May Day Rag Bag
NB: If seeking further resources, on my Facebook Profile page similar articles are shared. I also recommend analysis at www.coteret.com (
Who killed the Mideast peace process?
A commission of inquiry is needed to investigate who is responsible for the failure of the peace process. Akiva Eldar, 26th April, 2010
It is hard to believe that
U.S. Secretary of
In an interview with
If the
He proudly said that his father foresaw the 9/11 disaster. There was no mention as to whether he foresaw
The past that has shaped Netanyahu's present personality and future policy is overflowing with the graves of forefathers, the wars of the Jews and the horror of the Holocaust. All he wants is to convince us that
Netanyahu fears that giving
One examined the massacre at Sabra and Chatila in 1982, and the other the confrontation with Hezbollah in 2006. No commission has yet to investigate missing
Sagie, who negotiated with the Syrians on behalf of
No politician or body was asked to explain the failure of political efforts on the Palestinian track, starting from the problems the day after the Oslo Accords, through the unilateral withdrawal from
Nearly 50 years late, the Begin government appointed a public commission of inquiry to look into the murder of Chaim Arlosoroff. It is not too late to investigate who killed
Discrimination is flourishing in East Jerusalem
While children in West Jerusalem schools are celebrating 'Jerusalem Day,' thousands of children in East Jerusalem will stay home or crowd into rickety schoolrooms.
Akiva Eldar, 3rd May 2010
If everything goes as expected next week, with the beginning of proximity talks, thousands of Jews will be marking 43 years since the "unification of Jerusalem." The politicians will certainly not miss the festive opportunity to express their great love for "our united capital for all eternity."
At that same hour, the police will continue to question municipal leaders who, while singing songs of praise to Jerusalem, lent a hand to the construction of the monstrous Holyland complex. You don't need judges in Jerusalem to know that a serious crime was committed against the city with the Holyland. But corruption on the hill in West Jerusalem is nothing compared to the theft of land, identity rape, and the body of lies and criminal discrimination against 270,000 residents of the eastern part of the city.
Although these despicable acts have been going on in broad daylight for years, the public and the media don't find them interesting. After all, it's about Arabs. If not for the "unfortunate timing" of the U.S. vice-presidential visit, who would have cared about 1,600 housing units at Ramat Shlomo? Did anyone investigate why, over the opposition of the Israel Lands Administration representative, the District Planning and Building Committee rezoned the land from open space to land for construction? Who knows how many apartments the Housing and Construction Ministry built for young couples from East Jerusalem, which, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is no different than North Tel Aviv?
A reminder: Since 1967, Israel has expropriated 35 percent of the area of East Jerusalem (around 24 square kilometers). New Jewish neighborhoods were built on those lands, with 50,000 housing units.
Hundreds of developers and contractors (and public employees?) continue to get rich from this construction. How many neighborhoods were built during that time for Arab-Israeli residents? Zero. When was the last time the government supported the construction of 600 apartments in an Arab neighborhood? Thirty years ago. Most of the lands left in the hands of Palestinians (about 45 square kilometers) have been declared "green areas." Lacking a comprehensive master plan for Jerusalem because of intentional political foot-dragging, building permits cannot be issued for areas outside the densely built-up Palestinian neighborhoods.
And after all that, people on the right dare to complain that Arabs are building without permits, while attempts are being made to "expel" Jews from Beit Yonatan, a large building without a permit that their friends stuck like a bone in the throat of a Palestinian neighborhood. The prime minister is also peddling the line that "a Palestinian from East Jerusalem can build anywhere in the city." It's hard to believe that Netanyahu, who was born in Jerusalem, doesn't know that only Israeli citizens or those entitled to Israeli citizenship through the Law of Return have access to ILA property (93 percent of the land in Israel).
Not only are Arabs from East Jerusalem not allowed to buy the homes in Talbiyeh (whose name has been officially changed to Komemiyut) where they were born 63 years ago; the law doesn't permit them to build a home on one-third of the land of East Jerusalem - the area that was expropriated from Palestinians after 1967. In contrast, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who demanded that U.S. President Barack Obama leave Jerusalem alone, is welcome to purchase a vacation apartment in the new Jewish housing project in Sheikh Jarrah.
While children in West Jerusalem schools are celebrating "Jerusalem Day," thousands of children in East Jerusalem will stay home or crowd into rickety schoolrooms. The education minister and the mayor, who will praise the "unification of Jerusalem," are among those continually defaulting on the pledge to the High Court of Justice to build some 250 of the more than 1,000 classrooms that are lacking in the city.
And people who disregard Israel's High Court will have no trouble ignoring agreements with foreigners. Who remembers that according to phase one of the road map that the Israeli government was to reopen the Palestinian Chamber of Commerce and other shuttered Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem, pledging that they would operate based on previous agreements?
"For Zion's sake will I not hold My peace, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until her triumph go forth as brightness, and her salvation as a torch that burneth, and the nations shall see thy triumph, and all kings thy glory," wrote the prophet Isaiah. It's hard to believe that proximity talks will bring peace into closer proximity between Israel and the Palestinians. But if they help replace baseless, sickly sweet declarations with just a little more justice and wisdom emanating from Jerusalem, as the prophet envisioned, that will be enough.
Redeeming Jerusalem by truth, not hollow slogans
Daniel Seidemann April 26, 2010
In recent full page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, renowned author and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel argued that Jerusalem is "above politics." But the portrait of the city Wiesel painted is so factually inaccurate and so morally specious as to leave no room for doubt: Wiesel's false innocence and moral posturing over Jerusalem is an example of politics par excellence, with Wiesel willingly becoming a tool of Israel's extreme right in its desperate efforts to block Obama's peace efforts.
A review of the facts is in order.
93 percent of Israel - including most of West Jerusalem and the 35 percent of privately-owned land in East Jerusalem expropriated by Israel since 1967 - is categorized by Israel as "State Land." Only Israeli citizens and those entitled to immigrate under the Law of Return may acquire properties on this land. Palestinians of East Jerusalem, with rare exception, are in neither of these categories. So while Wiesel may purchase a home in anywhere in East or West Jerusalem, a Palestinian cannot.
Since 1967, Israel has built more than 50,000 dwellings for Israelis in East Jerusalem, but has built fewer than 600 for Palestinians (the last was built 35 years ago). And from 1967 until today, as East Jerusalem's Palestinian population increased from 70,000 to 280,000, Israel has issued only 4,000 permits for private Palestinian construction in East Jerusalem. Barred from building legally, the Palestinians built without permits - leaving them subject to Israeli demolition of their "illegal" homes.
Today extreme settler groups have launched a campaign to evict Palestinian families - refugees of Israel's War of Independence - from densely-populated Palestinian neighborhoods in the heart of East Jerusalem. They are doing so based on the "right" of Jews to recover properties lost in the 1948 war. But under Israeli law Palestinians have no such right. So while Israel insists that Palestinians renounce any "right of return" - something understood as necessary for the two-state solution - it is implementing a Jewish right of return to Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and turning 1948 refugees into 2010 refugees.
And then there is the question of Israel's respect for other religions.
In recent years the Israeli Government has transferred virtually all of the most sensitive religious, archeological and cultural sites in East Jerusalem to the de facto control of extreme settler groups. These groups are abusing archeology and public planning to highlight the Jewish past, while marginalizing the Christian, Muslim and Palestinian dimensions of the city, past and present.
Due to Israeli restrictions, today it is easier for a Palestinian Christian living just south of Jerusalem in Bethlehem to worship in Washington's National Cathedral than to pray in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Today a Muslim living in Turkey has a better chance of getting to Jerusalem to pray at the Old City's al-Aqsa mosque than a Muslim living a few miles away in Ramallah.
Before our eyes, Jerusalem is becoming the arena where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is morphing from a resolvable national conflict into a religious war - a transformation that, if it continues, poses an existential threat to Israel. And what starts in Jerusalem does not stay in Jerusalem: conflict in Jerusalem resonates throughout the region and beyond, wind in the sails of every jihadist.
By asserting the Jewish people's exclusive "ownership" of Jerusalem, Wiesel embraces the policies that are accelerating this metamorphosis.
Wiesel ignores these facts. He ignores the fact that the policies he is defending will soon turn Jerusalem into a city so balkanized, geographically and demographically, that the two-state solution will no longer be possible. And the demise of the two-state solution portends the end of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state, to be replaced by either an apartheid-like reality with a Jewish minority ruling over an Arab majority, or by a bi-national Arab-Jewish state.
Israel is at an existential crossroads with Jerusalem. Current policies cannot be justified - even by Elie Wiesel, even to Israel's staunchest allies. These policies consistently derail the resumption of negotiations towards a conflict-ending agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The cumulative impact of these policies will be the destruction of the two-state solution, the radicalization of the conflict and the de-legitimization of Israel. With these policies, Jerusalem is becoming the place where Israel slides down the slippery slope into pariah status.
By agreeing to carry the water for Israel's extreme right, Wiesel has not only undermined his own moral authority, but has done so in the service of a political agenda that is a grave threat to Israel's most vital interests. If Wiesel loves Jerusalem as much as he claims, he should indeed put Jerusalem above politics and join President Obama in his insistence that these dangerous policies cease, and support Obama's efforts to achieve a final status agreement that resolves all the issues, not the least of which being Jerusalem.
Daniel Seidemann is a Jerusalem-based lawyer and expert on Jerusalem, and founder of the Israeli NGO Ir Amim.
Is the Israel-Palestine Conflict “ripe” for Obama’s intervention?
Henry Siegman April 28, 2010
In an op-ed essay in the Wall Street Journal (04/26/2010), Richard Haass, the President of Council on Foreign Relations, argues that advocates of a more forceful U.S. intervention in the Middle East peace process have exaggerated that conflict's impact on America's interests elsewhere in the region.
I don't know anyone among those who have cited the damage the Israel-Palestine conflict is causing U.S. interests in the region who believes this concern to be anything other than a secondary reason for a more muscular U.S. initiative to bring this conflict to a close. For everyone, the main reason is the human cost to millions of Palestinians who have lived under the boot of a military occupation for over 40 years, and to Israel's citizens who, while living increasingly undisturbed and prosperous lives, nevertheless exist in the shadow of the threat of recurring wars and Qassam rockets.
The second compelling reason for a quick end to the conflict for all those who advocate it is the unrestrained expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, whose undeclared but widely understood goal it is to make impossible the emergence of a Palestinian state. This outcome would leave Israel with the choice of granting Palestinians Israeli citizenship, thus giving up its Jewish identity, or ending its democratic character as it enforces a regime that denies millions of Palestinians their individual and national rights - in effect turning Israel into an apartheid state.
Oddly enough, these concerns find no place in Richard Haass's essay as he warns against exaggerating the bearing of a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict on U.S. interests.
Forty plus years into this conflict and into the creeping Israeli annexation of territory in the 22 percent of Palestine left the Palestinians, Haass pleads for patience for the situation to "ripen" before we try to end it by putting forward an American plan. He maintains that what is missing is not ideas, but the will and ability of the parties to compromise. Haass notes that "Palestinian leadership remains weak and divided; the Israeli government is too ideological and fractured; U.S. relations are too strained for Israel to place much faith in American promises."
One would have thought the problem has been placing faith in Israeli promises. But more to the point, it is precisely the ability to compromise that will be the victim of further delay - for it will discredit the moderate leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad who will surely not be replaced by greater moderates. Their replacement will be Hamas - if we are lucky - or the more extreme groups in Gaza that are now challenging Hamas for what these groups consider to be Hamas's excessive moderation.
It is true that Palestinian leadership, as Haass states, remains weak and divided. But their weakness and division is the result of Israeli and American failure to reward their moderation. As far as Palestinians are concerned, aside from marginal improvements in the economy, for which the international donor community is largely responsible, it has produced only a hardening of Israeli positions on the core issues.
More to the point, the Palestinian divisions that Haass deplores were deliberately planned and fostered by Israel and the U.S. during the previous U.S. administration. There is something less than honorable in pointing to problems that our own misguided policies created as a reason the victims of our policies are undeserving of our support.
Of course, the U.S. must stand by its commitment to protect Israel's security. Haass must know there was never any reason for Israel to doubt the solidity of U.S. commitments on this score. Indeed, the over-the-top American assurances that there will never be "any daylight" between us and Israel when it comes to security may come to haunt us. For if we heed the advice to delay stronger U.S. intervention in the peace process for future, riper moments, we may find ourselves tied solidly to an Israeli government that - in order to preserve Israel's Jewish identity - imposes an apartheid regime on a Palestinian population under its control that outnumbers its Jewish counterpart.
Most of the political parties that comprise Netanyahu's government, including Yisrael Beiteinu, led by Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu's Foreign Minister, and Shas, have left no doubt that if forced to choose between democracy and the state's Jewish identity, they would opt without the slightest hesitation to end Israel's democracy.
What exactly would an American president do when confronted with such a new reality, which undoubtedly would again produce a spate of full-page advertisements and AIPAC resolutions in the U.S. Congress stressing the Jewish people's biblical attachment to the land and demanding that we stand by our traditional ally? How would a less than forthright U.S. response to such a situation play in the rest of the world? Isn't it in America's national interest - not to speak of the interests of the State of Israel and its people and of the Palestinian people - for an American president to exert every effort to prevent such a likely deterioration that would force our policymakers to make the most agonizing and fateful decisions?
None of these concerns seem to find a place in Haass's calculations of a "ripeness" that should motivate an American president to move expeditiously to help put an end to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The Elders - Lakhdar Brahimi, 24th March 2010
The Goldstone Report and the Peace Process
Lakhdar Brahimi recently chaired a panel discussion in London with two members of the Goldstone inquiry, Professor Christine Chinkin and Colonel Desmond Travers, a former member of Israel’s Knesset, Ami Ayalon, and Palestinian lawyer Karma Nabulsi. Here, he answers questions from the Elders’ team on some of the issues raised by the speakers and the audience.
Q: Can you have peace without justice?
Karma Nabulsi spoke eloquently about achieving peace through international law. She argued that without a legal approach that allows both sides to address their grievances, sustainable peace is not possible. The only alternative to a legal approach, she said, is through force of arms: the strongest dictates the terms of his peace. The weak must submit and accept the diktat of the strong. But of course the weak does not accept.
I agree with her; the use of force is not a lasting recipe for peace.
She was answering indirectly the official Israeli view that the Goldstone Report should have never been produced. This is a view often held by the strong and powerful: might is right. It is a total rejection of the very idea of international justice. Not unlike the colonial attitude of old. But the colonial days are over.
At the heart of this debate at LSE, we had in fact two debates. One was about Israeli occupation and the harsh, often cruel treatment to which Palestinians were subjected. The attack on Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 was the extreme manifestation of that behaviour and the Goldstone Report addressed those events in line with its UN mandate and the requirement of international law.
But there was also another debate that concerned more generally the tension that often arises between justice and peace – between using international law to address violations of human rights and what, in specific circumstances, needs to be done to reach a politically workable solution to a conflict.
Q: What should come first – peace or justice? Can you have peace without addressing grievances in a legally binding way?
When you have a situation like the one that exisits in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, "addressing grievances in a legally binding way” as you put it and peace are inseparable; they are practically one and the same thing: the first objective of the negotiation is in fact to end injustice, oppression etc.
But when a mediator gets to work to engineer a solution to a conflict, he or she may face a dilemma. One of the parties or the human rights community may take objection to the manner in which the mediation is conducted. I confronted such situations many times in my work around the world.
Q: But how do the two ideas of peace and justice connect?
Thanks to years of campaigning and advocacy by civil society and NGOs, we now know and accept that justice matters, human rights matter and that justice is part of the solution of conflicts. You cannot have peace without justice.
However tension arises around discussions of when and how justice can be seen to be done in relation to any peace process.
Different nations have found their own ways to justice or addressing the past and have done so at different stages along the path to peace. There is no 'one size fits all’ approach – the models used in South Africa, Chile, Argentina and Sierra Leone will not necessarily be viable in the Middle East.
Over the years, human rights activists and victims of war have asked me how I can sit down and talk with an individual or group that is known to have carried out serious violations of human rights – people they are demanding should be brought to justice. I understand their question, but I answer that the first step towards peace is putting an end to violence – and that requires that you speak to the ones who have the guns.
I agree 100 per cent that justice is indispensible, but at some stage you’ve got to talk to the bad guys. I fully understand that human rights campaigners and victims find this difficult. But the road to peace is never a simple or straightforward one.
It is important that the UN now will not be part of any peace agreement that gives blanket amnesty. Justice has been acknowledged as a fundamental component of any peace process.
The UN will sign agreements with those accused of violations, but the agreement cannot absolve them of those violations. For example at the Afghanistan conference in Bonn and in later constitutional discussions, the possibility of amnesty for human rights violations was raised and the UN said no – we cannot legalise the absence of justice.
The Goldstone report shows us what war has done and is doing in the Middle East. In that sense, the report is therefore a pressing appeal for peace. By highlighting the suffering of those affected by the conflict it should lead us to redouble our efforts in the search for a solution. I sincerely hope that we never need another Goldstone report - and the only way to ensure that is to achieve lasting peace.
Q: Who is to blame for the failure to reach peace in the Middle East?
Clearly Israel must be held accountable for their ongoing violations of human rights and international law in Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank. They are also the party refusing to end occupation.
It is also a scandal that the Palestinians are so divided and that their leadership structures are failing the people so badly in every sense. They have to get their act together. But the international community is almost as guilty. It is clear that the Israelis and Palestinians cannot solve their problems alone. They definitely need help.
For more than 30 years the Americans have pushed the UN out of the process of trying to resolve the conflict in the Middle East – yet have rarely acted as an honest broker. The US says almost every day that they are 100 per cent with Israel.
Europe is also guilty because they condone what is happening in Israel, especially in relation to human rights abuses. I tell my European friends that they are disqualifiying themselves from talking about human rights because they refuse to act against the destruction of homes, the stealing of land, the collective punishment of Palestinians that is happening every day.
It would actually help Israelis, especially the peace camp in Israel, if there was more condemnation of Israeli abuses from the US and EU. Joe Biden’s sharp response to Israel’s announcement of more settlements was welcome, but was it an indication of greater resolve? We will have to see.
Finally, ordinary Israelis and Palestinians need to get a much more realistic picture of each other.
An Israeli intellectual once said that 80 per cent of Israelis want peace, but they are absolutely certain that the Arabs don’t want peace. At the same time, 90 per cent of the Palestinians want peace – and they are absolutely certain that no Israeli wants peace.
If they knew more, a little more about each other, perhaps we’d get somewhere.
Podcast: Listen to the discussion ; Download: Read the Goldstone Report
A Middle East Peace That Could Happen (But Won’t) In Washington-Speak, “Palestinian State” Means “Fried Chicken”
The fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict grinds on without resolution might appear to be rather strange. For many of the world's conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement. In this case, it is not only possible, but there is near universal agreement on its basic contours: a two-state settlement along the internationally recognized (pre-June 1967) borders -- with "minor and mutual modifications," to adopt official U.S. terminology before Washington departed from the international community in the mid-1970s.
The basic principles have been accepted by virtually the entire world, including the Arab states (who go on to call for full normalization of relations), the Organization of Islamic States (including Iran), and relevant non-state actors (including Hamas). A settlement along these lines was first proposed at the U.N. Security Council in January 1976 by the major Arab states. Israel refused to attend the session. The U.S. vetoed the resolution, and did so again in 1980. The record at the General Assembly since is similar.
There was one important and revealing break in U.S.-Israeli rejectionism. After the failed Camp David agreements in 2000, President Clinton recognized that the terms he and Israel had proposed were unacceptable to any Palestinians. That December, he proposed his "parameters": imprecise, but more forthcoming. He then stated that both sides had accepted the parameters, while expressing reservations.
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met in Taba, Egypt, in January 2001 to resolve the differences and were making considerable progress. In their final press conference, they reported that, with a little more time, they could probably have reached full agreement. Israel called off the negotiations prematurely, however, and official progress then terminated, though informal discussions at a high level continued leading to the Geneva Accord, rejected by Israel and ignored by the U.S.
A good deal has happened since, but a settlement along those lines is still not out of reach -- if, of course, Washington is once again willing to accept it. Unfortunately, there is little sign of that.
Substantial mythology has been created about the entire record, but the basic facts are clear enough and quite well documented.
The U.S. and Israel have been acting in tandem to extend and deepen the occupation. In 2005, recognizing that it was pointless to subsidize a few thousand Israeli settlers in Gaza, who were appropriating substantial resources and protected by a large part of the Israeli army, the government of Ariel Sharon decided to move them to the much more valuable West Bank and Golan Heights.
Instead of carrying out the operation straightforwardly, as would have been easy enough, the government decided to stage a "national trauma," which virtually duplicated the farce accompanying the withdrawal from the Sinai desert after the Camp David agreements of 1978-79. In each case, the withdrawal permitted the cry of "Never Again," which meant in practice: we cannot abandon an inch of the Palestinian territories that we want to take in violation of international law. This farce played very well in the West, though it was ridiculed by more astute Israeli commentators, among them that country's prominent sociologist the late Baruch Kimmerling.
After its formal withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Israel never actually relinquished its total control over the territory, often described realistically as "the world's largest prison." In January 2006, a few months after the withdrawal, Palestine had an election that was recognized as free and fair by international observers. Palestinians, however, voted "the wrong way," electing Hamas. Instantly, the U.S. and Israel intensified their assault against Gazans as punishment for this misdeed. The facts and the reasoning were not concealed; rather, they were openly published alongside reverential commentary on Washington's sincere dedication to democracy. The U.S.-backed Israeli assault against the Gazans has only been intensified since, thanks to violence and economic strangulation, increasingly savage.
Meanwhile in the West Bank, always with firm U.S. backing, Israel has been carrying forward longstanding programs to take the valuable land and resources of the Palestinians and leave them in unviable cantons, mostly out of sight. Israeli commentators frankly refer to these goals as "neocolonial." Ariel Sharon, the main architect of the settlement programs, called these cantons "Bantustans," though the term is misleading: South Africa needed the majority black work force, while Israel would be happy if the Palestinians disappeared, and its policies are directed to that end.
Blockading Gaza by Land and Sea
One step towards cantonization and the undermining of hopes for Palestinian national survival is the separation of Gaza from the West Bank. These hopes have been almost entirely consigned to oblivion, an atrocity to which we should not contribute by tacit consent. Israeli journalist Amira Hass, one of the leading specialists on Gaza, writes that
"the restrictions on Palestinian movement that Israel introduced in January 1991 reversed a process that had been initiated in June 1967. Back then, and for the first time since 1948, a large portion of the Palestinian people again lived in the open territory of a single country -- to be sure, one that was occupied, but was nevertheless whole.... The total separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank is one of the greatest achievements of Israeli politics, whose overarching objective is to prevent a solution based on international decisions and understandings and instead dictate an arrangement based on Israel's military superiority....
"Since January 1991, Israel has bureaucratically and logistically merely perfected the split and the separation: not only between Palestinians in the occupied territories and their brothers in Israel, but also between the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem and those in the rest of the territories and between Gazans and West Bankers/Jerusalemites. Jews live in this same piece of land within a superior and separate system of privileges, laws, services, physical infrastructure and freedom of movement."
The leading academic specialist on Gaza, Harvard scholar Sara Roy, adds:
"Gaza is an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into one of aid-dependent paupers.... Gaza's subjection began long before Israel's recent war against it [December 2008]. The Israeli occupation - now largely forgotten or denied by the international community - has devastated Gaza's economy and people, especially since 2006.... After Israel's December [2008] assault, Gaza's already compromised conditions have become virtually unlivable. Livelihoods, homes, and public infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed on a scale that even the Israel Defense Forces admitted was indefensible.
"In Gaza today, there is no private sector to speak of and no industry. 80 percent of Gaza's agricultural crops were destroyed and Israel continues to snipe at farmers attempting to plant and tend fields near the well-fenced and patrolled border. Most productive activity has been extinguished.... Today, 96 percent of Gaza's population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs. According to the World Food Programme, the Gaza Strip requires a minimum of 400 trucks of food every day just to meet the basic nutritional needs of the population. Yet, despite a March [22, 2009] decision by the Israeli cabinet to lift all restrictions on foodstuffs entering Gaza, only 653 trucks of food and other supplies were allowed entry during the week of May 10, at best meeting 23 percent of required need. Israel now allows only 30 to 40 commercial items to enter Gaza compared to 4,000 approved products prior to June 2006."
It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008-9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons. Near-universal opinion asserts the contrary, claiming that Israel was acting in self-defense. That is utterly unsustainable, in light of Israel's flat rejection of peaceful means that were readily available, as Israel and its U.S. partner in crime knew very well. That aside, Israel's siege of Gaza is itself an act of war, as Israel of all countries certainly recognizes, having repeatedly justified launching major wars on grounds of partial restrictions on its access to the outside world, though nothing remotely like what it has long imposed on Gaza.
