moves to encourage Arab citizens to leave.
Farah said the strike date had been selected to coincide with the anniversary of the deaths of 13 Arab citizens in October 2000 to highlight both the failure to prosecute any of the policemen involved and the continuing official condoning of violence against Arab citizens by police and Jewish citizens.
Some 27 Arab citizens have been killed by the police in unexplained circumstances since the October deaths, Farah said, with only one conviction. Last week, Shahar Mizrahi, an undercover officer, was given a 15-month sentence for shooting Mahmoud Ghanaim in the head from point-blank range. The judge called Mizrahi's actions "reckless."
This week, in another controversial case, Shai Dromi, a Negev rancher, received six months community service after shooting dead a Bedouin intruder, Khaled al-Atrash, as the latter fled.
Farah said the regard in which Arab citizens were held by the government was illustrated by a comment from the public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, in June. During an inspection of police officers working undercover as drug addicts, the minister praised one for looking like a "real dirty Arab."
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.
No windows or pens in Gaza's classrooms
As Israel continues to commit slow-motion genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, saying they let in 150 trucks a day of food and medical aid (when they people of Gaza need 500-600 trucks a day), and B'tselem, the Israeli Human Rights group writes that more than 50% of the people of Gaza Israel killed were civilians, the world stands silent.
http://www.btselem.org/English/Press_Releases/20090909.asp
No building supplies are allowed into Gaza. Not one penny of the $4.5 billion to rebuild Gaza has been spent to rebuild.
Israel continues to occupy 1.5 million people, crushing them beneath their boots and their tanks. Farmers cannot farm, fishermen cannot fish.
Israel says they have 'allowed' some humanitarian supplies into Gaza, as though they have the right to control the destinies of the population. And now children are going back to school with no crayons, no paper, no books and no windows.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10762.shtml
The Free Gaza movement is determined to deliver a cargo ship of building supplies and educational supplies this year. Israel can ram our boats, hijack them and kidnap our passengers and throw them into prison, but they cannot stop our determination to sail to Gaza. Palestinians do not need hand-outs from the world. They are perfectly capable of determining their own destinies. They need their civil rights.
Coming in by sea is the only possible way to begin to break Israel's stranglehold on this small sliver of land.
And this struggle for justice is not just in Gaza, but in all of Palestine, as children begin to go back to schools, faced with either the racist regime in Israel or the draconian Israeli rule in the occupied territories and Gaza.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/09/israel's--arab-citizens-call-general-strike/
Greta Berlin
http://www.btselem.org/English/Press_Releases/20090909.asp
No building supplies are allowed into Gaza. Not one penny of the $4.5 billion to rebuild Gaza has been spent to rebuild.
Israel continues to occupy 1.5 million people, crushing them beneath their boots and their tanks. Farmers cannot farm, fishermen cannot fish.
Israel says they have 'allowed' some humanitarian supplies into Gaza, as though they have the right to control the destinies of the population. And now children are going back to school with no crayons, no paper, no books and no windows.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10762.shtml
The Free Gaza movement is determined to deliver a cargo ship of building supplies and educational supplies this year. Israel can ram our boats, hijack them and kidnap our passengers and throw them into prison, but they cannot stop our determination to sail to Gaza. Palestinians do not need hand-outs from the world. They are perfectly capable of determining their own destinies. They need their civil rights.
Coming in by sea is the only possible way to begin to break Israel's stranglehold on this small sliver of land.
And this struggle for justice is not just in Gaza, but in all of Palestine, as children begin to go back to schools, faced with either the racist regime in Israel or the draconian Israeli rule in the occupied territories and Gaza.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/09/israel's--arab-citizens-call-general-strike/
Greta Berlin
Friday, September 4, 2009
Agony in Gaza this Ramadhan
“Ramadan in Gaza is different this year. Every year the poverty gets worse but this Ramadan many hundreds of families are also trying to cope with the agony of having lost so many loved ones in the last conflict.
“As they sit at the table to break their fasts their thoughts are with those who are not joining them this year. Mothers who have lost their sons and daughters, children who have lost their fathers.
“This Ramadan I am helping Islamic Relief distribute food parcels to around 10,000 of the poorest families in Gaza. In Gaza the demand is high and the need is huge but I feel happy that we are moving forward and helping to create a better situation for the people here.
“The support of kind-hearted people from around the world means that we can help ease the pain of the people of Gaza this Ramadan.”
This is an extract from a blog by Hatem Shurrab, an Islamic Relief aid worker based in Gaza. To read the rest of the article and blogs from other aid workers around the world, click here.
To read more about Islamic Relief’s work to combat food shortages this Ramadan, please click here.
To make a donation to Islamic Relief or to set up regular giving, please click here.
Remember the orphans and the poor around the world. Help them by remembering to pay your Zakat and Zakat al-Fitr.
Donate online instantly with your credit or debit card. It's a quick, easy and secure way to help some of the world's poorest people. Click here to donate.
Or sign up to Islamic Relief's regular donations today and give something to the poor every month. Registering is easy, just Click here.