One crucial element of Israel's criminal siege, little reported, is the naval blockade. Peter Beaumont reports from Gaza that, "on its coastal littoral, Gaza's limitations are marked by a different fence where the bars are Israeli gunboats with their huge wakes, scurrying beyond the Palestinian fishing boats and preventing them from going outside a zone imposed by the warships." According to reports from the scene, the naval siege has been tightened steadily since 2000. Fishing boats have been driven steadily out of Gaza's territorial waters and toward the shore by Israeli gunboats, often violently without warning and with many casualties. As a result of these naval actions, Gaza's fishing industry has virtually collapsed; fishing is impossible near shore because of the contamination caused by Israel's regular attacks, including the destruction of power plants and sewage facilities.
These Israeli naval attacks began shortly after the discovery by the BG (British Gas) Group of what appear to be quite sizeable natural gas fields in Gaza's territorial waters. Industry journals report that Israel is already appropriating these Gazan resources for its own use, part of its commitment to shift its economy to natural gas. The standard industry source reports:
"Israel's finance ministry has given the Israel Electric Corp. (IEC) approval to purchase larger quantities of natural gas from BG than originally agreed upon, according to Israeli government sources [which] said the state-owned utility would be able to negotiate for as much as 1.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas from the Marine field located off the Mediterranean coast of the Palestinian controlled Gaza Strip.
"Last year the Israeli government approved the purchase of 800 million cubic meters of gas from the field by the IEC.... Recently the Israeli government changed its policy and decided the state-owned utility could buy the entire quantity of gas from the Gaza Marine field. Previously the government had said the IEC could buy half the total amount and the remainder would be bought by private power producers."
The pillage of what could become a major source of income for Gaza is surely known to U.S. authorities. It is only reasonable to suppose that the intention to appropriate these limited resources, either by Israel alone or together with the collaborationist Palestinian Authority, is the motive for preventing Gazan fishing boats from entering Gaza's territorial waters.
There are some instructive precedents. In 1989, Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans signed a treaty with his Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas granting Australia rights to the substantial oil reserves in "the Indonesian Province of East Timor." The Indonesia-Australia Timor Gap Treaty, which offered not a crumb to the people whose oil was being stolen, "is the only legal agreement anywhere in the world that effectively recognises Indonesia's right to rule East Timor," the Australian press reported.
Asked about his willingness to recognize the Indonesian conquest and to rob the sole resource of the conquered territory, which had been subjected to near-genocidal slaughter by the Indonesian invader with the strong support of Australia (along with the U.S., the U.K., and some others), Evans explained that "there is no binding legal obligation not to recognise the acquisition of territory that was acquired by force," adding that "the world is a pretty unfair place, littered with examples of acquisition by force."
It should, then, be unproblematic for Israel to follow suit in Gaza.
A few years later, Evans became the leading figure in the campaign to introduce the concept "responsibility to protect" -- known as R2P -- into international law. R2P is intended to establish an international obligation to protect populations from grave crimes. Evans is the author of a major book on the subject and was co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which issued what is considered the basic document on R2P.
In an article devoted to this "idealistic effort to establish a new humanitarian principle," the London Economist featured Evans and his "bold but passionate claim on behalf of a three-word expression which (in quite large part thanks to his efforts) now belongs to the language of diplomacy: the ‘responsibility to protect.'" The article is accompanied by a picture of Evans with the caption "Evans: a lifelong passion to protect." His hand is pressed to his forehead in despair over the difficulties faced by his idealistic effort. The journal chose not to run a different photo that circulates in Australia, depicting Evans and Alatas exuberantly clasping their hands together as they toast the Timor Gap Treaty that they had just signed.
Though a "protected population" under international law, Gazans do not fall under the jurisdiction of the "responsibility to protect," joining other unfortunates, in accord with the maxim of Thucydides -- that the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must -- which holds with its customary precision.
Obama and the Settlements
The kinds of restrictions on movement used to destroy Gaza have long been in force in the West Bank as well, less cruelly but with grim effects on life and the economy. The World Bank reports that Israel has established "a complex closure regime that restricts Palestinian access to large areas of the West Bank... The Palestinian economy has remained stagnant, largely because of the sharp downturn in Gaza and Israel's continued restrictions on Palestinian trade and movement in the West Bank."
The World Bank "cited Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints hindering trade and travel, as well as restrictions on Palestinian building in the West Bank, where the Western-backed government of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas holds sway." Israel does permit -- indeed encourage -- a privileged existence for elites in Ramallah and sometimes elsewhere, largely relying on European funding, a traditional feature of colonial and neocolonial practice.
All of this constitutes what Israeli activist Jeff Halper calls a "matrix of control" to subdue the colonized population. These systematic programs over more than 40 years aim to establish Defense Minister Moshe Dayan's recommendation to his colleagues shortly after Israel's 1967 conquests that we must tell the Palestinians in the territories: "We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads."
Turning to the second bone of contention, settlements, there is indeed a confrontation, but it is rather less dramatic than portrayed. Washington's position was presented most strongly in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's much-quoted statement rejecting "natural growth exceptions" to the policy opposing new settlements. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with President Shimon Peres and, in fact, virtually the whole Israeli political spectrum, insists on permitting "natural growth" within the areas that Israel intends to annex, complaining that the United States is backing down on George W. Bush's authorization of such expansion within his "vision" of a Palestinian state.
Senior Netanyahu cabinet members have gone further. Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz announced that "the current Israeli government will not accept in any way the freezing of legal settlement activity in Judea and Samaria." The term "legal" in U.S.-Israeli parlance means "illegal, but authorized by the government of Israel with a wink from Washington." In this usage, unauthorized outposts are termed "illegal," though apart from the dictates of the powerful, they are no more illegal than the settlements granted to Israel under Bush's "vision" and Obama's scrupulous omission.
The Obama-Clinton "hardball" formulation is not new. It repeats the wording of the Bush administration draft of the 2003 Road Map, which stipulates that in Phase I, "Israel freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)." All sides formally accept the Road Map (modified to drop the phrase "natural growth") -- consistently overlooking the fact that Israel, with U.S. support, at once added 14 "reservations" that render it inoperable.
If Obama were at all serious about opposing settlement expansion, he could easily proceed with concrete measures by, for example, reducing U.S. aid by the amount devoted to this purpose. That would hardly be a radical or courageous move. The Bush I administration did so (reducing loan guarantees), but after the Oslo accord in 1993, President Clinton left calculations to the government of Israel. Unsurprisingly, there was "no change in the expenditures flowing to the settlements," the Israeli press reported. "[Prime Minister] Rabin will continue not to dry out the settlements," the report concludes. "And the Americans? They will understand."
Obama administration officials informed the press that the Bush I measures are "not under discussion," and that pressures will be "largely symbolic." In short, Obama understands, just as Clinton and Bush II did.
American Visionaries
At best, settlement expansion is a side issue, rather like the issue of "illegal outposts" -- namely those that the government of Israel has not authorized. Concentration on these issues diverts attention from the fact that there are no "legal outposts" and that it is the existing settlements that are the primary problem to be faced.
The U.S. press reports that "a partial freeze has been in place for several years, but settlers have found ways around the strictures... [C]onstruction in the settlements has slowed but never stopped, continuing at an annual rate of about 1,500 to 2,000 units over the past three years. If building continues at the 2008 rate, the 46,500 units already approved will be completed in about 20 years.... If Israel built all the housing units already approved in the nation's overall master plan for settlements, it would almost double the number of settler homes in the West Bank." Peace Now, which monitors settlement activities, estimates further that the two largest settlements would double in size: Ariel and Ma'aleh Adumim, built mainly during the Oslo years in the salients that subdivide the West Bank into cantons.
"Natural population growth" is largely a myth, Israel's leading diplomatic correspondent, Akiva Eldar, points out, citing demographic studies by Colonel (res.) Shaul Arieli, deputy military secretary to former prime minister and incumbent defense minister Ehud Barak. Settlement growth consists largely of Israeli immigrants in violation of the Geneva Conventions, assisted with generous subsidies. Much of it is in direct violation of formal government decisions, but carried out with the authorization of the government, specifically Barak, considered a dove in the Israeli spectrum.
Correspondent Jackson Diehl derides the "long-dormant Palestinian fantasy," revived by President Abbas, "that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees." He does not explain why refusal to participate in Israel's illegal expansion -- which, if serious, would "force Israel to make critical concessions" -- would be improper interference in Israel's democracy.
Returning to reality, all of these discussions about settlement expansion evade the most crucial issue about settlements: what the United States and Israel have already established in the West Bank. The evasion tacitly concedes that the illegal settlement programs already in place are somehow acceptable (putting aside the Golan Heights, annexed in violation of Security Council orders) -- though the Bush "vision," apparently accepted by Obama, moves from tacit to explicit support for these violations of law. What is in place already suffices to ensure that there can be no viable Palestinian self-determination. Hence, there is every indication that even on the unlikely assumption that "natural growth" will be ended, U.S.-Israeli rejectionism will persist, blocking the international consensus as before.
Subsequently, Prime Minister Netanyahu declared a 10-month suspension of new construction, with many exemptions, and entirely excluding Greater Jerusalem, where expropriation in Arab areas and construction for Jewish settlers continues at a rapid pace. Hillary Clinton praised these "unprecedented" concessions on (illegal) construction, eliciting anger and ridicule in much of the world.
It might be different if a legitimate "land swap" were under consideration, a solution approached at Taba and spelled out more fully in the Geneva Accord reached in informal high-level Israel-Palestine negotiations. The accord was presented in Geneva in October 2003, welcomed by much of the world, rejected by Israel, and ignored by the United States.
Washington's "Evenhandedness"
Barack Obama's June 4, 2009, Cairo address to the Muslim world kept pretty much to his well-honed "blank slate" style -- with little of substance, but presented in a personable manner that allows listeners to write on the slate what they want to hear. CNN captured its spirit in headlining a report "Obama Looks to Reach the Soul of the Muslim World." Obama had announced the goals of his address in an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. "‘We have a joke around the White House,' the president said. ‘We're just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working and nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East.'" The White House commitment is most welcome, but it is useful to see how it translates into practice.
Obama admonished his audience that it is easy to "point fingers... but if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security."
Turning from Obama-Friedman Truth to truth, there is a third side, with a decisive role throughout: the United States. But that participant in the conflict Obama omitted. The omission is understood to be normal and appropriate, hence unmentioned: Friedman's column is headlined "Obama Speech Aimed at Both Arabs and Israelis." The front-page Wall Street Journal report on Obama's speech appears under the heading "Obama Chides Israel, Arabs in His Overture to Muslims." Other reports are the same.
The convention is understandable on the doctrinal principle that though the U.S. government sometimes makes mistakes, its intentions are by definition benign, even noble. In the world of attractive imagery, Washington has always sought desperately to be an honest broker, yearning to advance peace and justice. The doctrine trumps truth, of which there is little hint in the speech or the mainstream coverage of it.
Obama once again echoed Bush's "vision" of two states, without saying what he meant by the phrase "Palestinian state." His intentions were clarified not only by the crucial omissions already discussed, but also by his one explicit criticism of Israel: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop." That is, Israel should live up to Phase I of the 2003 Road Map, rejected at once by Israel with tacit U.S. support, as noted -- though the truth is that Obama has ruled out even steps of the Bush I variety to withdraw from participation in these crimes.
The operative words are "legitimacy" and "continued." By omission, Obama indicates that he accepts Bush's vision: the vast existing settlement and infrastructure projects are "legitimate," thus ensuring that the phrase "Palestinian state" means "fried chicken."
Always even-handed, Obama also had an admonition for the Arab states: they "must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities." Plainly, however, it cannot be a meaningful "beginning" if Obama continues to reject its core principles: implementation of the international consensus. To do so, however, is evidently not Washington's "responsibility" in Obama's vision; no explanation given, no notice taken.
On democracy, Obama said that "we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election" -- as in January 2006, when Washington picked the outcome with a vengeance, turning at once to severe punishment of the Palestinians because it did not like the outcome of a peaceful election, all with Obama's apparent approval judging by his words before, and actions since, taking office.
Obama politely refrained from comment about his host, President Mubarak, one of the most brutal dictators in the region, though he has had some illuminating words about him. As he was about to board a plane to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the two "moderate" Arab states, "Mr. Obama signaled that while he would mention American concerns about human rights in Egypt, he would not challenge Mr. Mubarak too sharply, because he is a ‘force for stability and good' in the Middle East... Mr. Obama said he did not regard Mr. Mubarak as an authoritarian leader. ‘No, I tend not to use labels for folks,' Mr. Obama said. The president noted that there had been criticism ‘of the manner in which politics operates in Egypt,' but he also said that Mr. Mubarak had been ‘a stalwart ally, in many respects, to the United States.'"
When a politician uses the word "folks," we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming. Outside of this context, there are "people," or often "villains," and using labels for them is highly meritorious. Obama is right, however, not to have used the word "authoritarian," which is far too mild a label for his friend.
Just as in the past, support for democracy, and for human rights as well, keeps to the pattern that scholarship has repeatedly discovered, correlating closely with strategic and economic objectives. There should be little difficulty in understanding why those whose eyes are not closed tight shut by rigid doctrine dismiss Obama's yearning for human rights and democracy as a joke in bad taste.
Is the Middle East on a peace process to nowhere?
Israeli iconoclast Meron Benvenisti says negotiations for a Palestinian state are an illusion that perpetuates the status quo; he is convinced that a two-state solution in the Middle East is doomed to fail. Ian Black, Middle East editor, Jerusalem, 28 April, 2010
Meron Benvenisti has been talking, writing and arguing about the Israel-Palestinian conflict for much of the last 40 years. Now aged 76 he is as forceful, articulate and unconventional as ever – and convinced that President Barack Obama is doomed to fail in his attempt to cajole the two sides to hammer out a solution at the negotiating table.
Benvenisti, the Cassandra of the Israeli left, has long held the view that the occupation that began after the 1967 Middle East war is irreversible and that Israelis and Palestinians need to find an alternative to the elusive two-state solution that has dominated thinking about the conflict in recent years. Controversial and iconoclastic when he first advanced it, his thesis is gaining ground.
"The whole notion of a Palestinian state now, in 2010, is a sham," he told the Guardian at his Jerusalem home as the US intensified efforts to get the long-stalled peace process moving again. "The entire discourse is wrong. By continuing that discourse you perpetuate the status quo. The struggle for the two-state solution is obsolete."
George Mitchell, the US envoy charged with launching "proximity talks" between Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas – in the absence of direct negotiations – does not agree. Nor do Israelis who believe that without an end to the occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state the Jewish majority and democratic character of their own state cannot survive. Abbas and his technocratic prime minister, Salam Fayyad, are working towards independence, though Palestinian opinion seems increasingly sceptical about the prospects.
Benvenisti's book, Sacred Landscapes, is one of the very best written on the conflict, interweaving the personal and the political. It is also deeply sympathetic to the Palestinians and their attachment to the land. He defines the Zionist enterprise bluntly as a "supplanting settler society" but also warns that using labels is a way of shutting down debate. He is wary of Holocaust-deniers and antisemites who try to recruit his dissident views to serve their anti-Israel goals.
Benvenisti, a political scientist by training, served as deputy mayor of Jerusalem after the 1967 war and was heavily influenced by his academic research on Belfast, another bitterly divided city. In the 1980's his West Bank Data Project collated and analysed the information that showed how the settlers were becoming fatefully integrated into Israeli society – under both Likud and Labour governments.
Israel's domination, he says, is now complete, while the Palestinians are fragmented into five enclaves – inside Israel, in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the diaspora.
In this situation, the concept of two states is misleading. "What does it mean, a state? It's a solution for less than one quarter of the Palestinian people on an area that is less than 10% of historic Palestine." Palestinian leaders who are ready to accept this "are a bunch of traitors to their own cause". Ramallah, prosperous headquarters of Abbas's Palestinian Authority and the recipient of millions of dollars in foreign aid, is a "bubble in which those who steal the money can enjoy themselves".
Benvenisti's territorial assumptions are not based on the 2000 "Clinton parameters" which Yasser Arafat turned down, nor proposals submitted by Ehud Olmert to Abbas – which talk of Israel withdrawing from some 97% of the West Bank with compensating land swaps – but a far smaller area hemmed in by Jewish settlements, settler-only roads and military zones.
"For the last 20 years I have questioned the feasibility of the partition of Palestine and now I am absolutely sure it is impossible," he says. "Or, it is possible if it is imposed on the Palestinians but that will mean the legitimisation of the status quo, of Bantustans, of a system of political and economic inequality which is hailed as a solution by the entire world – unlike in South Africa.
"The entire paradigm is wrong. We are doing this because it is self-serving. It is convenient for us to stick to the old slogan of two states as if nothing has happened since we began advocating it in the 1980s."
Taken the salience of the settlement issue in the peace process – rows over Netanyahu's temporary freeze in the West Bank and new building in East Jerusalem triggered the recent crisis in US-Israel relations – it is startling to find that Benvenisti is so dismissive of it.
"Israel's domination of the West Bank does not rely on the numbers of settlers or settlements," he argues. "The settlements are totally integrated into Israeli society. They've taken all the land they could. The rest is controlled by the Israeli army."
Benvenisti relishes overturning conventional wisdom. "The Israeli left would like to make us believe that the green line (the pre-1967 border) is something solid; that everything that is on this side is good and that everything bad began with the occupation in 1967. It is a false dichotomy. The green line is like a one-way mirror. It's only for the Palestinians, not for Israelis."
He avoids speculating about future scenarios and makes do with the concept "bi-nationalism" – "not as a political or ideological programme so much as a de facto reality masquerading as a temporary state of affairs … a description of the current condition, not a prescription." And he sees signs that the Palestinians are beginning to adjust to the "total victory of the Jews" and use the power of the weak: demanding votes and human rights may prove more effective than violence, he suggests.
"The peace process," Benvenisti concludes, "is more than a waste of time. It is an illusion and it perpetuates an illusion. You can engage in a peace process and have negotiations and conferences - which have no connection whatsoever to reality on the ground."
A PALESTINIAN VIEW
Incitement is the continued denial of freedom to Palestinians
Diana Buttu
Virtually every Palestinian official who has met an international delegation visiting Palestine has had to face the barrage of oft-repeated, ill-studied questions regarding incitement in general and Palestinian textbooks in particular. "But how do you expect to have peace if Palestinian textbooks don't recognize Israel?" goes the refrain. A few lessons later and our guests are politely educated about the true nature of Palestinian textbooks, what they really say and not simply what right-wing Israeli settler organizations (who have managed to convince members of the US Congress, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) claim that Palestinian textbooks say.
Incitement is an oft-wielded sword by Israeli officials. They point to Palestine TV, asserting that the airing of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire is "incitement". They point to Palestinian textbooks, alleging (incorrectly) that the books do not demarcate the 1967 border and (correctly) the lack of recognition of Israel as a "Jewish state". They chalk both down as "incitement". Most recently, they've started pointing to Palestinian streets, asserting that the naming of several streets after those killed by Israel is "incitement".
But according to this logic, any attempt to highlight Israel's racism and denial of freedom or resistance to such racism and denial of freedom can and should be considered "incitement". In short, in Israel's thinking, one is not allowed to speak of Israel's crimes or of Palestinian resistance to such crimes, but must instead simply accept them and, well, shut up. So, no pictures of dead Palestinians, Israel must be accepted as a Jewish state (no debate allowed) and no naming of streets after Yahiya Ayyash or Dalal al-Mughrabi (both killed by Israel).
But as is often the case, those in glass houses forget that they should not throw stones. Israel conveniently forgets that its annual commemoration of "Independence Day" constitutes incitement to Palestinians for whom the commemoration of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland in order to make way for Jewish immigrants is not a day of celebration.
Israel forgets that its own official maps issued by the Ministry of Tourism do not demarcate the 1967 border, something that by Israel's own standards should constitute incitement. Israeli officials also fail to remember that not a single Israeli prime minister has ever recognized Palestine's right to exist even while demanding that Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.
Israel has failed to take a long hard look at its own textbooks, which describe Arabs as "untrustworthy" among other things. More subtly, Israel's classification of Palestinian citizens of Israel as "Israeli Arabs" is, to the holders of such a title, "incitement" because it ignores that their identity and the identity of their ancestors both predate Israel's creation and are not tied to Israel in any positive way.
Israel conveniently forgets that its own naming of streets and highways constitutes incitement. For example, highway 90, which runs through the Jordan Valley (in the West Bank) and which is largely off-limits to Palestinians, is named after the late Israeli tourism minister, Rehavam Zeevi who openly advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
But most importantly, Israel forgets that its continued denial of freedom to the Palestinians and its continued racist, apartheid regime are the very essence of incitement. For Palestinians the list is endless and growing, particularly with each growing settlement, every home demolition, every land confiscation, every eviction and each day that passes that a brutal siege is imposed on the Gaza Strip or that Palestinian refugees are not allowed to return to their homes simply because they are not Jewish.
Perhaps in the Israeli mindset the entire "problem" (for Palestinians are viewed simply as that) would just "disappear" if we Palestinians stopped showing pictures of killed Palestinians, stopped demanding our rights and even took the bold step of naming our streets after Israeli terrorists or those who advocate our ethnic cleansing.
But that is an erroneous conclusion. Palestinian children do not recall what is written in their fifth grade textbook; they do recall when their classmates in the Gaza Strip are killed by Israeli bombings. Palestinians are not motivated to resist when they see the name of Yahiya Ayyash in the center of Ramallah but when they see that the Old City of Hebron and the Ibrahimi Mosque are off limits because they have been illegally taken over by 400 Israeli armed squatters who are protected by thousands of soldiers. No amount of "peace curriculum" can erase the fact that Palestinians will forever resent that they reside in refugee camps while immigrants have taken over their homes.
Perhaps if we stop demanding that our rights be upheld ("incitement" to Israel), then Israel will finally see the error of its ways and decide instead to end its racist apartheid regime and set Palestinians free. Perhaps...but not likely.
Israel's Big and Small Apartheids
An Entrenched System
By JONATHAN COOK, Counterpunch, April 26, 2010
This is the text of a talk delivered to the fifth Bili’in international conference for Palestinian popular resistance, held in the West Bank village of Bilin on April 21.
Israel’s apologists are very exercised about the idea that Israel has been singled out for special scrutiny and criticism. I wish to argue, however, that in most discussions of Israel it actually gets off extremely lightly: that many features of the Israeli polity would be considered exceptional or extraordinary in any other democratic state
That is not surprising because, as I will argue, Israel is neither a liberal democracy nor even a “Jewish and democratic state”, as its supporters claim. It is an apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but also inside Israel proper. Today, in the occupied territories, the apartheid nature of Israeli rule is irrefutable -- if little mentioned by Western politicians or the media. But inside Israel itself, it is largely veiled and hidden. My purpose today is to try to remove the veil a little.
I say “a little”, because I would need far more than the time allotted to me to do justice to this topic. There are, for example, some 30 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jews and non-Jews -- another way of referring to the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinian and supposedly enjoy full citizenship. There are also many other Israeli laws and administrative practices that lead to an outcome of ethnic-based segregation even if they do not make such discrimination explicit.
So instead of trying to rush through all these aspects of Israeli apartheid, let me concentrate instead on a few revealing features, issues I have reported on recently.
First, let us examine the nature of Israeli citizenship.
A few weeks ago I met Uzi Ornan, an 86-year-old professor from the
Technion university in Haifa, who has one of the few ID cards in Israel stating a nationality of “Hebrew”. For most other Israelis, their cards and personal records state their nationality as “Jewish” or “Arab”. For immigrants whose Jewishness is accepted by the state but questioned by the rabbinical authorities, some 130 other classifications of nationality have been approved, mostly relating to a person’s religion or country of origin. The only nationality you will not find on the list is “Israeli”. That is precisely why Prof Ornan and two dozen others are fighting through the courts: they want to be registered as “Israelis”. It is a hugely important fight -- and for that reason alone they are certain to lose. Why?
Far more is at stake than an ethnic or national label. Israel excludes a nationality of “Israeli” to ensure that, in fulfilment of its self-definition as a “Jewish state”, it is able to assign superior rights of citizenship to the collective “nation” of Jews around the globe than to the body of actual citizens in its territory, which includes many Palestinians. In practice it does this by creating two main classes of citizenship: a Jewish citizenship for “Jewish nationals” and an Arab citizenship for “Arab nationals”. Both nationalities were effectively invented by Israel and have no meaning outside Israel.
This differentiation in citizenship is recognised in Israeli law: the Law of Return, for Jews, makes immigration all but automatic for any Jew around the world who wishes it; and the Citizenship Law, for non-Jews, determines on any entirely separate basis the rights of the country’s Palestinian minority to citizenship. Even more importantly, the latter law abolishes the rights of the Palestinian citizens’ relatives, who were expelled by force in 1948, to return to their homes and land. There are, in other words, two legal systems of citizenship in Israel, differentiating between the rights of citizens based on whether they are Jews or Palestinians.
That, in itself, meets the definition of apartheid, as set out by the United Nations in 1973: “Any legislative measures or 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.” The clause includes the following rights: “the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”
Such separation of citizenship is absolutely essential to the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state. Were all citizens to be defined uniformly as Israelis, were there to be only one law regarding citizenship, then very dramatic consequences would follow. The most significant would be that the Law of Return would either cease to apply to Jews or apply equally to Palestinian citizens, allowing them to bring their exiled relatives to Israel – the much-feared Right of Return. In either a longer or shorter period, Israel’s Jewish majority would be eroded and Israel would become a binational state, probably with a Palestinian majority.
There would be many other predictable consequences of equal citizenship. Would the Jewish settlers, for example, be able to maintain their privileged status in the West Bank if Palestinians in Jenin or Hebron had relatives inside Israel with the same rights as Jews? Would the Israeli army continue to be able to function as an occupation army in a properly democratic state? And would the courts in a state of equal citizens be able to continue turning a blind eye to the brutalities of the occupation? In all these cases, it seems extremely unlikely that the status quo could be maintained.
In other words, the whole edifice of Israel’s apartheid rule inside Israel supports and upholds its apartheid rule in the occupied territories. They stand or fall together.
Next, let us look at the matter of land control.
Last month I met an exceptional Israeli Jewish couple, the Zakais. They are exceptional chiefly because they have developed a deep friendship with a Palestinian couple inside Israel. Although I have reported on Israel and Palestine for many years, I cannot recall ever before meeting an Israeli Jew who had a Palestinian friend in quite the way the Zakais do.
True, there are many Israeli Jews who claim an “Arab” or “Palestinian” friend in the sense that they joke with the guy whose hummus shop they frequent or who fixes their car. There are also Israeli Jews -- and they are an extremely important group -- who stand with Palestinians in political battles such as those here in Bilin or in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem. At these places, Israelis and Palestinians have, against the odds, managed to forge genuine friendships that are vital if Israel’s apartheid rule is to be defeated.
But the Zakais’ relationship with their Bedouin friends, the Tarabins, is not that kind of friendship. It is not based on, or shaped by, a political struggle, one that is itself framed by Israel’s occupation; it is not a self-conscious friendship; and it has no larger goal than the relationship itself. It is a friendship -- or at least it appeared that way to me -- of genuine equals. A friendship of complete intimacy. When I visited the Zakais, I realised what an incredibly unusual sight that is in Israel.
The reason for the very separate cultural and emotional worlds of Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel is not difficult to fathom: they live in entirely separate physical worlds. They live apart in segregated communities, separated not through choice but by legally enforceable rules and procedures. Even in the so-called handful of mixed cities, Jews and Palestinians usually live apart, in distinct and clearly defined neighbourhoods. And so it was not entirely surprising that the very issue that brought me to the Zakais was the question of whether a Palestinian citizen is entitled to live in a Jewish community.
The Zakais want to rent to their friends, the Tarabins, their home in the agricultural village of Nevatim in the Negev -- currently an exclusively Jewish community. The Tarabins face a serious housing problem in their own neighbouring Bedouin community. But what the Zakais have discovered is that there are overwhelming social and legal obstacles to Palestinians moving out the ghettoes in which they are supposed to live. Not only is Nevatim’s elected leadership deeply opposed to the Bedouin family entering their community, but so also are the Israeli courts.
Nevatim is not exceptional. There are more than 700 similar rural communities -- mostly kibbutzim and moshavim -- that bar non-Jews from living there. They control most of the inhabitable territory of Israel, land that once belonged to Palestinians: either refugees from the 1948 war; or Palestinian citizens who have had their lands confiscated under special laws.
Today, after these confiscations, at least 93 per cent of Israel is nationalised -- that is, it is held in trust not for Israel’s citizens but for world Jewry. (Here, once again, we should note one of those important consequences of the differentiated citizenship we have just considered.)
Access to most of this nationalised land is controlled by vetting committees, overseen by quasi-governmental but entirely unaccountable Zionist organisations like the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund. Their role is to ensure that such communities remain off-limits to Palestinian citizens, precisely as the Zakais and Tarabins have discovered in the case of Nevatim. The officials there have insisted that the Palestinian family has no right even to rent, let alone buy, property in a “Jewish community”. That position has been effectively upheld by Israel’s highest court, which has agreed that the family must submit to a vetting committee whose very purpose is to exclude them.
Again, the 1973 UN Convention on the “crime of apartheid” is instructive: it includes measures “designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups … [and] the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof.”
If Jewish and Palestinian citizens have been kept apart so effectively -- and a separate education system and severe limits on interconfessional marriage reinforce this emotional and physical segregation -- how did the Zakais and Tarabins become such close friends?
Their case is an interesting example of serendipity, as I discovered when I met them. Weisman Zakai is the child of Iraqi Jewish parents who immigrated to the Jewish state in its early years. When he and Ahmed Tarabin met as boys in the 1960s, hanging out in the markets of the poor neighbouring city of Beersheva, far from the centre of the country, they found that what they had in common trumped the formal divisions that were supposed to keep them apart and fearful. Both speak fluent Arabic, both were raised in an Arab culture, both are excluded from Jewish Ashkenazi society, and both share a passion for cars.
In their case, Israel’s apartheid system failed in its job of keeping them physically and emotionally apart. It failed to make them afraid of, and hostile to, each other. But as the Zakais have learnt to their cost, in refusing to live according to the rules of Israel’s apartheid system, the system has rejected them. The Zakais are denied the chance to rent to their friends, and now live as pariahs in the community of Nevatim.
Finally, let us consider the concept of “security” inside Israel.
As I have said, the apartheid nature of relations between Jewish and Palestinian citizens is veiled in the legal, social and political spheres. It does not mirror the “petty apartheid” that was a feature of the South African brand: the separate toilets, park benches and buses. But in one instance it is explicit in this petty way -- and this is when Jews and Palestinians enter and leave the country through the border crossings and through Ben Gurion international airport. Here the façade is removed and the different status of citizenship enjoyed by Jews and Palestinians is fully on show.
That lesson was learnt by two middle-aged Palestinian brothers I interviewed this month. Residents of a village near Nazareth, they had been life-long supporters of the Labor party and proudly showed me a fading picture of them hosting a lunch for Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. But at our meeting they were angry and bitter, vowing they would never vote for a Zionist party again.
Their rude awakening had come three years ago when they travelled to the US on a business trip with a group of Jewish insurance agents. On the flight back, they arrived at New York’s JFK airport to see their Jewish colleagues pass through El Al’s security checks in minutes. They, meanwhile, spent two hours being interrogated and having their bags minutely inspected.
When they were finally let through, they were assigned a female guard whose job was to keep them under constant surveillance -- in front of hundreds of fellow passengers -- till they boarded the plane. When one brother went to the bathroom without first seeking permission, the guard berated him in public and her boss threatened to prevent him from boarding the plane unless he apologised. This month the court finally awarded the brothers $8,000 compensation for what it called their “abusive and unnecessary” treatment.
Two things about this case should be noted. The first is that the El Al security team admitted in court that neither brother was deemed a security risk of any sort. The only grounds for the special treatment they received was their national and ethnic belonging. It was transparently a case of racial profiling.
The second thing to note is that their experience is nothing out of the ordinary for Palestinian citizens travelling to and from Israel. Similar, and far worse, incidents occur every day during such security procedures. What was exceptional in this case was that the brothers pursued a time-consuming and costly legal action against El Al.
They did so, I suspect, because they felt so badly betrayed. They had made the mistake of believing the hasbara (propaganda) from Israeli politicians of all stripes who declare that Palestinian citizens can enjoy equal status with Jewish citizens if they are loyal to the state. They assumed that by being Zionists they could become first-class citizens. In accepting this conclusion, they had misunderstood the apartheid reality inherent in a Jewish state.
The most educated, respectable and wealthy Palestinian citizen will always fare worse at the airport security check than the most disreputable Jewish citizen, or the one who espouses extremist opinions or even the Jewish citizen with a criminal record.
Israel’s apartheid system is there to maintain Jewish privilege in a Jewish state. And at the point where that privilege is felt most viscerally by ordinary Jews to be vulnerable, in the life and death experience of flying thousands of feet above the ground, Palestinian citizens must be shown their status as outsider, as the enemy, whoever they are and whatever they have, or have not, done.
Apartheid rule, as I have argued, applies to Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied territories. But is not apartheid in the territories much worse than it is inside Israel? Should we not concern ourselves more with the big apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza than this weaker apartheid? Such an argument demonstrates a dangerous misconception about the indivisible nature of Israel’s apartheid towards Palestinians and about its goals.
Certainly, it is true that apartheid in the territories is much more aggressive than it is inside Israel. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the apartheid under occupation is much less closely supervised by the Israeli civilian courts than it is in Israel. You can, to put it bluntly, get away with much more here. The second, and more significant, reason, however, is that the Israeli system of apartheid in the occupied territories is forced to be more aggressive and cruel -- and that is because the battle is not yet won here. The fight of the occupying power to steal your resources -- your land, water and labour -- is in progress but the outcome is still to be decided. Israel is facing the considerable pressures of time and a fading international legitimacy as it works to take your possessions from you. Every day you resist makes that task a little harder.
In Israel, by contrast, apartheid rule is entrenched -- it achieved its victory decades ago. Palestinian citizens have third or fourth class citizenship; they have had almost all of their land taken from them; they are allowed to live only in their ghettoes; their education system is controlled by the security services; they can work in few jobs other than those Jews do not want; they have the vote but cannot participate in government or effect any political change; and so on.
Doubtless, a related fate is envisioned for you too. The veiled apartheid facing Palestinians inside Israel is the blueprint for a veiled -- and more legitimate -- kind of apartheid being planned for Palestinians in the occupied territories, at least those who are allowed to remain in their Bantustans. And for this very reason, exposing and defeating the apartheid inside Israel is vital to the success of resisting the apartheid that has taken root here.
That is why we must fight Israeli apartheid wherever it is found -- in Jaffa or Jerusalem, in Nazareth or Nablus, in Beersheva or Bilin. It is the only struggle that can bring justice to the Palestinians.
Winston Churchill at the Be'er Sheva District Court
Report from the Be'er Sheba District Court, March 6, 2010 by Adam Keller
Last week, Nuri el-Okbi was held in the detention cell in the basement of Be'er Sheba's Hall of Justice, and the police demanded that he be remanded in custody until the end of judicial proceedings which might last for months or years – on charges of "trespassing". This week he sat, free, in the hall of Justice Sarah Dovrat, on the sixth floor of the same building – in the civil proceedings where he demands of the state to recognize that in the lands of Al-Arakib he is not "a trespasser" but the owner.
Adv. Rawash, for the state, started cross-examining the witness: "Professor Yiftachel, you came here as an expert witness to bolster the argument that the land subject to these proceedings should actually go into Bedouin ownership. The opinion which you submitted to the court describes the alleged centuries-long habitation and agricultural cultivation of this land by the al-Okbi Tribe. But Professor Ruth Kark of Jerusalem, an experienced researcher with professional qualifications no lesser than yours, has at the request of the state presented a counter-opinion to the court. She asserts that in the Nineteenth Century the area was not inhabited at all, there were only ruins and perhaps a tent or two. In general, throughout the Negev there were no fixed places of habitation, and the nomadic Bedouins subsisted mainly on pasture as well as robbery. The Okbi Tribe claims they had a village which was destroyed by Israel - but in fact, such a village had never existed, so it could not have been destroyed. What do you say to this?"
"Ruth Kark also accused me of a political bias to which I will not reciprocate. I can only express surprise that as a researcher, especially one who claims to be involved in studying the indigenous society, she chose to ignore the written documents and the extensive oral traditions of the Bedouin society," said the expert witness, Professor Oren Yiftachel of the Department of Geography and Environmental Planning at the nearby Ben Gurion University. "Her arguments about the Nineteenth Century Negev situation are based mainly on reports of European travelers, almost all of whom were momentary visitors who did not speak the local language, nor did they know or understand the Bedouin society. Moreover, most of them did not at all pass the Arakib Area which is the subject of the proceedings here. In writing her opinion Professor Kark did not bother to indicate any knowledge, even a superficial one, of the details of the land in question or of the communal history of the Okbis. It does not seem that she ever made any visit to the ground, nor did she speak with any member of the tribe.
"We should also remember that these travelers were not exactly objective people who came with an open mind, to observe the situation and society in the Negev and record what they saw. They were mostly devout Christians who came to this country in order to see the places where Jesus walked, where the events of the Old and the New Testaments had taken place. They adjusted what they saw to the preconceived notions which they had brought with them from Europe. For example, the French Victor Guérin in 1863 writes of the Negev as a place where great cities of Biblical times once stood but which had now fallen into the hands of "The descendants of Ishmael and Esau", who now pasture there their flocks. That is what he called the Bedouins, and it was not a compliment – in his terms these were the bad guys of the Bible.
"The travelers had a Western concept what a "village" or "place of habitation" was, and they filtered what they saw through European cognitive frames. In the places where they came from, a "village" usually was a cluster of stone houses or huts, built relatively densely, and having a clear external border. Such places they did not see in the Negev, and they concluded that the Negev was not inhabited. But geographical research shows that in this period, communities on the verge of the desert were differently organized. Usually, there were clusters of tents, relatively distant from one another, at a number of locations according to the season, with an occasional mud-built house (baika) or a stone one, especially for the Sheikh, around a well, dam or other focus of communal activity center. These communities functioned as geographical, administrative and economic centers for the families living all around. Western travelers could pass right by such a place and not realize that they were seeing a village, an inhabited place which sometimes had a long history.
"The same goes for farming methods. Travelers usually perceived 'agriculture' as a verdant landscape of a climate with plentiful precipitation, such as that of their own countries. Even so, the reports of these Western travelers include a lot of references to the agriculture which the Bedouins maintained under difficult conditions, the cultivation of wheat, barley, corn and melons ... "
Rawash: Where do you get the reference to melons? I see in your opinion a reference to sources mentioning wheat and barley, but not melons.
Yiftachel: Wait a minute, I'll find the reference. The sources are burned here on my disk, but it is hard to search them. (Searching for several minutes). Here, Abu Sita is talking specifically about the cultivation of melons by the Bedouins. Not that this detail is so important. Even if there were no melons but only wheat and barley, it definitely proves that the Bedouins were engaged in agriculture.
Judge: Professor Yiftachel, once you've written something in the opinion which you presented to the court as evidence, the accuracy of every word and detail is important. There are no unimportant details.
Yiftachel: what is really significant is that the Bedouins subsisted mainly on agriculture, at least from the Nineteenth Century on, and that land ownership was determined by their tribal law, recognized by the central government until the establishment of the State of Israel. Specifically, the clear evidence - geographical, written, and oral tradition – indicates that the Arakib area was inhabited and cultivated by the al-Okbis and other tribes, at least since the 18th and 19th centuries onwards. Without any doubt the tribe was dispossessed of land which had been held legally and whose possession was previously recognized by the authorities.
Rawash: In your opinion you're talking about "Assigned Land". But you do not bring any document showing that the Ottoman or British authorities assigned ownership of land to the Al-Okbis or other Bedouins. When you talk about "assigning land" you mean a father who bequeathed land to his sons.
Yiftachel: It's also a form of land assignment.
Judge: "Land Assignment" is a clear legal term, which refers to cases where the government allocates land to citizens or residents.
Yiftachel: This is an appropriate perception for the State of Israel in 2010, but it does not fit the society and law which prevailed in the Negev before 1948, and certainly not in the Ottoman period. It was not a situation which begins with a government holding land and deciding whether or not to allocate it to somebody. We must remember that from the Seventeenth Century until the Nineteenth there were long periods when the Ottoman Empire was not in effective control of the Negev. Bedouin tribes conducted their own affairs and took up many attributes of sovereign states, and they arranged the legal issues of land ownership by their own extensive legal system. For example there is an important land agreement from 1883, which involved the three tribal confederations of Tarabin, 'Azazmeh and Tiyaha, with all their Sheiks, and which is reminiscent of an international agreement between states.
Rawash: Professor Ruth Kark wrote in her opinion that the Bedouins had no regular land system capable of regulating ownership, and that the documents you brought are private agreements between persons which have no binding force indicating ownership.
Yiftachel: This is definitely not true, Bedouin society had a very clear concept of land ownership, it was one of the most important things in their lives, and they regulated it among themselves. Also now, it still is among the most important things in their lives. They are very careful about land ownership as defined under their own legal system. They regard land as their property even when it was taken away from them decades ago, and they refuse to accept land belonging to other Bedouins even when the State of Israel offers them such land. The internal legal system of the Bedouins exists even today, in parallel with the laws of the State of Israel. All the more it existed during the Ottoman and British rule, when the government gave official recognition to the legal system of the Bedouin society.
Rawash: But according to the Ottoman Land Law of 1858, these lands were considered as "Mawat ", "Dead Lands" which had no ownership.
Yiftachel: This is the Israeli interpretation to the Ottoman Law, an interpretation formulated decades after the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist. This was not the interpretation of the Ottoman Government itself gave to its own laws. As I mentioned, in 1858 the Ottoman Government did not exercise real power in the Negev and was in no position to enforce laws there. Decades later, around 1900, the Ottoman government began to maintain a real presence and control in the Negev. Notably in establishing the city of Be'er Sheva, where we are right now, as an administrative center of government in the Negev. But they were careful to respect the legal status of the Bedouin society and their land ownership rights. The Ottomans took care to purchase the land on which Be'er Sheva was established. When you buy land you thereby acknowledge the ownership rights of the seller from whom you bought it, and of the community to which the seller belongs.
Rawash: Sultan Abdul Hamid II held extensive lands in the Negev under his personal ownership.
Yiftachel: This exactly proves my point. Abdul Hamid II was a big land speculator. He bought a lot of lands – in fact, more in the north of the country than in the Negev. The point is that he bought the land. He respected the fact that the Bedouins were the owners and he had to pay them for it. It was an empire, he was the Sultan and he was not exactly a principled democrat. Still, it never occurred to him to just take the land from his Bedouin subjects and claim that they are not the real owners. Had he considered the land to be "Dead", "Mawat", under the law of 1858, that would have given him the right to take it without paying. But that is definitely not what he did.
Rawash: In 1921, at the beginning of the Mandate, the British Government enacted the "Dead Lands Ordinance" and gave the Bedouins two months to come up and register at the Land Registration Office their ownership of lands which they claimed. Hardly any Bedouin did that. They can’t come up with ownership claims now.
Yiftahel: This is the common judicial argument under which the Bedouin claims of land ownership are rejected. But it ignores salient facts.
On March 29, 1921 – before the expiration of that two-month period – a delegation of Bedouin Sheiks went to Jerusalem, to confer with Winston Churchill, at the time the British Secretary of State for the Colonies. In the official concluding statement, which I located at the Public Records Office in London, the Sheiks declared their loyalty to His Majesty's Government, while Churchill confirmed an earlier promise by High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, that "The special rights and customs of the Bedouin Tribes of Be'er Sheba will not be interfered with".
Subsequently, the British Mandatory Government excluded the Be'er Sheba District from the application of the new land law, absolving Bedouin inhabitants from the duty of registering their land. Instead, a Tribal Court was set up in Be'er Sheba, which remained active throughout the Mandate period. Cases of land dispute were usually settled by a bench of three Sheiks, in accordance with Bedouin Tribal Law.
The British recognized the Bedouins' ownership over the land. Whoever did want to register their land at the Land Registration Office was free to do so throughout the time of British rule, and 64,000 dunams of Bedouin lands were indeed registered. However, those who registered their land were usually those who wanted to sell it to non- Bedouins (including Jews). In order to continue holding the land, or to let sons inherit it, or to sell to other Bedouin, there was no need to have recourse to the governmental Land Registry Office. For such purposes, the traditional Bedouin tribal law was quite adequate. The assertion that Bedouin families or tribes which had not registered their land ownership in 1921 have "missed the train" and lost title to the land was never heard before 1948. This is not a British law, but an original Israeli judicial argument giving the British law a new interpretation which the British themselves never advanced.
What I want to emphasize is that the Israeli legal system made a distorted use of laws, applying them 'backwards' in time in order to ethnocratically promote dispossession. The State of Israel made of Ottoman and British laws an opposite use to that made by the Ottoman and British authorities which enacted the same laws. The most important of these is the "Dead Lands Ordinance" which was completely changed by the State of Israel - changed for the purpose of dispossession.
Neither the Ottomans nor the British are known to have dispossessed any landowner on the basis of the "Mawat" laws or because it was not registered in 1921. On the contrary, the cultivation of empty lands was encouraged. Only the state of Israel made an opposite use of the ordinance, to effect dispossession - and only against Arabs (both within Israel and in the Occupied Territories). It is a particularly reprehensible practice when directed against Bedouins, because both the Ottomans and the British recognized Bedouin customary law, as a legitimate way for the acquisition and division of land.
Rawash: The text which you presented about the meeting of the Sheiks with Churchill is not the same as that given in your written opinion. As far as I am concerned, this document does not exist. We will object to its being introduced to the court as evidence.
Yiftachel: It is a difference of a few individual words which does not influence the meaning. This is a key document which throws light on the whole substantive issue.
Judge: In legal matters every word is important.
(In the end, the document is formally presented to the court.)
https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=1badf00904&view=att&th=1273e2d20efa3fba&attid=0.2&disp=inline&zw
Rawash: In your statement of opinion you asserted that the Bedouins should be considered "An Indigenous People" like the Australian Aborigins. Professor Kark, however, opposes such a comparison, because indigenous peoples have lived where there was previously no state of any kind, while the Bedouins lived in the Ottoman Empire.
Yiftachel: First of all, there are many who consider that the Bedouins - at least some of the tribes - lived in the Negev long before the Ottoman Empire. In any case, the status of an indigenous people, recognized by the UN, is not determined in reference to the state which used to rule the territory in past times but in connection to the state which rules it at present and to how that present state treats its indigenous residents. The situation of the Bedouins in Israel puts them into this framework.
In Australia nowadays it is no longer asserted that Australia was "an empty land" ("terra nullis") when the Europeans arrived at its shores, and that therefore they did not have to take into consideration the property rights of the Aborigins. Now the Australians, through an important ruling of their Supreme Court, do give consideration to the Aborigins' legal system. So do Canada and other countries. It's time for Israel to join them.
The "Transitional Justice" approach holds that in the transition between land ownership regimes, the human and property rights under the previous regime should be protected as far as possible, and that meticulous attention must be given to the rights of people who belong to indigenous communities. Among other things, this means that groups and individuals who suffered from arbitrary acts of the new authorities must be compensated and their property rights restored in as close a way as possible to the original form - but without significant damage to new populations which arrived in good faith at minority areas, in this case, the Jewish population which had come to the Negev after 1948. The case of the al-Okbis can be adequately dealt with in such a framework. I.e., restoration of the family's rights, without damage to communities as "Givot Bar" established by new residents who arrived in the area after the family was expelled from its land.
Prof. Oren Yiftachel's home page: http://www.geog.bgu.ac.il/members/yiftachel/yiftachel.html
Yiftachel's original expert opinion, Kark's counter-opinion and Yiftachel's response (so far available only in Hebrew, English translation worked on)
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgmkttft_27fqh8crdm&btr=EmailImport
The Bedouin: Squatters on their own land
Oxfam’s Catherine Weibel reports on the Bedouin tribes of the Negev desert, a people whose semi-nomadic traditions have placed them in legal no-man’s land with the Israeli government. Photos: Catherine Weibel
A precarious situation
In Jerusalem, most souvenir shops sell postcards depicting camels crossing the Negev desert, which constitutes most of southern Israel. These cards rarely feature the people who’ve been roaming the desert for centuries alongside these camels, the Arab Bedouin. Many still live in a precarious situation, some 60 years after they were displaced from their lands during the early days of the State of Israel.
Today, the Negev (or “Naqab” in Arabic, as the Bedouin call it) is home to an estimated 160,000 Bedouin, about half of whom are living in villages considered illegal by the Israeli authorities, who have continually pressured the Arab Bedouin to give up their traditional, semi-nomadic ways for a more sedentary life. As Israeli General Moshe Dayan put it in 1963, the goal was to turn the traditional Bedouin into someone, “who would not live on his land with his herds, but would become an urban person who comes home in the afternoon and puts his slippers on.”
Morad El-Sana, a lawyer who worked for eight years with the Oxfam-supported partner organisation Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, explains that historically, the Arab Bedouin are neither rootless, nor landless people. “Each tribe used to have its own specific area in the Negev,” he says. “They led a semi-nomadic life, herding cattle and cultivating the land, with one village for the summertime and another during the winter to ensure their herds had enough grazing lands.”