For more information on Islamic Relief Worldwide, visit www.islamic-relief.com To unsubscribe from further emails please click here.
“As they sit at the table to break their fasts their thoughts are with those who are not joining them this year. Mothers who have lost their sons and daughters, children who have lost their fathers.
“This Ramadan I am helping Islamic Relief distribute food parcels to around 10,000 of the poorest families in Gaza. In Gaza the demand is high and the need is huge but I feel happy that we are moving forward and helping to create a better situation for the people here.
“The support of kind-hearted people from around the world means that we can help ease the pain of the people of Gaza this Ramadan.”
This is an extract from a blog by Hatem Shurrab, an Islamic Relief aid worker based in Gaza. To read the rest of the article and blogs from other aid workers around the world, click here.
To read more about Islamic Relief’s work to combat food shortages this Ramadan, please click here.
To make a donation to Islamic Relief or to set up regular giving, please click here.
Remember the orphans and the poor around the world. Help them by remembering to pay your Zakat and Zakat al-Fitr.
Donate online instantly with your credit or debit card. It's a quick, easy and secure way to help some of the world's poorest people. Click here to donate.
Or sign up to Islamic Relief's regular donations today and give something to the poor every month. Registering is easy, just Click here.
For more information on Islamic Relief Worldwide, visit www.islamic-relief.com To unsubscribe from further emails please click here.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
WHY ISRAEL IS AFTER MY SON
By Fouad Sultani, The Electronic Intifada, 3 September 2009
The persecution of Palestinian citizens inside Israel is not a new phenomenon. Yet, for me, this time it hit home. The Israeli intelligence agency Shabak, also known as the Shin Bet, accuses my son Rawi Sultani of "contact with a foreign agent" and "delivering information to the enemy." Both are grave security offenses in Israeli law. These and similar offenses were used against many Palestinian
leaders and activists such as Azmi Bishara of the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), Raed Salah of the Islamic Movement and Muhammad Kanaaneh of Sons of the Land. At times, even Jewish political activists sympathetic to Palestinians like Tali Fahima are similarly accused.
Rawi, a 23-year-old law student and a political activist of the NDA, is being charged in the district court of Petach Tikva with having contact with Hizballah members in order to deliver information on the whereabouts of the Israeli army's chief of staff.
The Israeli media rushed to spin the story and it became even juicier with claims that the purpose of these activities is a plot to hurt the chief of staff. Yet, the
inflated indictment itself does not go that far. The indictment does not accuse Rawi of being a Hizballah agent or operative but merely being in contact with one.
Although the indictment does not show criminal intent (mens rea) on Rawi's part, the Israeli media assumed its existence. Rawi's national and political affiliation seems
to be behind this assumption.
Even worse, Israeli media are not only uncritical of the government line when it comes to security-related affairs, but have also proven to be highly unprofessional. To take one prominent example, leading journalist Roni Daniel -- the military and security correspondent for Israel's Channel 2 -- admitted in an interview in which we both participated on Israeli radio on 1 September that he had not even read the indictment. However, that did not revent him from appearing on TV the night before to
confidently report on and discuss the case in an authoritative voice.
Nevertheless, the fantastic story-line is baseless and is an out-of-proportion interpretation of one careless sentence said by my son during a National Arab Youth
annual summer camp in Morocco attended by young activists from all over the Arab world. Rawi was part of an NDA delegation attending the conference. Sending these
delegations to such conferences helps break the isolation of the Palestinian minority inside Israel from the Arab world, an isolation we have been suffering from since the establishment of Israel. The purpose of such allegations and indictments, then, is to prevent Palestinian activists from breaking this isolation, causing a chilling effect to silence political activities disliked by the Israeli security apparatus.
Rawi was among the conference attendees who watched a movie on the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006. During the film several characters showed up on the screen such as
the chief of staff and a lawyer of Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. Rawi bragged that he knew the latter and trained in the same gym with
the former. It turned out later, according to the Israeli intelligence allegations, that one attendee -- a student from Lebanon -- was a Hizballah member. Hizballah is a
legitimate political party in Lebanon and an integral part of the Lebanese government and society, notwithstanding its label by Israel and the US as a "terrorist organization."
This sentence is largely the basis for the indictment against Rawi. From here the indictment goes on to build a story of hostile activity in which Rawi was asked to
deliver information on the chief of staff's visits to the gym. The facts however are that Rawi has not entered the gym for more than a year, the same year mentioned in the indictment, and I canceled his membership a long time ago because he did not use it. Thus, it is weird to argue that he had in that year any information to give on the chief of staff's visits to the gym and the security around him. The information he knew -- the mere membership of the chief -- was known and not secret, at least to all those who attended the gym. It thus becomes odd to maintain that Rawi monitored the chief of staff's movements given the fact that no such monitoring is mentioned in the indictment itself. In addition, the forum in which Rawi's statement was made was not secret or illegal according to Israeli law and took place in a country that has friendly (albeit not full diplomatic) relations with Israel.