Unrecognised villages
Today, about half of the Negev Bedouin have left their lands and moved to one of the seven legal, government-built villages. The other half remained on their land in 45 villages that are not recognised by the Israeli authorities and which, as if invisible, do not appear on commercial maps. These unrecognised villages receive little to no services. They lack basic transportation infrastructure, including roads. They have no access to power or water networks and offer few educational or health facilities, even though the Bedouin are Israeli citizens.
Many unrecognised villages are scattered a few minutes drive from modern highways but they still present a scene of appalling poverty, with bare-foot children running amid corrugated iron and wooden huts. The remains of demolished houses can be found in most of the villages - the authorities tore the huts down as their inhabitants have not been granted construction permits, even though they have sometimes been living on a particular plot of land for decades.
El-Sana explains that the Negev is said to be “dead land” by Israeli authorities. They rely on an ancient Ottoman law from the 1820s to back up that legal claim. In practice, it means that the Bedouin of 2010 cannot claim ownership of the ancestral lands their families and tribes have been using for centuries.
“Targeted by the authorities”
“Some isolated houses and farms (owned by Jewish-Israeli citizens) in the desert are connected to power and water supplies, so why can’t unrecognised Bedouin villages be?” El-Sana asks, adding that some of these buildings, which house Jewish communities, also lack construction permits. “Yet they are rarely destroyed, while Bedouin houses in unrecognised villages are systematically targeted by the authorities.”
With no construction permit being provided by the authorities to residents of the unrecognised villages, Arab Bedouin families live in constant fear of having their house demolished. Still they are reluctant to leave their land, rebuilding makeshift houses even after they have been taken down several times.
“People know their family home might be demolished but they don’t know whether it will happen in two weeks, two months or two years”, El-Sana says. “Houses can be destroyed without specific, advance warning. Sometimes people are not given enough time to salvage their few belongings before the house is torn down,” he adds.
An inadequate alternative
The seven government-planned towns, which were built without consulting the Bedouin communities, have proven an inadequate alternative due to decaying infrastructure, a lack of consideration for Bedouin family ties and a high unemployment rate. Although the Arab Bedouin do get some benefits from the state, such as healthcare and child allowances, it is not enough to help them escape from poverty. Travel distances to schools are so long, for example, that 77% of Bedouin girls end up dropping out of school, according to El-Sana.
The towns are also ill-equipped to handle any influx of new residents and lack the space to accommodate traditional livelihoods such as herding. Some of them look little better than shanty towns. They are a far cry from the shiny, modern cities which have been built recently to house other Israeli communities in the Negev.
“I want to stay on my land”
“I want to stay on my land, which has been passed from one generation to another in my family”, a Bedouin resident of one of the unrecognized villages told Oxfam. “If I leave and I move to one of the legal cities, I will lose any claim on my land and so will my children. I want the state to let us live legally in our house, on our land.”
Oxfam’s partner Adalah brings impact litigation cases before the Israeli courts to promote and defend the rights of the Arab Bedouin in the country, primarily in the fields of land and housing rights, health and education rights. Adalah advocates for an official recognition of the “unrecognised villages” by the Israeli authorities so that the Arab Bedouin living in these villages can stay on their lands and their ongoing forced displacement comes to an end.
Jerusalem mayor to raze 200 Palestinian homes
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 9 February 2010
Jerusalem's mayor threatened last week to demolish 200 homes in Palestinian neighborhoods of the city in an act even he conceded would probably bring long-simmering tensions over housing in East Jerusalem to a boil.
His uncompromising stance is the latest stage in a protracted legal battle over a single building towering above the jumble of modest homes of Silwan, a deprived and overcrowded Palestinian community lying just outside the Old City walls, in the shadow of the silver-topped al-Aqsa mosque.
Beit Yehonatan, or Jonathan's House, is distinctive not only for its height -- at seven stories, it is at least three floors taller than its neighbors -- but also for the Israeli flag draped from the roof to the street.
The settlement outpost, named for Jonathan Pollard, serving a life sentence in the US for spying on Israel's behalf in the 1980s, has been home to eight Jewish families since 2004, when it was built without a license by an extremist settler organization known as Ateret Cohanim.
Beit Yehonatan is one of dozens of settler-occupied homes springing up in Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem, most of them takeovers of Palestinian homes.
Critics say the intent of these "outposts," together with the large settlements of East Jerusalem built by the state and home to nearly 200,000 Jews, is to foil any peace agreement that might one day offer the Palestinians a meaningful state with Jerusalem as its capital.
But exceptionally for the settlers, who are used to a mix of overt and covert assistance from officials, the inhabitants of Beit Yehonatan are at risk of being evicted from their home, two years after an "urgent" enforcement order was issued by the Israeli Supreme Court.
Last week Nir Barkat, Jerusalem's mayor, finally agreed "under protest" to seal Beit Yehonatan amid mounting pressure from an array of legal officials. Barkat had been fighting strenuously against implementing the court order, aided by senior members of the parliament, the police, and even Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who opposed his own attorney general's advice by declaring Beit Yehonatan's future "a purely municipal matter."
But the mayor has not simply capitulated. He warned that Beit Yehonatan would be evacuated only on condition that more than 200 demolition orders on Palestinian homes, most of them in Silwan, were carried out at the same time. He argued that he had to avoid any impression that the law was being enforced in a "discriminatory" manner against Jews.
Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said Barkat's idea of fairness was "ridiculous."
"In the past 15 years there have been more than a thousand Palestinian homes demolished in East Jerusalem versus absolutely no settler homes," he said. "In fact, no settlers have ever lost their home in East Jerusalem."
In making his announcement, Barkat admitted that the 200 demolitions would trigger "a strong possibility for conflict." Palestinians in East Jerusalem are already seething over decades of planning restrictions that have forced many of them to build or extend homes illegally because it is all but impossible to get permits from the Israeli authorities.
Halper said the municipality had classified 22,000 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem as illegal, even as it also assessed a shortage of 25,000 homes for the city's 250,000-strong Palestinian population.
The homes targeted for demolition include Palestinian houses around Beit Yehonatan that violate planning restrictions that allow families to build only two floors; despite the restriction, many houses have four stories and owners pay fines.
In addition, the city council wants to demolish 88 homes in a small area called Bustan that the municipality claims is in danger of flooding.
Zeinab Jaber lives next to Beit Yehonatan in the home she was born in 61 years ago. The building was declared illegal 20 years ago, after it was extended to four stories to accommodate her growing family. Today she and her six grown-up sons pay monthly fines of more than $1,000 in the hope of warding off destruction.
Her son Amjad, 32, married with two young sons, said he did not dare miss a payment. "It's simple: if you don't pay, you'll end up in prison."
"What is there for the settlers here?" Jaber asked. "They are only here because they want to take this place from us. They won't be happy till we leave."
On the opposite slope across the valley from Beit Yehonatan, Mohammed Jalajil, 48, said he did not doubt that the municipality would demolish the 200 homes. He, his wife and five children have been crammed into a room in a relative's apartment since their own house was demolished seven years ago.
Jalajil, 48, said: "It was only months after they took our house from us that I saw the settlers building theirs nearby. My lawyer tells me that, even though my house is gone, I won't have paid off my fines for another 10 years."
If Barkat follows through with his threat, the demolitions will prompt a rebuke from the international community. Last month, France and the United States joined the UN in denouncing more than 100 demolitions in East Jerusalem over the past three months.
The mayor's decision, warned Meir Margalit, a Jerusalem city councillor, was comparable to the "price tag" policy of the settlers in the West Bank, who have attacked Palestinian villages in retaliation against official attempts to dismantle a few of the settlement outposts dotting Palestinian territory.
"But the difference here is that the price tag is being levied not by the settlers themselves but by the municipality and the government on their behalf," he said.
Yesterday the municipality was due to issue a seven-day evacuation notice to the inhabitants of Beit Yehonatan, but the operation was cancelled at the last minute when police refused to cooperate.
Frictions have been growing in Silwan for several years over the activities of another settler organization, Elad, which, with official backing, has been building an archaeological park known as the City of David in the midst of the Palestinian neighborhood. As Palestinians have been pushed out, at least 80 Jewish families have moved into homes nearby.
As Elad entrenches itself in Silwan, Beit Yehonatan has proved more difficult to secure. "Usually the settlers present a facade of legality to what they do," Halper said. "The problem here is that they built in an overtly illegal manner, without a permit and way over the building height restrictions."
Barkat's resistance to evicting Beit Yehonatan's inhabitants was highlighted last month when he tried to stave off legal pressure by proposing a new planning policy to legalize unlicensed buildings in Silwan. The mayor proposed that the rules limiting homes to two stories be revised to four.
The reform would have applied to Beit Yehonatan first, sealing its top three stories but allowing the Jewish families to inhabit the rest of the building.
Although Barkat promised that illegal Palestinian buildings would also be saved, Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights groups, dismissed the mayor's claim.
The overwhelming majority of Palestinian homes would fail to qualify because land registry documents are missing for the area and a range of requirements on car parking, access roads and sewerage connections are "impossible" to meet, Orly Noy, a spokeswoman, wrote in the Haaretz newspaper last month.
She added that Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem lacked 70 km of sewage pipes and that not a single new road had been paved in their neighborhoods since Israel's occupation in 1967.
A planning map of East Jerusalem drawn up recently by the Jerusalem municipality came to light last month, as Barkat was promising to legalize buildings, showing that more than 300 homes -- most of them in Silwan -- were facing imminent demolition.
Jaffa struggles to be left in peace
Jonathan Cook The National, February 16. 2010
JAFFA, ISRAEL // Over the past few days graffiti scrawled on walls around the mixed Jewish and Arab town of Jaffa in central Israel exclaims: “Settlers, keep out” and “Jaffa is not Hebron”.
Although Jaffa is only a stone’s throw from the bustling coastal metropolis of Tel Aviv, Arab residents say their neighbourhood has become the unlikely battleground for an attempted takeover by extremist Jews more familiar from West Bank settlements.
Small numbers of nationalist religious Jews, distinctive for wearing knitted skullcaps, have begun moving into Jaffa’s deprived main Arab district, Ajami, over recent months.
Tensions have been simmering since a special seminary was established last year in the heart of Ajami for young Jewish men who combine study of the Bible with serving in the Israeli army. Many such seminaries, known as “hesder yeshivas”, are located in the occupied territories and have earnt a reputation for turning out extremists.
Last week Ajami’s residents were dealt a further blow when an Israeli court approved the sale of one of the district’s few remaining building plots to B’Emuna (Hebrew for “with faith”), a construction company that specialises in building subsidised homes for religious families, many of them in West Bank settlements.
The Association of Civil Rights in Israel, the country’s largest human rights law centre, which petitioned the courts on the Arab residents’ behalf, called the company’s policy “racist”.
B’Emuna, which is expected to complete 20 apartments in the next few months, is applying for approval for a further 180, as well as a second seminary and a synagogue.
“We have no problem living peacefully with Jewish neighbours,” said Omar Siksik, an Arab councillor representing Jaffa in Tel Aviv’s municipality. “But these Jews are coming here as settlers.
“Like in Hebron, their policy is to weaken us as a population and eventually push us out of our homes,” he said, referring to a West Bank city where an enclave of a few dozen settlers has severely disrupted life for tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Jaffa’s fortunes have changed dramatically since early last century when it was the commercial hub of Palestine, famously exporting its orange crop around the world. During Israel’s founding in 1948, most of the town’s Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee, with the few remaining inhabitants confined to Ajami.
Today, Jaffa’s 18,000 Arab inhabitants are outnumbered two to one by Jews, after waves of immigrants were settled in empty homes during the 1950s.
Arab residents have long complained of being neglected by a municipality controlled from Tel Aviv. Ajami’s crumbling homes, ramshackle infrastructure and crime-ridden streets were on show in this year’s much-feted eponymous movie, nominated for an Oscar as best foreign-language film.
But the latest arrivals in Ajami are causing considerable anxiety, even from officials in Tel Aviv. Gilad Peleg, head of the Jaffa Development Authority, said he was “deeply concerned” at the trend of extremist organisations arriving “to shake up the local community”.
Nasmi Jabali, 56, lives in a modest single-storey home close to the olive grove where the new apartments will be built. “We’ve seen on TV how these settlers behave in the occupied territories, and don’t want them living next to us,” she said. “They’ll come here with the same attitudes.”
But despite widespread opposition, the Tel Aviv District Court last week rejected a petition from 27 residents who argued that the Israel Lands Authority had discriminated against them by awarding the land to B’Emuna, even though its policy is to build apartments only for Jews.
Yehuda Zefet, the judge, accused the residents of “bad faith” in arguing for equality when they wanted the interests of the local Arab community to take precedence over the interests of Jews.
Mr Siksik said the judge had failed to take into account the historical injustice perpetrated on Ajami’s population. “For six decades the authorities have not built one new house for the Arab population, and in fact they have demolished many Arab homes, while building social housing for Jews.”
Fadi Shabita, a member of the local Popular Committee for the Defence of Jaffa’s Lands, said the plots in Ajami being sold by the government originally belonged to Palestinian families, some of whom were still in the district but had been forced to rent their properties from the state.
“The land was forcibly nationalised many years ago and the local owners were dispossessed,” he said. “Now the same land is being privatised, but Ajami’s residents are being ignored in the development plans.
“For the settlers, the lesson of the disengagement [from Gaza in 2005] was that they need to begin a dialogue with Jews inside Israel to persuade them that a settlement in the West Bank is no less legitimate than one in Jaffa.”
B’Emuna told Israel National News, a settler website, that it was developing Jewish-only homes in several of the half dozen “mixed cities” in Israel to stem the flow of Jewish residents leaving because of poverty and falling property values caused by the presence of an Arab population.
B’Emuna has said it is looking to buy more land in Jaffa.
A short distance from the olive grove that is about to be developed is the Jewish seminary established last year. An Israeli flag is draped from the front of the building and stars of David adorn the gate at its entrance.
The manager, Ariel Elimelech, who was overseeing two dozen young men on Sunday as they pored over the Torah, said he commuted daily to Ajami from his home in Eli, an illegal settlement deep in the West Bank south of the Palestinian city of Nablus.
Mr Elimelech said he favoured coexistence in Jaffa but added that the seminary’s goal was to strengthen Jewish identity in the area. “We don’t call this place Ajami; it’s known as Givat Aliyah,” he said, using a Hebrew name that refers to the immigration of Jews to Israel.
He said the students performed a vital service by visiting schools to help in the education of Jewish children before performing 18 months of military service.
Kemal Agbaria, who chairs the Ajami neighbourhood council, said residents would launch an appeal to the Supreme Court and were planning large-scale demonstrations to draw attention to their plight.
ABDALLAH ABU RAHMAH (from Bil’in) writes from his Israeli prison cell
Dear Friends and Supporters,
It has been two months now since I was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken from my home. Today news has reached Ofer Military Prison that the apartheid wall on Bil’in’s land will finally be moved and construction has begun on the new route. This will return half of the land that was stolen from our village. For those of us inOfer , imprisoned for our protest against the wall, this victory makes the suffering of being here easier to bear. After actively resisting the theft of our land by the Israeli apartheid wall and settlements every week for five years now, we long to be standing along side our brothers and sisters to mark this victory and the fifth anniversary of our struggle.
Ofer is an Israeli military base inside the occupied territories that serves as a prison and military court. The prison is a collection of tents enclosed by razor wire and an electrical fence, each unit containing four tents, 22 prisoners per tent. Now, in winter, wind and rain comes in through cracks in the tent and we don’t have sufficient blankets, clothes, and other basic necessities.
Food is a critical issue here in Ofer, there’s not enough. We survive by buying ingredients from the prison canteen that we prepare in our tent. We have one small hot plate, and this is also our only source of warmth. Those whose families can put money in an account for us to buy food, do so, but many cannot afford to. The positive aspect to this is that I have learned how to cook! Tonight I made falafel and sweets to celebrate the news about our victory. I cannot wait to get home and cook for my wife and children!
I was arrested in my slippers, and to this day my family has been unable to get permission to supply me with a pair of shoes. I was finally given my watch after repeated requests. For me this is an essential way to keep oriented; it was unbearable not being able to see the rate at which time passes. Receiving it, I felt so overjoyed, like a child getting his first watch. I can barely imagine what it will be like to have a pair of proper shoes again.
Because of our imprisonment, the military considers our families to be a security threat. It is very hard for our wives, children and extended family to visit. My friend Adeeb Abu Rahmah , also a political prisoner from Bil’in, cannot receive visits from his wife and one of his daughters. Even his mother, a woman in her eighties who is currently in bad health, is considered a security threat! He is afraid that he will not see her before she dies.
I am a teacher and before my arrest I taught at a private school in Birzeit and also owned a chicken farm. My family had to sell the farm at a loss after I was arrested. I don’t know if I will have my position at the school when I am released. Adeeb ’s family of nine is left without their sole provider, as are many other families. Not being able to care for our loved ones who need us is the hardest part of being here.
It is the support that I receive from my family and friends that helps me go on. I am grateful to the Palestinian leaders who have contacted my family, the diplomats from the European Union and to the Israeli activists who have expressed their support by attending my hearings. The relationship we have built together with the activists has gone beyond the definition of colleague or friend, we are brothers and sisters in this struggle. You are an unrelenting source of inspiration and solidarity. You have stood with us during demonstrations and court hearings, and during our happiest and most painful occasions. Being in prison has shown me how many true friends I have, I am so grateful to all of you.
From the confines of my imprisonment it becomes so clear that our struggle is far bigger than justice for only Bil’in or even Palestine. We are engaged in an international fight against oppression. I know this to be true when I remember all of you from around the world who have joined the movement to stop the wall and settlements. Ordinary people enraged by the occupation have made our struggle their own, and joined us in solidarity. We will surely join together to struggle for justice in other places when Palestine is finally free.
Missing the five-year anniversary of our struggle in Bil’in will be like missing the birthday of one of my children. Lately I think a lot about my friend Bassem whose life was taken during a nonviolent demonstration last year and how much I miss him. Despite the pain of this loss, and the yearning I feel to be with my family and friends at home, I think that if this is the price we must pay for our freedom, then it is worth it, and we would be willing to pay much more.
Yours,
Abdallah Abu Rahmah
From the Ofer Military Detention Camp
Expulsion without trucks
Amira Hass
About eight of the 40 families from Dhaher al-Maleh have left their tiny village and have gone to live on the eastern side of the separation fence. They could no longer bear the Israeli ban on building houses.
Neither could they bear the other restrictions and prohibitions that the fence and its planners have imposed on them: They were forbidden to have relatives and friends visit; forbidden to get ill or have babies at night, when the gate is closed; forbidden to bring large quantities of food home, as big families require; forbidden to link their homes up with the electricity grid; and they were forbidden to build a clinic - restrictions and prohibitions to the point of suffocation.
Dhaher al-Maleh does not appear on Israeli maps. The maps are crowded with the settlements that have been positioned and expanded on and between the northwestern West Bank villages of Barta'a and Umm Reihan. The "Barta'a enclave" is one of the largest pockets created by the fence as it winds its way east of Umm al-Fahm. It contains 18,000 dunams that by any standards of justice, ethics and logic should have provided space for developing Palestinian society. But instead these lands were plundered under cover of security pretexts.
The fence was built some five kilometers from the Green Line, which now anyway exists only for the 5,000 or so Palestinians living in seven communities who are trapped between the line and the fence. As far as the maps and the authorities are concerned, this is all already Israel. The occupation authorities have taken land that was not theirs for the 1,500 settlers already there and the many more they hope will come to live there. An industrial zone is for Israelis only, as is the beautiful scenery. As for the indigenous Palestinians, if they want to stay there, let them suffer.
The Barta'a enclave reflects the entire Palestinian condition, or more correctly, Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and its repercussions. It is a matter of regional planning policy that expropriates vacant lands and restricts Palestinian development, and of the denial of the indigenous people's natural rights: the right of inheritance and cultivation, the right to freedom of movement, the right to work, the right to family life, and the right to housing and education by choice.
This pernicious combination sums up the history of the occupation from 1967 to today. It is the government's guiding policy in East Jerusalem and lies at the foundation of the treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel. The hands that do the work are different: In one area it's the army, its civil administration and the defense ministry, in the other it's the municipality and the government ministries. Different hands, the same head.
It is from this combination that we deduce Israeli intentions that are usually not pronounced out loud. Instead we hear the old mantra: Preserve the country's Jewish majority. One way of doing this, especially now that the reservoirs of mass Jewish migration have dried up, is to thin out the Palestinian population.
A popular Palestinian response to the Israeli intentions is a high birth rate. This does prevent a thinning out, but in the absence of space for development the result is intolerable overcrowding, poverty, dependence on social welfare and a lack of sources of livelihood.
Guided by an innate impulse and inbuilt knowledge, Israel constantly creates intolerable conditions that drive the Palestinians to leave against their inclinations and plans. They migrate from the forbidden Area C to Area A, and from Qalqilyah, Jenin and Jerusalem to Ramallah. Meanwhile, people from Ramallah and Jerusalem - especially the young, educated and propertied - go abroad.
Expulsion, drop by drop, is happening all the time, even though there are no trucks.
IDF order will enable mass deportation from West Bank, by Amira Hass
A new military order aimed at preventing infiltration will come into force this week, enabling the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank, or their indictment on charges carrying prison terms of up to seven years.
When the order comes into effect, tens of thousands of Palestinians will automatically become criminal offenders liable to be severely punished.
Given the security authorities' actions over the past decade, the first Palestinians likely to be targeted under the new rules will be those whose ID cards bear home addresses in the Gaza Strip - people born in Gaza and their West Bank-born children - or those born in the West Bank or abroad who for various reasons lost their residency status. Also likely to be targeted are foreign-born spouses of Palestinians.
Until now, Israeli civil courts have occasionally prevented the expulsion of these three groups from the West Bank. The new order, however, puts them under the sole jurisdiction of Israeli military courts.
The new order defines anyone who enters the West Bank illegally as an infiltrator, as well as "a person who is present in the area and does not lawfully hold a permit." The order takes the original 1969 definition of infiltrator to the extreme, as the term originally applied only to those illegally staying in Israel after having passed through countries then classified as enemy states - Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria.
The order's language is both general and ambiguous, stipulating that the term infiltrator will also be applied to Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, citizens of countries with which Israel has friendly ties (such as the United States) and Israeli citizens, whether Arab or Jewish. All this depends on the judgment of Israel Defense Forces commanders in the field.
The Hamoked Center for the Defense of the Individual was the first Israeli human rights to issue warnings against the order, signed six months ago by then-commander of IDF forces in Judea and Samaria Area Gadi Shamni.
Two weeks ago, Hamoked director Dalia Kerstein sent GOC Central Command Avi Mizrahi a request to delay the order, given "the dramatic change it causes in relation to the human rights of a tremendous number of people."
According to the provisions, "a person is presumed to be an infiltrator if he is present in the area without a document or permit which attest to his lawful presence in the area without reasonable justification." Such documentation, it says, must be "issued by the commander of IDF forces in the Judea and Samaria area or someone acting on his behalf."
The instructions, however, are unclear over whether the permits referred to are those currently in force, or also refer to new permits that military commanders might issue in the future. The provision are also unclear about the status of bearers of West Bank residency cards, and disregards the existence of the Palestinian Authority and the agreements Israel signed with it and the PLO.
The order stipulates that if a commander discovers that an infiltrator has recently entered a given area, he "may order his deportation before 72 hours elapse from the time he is served the written deportation order, provided the infiltrator is deported to the country or area from whence he infiltrated."
The order also allows for criminal proceedings against suspected infiltrators that could produce sentences of up to seven years. Individuals able to prove that they entered the West Bank legally but without permission to remain there will also be tried, on charges carrying a maximum sentence of three years. (According to current Israeli law, illegal residents typically receive one-year sentences.)
The new provision also allow the IDF commander in the area to require that the infiltrator pay for the cost of his own detention, custody and expulsion, up to a total of NIS 7,500.
The fear that Palestinians with Gaza addresses will be the first to be targeted by this order is based on measures that Israel has taken in recent years to curtail their right to live, work, study or even visit the West Bank. These measures violated the Oslo Accords.
According to a decision by the West Bank commander that was not backed by military legislation, since 2007, Palestinians with Gaza addresses must request a permit to stay in the West Bank. Since 2000, they have been defined as illegal sojourners if they have Gaza addresses, as if they were citizens of a foreign state. Many of them have been deported to Gaza, including those born in the West Bank.
Currently, Palestinians need special permits to enter areas near the separation fence, even if their homes are there, and Palestinians have long been barred from the Jordan Valley without special authorization. Until 2009, East Jerusalemites needed permission to enter Area A, territory under full PA control.