Yet, one should understand the context of the indictment:
First, a month ago it was revealed that an Israeli Jewish soldier penetrated the chief of staff's office and stole his credit card and pistol and sold them to criminals. The Israeli intelligence was embarrassed by this discovery and therefore had to demonstrate that it is doing its work and needed to show an achievement, and as quickly as possible. My son's case, which in other circumstances might have
gone without an indictment, was available. It turns out that Rawi and the other Palestinian Israeli attendees of the conference, all of them NDA activists, were under constant surveillance at least since the conference and for about a year. Yet, the timing of my son's arrest, after the credit card affair, shows that it only comes to cover up the intelligence's failure in the latter case. Had my son's alleged spying been real and dangerous the security around the chief of staff would have been tightened or changed and the credit card affair would not have occurred. Had my son's alleged spying been real and dangerous he would have been arrested a long time ago and would not be allowed to leave the country. After all, there were no new developments in the investigation of the case at least since December 2008.
Second, the need for an achievement was even more crucial with the backdrop of the success of Lebanese intelligence in unveiling Israeli spying networks in the country.
Again, they needed an achievement to boost the Israeli national morale which sagged after the 2006 war.
Third, this indictment is part and parcel of the attack on Arab political activists who oppose the Zionist policies of oppression. Accordingly, the purpose of such
high-profile arrests and indictments is to criminalize Arab political activity and thus transfer the political and ideological struggle from the public arena to
courtrooms. It also aims at delegitimizing Arab political activists, restricting their movement, and intimidating their constituency from following in their footsteps or identifying with them.
This intimidation is revealed not only by the orchestrated media coverage but also by the dramatization of the case: a comprehensive and tight gag order, incommunicado
detention and orders preventing lawyers from meeting Rawi, closed-to-the-public courtroom proceedings, and most importantly, show-arrests in daylight of Rawi and his
friends using a large number of policemen and Shabak agents so that all the town will know and hear. These tactics make it difficult for Rawi to have a fair trial
before unbiased judges. Studies and experience show well-entrenched bias against Palestinian citizens in courtrooms in general and in security-related issues in
particular. Now with the hysteria in the media it is even harder for Rawi to have his day in court with the presumption of innocence on his side.
The charges chosen by the authorities further reveal the political nature of the indictment. "Contact with a foreign agent" and "delivering information to the enemy"
are vaguely and widely construed in Israeli law. That is why it is a convenient tool for the Shabak to prosecute political activists. Behind the veil of "national
security" the Shabak enjoys freedom of action unhindered by meaningful judicial review or public scrutiny. The Shabak decides who is a "foreign agent" even retroactively (and a journalist can be considered a "foreign agent," as in the Bishara case). It also has the sole discretion to decide who is the "enemy," but the Arab world is not our enemy and we cannot be expected to ask Arabs we meet
abroad to have a security clearance before they talk to us. Moreover, even well-known public facts can be the reason for a legal conviction under this law. In a real
democracy, such draconian legislation would be narrowly construed to minimize restrictions on freedom of speech and legitimate political activism.
In recent years, the NDA -- to which both myself and my son are proud to belong -- was a main target of such attacks on political activists in Israel's media and the
courtrooms. The party's relationship with the Arab world and the relentless opposition to occupation and oppression are among the reasons for this attack. The accusation of "contact with a foreign agent" against NDA member of Knesset (Israel's parliament) Said Naffa is only one of the last episodes of this attack. Indeed, the indictment itself highlights that Rawi was an NDA activist and the media has emphasized that I, as a lawyer, represented Azmi Bishara and the NDA in legal proceedings when his case became public.
Following Rawi's case, some right-wing lawmakers in the Knesset have already begun inciting against the NDA and Arab citizens in general. One of them asked the Attorney
General to look for ways to discontinue state funding for the NDA. It is unsurprising then that with the current right-wing government in Israel, which demands "loyalty" to Zionist narratives and promotes legislation to encroach
upon the rights of the Arab citizens, Rawi's case became a jumping board for Zionist extremists to inflame racial hatred.
Rawi's case reveals the predicament of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Rawi's trial is the trial of the NDA and the Arab minority as a whole.
We need all possible help from our friends in our struggle towards freedom and equality.
--
Attorney Fouad Sultani is the father of Rawi Sultani and a leading figure in the National Democratic Assembly and a board member of Adalah -- The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.
--
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The persecution of Palestinian citizens inside Israel is not a new phenomenon. Yet, for me, this time it hit home. The Israeli intelligence agency Shabak, also known as the Shin Bet, accuses my son Rawi Sultani of "contact with a foreign agent" and "delivering information to the enemy." Both are grave security offenses in Israeli law. These and similar offenses were used against many Palestinian
leaders and activists such as Azmi Bishara of the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), Raed Salah of the Islamic Movement and Muhammad Kanaaneh of Sons of the Land. At times, even Jewish political activists sympathetic to Palestinians like Tali Fahima are similarly accused.
Rawi, a 23-year-old law student and a political activist of the NDA, is being charged in the district court of Petach Tikva with having contact with Hizballah members in order to deliver information on the whereabouts of the Israeli army's chief of staff.