Another group expected to be particularly harmed by the new rules are Palestinians who moved to the West Bank under family reunification provisions, which Israel stopped granting for several years.
In 2007, amid a number of Hamoked petitions and as a goodwill gesture to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, tens of thousands of people received Palestinian residency cards. The PA distributed the cards, but Israel had exclusive control over who could receive them. Thousands of Palestinians, however, remained classified as "illegal sojourners," including many who are not citizens of any other country.
The new order is the latest step by the Israeli government in recent years to require permits that limit the freedom of movement and residency previously conferred by Palestinian ID cards. The new regulations are particularly sweeping, allowing for criminal measures and the mass expulsion of people from their homes.
The IDF Spokesman's Office said in response, "The amendments to the order on preventing infiltration, signed by GOC Central Command, were issued as part of a series of manifests, orders and appointments in Judea and Samaria, in Hebrew and Arabic as required, and will be posted in the offices of the Civil Administration and military courts' defense attorneys in Judea and Samaria. The IDF is ready to implement the order, which is not intended to apply to Israelis, but to illegal sojourners in Judea and Samaria."
Israeli military orders “in breach of international human rights law,” warns UN Special Rapporteur
GENEVA (19 April 2010) – The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights on Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Richard Falk, warned Monday that two Israeli Defense Forces Military Orders* may be in breach of the fourth Geneva Convention and violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Mr. Falk noted that “a wide range of violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law could be linked to actions carried out by the Government of Israel under these Orders, with particular gravity in the event that young persons become victims of their application.”
“The Orders appear to enable Israel to detain, prosecute, imprison and/or deport any and all persons present in the West Bank,” noted the Special Rapporteur, basing his concern on Israel’s new definition of the term ‘infiltrator:’ “A person who entered the Area unlawfully following the effective date, or a person who is present in the Area and does not lawfully hold a permit.”
“Even if this open-ended definition is not used to imprison or deport vast numbers of people, it causes unacceptable distress,” the UN independent expert said. Mr. Falk further noted that “it is not at all clear what permit, if any, will satisfy this Order.”
“Illustrative of the potential for cruel abuse,” he said, “is a provision of the Order requiring the person deported to pay the costs of his or her deportation, and suffer confiscations of property if unable to pay.”
Mr. Falk warned that deportations under the two new Orders could take place without judicial review, and that detained persons can be imprisoned for 7 years, unless able to prove that their entry was lawful, in which case they would be imprisoned for 3 years.
The UN Special Rapporteur recalled that Israel is party to the fourth Geneva Convention, which outlines its obligations as the Occupying Power in the West Bank. Article 49 of this Convention states that “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”
Mr. Falk also noted that, despite the fact that Israel is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, “the Orders establish a system that allows Israel to deport people without having their right to judicial review properly fulfilled, or possibly not reviewed at all.” He stressed that “the Orders do not even ensure that detainees will be informed in their own language that a deportation order has been issued against them.”
The independent expert, who is mandated by the UN Human Rights Council to monitor the situation of human rights and international humanitarian law on Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, also expressed his serious concern regarding “whether a military committee, as the one established by one of the Orders, is the kind of mechanism appropriate to satisfy requirements of judicial review, in the case that detained persons are not deported before having their situation reviewed.”
In 2008, the UN Human Rights Council designated Richard Falk (United States of America) as the fifth Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights on Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. The mandate was originally established in 1993 by the then UN Human Rights Council.
(*) Israel Defense Forces, Order No. 1650, Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (Amendment No. 2) (13 October 2009); and Israel Defense Forces, Order No. 1649, Order regarding Security Provisions (Amendment No. 112) (13 October 2009).
HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual and nine other human rights organizations urgently appealed to the minister of defense this morning: delay the entry into force of two military orders which will turn all residents of the West Bank into criminals who may be imprisoned for up to seven years or deported from the area
Press Release, 11th April, 2010
A NEW MILITARY ORDER DEFINES ALL RESIDENTS OF THE WEST BANK AS “INFILTRATORS” WHO MAY BE JAILED AND DEPORTED
The new order: an Israeli demand that all residents of the West Bank including those who were born there and live in the Palestinian Authority obtain an Israeli issued permit
HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual and nine other human rights organizations urgently appealed to the minister of defense this morning with a demand to delay the entry into force of two military orders which will turn all residents of the West Bank into criminals who may be imprisoned for up to seven years or deported from the area.
On Tuesday, April 13 2010, the Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (Amendment No. 2) and the Order regarding Security Provisions (Amendment No. 112) are to enter into effect. The orders, signed by the previous GOC Central Command, Gadi Shamni but not revealed, are worded so broadly such as theoretically allowing the military to empty the West Bank of almost all its Palestinian inhabitants. Despite the severe ramifications of the orders, the authorities did not publicize their existence among the Palestinian population as required, which raises grave concerns that they intended to pass them secretly without public debate or judicial review.
The orders substantively change the definition of “infiltrator” and in effect apply it to anyone who is present in the West Bank without an Israeli permit. The orders do not define what Israel considers a valid permit. The vast majority of people now living in the West Bank have never been required to hold any sort of permit to be present therein.
The military will be able to prosecute and deport any Palestinian defined as infiltrator in stark contradiction to the Geneva Convention. There is a possibility that some of the deportees will not be given an opportunity for a hearing before being removed from the West Bank as, according to the orders, the deportation may be executed within 72 hours whereas it is possible to delay bringing a person before the appeals committee for up to eight days from issuance of a deportation order.
In their letter to the minister of defense, the organizations stated that based on Israel’s current policy, the orders are expected to be initially used against Palestinian residents of the West Bank whom Israel wishes to transfer to the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that many of them were born in the West Bank or lawfully relocated thereto. Israel is further expected to use the orders to deport foreign passport holding spouses of West Bankers abroad. This category includes tens of thousands of individuals. However, the definition of “infiltrator” which exposes a person to a prison term of three to seven years could, in principle, be applied to any person the military commander wishes ill, including Israeli and international citizens who are present in the West Bank.
The organizations demanded the minister of defense delay the entry into effect of the orders pending a serious and comprehensive debate thereof and announced that they will fight the draconian legislation by any means.
The signatory organizations: HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual, The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Bimkom, B’Tselem, Gisha, The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Yesh Din, Adalah, Rabbis for Human Rights, Physicians for Human Rights
To View the letter dated 11.4.2010 to the minister of defense
To View HaMoked's letter dated 25.3.2010 to the GOC Central Command
To View the Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (Amendment No. 2)
To View the Order regarding Security Provisions (Amendment No. 112)
To View the Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (from 1969)
Press Release, 14.4.2010
CONTRARY TO ISRAEL’S STATEMENTS, INFILTRATION ORDERS ALLOW, AS OF YESTERDAY, THE IMPRISONMENT OR DEPORTATION OF PALESTINIAN WEST BANKERS WITHOUT JUDICIAL REVIEW
Yesterday two military orders came into effect which define, for the first time since the occupation of the oPt in 1967, Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories as “infiltrators” or “illegal aliens” in their land and in their homes.
Contrary to statements made by political and military officials, the orders allow deportation of a person from his home within 72 hours, without judicial review..This is due to the fact that while the orders require the military commander to bring the individual under threat of deportation before the committee for judicial review within eight days of the arrest, he also has the authority to deport the individual within 72 hours. At the same time, the individual under threat of deportation cannot turn to the committee, or seek any other legal recourse on his own initiative within those eight days.
Claims made by Israel that family relations will be taken into account when considering whether or not to deport a person clash with the military’s official and written position – as has been presented to the Supreme Court – that when it comes to decisions on entry, presence or deportation from the West Bank, “family ties in and of themselves do not constitute sufficient humanitarian grounds”.
Over the past year, HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual has petitioned the Supreme Court in a number of cases in which the military issued orders of deportation to Gaza against Palestinians who were present in the West Bank and whose registered address is in the Gaza Strip. In some of the cases, the justices harshly criticized the deportation and clarified to the military that the orders were extremely problematic from a legal standpoint. The military was subsequently forced to revoke the deportation orders. There is no wonder, then, that in the last few months the military managed - or preferred, in light of the criticism directed against it – to deport to the Gaza Strip only five individuals. There is no doubt that the new order was meant, inter alia, to serve as a way to circumvent the Supreme Court in order to facilitate, allow and sanction deportation in similar cases in the future.
The military’s attempts to explain and clarify the manner in which it intends to apply the new orders – and as such to clarify, for instance, that it does not intend to apply them to settlers – attest to the fact that the orders’ vague wording is entirely open to arbitrary interpretation in accordance with changing policies and political considerations.
Moreover, defining a person as an infiltrator renders him criminally liable. Not only might all Palestinians living in the West Bank be removed from it, but now they also find themselves suddenly declared criminals who may be sentenced to lengthy jail terms despite having done nothing wrong and having always acted lawfully.
The military’s statements indicate that Israel does not currently intend to use the orders in a sweeping manner for the purpose of mass deportation of residents of the Territories, however, the orders’ severity and utter unlawfulness stem primarily from the very fact that they allow such actions now or in the future.
In accordance with international law, a person’s right not to be deported from his home and his place of residence is a central and substantive fundamental right. The Fourth Geneva Convention imposes a complete ban on forced removal of civilians from their homes, a prohibition whose violation is considered a grave violation of the Convention. We call on all state parties to the Convention to take immediate action to have the Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (Amendment No. 2) and the Order regarding Security Provisions (Amendment No. 112) revoked.
The Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (Amendment No. 2) (No. 1650)
Legal and Factual Background
Introduction: On April 13, 2010, the Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (Amendment No. 2) (No. 1650) came into effect. The order must be read within the wider context of the army’s positions and conduct in the past few years, which point to a clear trend toward separating the Gaza Strip and West Bank, eroding some of the powers transferred to the Palestinian Authority in the Oslo Accords and engaging in forcible transfers with no legal basis and in clear contravention of the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The new order is worded such that it effectively allows the army the possibility to use the extreme measure of forcible transfers arbitrarily and bypass the criticism previously directed against it in Israeli courts.
The language of the order could be construed as meaning that it applies to all residents of the West Bank, whoever they may be. However, Israeli policy thus far leads to the conclusion that there are groups among the Palestinian population of the West Bank which face greater and more immediate danger relative to other groups within this population. The legal/historic analysis below focuses on these groups:
It is important to clarify, at the outset, that legally, the entire area of the population registry and the arrangement of presence in the Territories was transferred to the Palestinian Authority in the Oslo Accords. Under the Accords, identity cards and visitation permits are issued by the Palestinian Authority (with prior authorization by Israel); updating of addresses is carried out by the Palestinian Authority exclusively with no need for prior contact with Israel. However, in practice, Israel has seized control of managing the population registry.
Not only is the new order the first ever reference in military registration to a demand that residents of the occupied Palestinian territories hold permits, but it also emphasizes that these permits must be issued by the Israeli military commander. This, when almost everyone living in the West Bank has, at most, documents issued to them by the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords. In so doing, the new order, for the first time, revokes the arrangements established in the Oslo Accords, turns back the clock 15 years and once again makes the Israeli military commander the only official empowered to issue and determine which documents and permits allow people to be present and dwell in the Territories.
Residents of the West Bank with Registered Addresses in the Gaza Strip
In the Oslo Accords, Israel acknowledged the fact that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank form a single, integral territorial unit, and pursuant to the Accords, the safe passage allowing free movement between the two areas was established.
However, since 2000, Israel has been taking measures to create a separation between the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In this context, Israel has been prohibiting the changing of official population registry addresses of residents of the oPt from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip and vice versa. Thus, Israel created a situation whereby a person might live for many years in the West Bank – and perhaps even be born there – but his registered address still appears as Gaza.
In the past few years, Israel has begun taking action to forcibly remove Palestinians whose registered address is in the Gaza Strip from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.
Israel carried this out via an attempt to rely on two military orders: the proclamation of the entire West Bank as a “closed military zone” from 1967 and the Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (in its previous version).
HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual has filed several petitions over these years in the matters of Palestinians who were forcibly transferred in this way to the Gaza Strip. In the vast majority of cases, Israel allowed their return to their homes following the petition and thus avoided bringing the policy and practice of deportation and forced transfer to the scrutiny of the High Court of Justice (HCJ).
In 2009, HaMoked filed two HCJ petitions in the matter of two Palestinians who have lived with their wives and children in the West Bank for many years and against whom Israel issued deportation orders to the Gaza Strip under previous military legislation. These were the first cases in which HaMoked managed to file a petition before the army could execute the deportation.
In the HCJ petitions, HaMoked clarified the unlawfulness of Israel’s deportation policy: there is not, nor was there ever any legal provision in military legislation forcing Palestinian residents of the oPt to hold any permit in order to be present and live in the oPt – whether in Gaza or in the West Bank. Therefore, all those individuals are living in the West Bank entirely lawfully and there is an absolute prohibition on deporting or forcibly transferring them.
In the course of hearings in these petitions, the HCJ justices harshly criticized the position of the army while emphasizing the shaky legal grounds and the immense legal problem of executing such deportations or forced transfers. In one of the cases, the court issued an order nisi.
Following the HCJ’s criticism, the military was forced to revoke the two deportation orders.
It is clear that the new order was designed as an “HCJ bypass” and a means to allow and facilitate the future deportation of residents of the West Bank whose registered address is in the Gaza Strip.
Palestinians and Family Members of Palestinians Not Registered in the Palestinian Population Registry
At the end of 2000, Israel froze processing of visitation permit and family unification applications, severed communications with the Palestinian Authority on these issues and refused to accept new applications for processing.
The result was that tens of thousands of Palestinians or their relatives found themselves with no possibility of arranging for their status in the oPt and declared by Israel “illegal aliens” in their own homes.
Over the course of 2007, HaMoked filed close to 50 HCJ petitions on behalf of such families.
HaMoked stressed before the court that the “freeze” was entirely unlawful. According to international law, these individuals have every right to live with their families in their country. According to the laws of occupation, the military commander may act only in the name of narrow and defined military necessities and he clearly may not apply sweeping moratoriums stemming from political considerations.
In the context of the HCJ, Israel insisted on its position that these were “illegal aliens” who had no right to continue to live in their country. However, the HCJ did not accept this position and ordered the state to consider the option of resuming processing of family unification applications.
Consequently, and perhaps in order to avert a judgment, in late 2007, Israel announced a one-time quota as a political “gesture” to the head of the Palestinian Authority. In the context of this political gesture, Israel agreed to admit for processing and approve, in an exceptional and targeted manner, some 30,000 applications.
It is difficult to estimate the number of people who were not lucky enough to be included in this political gesture. A fleeting political gesture cannot substitute a regulated procedure allowing for family unification and the arrangement of status in the West Bank.
However, it is important to note that even receiving a Palestinian identity card in this manner is no guarantee against deportation. HaMoked is handling a number of cases of Palestinians who received a Palestinian identity card with Israeli approval in the context of the quota, but Israel subsequently decided to “revoke” the decision, immediately deleted their names from its copy of the Palestinian population registry and issued deportation orders against them.
According to the new order, all those individuals do not only face deportation but have suddenly turned into criminals facing a maximum prison term of three to seven years.
The new orders expand the power to deport in another manner, which entirely contravenes international law, in imposing a duty on the candidate for deportation to arrange the deportation procedures himself and to agree to be deported to any country. This expansion will allow, for the first time, the deportation of individuals who are stateless in a complete departure from international law.
Conclusion
The new orders drastically expand the power to deport from the occupied Palestinian territories. Many people who, under existing legislation as well as international law, are entitled to continue to live in their homes in the oPt may now be defined as “infiltrators”, deported from their homes and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. In effect, the new orders create an alleged “legal” basis for conducting patently illegal acts – forcible transfers and grave breaches of international law.
Military Orders 1649 and 1650
Summary
April 21, 2010
Main Points:
In response to the media attention and public outcry against two new military orders which came into effect on Tuesday, April 13th—the Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (Order 1650) and the Order regarding Security Provisions (Order 1649)—Israeli political and military officials have begun a spin campaign to distort and downplay the effects of the orders and the broad new powers they grant the military.
On March 25th, HaMoked sent a detailed letter to the military commander in the West Bank, followed by a joint letter to Defense Minister Ehud Barak, together with 9 other organizations, on April 11th. Both letters requested clarification and response; however, the State has not provided any formal or direct response to any of the issues raised. Instead, diplomatic, military, and political spokespeople have responded only through the media, in an incomplete and misleading manner. Regardless of these responses, the State has not made any attempt to amend either order. This insistence on maintaining the orders’ allowance to be used, theoretically, to implement mass deportations draws into question the State’s claim that it will not use the orders in a broad and sweeping way.
The State’s responses have attempted to shift focus to Order 1649, avoiding Order 1650, which allows for all Palestinians present in the West Bank to be defined as “infiltrators” in their own land, and subject to deportation, forcible transfer, and/or criminal charges. Order 1649, which creates some procedural changes (discussed in further detail below) must be viewed as secondary to Order 1650, which fundamentally changes the definition of “infiltrator” in a way that may be broadly and arbitrarily applied to Palestinians living in the West Bank.
The crux of the State’s arguments in defense of Order 1650 is that the State will choose not apply it to certain groups, and therefore it should not be seen as a major policy change. However, the military’s statements about the manner in which it intends to apply the Order reinforce the fact that the order is entirely open to interpretation, and gives the military a “blank check”, through its vague and broad language, to use at any time and in any way it sees fit.
Background:
Military Orders 1649 and 1650 were signed and enacted in October 2009, behind closed military doors, and without any opportunity for public comment. They were published to the Military Advocate General’s website, without special highlight, and in Hebrew only. In fact, the Orders were not accessible in any language other than Hebrew until HaMoked translated them into English. This is in clear violation of Geneva IV, Article 65, which requires that “the penal provisions enacted by the Occupying Power shall not come into force before they have been published and brought to the knowledge of the inhabitants in their own language.”
The new definition of “infiltrator” must be viewed in the larger context of the military’s positions and conduct in recent years. Since 2000, Israel has forcibly transferred Palestinians from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip solely on the basis of their registered address, attempting to use the previous version of the Order to Prevent Infiltration as legal justification. In 2009, following HaMoked’s petitions, Supreme Court judges harshly criticized the shaky and problematic legal basis of these deportation orders. Due to the Court’s criticism, the military was forced to revoke several of the deportation orders.
It is apparent that the new Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration was meant, inter alia, to serve as a way to circumvent the Supreme Court in order to facilitate deportation in similar cases in the future.
As an additional note, HaMoked strongly objects to the misleading and inaccurate term “repatriation”, used by the Israeli spokespeople to describe the deportations and forcible transfers allowed by the new orders. “Repatriation” implies returning a person to her/his country of origin; since it is clear that the order can be used to forcibly transfer Palestinians from the West Bank to Gaza, the State is implying that the West Bank and Gaza are not part of the same territorial entity, in contravention to the Oslo agreements and international treaties. Many of the individuals at risk—Palestinians who have official registered addresses in Gaza but who reside in the West Bank—have lived in the West Bank for many years, and have established families therein. In some cases, children are born in the West Bank but given official Gaza addresses because one or more of their parents are registered with Gaza addresses—many of these children have never set foot Gaza in their lifetime. Moreover, the orders themselves do not use the Hebrew term for “repatriation,” but rather the one for “deportation”.
Order 1649: The State, in its responses, has focused on this order and de-emphasized Order 1650. It is important to note that Order 1649 creates a problematic illusion of judicial oversight, but Order 1650 dramatically expands the power of the military to carry out deportations and forced transfer. For this reason, Order 1649 is less important, and should be viewed as secondary to Order 1650. International law prohibits the deportation or forced transfer of people from their homes; therefore, Order 1649, which governs the manner in which deportations and forced transfers may be carried out, does not negate the illegality of the deportations in the first place.
In several judgments over the past several years, the High Court of Justice has urged the military to allow better judicial oversight of situations in which individuals are taken into custody awaiting deportation, sometimes for years. Order 1649 goes far further than these parameters, giving the military committee it creates power of oversight of the deportations themselves, and thereby restricting direct access to the HCJ for appeal on deportation orders.
Rather than adding “significant safeguards and protections” as the State claims, Order 1649 apparently bars the individual under threat of deportation from actively appealing to the committee of her/his own initiative. Until she or he is brought before the military committee or deported, the individual may remain in custody awaiting deportation, and cannot appeal to the courts for redress.
There is no provision stating that a deportation, which according to Order 1650 can be carried out after 72 hours, won't be carried out before the person is brought before the military committee. It only states that if still in custody, a person must be brought to the committee within eight days. Therefore, there is no clear guarantee that every deportation or forced transfer order will undergo meaningful judicial review before it is carried out.
Order 1649 allows individuals to be held in custody for unreasonably long periods of time. It also adds the dangerous option of deporting an individual to any state in the world, and further assigns duty to the "deportee" to take active steps towards her or his own deportation – to her or his home state, or to any other state in the world who will accept her or him as an refugee or asylum seeker.
Order 1650: The State claims that the order applies only to “unlawful residents”; however, the problem lies in the new order’s definition of this term.
As stated above, it seems that the new definition of “infiltrator”, with its vague and broad formulation, was intended to apply, theoretically, to any Palestinian in the West Bank. Order 1650 defines an “infiltrator” as anyone present in the West Bank who “does not lawfully hold a permit.” The Order does not define what constitutes a permit, except that it must be Israeli-issued, so while the State may claim that it will not apply the Order to Palestinians who are listed in the official population registry, there is no provision in the new order that states this. Furthermore, it ignores or negates the authority granted to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo agreement to issue documents, certificates, and permits, and recognizes only permits issued by the Israeli military.
The older version of the infiltration order stated that a document which identifies an individual as a resident of the area can exclude him from being an infiltrator. The older version defined a resident of the area as "anyone who resides permanently in the area". That provision was revoked n the new version, along with the definition of "resident of the area".
Again, in the past year, Israel has attempted to use the previous version of the Order to Prevent Infiltration to forcibly transfer Palestinians who are registered in the official population registry. For this reason, HaMoked is concerned that the new order will likely be applied in the same manner.
The new order gives a "blank check" to the military, through its vague and broad language, to use at any time and in any way it sees fit. Based on this history, it is likely that Palestinians with official registered addresses in Gaza and those Palestinians and family members of Palestinians who do not appear in the official Palestinian population registry are at highest risk for deportation or forced transfer under the new Order. Exactly how the order will be implemented remains to be seen, and further underscores the Order’s illegality, since it allows for its use in a sweeping manner for the purpose of mass deportation of residents of the Territories, now or in the future. The military’s statements about the manner in which it intends to apply the orders reinforce the fact that the orders are entirely open to interpretation in accordance with changing policies and political considerations.
The new order also adds criminal liability: previously, individuals defined as “infiltrators” faced deportation, but not criminal proceedings, if they entered the area legally but stayed beyond their permit’s expiry. According to the new order, anyone considered an “infiltrator” because their permit has expired can be imprisoned for up to three years. In other cases, individuals may face up to seven years.
Regardless of the methodology, any breach of the complete ban on forced removal of civilians from their homes is considered a grave violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a party. The Order Regarding the Prevention of Infiltration is in violation of Geneva IV, and should be revoked immediately. HaMoked calls on all parties to oppose the Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (1650) and the Order regarding Security Provisions (1649).
Talking Points (HaMoked)
· On Tuesday, April 13th, two new military orders came into effect.
- Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (No. 1650)
- Order regarding Security Provisions (No. 1649)
· The new definition of “infiltrator” must be viewed in the larger context of the military’s positions and conduct in recent years.
- Since 2000, Israel has forcibly transferred Palestinians from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip solely on the basis of their registered address, attempting to use the previous version of the Order to Prevent Infiltration as legal justification
- In 2009, following HaMoked’s petitions, Supreme Court judges harshly criticized the shaky and problematic legal basis of these deportation orders. Due to the Court’s criticism, the military was forced to revoke several of the deportation orders
- It is apparent that the new Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration was meant, inter alia, to serve as a way to circumvent the Supreme Court in order to facilitate deportation in similar cases in the future
· The major change that this order represents is that now, for the first time Palestinians can be considered "infiltrators" in their own land.
- Anyone present in the West Bank without an Israeli-issued permit is regarded as an "infiltrator" and can be deported or forcibly transferred and face criminal charges
- The mere implication that all Palestinians must hold a permit in order to live “legally” in the West Bank is another step towards a policy of separation, creating a double-standard for Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank
· The new order gives a "blank check" to the army, through its vague and broad language, to use at any time and in any way it sees fit.
- The orders’ severity and utter unlawfulness stem primarily from the very fact that they allow for their use in a sweeping manner for the purpose of mass deportation of residents of the Territories, now or in the future
- The military’s statements about the manner in which it intends to apply the orders reinforce the fact that the orders are entirely open to interpretation in accordance with changing policies and political considerations
- At present, foreign-born West Bank residents and those registered with Gaza addresses are particularly at risk
· The required permit is not defined under these or under any previous military order.