The Israeli media rushed to spin the story and it became even juicier with claims that the purpose of these activities is a plot to hurt the chief of staff. Yet, the
inflated indictment itself does not go that far. The indictment does not accuse Rawi of being a Hizballah agent or operative but merely being in contact with one.
Although the indictment does not show criminal intent (mens rea) on Rawi's part, the Israeli media assumed its existence. Rawi's national and political affiliation seems
to be behind this assumption.
Even worse, Israeli media are not only uncritical of the government line when it comes to security-related affairs, but have also proven to be highly unprofessional. To take one prominent example, leading journalist Roni Daniel -- the military and security correspondent for Israel's Channel 2 -- admitted in an interview in which we both participated on Israeli radio on 1 September that he had not even read the indictment. However, that did not revent him from appearing on TV the night before to
confidently report on and discuss the case in an authoritative voice.
Nevertheless, the fantastic story-line is baseless and is an out-of-proportion interpretation of one careless sentence said by my son during a National Arab Youth
annual summer camp in Morocco attended by young activists from all over the Arab world. Rawi was part of an NDA delegation attending the conference. Sending these
delegations to such conferences helps break the isolation of the Palestinian minority inside Israel from the Arab world, an isolation we have been suffering from since the establishment of Israel. The purpose of such allegations and indictments, then, is to prevent Palestinian activists from breaking this isolation, causing a chilling effect to silence political activities disliked by the Israeli security apparatus.
Rawi was among the conference attendees who watched a movie on the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006. During the film several characters showed up on the screen such as
the chief of staff and a lawyer of Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. Rawi bragged that he knew the latter and trained in the same gym with
the former. It turned out later, according to the Israeli intelligence allegations, that one attendee -- a student from Lebanon -- was a Hizballah member. Hizballah is a
legitimate political party in Lebanon and an integral part of the Lebanese government and society, notwithstanding its label by Israel and the US as a "terrorist organization."
This sentence is largely the basis for the indictment against Rawi. From here the indictment goes on to build a story of hostile activity in which Rawi was asked to
deliver information on the chief of staff's visits to the gym. The facts however are that Rawi has not entered the gym for more than a year, the same year mentioned in the indictment, and I canceled his membership a long time ago because he did not use it. Thus, it is weird to argue that he had in that year any information to give on the chief of staff's visits to the gym and the security around him. The information he knew -- the mere membership of the chief -- was known and not secret, at least to all those who attended the gym. It thus becomes odd to maintain that Rawi monitored the chief of staff's movements given the fact that no such monitoring is mentioned in the indictment itself. In addition, the forum in which Rawi's statement was made was not secret or illegal according to Israeli law and took place in a country that has friendly (albeit not full diplomatic) relations with Israel.
Yet, one should understand the context of the indictment:
First, a month ago it was revealed that an Israeli Jewish soldier penetrated the chief of staff's office and stole his credit card and pistol and sold them to criminals. The Israeli intelligence was embarrassed by this discovery and therefore had to demonstrate that it is doing its work and needed to show an achievement, and as quickly as possible. My son's case, which in other circumstances might have
gone without an indictment, was available. It turns out that Rawi and the other Palestinian Israeli attendees of the conference, all of them NDA activists, were under constant surveillance at least since the conference and for about a year. Yet, the timing of my son's arrest, after the credit card affair, shows that it only comes to cover up the intelligence's failure in the latter case. Had my son's alleged spying been real and dangerous the security around the chief of staff would have been tightened or changed and the credit card affair would not have occurred. Had my son's alleged spying been real and dangerous he would have been arrested a long time ago and would not be allowed to leave the country. After all, there were no new developments in the investigation of the case at least since December 2008.
Second, the need for an achievement was even more crucial with the backdrop of the success of Lebanese intelligence in unveiling Israeli spying networks in the country.
Again, they needed an achievement to boost the Israeli national morale which sagged after the 2006 war.
Third, this indictment is part and parcel of the attack on Arab political activists who oppose the Zionist policies of oppression. Accordingly, the purpose of such
high-profile arrests and indictments is to criminalize Arab political activity and thus transfer the political and ideological struggle from the public arena to
courtrooms. It also aims at delegitimizing Arab political activists, restricting their movement, and intimidating their constituency from following in their footsteps or identifying with them.
This intimidation is revealed not only by the orchestrated media coverage but also by the dramatization of the case: a comprehensive and tight gag order, incommunicado
detention and orders preventing lawyers from meeting Rawi, closed-to-the-public courtroom proceedings, and most importantly, show-arrests in daylight of Rawi and his
friends using a large number of policemen and Shabak agents so that all the town will know and hear. These tactics make it difficult for Rawi to have a fair trial
before unbiased judges. Studies and experience show well-entrenched bias against Palestinian citizens in courtrooms in general and in security-related issues in
particular. Now with the hysteria in the media it is even harder for Rawi to have his day in court with the presumption of innocence on his side.
The charges chosen by the authorities further reveal the political nature of the indictment. "Contact with a foreign agent" and "delivering information to the enemy"
are vaguely and widely construed in Israeli law. That is why it is a convenient tool for the Shabak to prosecute political activists. Behind the veil of "national
security" the Shabak enjoys freedom of action unhindered by meaningful judicial review or public scrutiny. The Shabak decides who is a "foreign agent" even retroactively (and a journalist can be considered a "foreign agent," as in the Bishara case). It also has the sole discretion to decide who is the "enemy," but the Arab world is not our enemy and we cannot be expected to ask Arabs we meet
abroad to have a security clearance before they talk to us. Moreover, even well-known public facts can be the reason for a legal conviction under this law. In a real
democracy, such draconian legislation would be narrowly construed to minimize restrictions on freedom of speech and legitimate political activism.
In recent years, the NDA -- to which both myself and my son are proud to belong -- was a main target of such attacks on political activists in Israel's media and the
courtrooms. The party's relationship with the Arab world and the relentless opposition to occupation and oppression are among the reasons for this attack. The accusation of "contact with a foreign agent" against NDA member of Knesset (Israel's parliament) Said Naffa is only one of the last episodes of this attack. Indeed, the indictment itself highlights that Rawi was an NDA activist and the media has emphasized that I, as a lawyer, represented Azmi Bishara and the NDA in legal proceedings when his case became public.
Following Rawi's case, some right-wing lawmakers in the Knesset have already begun inciting against the NDA and Arab citizens in general. One of them asked the Attorney
General to look for ways to discontinue state funding for the NDA. It is unsurprising then that with the current right-wing government in Israel, which demands "loyalty" to Zionist narratives and promotes legislation to encroach
upon the rights of the Arab citizens, Rawi's case became a jumping board for Zionist extremists to inflame racial hatred.
Rawi's case reveals the predicament of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Rawi's trial is the trial of the NDA and the Arab minority as a whole.
We need all possible help from our friends in our struggle towards freedom and equality.
--
Attorney Fouad Sultani is the father of Rawi Sultani and a leading figure in the National Democratic Assembly and a board member of Adalah -- The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.
--
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Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Two years later, reconstruction to start in Nahr al-Bared
Report, Electronic Lebanon, 18 August 2009
Despite the removal of 90 percent of the rubble from the destruction of Nahr al-Bared, two years on from the conflict, reconstruction in the official camp has yet to begin. (Hugh Macleod/IRIN)
NAHR AL-BARED (IRIN) - Two years on from the devastating battle which destroyed their homes and livelihoods, Palestinian refugees from Nahr al-Bared are set to see reconstruction work begin inside the camp's official boundaries.
Despite a resilient recovery under way among Palestinians living in the new camp -- the area around the edge of the official Nahr al-Bared refugee camp -- legal hurdles, political wrangling and the recent discovery of archaeological ruins under the site of the old camp have delayed reconstruction work there.
Nahr al-Bared old camp was completely destroyed and the new camp badly damaged in a 15-week battle in 2007 between the army and Islamist militant group Fatah Islam, which killed more than 400 people and displaced up to 30,000 Palestinians.
With over 90 percent of the rubble now removed, reconstruction in the first one-eighth sector of the old camp was due to begin six months ago, following the laying of the foundation stone on 9 March.
However, UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, had to rethink construction plans to avoid digging deep foundations after the discovery of what Lebanon's Directorate General of Antiquities believes could be the remains of a Roman village under the destroyed camp.
After carrying out a survey, the Directorate has now agreed that reconstruction can take place, despite the misgivings of some Lebanese politicians.
The archaeological discovery followed lengthy negotiations in Lebanon's notoriously divided cabinet over granting the final green light for reconstruction, and after a complex but successful scheme to purchase land in and around Nahr al-Bared from its original Lebanese titleholders.
Donation boost
Reconstruction has been given momentum recently by two much-needed funding pledges to UNRWA, which had been struggling to raise money to meet even its basic recovery needs, let alone begin rebuilding the old camp.
In July, the US embassy in Lebanon announced an additional $25 million for the reconstruction of the old camp, now estimated by UNRWA to cost $328 million, and a further $5 million towards food, health care, shelter, access to basic education and improved water and sanitation services while the camp is being reconstructed.
In February, a second health care center on the edge of the camp opened, funded by the US, to serve families living in poorly equipped temporary shelters there, known as "the barracks."
The grant raised donations by the US to Nahr al-Bared to $71.8 million, making it the single largest donor.
In early May, Saudi Arabia became the first Arab country to donate to the reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared, contributing $25 million to rebuild the second section of the camp. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have pledged to fund half the total reconstruction costs.
Overall, UNRWA has now received $92 million, plus $10.4 million from the Multi-Donor Trust Fund administered by the World Bank, which it says is enough for nearly one third of the official camp's reconstruction.
UNRWA's current early recovery appeal for $42.7 million to cover the last quarter of the year was just over half funded by the middle of July. The single largest relief cost is rent subsidies to 3,050 families, which cost around $500,000 a month.