- The vast majority of people now living in the West Bank have never been legally required to hold any sort of permit to be present therein
- The order allows for the creation of a new permit regime affecting everyone in the West Bank
· Judicial Review: required or not under the new orders? Israeli political and military officials state that Order 1650 creates a system of judicial review which benefits Palestinians, while in fact:
- The order grants sole oversight of deportation orders to a military committee, but bars individuals from appealing to the committee, or to the courts, on their own initiative
- The orders do not ensure that all individuals under threat of deportation will be brought before the committee, since a deportation may be carried out after only three days (and even faster in some situations), while the committee may be delayed up to eight days
- Any system of judicial review is rendered meaningless while the Order 1650 remains because it inherently may be applied to virtually any individual in the West Bank
· The Order Regarding the Prevention of Infiltration is in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and should be revoked immediately.
- Violation of the complete ban on forced removal of civilians from their homes is considered a grave violation of the Convention
- A person’s right not to be deported from his home and his place of residence is a central and substantive fundamental right
HaMoked calls on all parties to oppose the Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration (1650) and the Order regarding Security Provisions (1649)
To view further background material and the orders: http://www.hamoked.org.il/news_main_en.asp?id=904
22nd April, 2010
Contrary to Israel's Statements: yesterday a Palestinian from the West Bank was Deported to Gaza
Last night, Israel forcibly transferred Ahmad Sayeed Sabah to Gaza. He has resided in the West Bank for the past 15 years with his wife and child.
Sabah, who finished serving his prison sentence in Israeli prison, was forcibly removed immediately upon his release from prison, within less than 72 hours and without any judicial review, and without being given any opportunity to bid farewell to his family, which was waiting for him expectantly.
Only about seven days ago, the media published that the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Major General Eitan Dangot, promised that "not a single person would be deported to Gaza", and further stated that "there is no intention to treat residents originally from Gaza as 'illegal'."
Further, despite the campaign of reassurance waged by Israel in the media, it is clear that Israel does not hesitate to deport to Gaza Palestinians who have lived in the West Bank for many years, and for these purposes is willing to use even more draconian measures than those established by the new order.
HaMoked: Center for Defence of the Individual seriously condemns the forced transfer of Palestinians to Gaza, or to anywhere else. It is clear that yesterday's deportation illustrates Israel's true intentions.
HaMoked is representing Mr. Sabah, and will continue to update on any new developments.
Camped Out in Erez Crossing
http://www.gazagateway.org/2010/05/camped-out-in-erez-crossing/
The eleven-day protest of Ahmed Sabeh, released from an Israeli prison on Wednesday, April 21, 2010, and taken to the Gaza Strip – even though his home, wife and son are in Tulkarem – raises an interesting challenge to Israel’s control over the borders and population registry of the occupied Palestinian territory. Mr. Sabeh has camped out inside the Erez Crossing, refusing to enter Gaza, in protest of Israel’s refusal to allow him to return to his home in the West Bank. The Hamas government, in turn, has announced that it will not allow him back into Gaza, in order to avoid facilitating the Israeli policy of removing Palestinians from the West Bank.
Mr. Sabeh, represented by HaMoked – Center for the Defence of the Individual, was taken to Gaza as part of a policy to remove from the West Bank Palestinians whose addresses in the Israeli controlled population registry are listed in Gaza, a policy strengthened by a new military order that gives the military broad powers to deport and arrest.
His refusal to enter Gaza – and the Hamas government’s refusal to receive him – provide a window into Israel’s double-bind policy on control of Gaza. On the one hand, Israel claims that it has ended its occupation of Gaza and that Gaza is a “foreign” and even “hostile” entity for whose 1.5 million residents – Israel bears no responsibility. On the other hand, Israel has determined, that Mr. Sabeh is a “resident” of the supposedly “foreign” entity of Gaza (through Israel’s control of the Palestinian Population Registry) and that Israel may force him to live there (through Israel’s control of Gaza’s borders).
Palestinian Roads: Cementing Statehood, or Israeli Annexation?
Nadia Hijab
Jesse Rosenfeld,
April 30, 2010
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has staked his political credibility on securing a Palestinian state by 2011 in the entire West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, a program enthusiastically embraced by the international community. Ambitious PA plans include roads and other infrastructure across the West Bank, with funds provided by the United States, Europe and other donors.
Fayyad has argued that development will make the reality of a Palestinian state impossible to ignore. However, many of the new roads facilitate Israeli settlement expansion and pave the way for the seizure of main West Bank highways for exclusive Israeli use.
For decades Israel has carried out its own infrastructure projects in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. These include a segregated road network that, together with the separation wall Israel began building in 2002, divides Palestinian areas from each other while bringing the settlements--all of which are illegal under international law--closer to Israel.
Now, armed with information from United Nations sources and their own research, Palestinian nongovernmental organizations are raising the alarm. Their evidence spotlights the extent to which PA road-building is facilitating the Israeli goal of annexing vast areas of the West Bank--making a viable Palestinian state impossible.
Roads currently under construction in the Bethlehem governorate are a prime example, as they will complete the separation of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, which includes some of the earliest Israeli settlements, from the Palestinian West Bank, swallowing up more pieces of Bethlehem on the way. The PA is building these roads with funding from the US Agency for International Development and thus ultimately the US taxpayer.
Bethlehem Palestinians had not grasped the implications of the PA-USAID road construction until a meeting organized last month by Badil, the refugee rights group. Representatives of local councils, refugee camps, governorate offices and NGOs were shocked by the information presented, and are calling for a halt to road construction until risks are assessed.
It is unlikely that either the PA or USAID would wittingly advance Israeli annexation plans. Still, several factors conspire to help Israel take advantage of donor support to Palestinian development and sweep land away from under Palestinian feet. For example, it is impossible to build in most areas without Israel's say-so, and permission is usually given only when it suits Israel's plans.
As public works minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh defended the PA's road rehabilitation and construction: "All these efforts have improved Palestinian infrastructure and fit into the plans of the government," he said. But, he added, "this work needs a political frame to end the occupation." (Shtayyeh has since resigned his post.) As for USAID, it insists that the PA is responsible for project selection, while its role is limited to economic and technical assessment and funding.
But research by the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ), the respected Palestinian natural resources institute, reveals some damning facts: 32 percent of the PA roads funded and implemented by USAID neatly fall into a proposal the Israeli Civil Administration (aka the military occupation authority) presented to donors in 2004. Israel wanted donors to fund some 500 kilometers of alternative roads to serve the Palestinians it was blocking from the main road network (see animated slide here). The donors rejected the proposal at that time, but it now turns out that PA-USAID efforts have effectively implemented 22 percent of Israel's plan.
When it is pointed out that many of the alternative roads could facilitate settlement expansion, apartheid-style segregation and annexation by taking Palestinians off the main grid--thus working against a Palestinian state--Shtayyeh said, "We don't look at it this way. The Israelis are stopping people from using these roads, and our job is to find ways for people to survive. This doesn't mean these roads are permanent structures."
The Palestine Liberation Organization's Negotiation Support Unit carefully studied the perils of developing infrastructure under occupation after the International Court of Justice in 2004 reaffirmed the illegality of Israel's wall in the occupied West Bank. The NSU prepared a manual with guidance on how to build without becoming complicit in Israeli colonization. Asked whether the PA was aware of the role these roads would play in settler annexation, an NSU staffer, speaking anonymously as he was not authorized to speak to the media, told The Nation, "We have presented our position paper to the prime minister's office and Mohammad Shtayyeh, and they are well aware of the issue."
In a meeting with Badil and other local Palestinian NGOs, a senior official at the Palestinian public works ministry reportedly criticized some Palestinian municipalities for exacerbating the problem by dealing directly with donors, without concern for the national interest. He also targeted international aid agencies, reportedly saying that Western donors insist on accommodating the Israeli settlements. For example, he said, German donors enabled the Israeli settlement of Psagot to link into the Palestinian town of El-Bireh's sewage system despite PA objections. He added that USAID goes along with PA priorities "so long as Israel doesn't object."
Roads to Dispossession
The Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO facilitated the implementation of Israel's segregated road system. The PA, supposedly established for an "interim" five-year period in 1994, has control over Area A, some 17 percent of the West Bank. Israel and the PA share control over Area B, while Israel retains absolute control of Area C--around 60 percent of the West Bank. Not coincidentally, Areas A and B include some 96 percent of the Palestinian population, while Area C comprises the settlements and most of the agricultural land, including the fertile Jordan Valley. In addition, Israel has sole control over development in occupied East Jerusalem, which it annexed de facto in 1967.
Israel continues to cement these interim arrangements into permanence, with control of road construction being one of its major tools. USAID explains that "only" the roads located in Areas B and C (more than 80 percent of the West Bank) require coordination with Israeli officials. Roads located in Area B are forwarded to Israel's District Civil Liaison for security coordination, while roads located in Area C are submitted for "security coordination and construction permitting" so that the liaison can verify "compliance with existing master plans and confirmation of rights-of-way."
Badil director Ingrid Jaradat Gassner says that the PA receives fast-tracked permission from the Israeli Civil Administration for construction in area C that can be incorporated into Israel's road plans. She adds that not all roads are a problem, but the ones that don't link to main roads or act as substitutes for established routes are of serious concern.
After donors rejected its 2004 proposal for the alternative road network, Israel began building the roads anyway, later terming them "fabric of life" roads. "Apart from being racist, these roads are wasteful," said Sarit Michaeli, spokesperson for B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization. "The fabric-of-life roads are meant to solve a problem that in most cases was illegally imposed by Israel."
In mid-2009 the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that Israeli authorities had paved about forty-nine kilometers of alternative roads, including forty-three tunnels and underpasses, raising not just political but also environmental concerns about the impact of an additional road network on a small area like the West Bank. OCHA describes the fabric-of-life roads as one of the mechanisms to control Palestinian movement and facilitate that of Israeli settlers. B'Tselem estimates that Israel has spent some $44.5 million on the fabric-of-life road system--a small price to pay to seize vast tracts of land.
The Human Impact
Nidal Hatim, a local playwright, online columnist and activist with the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS), cannot take the main road from Bethlehem to his home village of Battir, just outside the city. Route 60 is the main highway running north-south through the center of the West Bank. "To go on the highway, we have to go through the checkpoint and turn around," he said. "I have a West Bank Palestinian ID, so I can't go through the checkpoint." Instead, he takes a bumpy side road that is currently being built by the PA with USAID support. The road turns from choppy cement to residential street to dirt and gravel path, weaving around and under the four-lane Route 60, which is now used mostly by Israeli settlers. Passing through a partly completed tunnel, the car stalls for a second on a steep unpaved incline on the edge of an olive grove.
According to a Battir council member Hassan Awaineh, the tunnel will become the only access point connecting the 22,000 residents of Battir and neighboring villages to Bethlehem.
B'Tselem's Michaeli affirms that the dual road system in the West Bank will "in the long run cement Israeli control. The tunnel that connects with Battir can be controlled by one army jeep."
The tunnel will enable Israel to fully integrate the Gush Etzion settlement bloc into Israel and separate it from the Palestinian population, a Western NGO worker explained. "Once the tunnel is completed, it's all over," she said, speaking anonymously because she is not authorized to speak to the media. Sitting on his porch in Battir overlooking the valley where the train connecting Jerusalem to Tel Aviv runs, Awaineh points to the now defunct Battir station, where trains used to stop during Ottoman and British rule. Since then, Battir has had nearly half its land confiscated by Israel, and Palestinian activity there is forbidden. Awaineh leans forward, the sun reflecting off his white hair, and sighs. "In the end they will make life difficult for students going to school, laborers going to work and farmers going to their fields," he says. "People will be forced to move to Bethlehem."
"This is part of Israel's policy to 'thin out' Palestinian areas," the NGO worker said. "It's not full-blown ethnic cleansing but rather incremental displacement, just as was done to the Palestinians who remained in Israel in 1948." What is happening to Battir and its neighbors in Area C has already happened in the Jerusalem-Ramallah area and elsewhere in the West Bank.
How It Works
A slide in a PowerPoint presentation produced by OCHA on new development in the Gush Etzion area graphically shows how PA-USAID-constructed roads connect with existing or planned Israeli bypass roads that push Palestinians off the main road network. The slide disappeared from the OCHA website after a presentation to donor organizations last month, but a copy has been obtained by The Nation. ARIJ has produced its own maps showing the impact of Gush Etzion development. The completion of the separation wall will sever Palestinian access to the section of Route 60 between Bethlehem and Hebron. Israel is increasingly pushing Palestinians off Route 60 and onto other roads like Road 356, part of which Israel has rehabilitated. Conveniently for Israel, the PA rehabilitated another segment of 356 with support from foreign donors, and a third segment is under rehabilitation by the PA with support from USAID.
"When you look at all things put together, it doesn't look like we'll be using Route 60 for very long," said Badil director Gassner in her Bethlehem office.
It gets worse. The rehabilitation of Road 356 has given several of the Jewish settlements in the Bethlehem governorate a new lease on life. ARIJ points out that the settlements of Teqoa and Noqdim had their travel time to Jerusalem slashed from forty-five minutes to fifteen, encouraging Israeli settlers to buy property in the bloc, where house prices have soared by 70 percent. By contrast, Palestinians who will be pushed off Route 60 onto Road 356 will see their travel time from Hebron to Bethlehem quadruple, to 100 minutes. And of course Israel has made Jerusalem increasingly off limits to West Bank Palestinians.
Community Outcry
There is no question that Palestinians need, and have a right to, a secure and functioning infrastructure and that the communities are crying out for it. It is also clear that Israel wields overwhelming power over the occupied Palestinian territories, putting many obstacles in the way of independent action. Moreover, communities are reliant on the PA's good graces for development support, which in turn is reliant on the funding of donors like USAID.
Nonetheless, those on the front lines are not accepting development at any price, and activists are demanding that road construction be halted until political risk assessments can be done. "No one wants to see the wrong roads built overnight," Gassner says.
"The people here need to resist," says Hatim, the playwright and activist. Walking around a Palestinian taxi stand in the setting sun and looking at the tunnel that now connects his village to Bethlehem as settler cars speed by overhead, he adds, "We also need to target the PA and USAID. People need to boycott USAID and its contractors. As long as the problem is Israel, the PA and USAID, we need to struggle on all three fronts."
Battir's Awaineh, who is close to the PA, is more guarded in his criticism and focuses on the Israeli role. Yet when pressed, he is clear on the need to resist the isolation and displacement of his community. "We must encourage people to stay here and survive. The PA and USAID need to build roads for the Palestinian people, not for settlers in the name of Palestinians."
How the Palestinian Authority’s Road Building Projects are Cementing the Occupation (Jerry Haber, on Magnes Zion blog)
Every once in a while an article comes down the pike that bursts the bubble of all the cautious optimists. You know, the folks who say, "Maybe Obama will present a peace plan soon," or "Gee, the Palestinian (i.e., the West Bank Palestinian) economy is doing better" or "Fayyad's state-building may do the trick."
J-Streeters and J-Callers should change direction and do some jaywalking. For what if the moderate and benign Palestinian Authority were taking measures that, far from building the future Palestinian state, are dooming it to oblivion?
Nadia Hijab, a senior fellow at the Washington office of the Insitute for Palestinian Studies, and Jesse Rosenfeld, a reporter based in Israel and Palestine, have written a stunning article in theNation on the effect of the Palestinian Authority's road construction in the West Bank – especialy the effect on Palestinian life. In a word, the PA, with donor money (especially USAID), can only fund construction projects that Israel approves. And Israel approves only those projects which allow for the maximum amount of settlement expansion and bypass roads. As the authors write:
For decades Israel has carried out its own infrastructure projects in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. These include a segregated road network that, together with the separation wall Israel began building in 2002, divides Palestinian areas from each other while bringing the settlements--all of which are illegal under international law--closer to Israel.
Now, armed with information from United Nations sources and their own research, Palestinian nongovernmental organizations are raising the alarm. Their evidence spotlights the extent to which PA road-building is facilitating the Israeli goal of annexing vast areas of the West Bank--making a viable Palestinian state impossible.
You will have to read the article for the evidence. [see above – ed. AG-G]
But here is one statistic -- almost a third of the Palestinian roads that the Israeli government proposed to the donors in 2004 – in a proposal that was rejected by the donors because it clearly served Israeli and not Palestinian aims – are now being built by the Palestinian Authority.
Let me make something clear. When the system of settlement by-pass roads came to pass during the Oslo period, it was part of an interim agreement that expired in 1999. The idea then was that these roads would be temporary measures to ensure the safety of the settlers during a transition period, at the end of which, many of them would have moved back to Israel. When Netanyahu beat Peres in 1996, one of the few things he liked about the Oslo agreements were the bypass roads. He knew that a) they would strengthen the settlements and b) they would make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. The system of bypass roads is one of the reasons why it is an insult to apartheid to liken the situation in the West Bank to apartheid – for in apartheid South Africa, blacks and whites were able to use the same roads.
All this is not new. What is new is the extent to which the Palestinian Authority, for reasons known to only to itself, is willing to to make the lives of the ordinary Palestinians suffer. Well, maybe that is not new, either.
The important point is that were there to be an Israeli-Palestinian peace under the present circumstances, and with the status quo thinking, it would be an unmitigated long-term disaster both for Palestinians and the Israelis. As I have said here ad nauseum, none of the so-called two-staters I know really want two sovereign and independent states.
If Fayyad or Abbas succeed and the Palestinians get a state in the West Bank, then they will still be under Israeli Occupation, or some form of neo-colonialism, for they will still be under the effective control of Israel. The lives of the West Bank Palestinians would be only slightly less miserable than that of the Gazans.
I don't believe that Oslo was intended to kill a Palestinian state. But it has certainly hurt the chances for one.
Compare Mr. Sabeh’s plight with that of Palestinians who entered the West Bank from Jordan, but Israel refuses to “recognize” their residence and issue them Palestinian ID cards. Israel does not try to deport them to Jordan, because Israel cannot dictate who is a citizen of Jordan and cannot force Jordan, a sovereign state, to accept a deportee. Not so for Gaza, part of the occupied Palestinian territory, where Israel decides who is a Palestinian resident and uses its control to dictate where he or she may live (in the case of Mr. Sabeh – thus far with only limited success).
Gaza Gateway will soon be adding to its weekly updates statistics about the movement of persons through Gaza’s crossings – and we’ll be sure to include data about those stuck in the middle.
For the second time in a week, Israel forcibly transfers a Palestinian from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip: The deportee has been living in the West Bank since he was 7 years old, 29th April, 2010
On April 27, 2010, Israel forcibly transferred Fadi Al-‘Azazmeh to the Gaza Strip. Al-‘Azazmeh was born in 1991, and moved, when he was seven years old, with his father and siblings from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank, where they established their home.
Mr. Al-‘Azazmeh was apprehended by soldiers where he works and since he did not have an ID card, was taken into interrogation. After examining Israeli records, his interrogators discovered that he was born in the Gaza Strip and that apparently his address was not updated in the Israeli copy of the population registry.
He was held in the interrogation facility for five hours, blindfolded with hands and feet cuffed while his “interrogators” beat him. My client was then asked regarding his life in the West Bank and clarified that this was his home and that he had lived there since he was a boy. Despite this, my client was forcibly transferred that same day, to the Gaza Strip.
It is superfluous to note that Mr. Al-‘Azazmeh was not provided with the opportunity to appeal the decision to deport him from his home, to seek counsel or to notify his family about his situation.
Clearly, whether pursuant to the new orders which entered into effect on April 13, 2010, or by other means, Israel continues to deport Palestinians living in the West Bank for many years to the Gaza Strip.
HaMoked urgently contacted the army demanding to return Mr. Al-‘Azazmeh to the West Bank and to immediately desist from the improper custom of forcible transfers of Palestinians living in the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.
Currently, Mr. Al-‘Azazmeh lives in a protest tent in Beit Hanun, in the Gaza Strip. HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual represents him and will provide updates on further developments.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE FROM FREE GAZA MOVEMENT
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Contact: Greta Berlin, +33 63 142 7577, Iristulip@gmail.com
Huwaida Arraf,+970-598-336-215, +972-542-635-936, huwaida@freegaza.org
Caoimhe Butterly, +353 876 114 553, caoimhe@freegaza.org
(London, UK) On May 24, 2010, the Freedom Flotilla sets sail for Gaza determined to, once again, challenge Israel’s blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in an open-air prison. Under the coordination of the Free Gaza Movement, numerous human rights organizations, including the Turkish Relief Foundation (IHH), the Perdana Global Peace Organization from Malaysia, the European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza, and the Swedish and Greek Boat to Gaza initiatives will send three cargo ships loaded with reconstruction, medical and educational supplies. At least five passenger boats with over 600 people on board will accompany the cargo ships.
These passengers include members of Parliament from around the world, U.N., human rights and trade union activists, as well as journalists who will document the largest coordinated effort to directly confront Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza and take in basic supplies.
Said Mary Hughes Thompson, one of Free Gaza’s co-founders, “Although we were happy with the first trips, it was bitter-sweet, knowing that our small boats and symbolic amounts of relief paled in comparison to what was really needed in Gaza. Now, we finally feel we are helping to organize a powerful action, one with the potential to translate into a sustained campaign of much more effective challenges to Israel's brutal siege.”
In the past three months, Israel has limited fuel to run the power station. Much of Gaza is often in darkness. There are just enough trucks coming in to barely prevent total starvation, and Egypt, complicit with the Israeli-US policy of blockading Palestinians, is building an underground steel wall to prevent people in Gaza from bringing in vitally needed supplies through tunnels.
A cargo ship sponsored by the people of Malaysia and loaded with cargo donated from citizens of Ireland, Scotland, and Britain as well as thousands around the world, will depart from Ireland the second week of May. When it reaches the Mediterranean, she will be joined by the other boats and begin the journey to Gaza.
Dr. Mona El-Farra, Deputy Director of the Union of Health Work Committees in Gaza was pleased to hear we are coming back. When the two boats from Free Gaza entered the harbor in 2008, it was like a dream, it was historic. And all great things start with some dreamers who made it true. For us in Gaza, the dream of freedom will not be lost, and we welcome this next voyage with open hearts.
The Free Gaza Movement along with the partners listed above, are the organizers of this flotilla. However, dozens of organizations and tens of thousands of people around the world are taking part to make this voyage a success. www.freegaza.org
Cross-posted from Gaza Gateway, an analytical blog recently launched by the Israeli human rights group Gisha — The legal Center for Freedom of Movement. Gaza Gateway provides up to date data and analysis on access to the Gaza Strip and is an essential tool for for fact-checking and contextualizing information provided by other sources.
How to Market Gaza as an Israeli success story: The complete guide
The following guide was inspired by a report by the Government of Israel, summarizing Israel’s humanitarian activities for the Gaza Strip in 2009 and at the start of 2010, which was submitted yesterday to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee.
- Take things out of context. When you say that, “41 truckloads of equipment for the maintenance of the electricity networks were transferred”, you do not need to mention that those spare parts were waiting for many months for clearance, and that, at the end of 2009, the Gaza Electricity Distribution Company reported that 240 kinds of spare parts were completely out of stock or had dipped below the required minimum stock. Likewise, “There was a significant increase in the number of international organization staff entering the Gaza Strip” does not require explanation that, were the productive sector in Gaza not almost completely paralyzed, so many aid workers would not be needed and the number of aid recipients would not be so high. You also don’t need to explain that the high number of staff you quote might be misleading, since it’s likely you are counting individual entrances and not unique visitors (the same international aid workers enter and exit multiple times per month).
- Demonstrate impartiality. Present the transfer of 44,500 doses of swine flu vaccine as having nothing to do with you. There is always a chance people will forget it is a border-transcending epidemic and that the head of the Gaza District Coordination Office himself said an outbreak in Gaza would endanger Israel.
- Make it look like you are paying the bill. Use vague language such as “In 2009, Israel continued to supply electricity to the Gaza Strip”. Count on the fact that most people don’t know that Israel charges full payment for the electricity by deducting the amount from the VAT and taxes it collects for the Palestinian Authority via import into its territory.
- Take credit for the work of others. . Note that “Between April and October 2009, maintenance work was conducted on the power station by Siemens” and “In 2009, the international community transferred 141,390 tons of humanitarian aid” are your successes too. These actions were undertaken after you decided in a unique instance to lift the restrictions you imposed yourself. You deserve credit even for the summer camps UNRWA runs for children in Gaza: in an exceptional measure you did not prevent the transfer of musical instrumentsand other items you define as “non-humanitarian” (such as ice cream machines and swimming pools).