There are now 3,100 families living in the new camp, with 2,000 families (10,000 people) still displaced and living mainly in neighboring Beddawi camp.
Signs of optimism
Wafika al-Hassan, a nurse at an UNRWA clinic, is one of those who have returned to their homes in the new camp. In the immediate aftermath of the conflict in 2007, IRIN visited the mother of three as she inspected the damage and looting of her home.
Today, with fresh paint on the walls, cement bags piled high on the streets outside and her children smiling around her, al-Hassan is optimistic about the future, despite working overtime to pay back the $15,000 she spent rebuilding her home.
"Social conditions are improving. People are trying to improve themselves and depression has decreased," she said. "The children used to talk about the war a lot, but now they are concentrating on school again and trying to forget what happened."
Restrictions
Eighteen-year-old Omar Baraka was a farmer from the old camp, until the battle destroyed his home and killed most of his cows. He now runs a bakery amid the cleared rubble and ruined buildings of the new camp and says business is fair, but that army restrictions on Lebanese entering the camp -- just 2,000 permits for Lebanese to enter have been issued -- mean little hope of a return to Nahr al-Bared's once flourishing marketplace.
"The checkpoints let through as much flour as we want, but there are no outsiders coming into the camp, so businesses can't expand," said Baraka. "Money is rotating between Palestinians only."
Charlie Higgins, UNRWA's project manager for the reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared, said there needed to be a new approach to the system of army-controlled checkpoints set up around both the new and old camps.
"Lebanese used to do their shopping in the adjacent area and in Nahr al-Bared camp, but they don't do it anymore as the market place that was highly integrated with the surrounding Lebanese local communities has not been restored."
This item comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. All IRIN material may be reposted or reprinted free-of-charge; refer to the copyright page for conditions of use. IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Despite the removal of 90 percent of the rubble from the destruction of Nahr al-Bared, two years on from the conflict, reconstruction in the official camp has yet to begin. (Hugh Macleod/IRIN)
NAHR AL-BARED (IRIN) - Two years on from the devastating battle which destroyed their homes and livelihoods, Palestinian refugees from Nahr al-Bared are set to see reconstruction work begin inside the camp's official boundaries.
Despite a resilient recovery under way among Palestinians living in the new camp -- the area around the edge of the official Nahr al-Bared refugee camp -- legal hurdles, political wrangling and the recent discovery of archaeological ruins under the site of the old camp have delayed reconstruction work there.
Nahr al-Bared old camp was completely destroyed and the new camp badly damaged in a 15-week battle in 2007 between the army and Islamist militant group Fatah Islam, which killed more than 400 people and displaced up to 30,000 Palestinians.
With over 90 percent of the rubble now removed, reconstruction in the first one-eighth sector of the old camp was due to begin six months ago, following the laying of the foundation stone on 9 March.
However, UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, had to rethink construction plans to avoid digging deep foundations after the discovery of what Lebanon's Directorate General of Antiquities believes could be the remains of a Roman village under the destroyed camp.
After carrying out a survey, the Directorate has now agreed that reconstruction can take place, despite the misgivings of some Lebanese politicians.
The archaeological discovery followed lengthy negotiations in Lebanon's notoriously divided cabinet over granting the final green light for reconstruction, and after a complex but successful scheme to purchase land in and around Nahr al-Bared from its original Lebanese titleholders.
Donation boost
Reconstruction has been given momentum recently by two much-needed funding pledges to UNRWA, which had been struggling to raise money to meet even its basic recovery needs, let alone begin rebuilding the old camp.
In July, the US embassy in Lebanon announced an additional $25 million for the reconstruction of the old camp, now estimated by UNRWA to cost $328 million, and a further $5 million towards food, health care, shelter, access to basic education and improved water and sanitation services while the camp is being reconstructed.
In February, a second health care center on the edge of the camp opened, funded by the US, to serve families living in poorly equipped temporary shelters there, known as "the barracks."
The grant raised donations by the US to Nahr al-Bared to $71.8 million, making it the single largest donor.
In early May, Saudi Arabia became the first Arab country to donate to the reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared, contributing $25 million to rebuild the second section of the camp. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have pledged to fund half the total reconstruction costs.
Overall, UNRWA has now received $92 million, plus $10.4 million from the Multi-Donor Trust Fund administered by the World Bank, which it says is enough for nearly one third of the official camp's reconstruction.
UNRWA's current early recovery appeal for $42.7 million to cover the last quarter of the year was just over half funded by the middle of July. The single largest relief cost is rent subsidies to 3,050 families, which cost around $500,000 a month.
There are now 3,100 families living in the new camp, with 2,000 families (10,000 people) still displaced and living mainly in neighboring Beddawi camp.
Signs of optimism
Wafika al-Hassan, a nurse at an UNRWA clinic, is one of those who have returned to their homes in the new camp. In the immediate aftermath of the conflict in 2007, IRIN visited the mother of three as she inspected the damage and looting of her home.
Today, with fresh paint on the walls, cement bags piled high on the streets outside and her children smiling around her, al-Hassan is optimistic about the future, despite working overtime to pay back the $15,000 she spent rebuilding her home.