- Make sure to even present your failures as successes. “As part of the preparations for winter” you approved the transfer of glass. Even if you did so only after external parties exerted heavy pressure on you, even if you had to make an exception to a prohibition you imposed for two winters, even if you started transferring the glass only on December 29 (long after winter weather had already begun battering destroyed homes in Gaza), and even if you continue preventing the transfer of heaters – present the transfer of glass as your success.
- Make sure to use headlines that will stun your readers. . “The activities of the private and banking sectors in the Gaza Strip are maintained”. With a headline like that, few are likely to realize you are talking about maintaining an economy that has been at an almost complete standstill for nearly three years, with more than 90% of the factories closed or working at minimal capacity, because Israel has been preventing the transfer of raw materials. The headline “Over the years, Israel has kept the issue of public humanitarian infrastructure out of the conflict” will also obscure the Cabinet Decision to restrict the transfer of industrial diesel fuel to the power plant, which is crucial to the functioning of the water and sewage systems and other vital infrastructure, in an attempt to pressure the Hamas government.
- Use vague terminology. Choose words such as “transferred” and “were transferred”. This way, some people will understand that “Over 1.1 billion NIS were transferred to the Gaza Strip to cover the salaries and activities of international organizations” came out of Israel’s pocket and not, as actually happened, that Israel simply did not prevent the PA and international organizations from transferring the money through the border crossings under Israel’s control, in a rare exception to its restrictions on cash transfers and on the banking system in Gaza.
- Use visual tricks. State the number of individual flowers you allowed to Gaza farmers to export (9,782,076). This method can become problematic only if you mention that the potential for export is 55 million individual flowers per year, or that in 2006, 2,089 tons of strawberries were exported (compared to only 54 tons in 2009). 105,701,740 liters of industrial diesel fuel (according to COGAT’s 2009 report) sounds like a respectable amount when you state it in individual liters, but is a little less respectable when you discover that it amounts to only 57% of the amount required for maximum electricity production at the Gaza power plant. You do not have to reveal everything. Play down the extent and nature of your control of the Gaza Strip’s border crossings, including indirect but substantial control of the Rafah Crossing.
- You do not have to reveal everything. Play down the extent and nature of your control of the Gaza Strip’s border crossings, including indirect but substantial control of the Rafah Crossing.
Don’t be so modest! You play a central role in the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
GAZA – BENEATH THE BOMBS
by Sharyn Lock with Sarah Irving (Pluto Press January 2010)
AFTERWORD, By Richard Falk
Sharyn Lock provides her readers with a moving and understated account of her real time experience of Gaza and Gazans living and dying under Israeli occupation. The narrative is highlighted by the 22 days of sustained attack by the Israeli military forces (December 27, 2008 – January 18, 2009) that adds an indispensable dimension of understanding to our awareness of that terrible ordeal. By witnessing, participating, and sharing in the vulnerability of the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in the impoverished and crowded killing fields of the Gaza Strip Sharyn Lock manages to humanize the inhuman. In doing so she creates an unforgettable profile of the fear mingled with love that existed among Gazans constantly living in gruesome conditions that have not yet been mitigated to this day despite the myriad of calls from political leaders and moral authority figures around the world.
How the Israeli psyche can stand its role as cruel perpetrator of such an orgy of suffering inflicted on an entrapped civilian population, of whom more than half are children, has become a grotesque mystery for me. A juridical searchlight has been shined on the Gaza attacks of last winter by the release of the Goldstone Report on September 15, 2009. This report with its methodical examination of the grounds for war crimes allegations leveled at Israel, but also at Hamas, is a model of careful, balanced inquiry conducted by respected experts eager to convey and act upon the truth; nothing more, but also nothing less. Its 575 pages of factual presentation and legal analysis are a much less readable account of the same events than are Sharyn Lock’s daily journal entries and edited blogs. Both report on an orgy of one-sided violence directed at an essentially defenseless society, and essentially confirm one another.
The fury of Israel’s official repudiation of the Goldstone Report exhibits the extent to which a raw nerve was touched, perhaps illustrating the old adage that ‘the truth hurts.’ For the Israeli leadership, including the Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, to claim that the report is a ‘gift to terrorism’ or a challenge to Israel’s right to defend itself repudiates the very notion that there are legal and moral limits to the way war is waged in the twenty-first century. For what the Goldstone Report contends, and what the testimony of IDF soldiers reinforces in the powerful pamphlet, ‘Breaking the Silence,’ is that Israeli rules of engagement and operational tactics on the Gaza battlefield deliberately targeted unarmed civilians and used hyper-modern weaponry in areas where civilians were known to be with the intention of destroying much of the already strained civilian infrastructure of Gaza, including its electricity generators, educational institutions, medical facilities, UN buildings, mosques. Sharyn Lock puts the truth of the situation in a single devastating sentence that is undoubtedly too simple for the legal mind:
‘Everything I have seen suggests that the Israeli army doesn’t even understand the concept of “innocent civilians”’ (p.64)
Such destruction abetted a situation of extreme deprivation that has persisted at least since mid-2007 when a comprehensive blockade was imposed that has allowed only sub-subsistence levels of food, medicine, and fuel to enter Gaza. Without the several hundred tunnels into Egypt, as well as the vital food and services provided by the UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency) presence, the ordeal in the Gaza Strip would have long ago eventuated in a genocidal catastrophe. This blockade has even been used to disallow donated aid to bring such basic building materials as cement, glass, and bricks into Gaza to repair some of the damage done by the attacks of last winter, which amounts to a new kind of post-conflict crime, that of disallowing civilian recovery from military devastation.
The Goldstone Report, essentially a fact-finding mission, that does recommend implementing accountability for the commission of war crimes in Gaza challenges the UN to live up finally to its own Charter, to end the regime of impunity for politically powerful leaders of sovereign states. It recommends making use of the International Criminal Court to the extent necessary, and also proposes prosecution of alleged war criminals in national courts should serious suspects enter national territory. This latter recommendation, known as ‘universal jurisdiction,’ was prominently invoked back in 1998 when Spain requested that Britain detain and extradite the former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, to face criminal charges in Madrid. In 1962 Israel itself relied on universal jurisdiction when it prosecuted and executed Adolph Eichmann for Nazi crimes committed in Germany before the state of Israel came into existence. Surely, if the UN is to supplant the regime of force by the rule of law, it should fully implement the Goldstone recommendations.
At the time of writing (November 2009), the future of the Goldstone Report is uncertain. The UN General Assembly is likely to endorse its recommendations, but then what? It is clear that the United States will continue brazenly to use its geopolitical muscle to ensure Israeli impunity, standing irresponsibly ready to wield the veto in the Security Council if any effort is made toenforce Goldstone. My own skeptical view is that the UN will fail the Goldstone test, and that its call for accountability will not be heeded, and the peoples of the world will be again reminded that international criminal law is only meant for the weak and defeated. In this respect, the inter-governmental system although fashioning the international legal order remains the domain of unchecked power and violence. Within the UN this means that geopolitics trumps law and justice, while the bodies pile up.
It should be realized that the Goldstone Report leans over backwards to overlook the multiple criminality of Israel’s occupation policies associated with the attacks on Gaza of 2008-09. For instance, despite the existence of an effective ceasefire, along with a Hamas offer to extend it for up to ten years, Israel’s dubious claim of necessary self-defense was uncritically accepted by the Goldstone Report, and inquiry was limited to determining whether the use of force was excessive and directed at unlawful targets. As a result, the core international law question was never raised – was this justifiable use of defensive force or was it aggression, a crime against the peace since the Nuremburg Judgment in 1945. Furthermore, the Goldstone Report never criminalizes the Israeli failure to allow Gazan civilians to leave the war zone, and become refugees. To deny civilians a refugee option is rare in the annals of modern warfare. It meant that every civilian in Gaza whether or not wounded experienced the severe trauma of being exposed day and night to the terror of these essentially unopposed and relentless Israeli attacks from land, sea, and air.
International law does not clearly address this Gaza reality in which one-sided violence is undertaken by Israel without any serious military resistance. The casualty ratios were over 100:1, and much greater if the wounded are included, and almost encompassing the whole of the Gazan population if mental harm is counted. The conflict was so one-sided that it hardly counts as a war, where normally reciprocity between actors lends weight to prescriptions for mutual restraints on tactics and weapons. When one side is all powerful, choosing how and what to destroy at its discretion without any serious worry about retaliation, the relationship resembles torture not war. The international law of war, because it is shaped to such an extent by the victors and the strong, has been slow to impose restraints on the violence of the powerful. It is shocking, yet revealing, that even nuclear weapons, despite being massively indiscriminate in their destructive-ness, have neither been prohibited nor renounced. Virtually every page of Sharyn Lock’s testimony transmits the tearful reality of this utter Palestinian vulnerability.
What gives a radiance to this deeply felt autobiographical account of Sharyn Lock’s Gaza experience is the tacit comparison between the sterility of inter-governmental responsiveness and the creative engagement of civil society with Palestinian suffering. Her participation in the International Solidarity Movement, whose members have died or been maimed in their roles as nonviolent volunteers, is notable for its transnational bonds of love, as well as for its affirmation of the human spirit. Her involvement with the Free Gaza Movement demonstrates that civil society activists, including from Israel, who gather the resources to send boats with medical supplies to Gaza, were prepared to break the unlawful blockade of Gaza in a manner that governments are afraid or unable to do.
What is conveyed indirectly is the tragedy and the truth of the Palestinian ordeal: the only hope that presents exists for this long beleaguered people arises from the commitment and work of people like Sharyn Lock and her collaborators all over the world. The UN shows neither the capacity nor the political will to implement its own resolutions, encouraging the false belief that only violent resistance can end the Israeli occupation and produce peace. Governments are subject to the geopolitical discipline imposed by military power: so far only Libya has attempted to send humanitarian relief to Gaza, and turned away as soon as its cargo ship with supplies was refused entry by Israel, not willing to risk a confrontation.
Sharyn Lock’s real achievement is to convey the wisdom of the great Jewish thinking Abraham Heschel: ‘Few are guilty, but all are responsible.’ The fate of the Palestinian people continues, of course, to depend mainly on their own efforts. But these efforts are being increasingly supported by the Palestinian success in the second war, The Legitimacy War being fought on a global battlefield. It is the authentic successor to the anti-apartheid campaign that eventually contributed to realizing the impossible, nonviolently dismantling the racist regime in South Africa. The growing strength of BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) initiatives around the world is expressive of this legitimacy dimension in the Palestinian struggle. The Goldstone Report is a major victory for the Palestinians in The Legitimacy War that should have shown the Israelis by now that military dominance and political oppression bring their country neither security nor peace. To reach a just and sustainable solution is far from automatic. It will depend, as Heschel’s imperative instructs us, on people of conscience throughout the world becoming warriors in The Legitimacy War. There are many opportunities: not attending cultural or academic events with Israeli performers, refusing touristic visits to Israel, boycotting products and companies that do business in Israel, and lobbying their governments to withhold weapons and impose sanctions so long as Israel defies international law and morality. For the clarity of this teaching about nonviolent struggle and engagement I will long remain grateful to Sharyn Lock!
Santa Barbara, California, November 2009
Gaza: Treading on Shards
By Sara Roy, February 17, 2010
"Do you know what it's like living in Gaza?" a friend of mine asked. "It is like walking on broken glass tearing at your feet."
On January 21, fifty-four House Democrats signed a letter to President Obama asking him to dramatically ease, if not end, the siege of Gaza. They wrote:
The people of Gaza have suffered enormously since the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt following Hamas's coup, and particularly following Operation Cast Lead.... The unabated suffering of Gazan civilians highlights the urgency of reaching a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we ask you to press for immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza as an urgent component of your broader Middle East peace efforts.... Despite ad hoc easing of the blockade, there has been no significant improvement in the quantity and scope of goods allowed into Gaza.... The crisis has devastated livelihoods, entrenched a poverty rate of over 70%, increased dependence on erratic international aid, allowed the deterioration of public infrastructure, and led to the marked decline of the accessibility of essential services.
This letter is remarkable not only because it directly challenges the policy of the Israel lobby--a challenge no doubt borne of the extreme crisis confronting Palestinians, in which the United States has played an extremely damaging role--but also because it links Israeli security to Palestinian well-being. The letter concludes, "The people of Gaza, along with all the peoples of the region, must see that the United States is dedicated to addressing the legitimate security needs of the State of Israel and to ensuring that the legitimate needs of the Palestinian population are met."
I was last in Gaza in August, my first trip since Israel's war on the territory one year ago. I was overwhelmed by what I saw in a place I have known intimately for nearly a quarter of a century: a land ripped apart and scarred, the lives of its people blighted. Gaza is decaying under the weight of continued devastation, unable to function normally. The resulting void is filled with vacancy and despair that subdues even those acts of resilience and optimism that still find some expression. What struck me most was the innocence of these people, over half of them children, and the indecency and criminality of their continued punishment.
The decline and disablement of Gaza's economy and society have been deliberate, the result of state policy--consciously planned, implemented and enforced. Although Israel bears the greatest responsibility, the United States and the European Union, among others, are also culpable, as is the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. All are complicit in the ruination of this gentle place. And just as Gaza's demise has been consciously orchestrated, so have the obstacles preventing its recovery.
Gaza has a long history of subjection that assumed new dimensions after Hamas's January 2006 electoral victory. Immediately after those elections, Israel and certain donor countries suspended contacts with the PA, which was soon followed by the suspension of direct aid and the subsequent imposition of an international financial boycott of the PA. By this time Israel had already been withholding monthly tax revenues and custom duties collected on behalf of the Authority, had effectively ended Gazan employment inside Israel and had drastically reduced Gaza's external trade.
With escalating Palestinian-Israeli violence, which led to the killing of two Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Shalit in June 2006, Israel sealed Gaza's borders, allowing for the entry of humanitarian goods only, which marked the beginning of the siege, now in its fourth year. Shalit's abduction precipitated a massive Israeli military assault against Gaza at the end of June, known as Operation Summer Rains, which initially targeted Gaza's infrastructure and later focused on destabilizing the Hamas-led government through intensified strikes on PA ministries and further reductions in fuel, electricity, water delivery and sewage treatment. This near daily ground operation did not end until October 2006.
In June 2007, after Hamas's seizure of power in the Strip (which followed months of internecine violence and an attempted coup by Fatah against Hamas) and the dissolution of the national unity government, the PA effectively split in two: a de facto Hamas-led government--rejected by Israel and the West--was formed in Gaza, and the officially recognized government headed by President Mahmoud Abbas was established in the West Bank. The boycott was lifted against the West Bank PA but was intensified against Gaza.
Adding to Gaza's misery was the decision by the Israeli security cabinet on September 19, 2007, to declare the Strip an "enemy entity" controlled by a "terrorist organization." After this decision Israel imposed further sanctions that include an almost complete ban on trade and no freedom of movement for the majority of Gazans, including the labor force. In the fall of 2008 a ban on fuel imports into Gaza was imposed. These policies have contributed to transforming Gazans from a people with political and national rights into a humanitarian problem--paupers and charity cases who are now the responsibility of the international community.
Not only have key international donors, most critically the United States and European Union, participated in the sanctions regime against Gaza, they have privileged the West Bank in their programmatic work. Donor strategies now support and strengthen the fragmentation and isolation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip--an Israeli policy goal of the Oslo process--and divide Palestinians into two distinct entities, offering largesse to one side while criminalizing and depriving the other. This behavior among key donor countries reflects a critical shift in their approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from one that opposes Israeli occupation to one that, in effect, recognizes it. This can be seen in their largely unchallenged acceptance of Israel's settlement policy and the deepening separation of the West Bank and Gaza and isolation of the latter. This shift in donor thinking can also be seen in their unwillingness to confront Israel's de facto annexation of Palestinian lands and Israel's reshaping of the conflict to center on Gaza alone, which is now identified solely with Hamas and therefore as alien.
Hence, within the annexation (West Bank)/alien (Gaza Strip) paradigm, any resistance by Palestinians, be they in the West Bank or Gaza, to Israel's repressive occupation, including attempts at meaningful economic empowerment, are now considered by Israel and certain donors to be illegitimate and unlawful. This is the context in which the sanctions regime against Gaza has been justified, a regime that has not mitigated since the end of the war. Normal trade (upon which Gaza's tiny economy is desperately dependent) continues to be prohibited; traditional imports and exports have almost disappeared from Gaza. In fact, with certain limited exceptions, no construction materials or raw materials have been allowed to enter the Strip since June 14, 2007. Indeed, according to Amnesty International, only forty-one truckloads of construction materials were allowed to enter Gaza between the end of the Israeli offensive in mid-January 2009 and December 2009, although Gaza's industrial sector presently requires 55,000 truckloads of raw materials for needed reconstruction. Furthermore, in the year since they were banned, imports of diesel and petrol from Israel into Gaza for private or commercial use were allowed in small amounts only four times (although the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, periodically receives diesel and petrol supplies). By this past August, 90 percent of Gaza's total population was subject to scheduled electricity cuts of four to eight hours per day, while the remaining 10 percent had no access to any electricity, a reality that has remained largely unchanged.
Gaza's protracted blockade has resulted in the near total collapse of the private sector. At least 95 percent of Gaza's industrial establishments (3,750 enterprises) were either forced to close or were destroyed over the past four years, resulting in a loss of between 100,000 and 120,000 jobs. The remaining 5 percent operate at 20-50 percent of their capacity. The vast restrictions on trade have also contributed to the continued erosion of Gaza's agricultural sector, which was exacerbated by the destruction of 5,000 acres of agricultural land and 305 agricultural wells during the war. These losses also include the destruction of 140,965 olive trees, 136,217 citrus trees, 22,745 fruit trees, 10,365 date trees and 8,822 other trees.
Lands previously irrigated are now dry, while effluent from sewage seeps into the groundwater and the sea, making much of the land unusable. Many attempts by Gazan farmers to replant over the past year have failed because of the depletion and contamination of the water and the high level of nitrates in the soil. Gaza's agricultural sector has been further undermined by the buffer zone imposed by Israel on Gaza's northern and eastern perimeters (and by Egypt on Gaza's southern border), which contains some of the Strip's most fertile land. The zone is officially 300 meters wide and 55 kilometers long, but according to the UN, farmers entering within 1,000 meters of the border have sometimes been fired upon by the IDF. Approximately 30-40 percent of Gaza's total agricultural land is contained in the buffer zone. This has effectively forced the collapse of Gaza's agricultural sector.
These profound distortions in Gaza's economy and society will--even under the best of conditions--take decades to reverse. The economy is now largely dependent on public-sector employment, relief aid and smuggling, illustrating the growing informalization of the economy. Even before the war, the World Bank had already observed a redistribution of wealth from the formal private sector toward black market operators.
There are many illustrations, but one that is particularly startling concerns changes in the banking sector. A few days after Gaza was declared an enemy entity, Israel's banks announced their intention to end all direct transactions with Gaza-based banks and deal only with their parent institutions in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Accordingly, the Ramallah-based banks became responsible for currency transfers to their branches in the Gaza Strip. However, Israeli regulations prohibit the transfer of large amounts of currency without the approval of the Defense Ministry and other Israeli security forces. Consequently, over the past two years Gaza's banking sector has had serious problems in meeting the cash demands of its customers. This in turn has given rise to an informal banking sector, which is now controlled largely by people affiliated with the Hamas-led government, making Hamas Gaza's key financial middleman. Consequently, moneychangers, who can easily generate capital, are now arguably stronger than the formal banking system in Gaza, which cannot.
Another example of Gaza's growing economic informality is the tunnel economy, which emerged long ago in response to the siege, providing a vital lifeline for an imprisoned population. According to local economists, around two-thirds of economic activity in Gaza is presently devoted just to smuggling goods into (but not out of) Gaza. Even this lifeline may soon be diminished, as Egypt, apparently assisted by US government engineers, has begun building an impenetrable underground steel wall along its border with Gaza in an attempt to reduce smuggling and control the movement of people. At its completion the wall will be six to seven miles long and fifty-five feet deep.
The tunnels, which Israel tolerates in order to keep the siege intact, have also become an important source of income for the Hamas government and its affiliated enterprises, effectively weakening traditional and formal businesses and the rehabilitation of a viable business sector. In this way, the siege on Gaza has led to the slow but steady replacement of the formal business sector by a new, largely black-market sector that rejects registration, regulation or transparency and, tragically, has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
At least two new economic classes have emerged in Gaza, a phenomenon with precedents in the Oslo period: one has grown extremely wealthy from the black-market tunnel economy; the other consists of certain public-sector employees who are paid not to work (for the Hamas government) by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Hence, not only have many Gazan workers been forced to stop producing by external pressures, there is now a category of people who are being rewarded for their lack of productivity--a stark illustration of Gaza's increasingly distorted reality. This in turn has led to economic disparities between the haves and have-nots that are enormous and visible, as seen in the almost perverse consumerism in restaurants and shops that are the domain of the wealthy.
Gaza's economy is largely devoid of productive activity in favor of a desperate kind of consumption among the poor and the rich, but it is the former who are unable to meet their needs. Billions in international aid pledges have yet to materialize, so the overwhelming majority of Gazans remain impoverished. The combination of a withering private sector and stagnating economy has led to high unemployment, which ranges from 31.6 percent in Gaza City to 44.1 percent in Khan Younis. According to the Palestinian Chamber of Commerce, the de facto unemployment rate is closer to 65 percent. At least 75 percent of Gaza's 1.5 million people now require humanitarian aid to meet their basic food needs, compared with around 30 percent ten years ago. The UN further reports that the number of Gazans living in abject poverty--meaning those who are totally unable to feed their families--has tripled to 300,000, or approximately 20 percent of the population.
Access to adequate amounts of food continues to be a critical problem, and appears to have grown more acute after the cessation of hostilities a year ago. Internal data from September 2009 through the beginning of January 2010, for example, reveal that Israel allows Gazans no more (and at times less) than 25 percent of needed food supplies, with levels having fallen as low as 16 percent. During the last two weeks of January, these levels declined even more. Between January 16 and January 29 an average of 24.5 trucks of food and supplies per day entered Gaza, or 171.5 trucks per week. Given that Gaza requires 400 trucks of food alone daily to sustain the population, Israel allowed in no more than 6 percent of needed food supplies during this two-week period. Because Gaza needs approximately 240,000 truckloads of food and supplies per year to "meet the needs of the population and the reconstruction effort," according to the Palestinian Federation of Industries, current levels are, in a word, obscene. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program, "The evidence shows that the population is being sustained at the most basic or minimum humanitarian standard." This has likely contributed to the prevalence of stunting (low height for age), an indicator of chronic malnutrition, which has been pronounced among Gaza's children younger than 5, increasing from 8.2 percent in 1996 to 13.2 percent in 2006.
Gaza's agony does not end there. According to Amnesty International, 90-95 percent of the water supplied by Gaza's aquifer is "unfit for drinking." The majority of Gaza's groundwater supplies are contaminated with nitrates well above the acceptable WHO standard--in some areas six times that standard--or too salinated to use. Gaza no longer has any source of regular clean water. According to one donor account, "Nowhere else in the world has such a large number of people been exposed to such high levels of nitrates for such a long period of time. There is no precedent, and no studies to help us understand what happens to people over the course of years of nitrate poisoning," which is especially threatening to children. According to Desmond Travers, a co-author of the Goldstone Report, "If these issues are not addressed, Gaza may not even be habitable by World Health Organization norms."
It is possible that high nitrate levels have contributed to some shocking changes in the infant mortality rate (IMR) among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. IMR, widely used as an indicator of population health, has stalled among Palestinians since the 1990s and now shows signs of increasing. This is because the leading causes of infant mortality have changed from infectious and diarrheal diseases to prematurity, low birth weight and congenital malformations. These trends are alarming (and rare in the region), because infant mortality rates have been declining in almost all developing countries, including Iraq.
The people of Gaza know they have been abandoned. Some told me the only time they felt hope was when they were being bombed, because at least then the world was paying attention. Gaza is now a place where poverty masquerades as livelihood and charity as business. Yet, despite attempts by Israel and the West to caricature Gaza as a terrorist haven, Gazans still resist. Perhaps what they resist most is surrender: not to Israel, not to Hamas, but to hate. So many people still speak of peace, of wanting to resolve the conflict and live a normal life. Yet, in Gaza today, this is not a reason for optimism but despair.
ISRAEL’S UNDERMINING OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
Jeff Halper
The Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 was not merely a military assault on a primarily civilian population, impoverished and the victim of occupation and besiegement these past 42 years. It was also part of an ongoing assault on international humanitarian law by a highly coordinated team of Israeli lawyers, military officers, PR people and politicians, led by (no less) a philosopher of ethics. It is an effort coordinated as well with other governments whose political and military leaders are looking for ways to pursue “asymmetrical warfare” against peoples resisting domination and the plundering of their resources and labor without the encumbrances of human rights and current international law. It is a campaign that is making progress and had better be taken seriously by us all.