"Social conditions are improving. People are trying to improve themselves and depression has decreased," she said. "The children used to talk about the war a lot, but now they are concentrating on school again and trying to forget what happened."
Restrictions
Eighteen-year-old Omar Baraka was a farmer from the old camp, until the battle destroyed his home and killed most of his cows. He now runs a bakery amid the cleared rubble and ruined buildings of the new camp and says business is fair, but that army restrictions on Lebanese entering the camp -- just 2,000 permits for Lebanese to enter have been issued -- mean little hope of a return to Nahr al-Bared's once flourishing marketplace.
"The checkpoints let through as much flour as we want, but there are no outsiders coming into the camp, so businesses can't expand," said Baraka. "Money is rotating between Palestinians only."
Charlie Higgins, UNRWA's project manager for the reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared, said there needed to be a new approach to the system of army-controlled checkpoints set up around both the new and old camps.
"Lebanese used to do their shopping in the adjacent area and in Nahr al-Bared camp, but they don't do it anymore as the market place that was highly integrated with the surrounding Lebanese local communities has not been restored."
This item comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. All IRIN material may be reposted or reprinted free-of-charge; refer to the copyright page for conditions of use. IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
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.
Irish construction giant digs deeper in occupation
Adri Nieuwhof, The Electronic Intifada, 18 August 2009
Nesher cement being used in the construction if Israel's illegal light rail in occupied East Jerusalem. (Project Clean Hands)
A recent acquisition by the Israeli subsidiary of brick and mortar giant Irish CRH has placed the European conglomerate under increased pressure from Palestine solidarity activists. Irish CRH, formerly known as Cement Roadstone Holding, owns 25 percent of the Mashav Group, an Israeli construction firm. Mashav recently announced that it will acquire Hanson Israel, a subsidiary of Germany's HeidelbergCement. With the acquisition of Hanson Israel, CRH is further entrenched in violations of international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
Last month, The Electronic Intifada reported that German HeidelbergCement, one of the world's largest construction companies, became the target of legal action in Israel because its subsidiary, Hanson Israel, was involved in illegal mining activities in the occupied West Bank.
Hanson Israel is the second-largest building materials company in Israel. It manufactures ready-made cement, aggregates and asphalt for Israel's construction industry. In addition, the company operates a quarry in the occupied West Bank. In March, the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din filed a petition with the Israeli high court demanding a halt to illegal mining activity in West Bank quarries, including Hanson Israel's Nahal Raba quarry. The attorneys representing Yesh Din called upon the court to put an end to this "clearly illegal activity" and the court decided to freeze the expansion of quarries for six months. Hanson Israel also owns two concrete plants in the settlements of Modiin Illit and Atarot, and an asphalt plant south of the Elqana settlement, all illegally built on occupied Palestinian land.
According to a 29 July 2009 report in the Israeli business magazine Globes, HeidelbergCement tried to distance itself from the actions of its subsidiary by selling it to the Mashav Group. The website of Who Profits from the Occupation?, an Israeli group that monitors corporations' involvement in Israel's occupation, states that 85 percent of all cement in Israel is sold by Nesher Cement, a Mashav subsidiary. As a result, Irish CRH is currently complicit in the violation of international law through illegal mining activities in the OPT as well as the construction of Israel's wall in the West Bank, checkpoints and settlements.
Over the past six years, CRH has been a target of international calls for divestment from companies facilitating and benefiting from Israel's policies and actions. Most recently, in June 2009, volunteers with "Project Clean Hands," an ad hoc coalition of Irish non-governmental organizations pressuring CRH, investigated the use of Nesher Cement products in Israel's building of settlements and the wall in the OPT. Project Clean Hands documented Nesher products being used in the construction of housing, schools, synagogues and infrastructure in the occupied West Bank, including the light rail project illegally being built and operated in East Jerusalem.
These findings build on previous reports by Amnesty International and the US-based United Methodist Church. In 2003, Amnesty International Ireland publicly stated that "CRH, through its subsidiaries Mashav and Nesher Cement, is likely to be providing the raw material" for Israel's wall being built on occupied West Bank land.
The United Methodist Church called for the divestment from companies that are significantly supporting the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2005. Two years later, at its New England Annual Conference, the body specifically urged its members, churches and investment managers to divest from CRH.
Increasingly, companies are coming under pressure to comply with norms of corporate responsibility, including respect for human rights. Palestine solidarity activists are calling on corporations to cease their involvement in Israel's violations of international humanitarian law. Indeed, fear of bad publicity may be the reason behind HeidelbergCement selling off Hanson Israel to the Mashav Group. The deal is still awaiting the approval of the Israel AntiTrust Authority, the Israeli government's enforcement agency.
Should Mashav's acquisition of Hanson Israel be approved, CHR will come under greater scrutiny and pressure to live up to its stated principles of corporate responsibility. Through Mashav's activities, activists contend, CHR is not only violating these principles but is profiting from the Israeli occupation.
The pressure on CRH to divest from Mashav has increased over the past few years. In 2005, activists in Ireland called on Irish pension funds to divest from CRH, until the company provides an absolute guarantee to cease involvement in the supply of materials used in illegal Israeli construction projects in the West Bank. The same year, the biennial Irish Congress of Trade Unions conference passed a resolution that called for boycott and divestment from Israel and companies such as CRH that are building Israel's wall in the occupied West Bank. Recently, the Irish Free Palestine Campaign, the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Irish Anti-War Movement and the political party Sinn Fein demanded the company end all of its activities that facilitate the Israeli occupation. They loudly voiced their concerns for hours in front of CRH's head office in Dublin on 7 August 2009.
Adri Nieuwhof is a consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland.
Nesher cement being used in the construction if Israel's illegal light rail in occupied East Jerusalem. (Project Clean Hands)
A recent acquisition by the Israeli subsidiary of brick and mortar giant Irish CRH has placed the European conglomerate under increased pressure from Palestine solidarity activists. Irish CRH, formerly known as Cement Roadstone Holding, owns 25 percent of the Mashav Group, an Israeli construction firm. Mashav recently announced that it will acquire Hanson Israel, a subsidiary of Germany's HeidelbergCement. With the acquisition of Hanson Israel, CRH is further entrenched in violations of international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).
Last month, The Electronic Intifada reported that German HeidelbergCement, one of the world's largest construction companies, became the target of legal action in Israel because its subsidiary, Hanson Israel, was involved in illegal mining activities in the occupied West Bank.
Hanson Israel is the second-largest building materials company in Israel. It manufactures ready-made cement, aggregates and asphalt for Israel's construction industry. In addition, the company operates a quarry in the occupied West Bank. In March, the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din filed a petition with the Israeli high court demanding a halt to illegal mining activity in West Bank quarries, including Hanson Israel's Nahal Raba quarry. The attorneys representing Yesh Din called upon the court to put an end to this "clearly illegal activity" and the court decided to freeze the expansion of quarries for six months. Hanson Israel also owns two concrete plants in the settlements of Modiin Illit and Atarot, and an asphalt plant south of the Elqana settlement, all illegally built on occupied Palestinian land.
According to a 29 July 2009 report in the Israeli business magazine Globes, HeidelbergCement tried to distance itself from the actions of its subsidiary by selling it to the Mashav Group. The website of Who Profits from the Occupation?, an Israeli group that monitors corporations' involvement in Israel's occupation, states that 85 percent of all cement in Israel is sold by Nesher Cement, a Mashav subsidiary. As a result, Irish CRH is currently complicit in the violation of international law through illegal mining activities in the OPT as well as the construction of Israel's wall in the West Bank, checkpoints and settlements.
Over the past six years, CRH has been a target of international calls for divestment from companies facilitating and benefiting from Israel's policies and actions. Most recently, in June 2009, volunteers with "Project Clean Hands," an ad hoc coalition of Irish non-governmental organizations pressuring CRH, investigated the use of Nesher Cement products in Israel's building of settlements and the wall in the OPT. Project Clean Hands documented Nesher products being used in the construction of housing, schools, synagogues and infrastructure in the occupied West Bank, including the light rail project illegally being built and operated in East Jerusalem.
These findings build on previous reports by Amnesty International and the US-based United Methodist Church. In 2003, Amnesty International Ireland publicly stated that "CRH, through its subsidiaries Mashav and Nesher Cement, is likely to be providing the raw material" for Israel's wall being built on occupied West Bank land.
The United Methodist Church called for the divestment from companies that are significantly supporting the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2005. Two years later, at its New England Annual Conference, the body specifically urged its members, churches and investment managers to divest from CRH.
Increasingly, companies are coming under pressure to comply with norms of corporate responsibility, including respect for human rights. Palestine solidarity activists are calling on corporations to cease their involvement in Israel's violations of international humanitarian law. Indeed, fear of bad publicity may be the reason behind HeidelbergCement selling off Hanson Israel to the Mashav Group. The deal is still awaiting the approval of the Israel AntiTrust Authority, the Israeli government's enforcement agency.
Should Mashav's acquisition of Hanson Israel be approved, CHR will come under greater scrutiny and pressure to live up to its stated principles of corporate responsibility. Through Mashav's activities, activists contend, CHR is not only violating these principles but is profiting from the Israeli occupation.
The pressure on CRH to divest from Mashav has increased over the past few years. In 2005, activists in Ireland called on Irish pension funds to divest from CRH, until the company provides an absolute guarantee to cease involvement in the supply of materials used in illegal Israeli construction projects in the West Bank. The same year, the biennial Irish Congress of Trade Unions conference passed a resolution that called for boycott and divestment from Israel and companies such as CRH that are building Israel's wall in the occupied West Bank. Recently, the Irish Free Palestine Campaign, the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Irish Anti-War Movement and the political party Sinn Fein demanded the company end all of its activities that facilitate the Israeli occupation. They loudly voiced their concerns for hours in front of CRH's head office in Dublin on 7 August 2009.
Adri Nieuwhof is a consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland.
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