Since Ariel Sharon was indicted by a Belgian court in 2001 over his involvement in the Sabra and Chatila massacres, and Israel faced accusations of war crimes in the wake of its 2002 invasion of the cities of the West Bank, with its high toll in civilian casualties (some 500 people killed, 1500 wounded, more than 4000 arrested), hundreds of homes demolished and the urban infrastructure utterly destroyed, Israel has adopted a bold and aggressive strategy: alter international law so that non-state actors caught in a conflict with states and deemed by the states as “non-legitimate actors” (“terrorists,” “insurgents” and “non-state actors,” as well as the civilian population that supports them) can no longer claim protection from invading armies. The urgency of this campaign has been underscored by a series of notable setbacks Israel subsequently incurred at the hands of the UN. In 2004, at the request of the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that Israel’s construction of the wall inside Palestinian territory is “contrary to international law” and must be dismantled – a ruling adopted almost unanimously by the General Assembly, with only Israel, the US, Australia and a few Pacific atolls dissenting. In 2006, the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that “a significant pattern of excessive, indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force by the IDF against Lebanese civilians and civilian objects, failing to distinguish civilians from combatants and civilian objects from military targets,” together with the harsh criticism of the UN’s Goldstone Report on Gaza accusing the Israeli government and military again of targeting Palestinian civilians and causing disproportionate destruction, has made this campaign even more urgent.
Fortunately, it is an uphill battle. The thrust of “just war theory,” from which international humanitarian law (IHL) draws,
is to limit warfare, and in particular to regulate its conduct and scope. Wars between states should never be total wars between nations or peoples. Whatever happens to the two armies involved, whichever one wins or loses, whatever the nature of the battles or the extent of the casualties, the two nations, the two peoples, must be functioning communities at the war's end. The war cannot be a war of extermination or ethnic cleansing. And what is true for states is also true for state-like political bodies such as Hamas and Hezbollah, whether they practice terrorism or not. The people they represent or claim to represent are a people like any other. (Margalit and Walzer 2009)
Protecting the lives, property and human rights of civilians caught up in warfare from the power and impunity of states is especially relevant in our age when, as British General Rupert Smith (2005) tells us, modern warfare is rapidly moving away from the traditional inter-state model to what he calls a “new paradigm” – “war amongst the people” – in which “We fight amongst the people, not on the battlefield.” A more popular term used by military people, “asymmetrical warfare,” is perhaps more honest and revealing, since it highlights the vast power differential that exists between states and their militaries and the relative weakness of the non-state forces confronting them.
Now, the issue of adapting laws and ethical approaches coming out of traditional inter-state warfare to new forms of “asymmetrical warfare” is a legitimate and vital endeavor. As Judge Richard Goldstone indicated in the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (2009:5), “The Mission interpreted [its] mandate as requiring it to place the civilian population of the region at the centre of its concerns regarding the violations of international law.” Two prime issues of concern arise here: protecting all non-combatants finding themselves caught up in armed conflict, whether from state or non-state adversaries, and the degree to which non-state actors must be held accountable under IHL, no matter how just their cause may be. Thus the Goldstone Report, recognizing the limitations under which non-state actors operate, specified as well the obligation of Palestinian armed groups “to exercise care and take feasible precautions to protect the civilian population in Gaza from the inherent dangers of the military operations.”
Common sense and justice argue against a symmetry of responsibility between heavily armed and coordinated state-sponsored armies able to exert enormous force in order to exercise effective control over a territory and its people (Israel over the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in this case) and the military weakness, financial constraints and fundamental difficulties of non-state actors resisting oppression in either protecting their people or creating a neutral “battleground” separate from its civilian populations (as in the case of the Palestinians). Nonetheless, even a certain implied symmetry introduced by the Goldstone committee in which non-state actors possess legitimacy as “a side” is unacceptable to Israeli political and military leaders. This, despite the fact that, in 1960, the UN General Assembly’s Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples endorsed the right of peoples to self-determination and, by extension, their right to resist “alien subjugation, domination and exploitation” – again, with the obligations set out by the Goldstone Report. Nor is the notion thatstates and their armies should be significantly constrained in their military actions by IHL acceptable to Israeli decision-makers, political and military. They seek, therefore, to alter international law in ways that enable them – and by extension other states involved in “wars on terror” – to effectively pursue warfare amongst the people while eliminating both the legitimacy and protection enjoyed by their non-state foes.
This campaign is led by two Israeli figures: Asa Kasher, a professor of philosophy and “practical ethics” at Tel Aviv University, the author of the Israeli army’s Code of Conduct, and Major General Amos Yadlin, former head of the IDF’s National Defense College under whose auspices Kasher and his “team” formulated the Code of Conduct, and today the head of Military Intelligence. And, Kasher vigorously asserts, it is completely appropriate and understandable that Israelis should be leading it. “The decisive question,” he says,
is how enlightened countries conduct themselves. We in Israel are in a key position in the development of law in this field because we are on the front lines in the fight against terrorism. This is gradually being recognized both in the Israeli legal system and abroad. After the debate before the High Court of Justice on the issue of targeted killings there was no need to revise the document [on the ethics of fighting terrorism] that Yadlin and I drafted, even by one comma. What we are doing is becoming the law. These are concepts that are not purely legal, but also contain strong ethical elements.
The Geneva Conventions are based on hundreds of years of tradition of the fair rules of combat. They were appropriate for classic warfare, where one army fought another. But in our time the whole business of rules of fair combat has been pushed aside. There are international efforts underway to revise the rules to accommodate the war against terrorism. According to the new provisions, there is still a distinction between who can and cannot be hit, but not in the blatant approach which existed in the past. The concept of proportionality has also changed (quoted in Ha’aretz, Feb. 6, 2009; italics added)….
Customary international law accrues through an historic process. If states are involved in a certain type of military activity against other states, militias, and the like, and if all of them act quite similarly to each other, then there is a chance that it will become customary international law…. I am not optimistic enough to assume that the world will soon acknowledge Israel’s lead in developing customary international law. My hope is that our doctrine, give or take some amendments, will in this fashion be incorporated into customary international law in order to regulate warfare and limit its calamities (Kasher 2009:7).
In their assault on protections by IHL afforded to non-state actors and the populations that support them, Kasher and Yadlin go after two of the most fundamental principles of IHL: the Principle of Distinction and the Principle of Proportionality.
The Principle of Distinction, embodied in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their two Additional Protocols of 1977, lays down a hard-and-fast rule: civilians cannot be targeted by armies and, on the contrary, must be protected. Article 3 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “Persons taking no active part in the hostilities…shall in all circumstances be treated humanely….To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: violence to life and person…and outrages upon personal dignity.”
The Principle of Proportionality, embodied in the 1977 Protocols to the Fourth Geneva Conventions (to which neither the US nor Israel is a signatory, but which nevertheless, as customary law, binds them), considers it a war crime to intentionally attack a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. “The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians,” says Protocol I, Article 50 (3), “does not deprive the population of its civilian character.”
Undermining these principles is therefore a key to what Kasher and Yadlin (2005) put forward as their “new doctrine of military ethics.” It is based on privileging states in their conflicts with non-state actors and on giving them the authority to deem an adversary “terrorist,” a term lacking any agreed-upon definition in IHL and one which obviously removes any legitimacy non-state actors so labeled might otherwise have. Indeed, Kasher and Yadlin’s “Just War Doctrine of Fighting Terror” is grounded on a tendentious definition of “terrorism” custom-tailored to legitimizing state policies and actions. We define an “act of terror,” they (2005:2) write,
as an act, carried out by individuals or organizations, not on behalf of any state, for the purpose of killing or otherwise injuring persons, insofar as they are members of a particular population, in order to instill fear among the members of that population (‘terrorize’ them), so as to cause them to change the nature of the related regime or of the related government or of policies implemented by related institutions, whether for political or ideological (including religious) reasons.
By defining terrorism as “an act” carried out by an individual or organization, Kasher and Yadlin both de-contextualize and de-politicize the protracted struggles of non-state actors, including those of all peoples oppressed by state (and corporate) regimes. Although they admit a certain legitimacy to “guerilla warfare,” by reducing a popular struggle to a series of discrete acts, they make it possible to label an entire resistance movement “terrorist” purely on the basis of one or more particular acts, with no regard to its situation or the justness of its cause. Once this is done, it is easy to criminalize non-state resistance, since terrorism is, in Kasher’s words, “utterly immoral.” When, for example, Palestinians or the Hizbollah attack Israeli soldiers on active duty, Kasher refers to these acts as “kidnapping” rather than “capturing” them.
This very language and approach also has the effect of privileging state actors, since it implies that state actions are by definition legitimate and not “utterly immoral.” Even when a country is accused of war crimes, it is often able to justify its actions by “military necessity.” It is extremely difficult to actually sanction or punish a country for war crimes even when they are deemed to have occurred, and even when all this takes place, “war crimes” possess a different meaning than the type of criminalization applied to non-state actors. States may be sanctioned, but their existential legitimacy is not removed. Germany was judged as having committed horrendous war crimes during the Nazi era, and paid certain penalties, but that did not prevent it from rejoining the international community immediately after the war. Thus Kasher and Yadlin define an act as terror by its “purpose” of terrorizing a particular population without the slightest thought of applying that principle to Israel’s own policies and actions over its occupation of 42 years, despite exhaustive documentation of that terrorization.
Just how self-serving the tendentious use of the concept “terror” can be is evident in Israel’s own attempts to have the Iranian Revolutionary Guards declared a “terror organization,” even though, being an agent of a state, it would not fit into Kasher and Yadlin’s own “state/non-state” dichotomy. What, then, should prevent the international community from naming the IDF and various covert Israeli agencies such as the Mossad or the Shin Bet (the General Security Services) as “terror organizations”? The Goldstone Report itself concluded that Israel's offensive against Gaza during Operation Cast Lead was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” Cognizant of this contradiction, Kasher and Yadlin are careful to add a caveat: they define an act of terror as one carried out “not on behalf of any state.”
Having de-legitimized state-defined “acts of terrorism,” Kasher and Yadlin then go on to further legitimize state actions such as those taken by Israel against Hizbollah, Hamas or, indeed, all Palestinian resistance, by invoking “self-defense” – again, a claim which, according to Just War Theory and Article 51 of the UN Charter, only a state can make. In order to do so, they begin the narrative of events leading up to the attack on Gaza with what the “terrorist” organization alone had done, launching rockets on the town of Sderot and its vicinity. Nothing of the fact that the vast majority of Gazans are refugees from 1948, denied their right of return and deprived of all their properties and assets. Nothing of the occupation since 1967 and the deliberate de-development of the Gazan economy; nothing of the exclusion since 1989 of Gazan workers from the Israeli job market upon which they had been made dependent, and thus their subsequent impoverishment; nothing of the years of settlement in which 7000 Israelis lorded it over a million and a half Palestinians at a cost to the Palestinians of much in terms of their lives and livelihoods; nothing of the siege illegally imposed since 2006, or of the transformation of Gaza into the world’s largest open-air prison; nothing of the fact that until today much of the land of Gaza – and the sea – are off-limits to Palestinian farmers and fishermen; nothing of the fact that Gazans live in mud and sewage created by Israel’s wholesale destruction of their infrastructure; nothing of the wasted lives of the young people; nothing of the fact that Hamas observed an 18 month cease-fire and was willing to extend it, until Israel broke it on Nov. 4, 2008, setting off the rocket attacks. Nothing, in short, which would call into question whether the assault on Gaza was genuinely an act of self-defense.
Indeed, the process of de-contextualization is a prerequisite to the ethics Kasher offers as the basis of international morality, law, political practice and warfare. Rather than taking into account Israel’s four decades and more of occupation over Gaza and the West Bank, in which the Occupying Power may be said to have at least a modicum of responsibility for what transpires, Kasher instead bases his entire moral justification on what Israel has done over the years on a disembodied “double effect” principle, according to which, “when we are seeking a goal that is morally justified in and of itself, then it is also morally justified to achieve it, even if this may lead to undesirable consequences – on the condition that the undesirable consequences are unavoidable and unintentional, and that an effort was made to minimize their negative effects.” As if maintaining a belligerent occupation for almost a half century is unavoidable and unintentional, and Israel actually took steps to minimize its negative effects.
This, then, sets up a hierarchy of priorities – indeed, “obligations” on states – that turn IHL on its head. The Principle of Distinction cannot be honored, Kasher and Yadlin argue, because “terrorists do not play by the rules.” Nothing less is required than a fundamental “updating the concept of war.” “As we sought to try and formulate how to fight terror,” Yadlin (2004) writes,
we understood that we were in a different kind of war, where the laws and ethics of conventional war did not apply. It involves not only the asymmetry of tanks… The main asymmetry is in the values of the two societies involved in the conflict – in the rules they obey….
A new model of warfare - the counter-terrorism war - requires a new set of rules on how to fight it. The other side is fighting outside the rules and we have to create new ethical rules for the international law of armed conflict. The duty of the state is to defend its citizens. Any time a terrorist gets away because of concerns about collateral damage, we may be violating our main duty to protect our citizens. We look for alternatives so as not to cause collateral damage, or to cause the minimum amount of collateral damage, but the main obligation is to defend our citizens….
Thus, says Kasher, in an area such as the Gaza Strip in which the IDF does not have effective control, “the responsibility for distinguishing between terrorists and noncombatants is not placed upon [Israel’s] shoulders, since it is not the effective ruler.” Military commanders must thus place prime importance on achieving their military objectives, since this is what self-defense depends upon. Next in priority is protecting soldiers’ lives – indeed, Kasher and Yadlin define soldiers as “civilians in uniforms,” thereby eliding the principle of a state’s duty to protect its citizens with its deployment of trained and armed combatants sworn to pursue its military aims. Only then does the army have to worry about avoiding injury to civilian non-combatants. “Sending a soldier [to Gaza] to fight terrorists is justified,” writes Kasher, “but why should I force him to endanger himself much more than that so that the terrorist's neighbor isn't killed?” asks Kasher. “From the standpoint of the State of Israel, the neighbor is much less important. I owe the soldier more. If it's between the soldier and the terrorist's neighbor, the priority is the soldier. Any country would do the same.”
Kasher introduces a radically new principle of distinction – that in territories where it does not exercise effective control, a country does not bear the moral responsibility for properly separating between dangerous individuals and harmless ones (Kasher 2010) – as if simply asserting it lends it the necessary authority. And this is, in fact, the point. “If you do something for long enough,” says Colonel (res.) Daniel Reisner, former head of the IDF’s Legal Department, “the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries…. International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassinations thesis [that extra-judicial killings are permitted when it is necessary to stop a certain operation against the citizens of Israel and when the role played by the target is crucial to the operation] and we had to push it. Eight years later it is in the center of the bounds of legality” (quoted in Kearney 2010:29). Or, as Kasher (2010) puts it, “The more often Western states apply principles that originated in Israel to their own non-traditional conflicts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, then the greater the chance these principles have of becoming a valuable part of international law.”
Even the attempt to distinguish civilians from combatants was abandoned in the assault on Gaza. According to another report in Ha’aretz (3.2.10), “The Israel Defense Forces chose to risk civilians in Gaza in order to protect its soldiers during Operation Cast Lead, a high-ranking Israeli military officer told the British daily The Independent on Wednesday. The IDF officer claimed the traditional ‘means and intentions’ engagement principle – stating that a suspect must have both a weapon and a visible intent to use it before being fired at – was discarded during Israel's Gaza incursion in late 2008 and early 2009.”
Does that mean that states cannot engage in terrorism? This is a pretty bold claim. In fact, the non-state “terrorism from below” which so concerns Kasher and Yadlin pales in its horror when compared to “terrorism from above,” State Terrorism. In his book Death By Government (1994:13), R.J. Rummel points out that over the course of the 20th century about 170,000 innocent civilians were killed by non-state actors, a significant figure to be sure. But, he adds,
during the first eighty-eight years of this [20th] century, almost 170 million men, women and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people.
And that doesn’t include Zaire, Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, Saddam Hussein’s reign, the impact of UN sanctions on the Iraqi civilian population and other state-sponsored murders that occurred after Rummel compiled his figures. It also does not account for all the forms of State Terrorism that do not result in death: torture, imprisonment, repression, house demolitions, induced starvation, intimidation and all the rest.
“We do not deny,” Kasher (2009) concedes, “that a state can act for the purpose of killing persons in order to terrorize a population with the goal of achieving some political or ideological goal.” He then adds another crucial caveat:
However, when such acts are performed by on behalf of a state, or by some of its overt or covert agencies or proxies, we apply to the ensuing conflict moral, ethical and legal principles that are commonly held to pertain to ordinary international conflicts between states or similar political entities. In such a context, a state that killed numerous citizens of another state in order to terrorize its citizenry would be guilty of what is commonly regarded as a war crime [italics added].
Kasher’s caveat – “a state that killed numerous citizens of another state in order to terrorize its citizenry” – apparently means that states can neither be accused of terrorism nor held accountable for war crimes arising out of killing or terrorizing civilian populations such as the people of Gaza, since the latter are not citizens of another state.
As for the Principle of Proportionality, that, too, is a casualty of Kasher and Yadlin’s assault on IHL. Their alternative is what is known by the IDF as its Dahiya Doctrine. Coming out of the second Lebanon war of 2006, in which Israel destroyed the Hizbollah stronghold of Dahiya in Beirut, the Dahiya Doctrine states attacks against Israel will be deterred by “harming the civilian population to such an extent that it will bring pressure to bear on the enemy combatants […] through the damage and destruction of civilian and military infrastructures which necessitate long and expensive reconstruction actions which would crush the will of those who wish to act against Israel” (PCATI 2009). According to the Goldstone Report (2009:48),
The tactics used by Israeli military armed forces in the Gaza offensive are consistent with previous practices, most recently during the Lebanon war in 2006. A concept known as the Dahiya doctrine emerged then, involving the application of disproportionate force and the causing of great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, and suffering to civilian populations. The Mission concludes from a review of the facts on the ground that it witnessed for itself that what was prescribed as the best strategy appears to have been precisely what was put into practice.
It then goes on to quote the head of Israel’s Northern Command, Gen. Gadi Eisenkott: “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. […] This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.” But here again, it is the assertion of a new version of the principle that is important. Thus, declares Kasher, the Principle of Proportionality does not have to do with inflicting civilian injuries clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage, as the international community now thinks, but the exact opposite: “Proportionality is justifiability of the collateral damage on grounds of the military advantage gained” (Kasher 2010).
The upshot of Kasher and Yadlin’s “updating the concept of war” was clearly evident in the attack on Gaza. “When senior Israel Defense Forces officers are asked about the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians during the fighting in the Gaza Strip,” Ha’aretz (Feb.6, 2009) reported,
they almost all give the same answer: The use of massive force was designed to protect the lives of the soldiers, and when faced with a choice between protecting the lives of Israeli soldiers and those of enemy civilians under whose protection the Hamas terrorists are operating, the soldiers take precedence. The IDF's response to criticism does not sound improvised or argumentative…. And it operated there not only with the backing of the legal opinion of the office of the Military Advocate General, but also on the basis of ethical theory, developed several years ago, that justifies its actions.
Prof. Asa Kasher of Tel Aviv University, an Israel Prize laureate in philosophy, is the philosopher who told the IDF that it was possible. In a recent interview with Ha’aretz, Kasher said the army operated in accordance with a code of conduct developed about five years ago for fighting terrorism. “The norms followed by the commanders in Gaza were generally appropriate,” Kasher said. In Kasher's opinion there is no justification for endangering the lives of soldiers to avoid the killing of civilians who live in the vicinity of terrorists. According to Kasher, IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi “has been very familiar with our principles from the time the first document was drafted in 2003 to the present.”
Kasher's argument is that in an area such as the Gaza Strip in which the IDF does not have effective control, the overriding principle guiding the commanders is achieving their military objectives. Next in priority is protecting soldiers' lives, followed by avoiding injury to enemy civilians…. Prof. Kasher has strong, long-standing ties with the army. He drafted the IDF ethical code of conduct in the mid-1990's. In 2003 he and Maj. Gen Amos Yadlin, now the head of Military Intelligence, published an article entitled “The Ethical Fight Against Terror.” It justified the targeted assassination of terrorists, even at the price of hitting nearby Palestinian civilians. Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, who was the IDF Chief of Staff at the time, did not make the document binding, but Kasher says the ideas in the document were adopted in principle by Ya'alon and his successors. Kasher has presented them to IDF and Shin Bet security service personnel dozens of times.
Such arguments are also being taken up by “pro-Israeli” critics of IHL. Amichai Cohen (2010), for example, writing in the Global Law Forum of the neo-con Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, sums up Kasher and Yadlin’s argument succinctly (though marshalling numerous legal citations just as Kasher mobilizes ethical arguments): “The concept of proportionality permits military personnel to kill innocent civilians, provided that the intended targets of the operation are enemy forces and not civilians.”
And yet, when challenged, the philosophy, ethics and principled argumentation of Kasher and Yadlin dissipate, and one is found in the same kind of emotional and half-baked discourse that typifies shouting matches in bars or on the street. When, for example, Uri Avnery (2009) challenges Kasher’s reduction of the Gaza operation as merely a justified defensive reaction to “continued rocket attacks on Israel by the terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip,” Kasher (2009) retreats from his philosophical argumentation into personal attacks: “Nor is it a surprise,” he writes, “that Avnery does not want us to use the term ‘terrorists’ to describe the Palestinians – with whom he identifies – because of these negative moral connotations. He himself does not wish to be morally tainted as someone who identifies with terrorists.”
From here Kasher abandons intellectual analysis completely and descends into mere personal opinion and insupportable suppositions. “Some people claim that a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians would provide Israeli citizens with the best protection against rockets and missiles, suicide attacks, and other horrors of terrorism,” he begins:
It is true that a democratic state is required to seek peace agreements with neighboring states and peoples. However, the idea that it is possible to reach a political settlement with the Palestinians that would be upheld by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist organizations is quite doubtful. Even if we accepted the plausibility of such a claim, it is all but certain that rocket attacks on Israel would continue throughout the negotiations. In fact, they would likely increase. Leaving a state’s citizens vulnerable to persistent threat is not morally justified by the mere fact of ongoing negotiations. Nor can the fact that negotiations are taking place justify avoiding the last-resort option after all alternative courses of action have failed…. There are those who call on Israel to engage in direct negotiations with Hamas, in order to rid its citizens of the threats posed to them by rocket attacks and other kinds of terrorist activity. This argument warrants a similar response. From a moral standpoint, demanding that Israel engage in direct negotiations with a terrorist organization that does not recognize its right to exist cannot be justified (Kasher 2009. italics added).
Apparently this method is common when Israelis attempt to alter IHL in order to justify unjustifiable practices. A few years ago (April 15, 2005, p. 34) the Up Front weekend magazine of The Jerusalem Post published an interview with an Israeli “expert in international law” who, tellingly, chose to remain anonymous. This is what s/he said:
International law is the language of the world and it’s more or less the yardstick by which we measure ourselves today. It’s the lingua franca of international organizations. So you have to play the game if you want to be a member of the world community. And the game works like this. As long as you claim you are working within international law and you come up with a reasonable argument as to why what you are doing is within the context of international law, you’re fine. That’s how it goes. This is a very cynical view of how the world works. So, even if you’re being inventive, or even if you’re being a bit radical, as long as you can explain it in that context, most countries will not say you’re a war criminal.
This is serious stuff. We are in the midst of the second battle of Gaza, a campaign not only to refute and defame the UN’s Goldstone Report and sanitize Israel’s actions there but to change international humanitarian law in a way that protects the powerful states and their armies, while removing the fundamental rights of the world’s poor and downtrodden to resist. The stakes are high. What will happen to the Palestinians – or oppressed peoples everywhere – if Kasher & Co. succeed in striking the Principles of Distinction and Proportionality from international law? Imagine an entire world unprotected against occupation, invasions, exploitation and warehousing, a global Gaza. It would be a world that reflects current reality: everyone would be either an Israeli Jew, part of a privileged global minority whose main ethical responsibility is towards defending itself against “terrorists,” or a Palestinian, part of an impoverished, occupied majority with no control over its resources or its future, which nevertheless carries responsibility for the well-being and security of its violent “zero-tolerant” masters.
Standing on the ramparts of international law to guarantee its integrity should be an integral part of the struggle against oppression everywhere. If the people of Gaza can become fair game, so can any of us. In terms of vulnerability as well as solidarity, we are all, indeed, Palestinians. If IHL needs to be altered to take into account the rise of non-state actors in international conflicts – and here we should note the increased use of “outsourced” private military contractors by states and corporations, the emergence of “failed states,” many of which combine state apparatus with criminal activity, and even the role played by NGOs – then it must be done in a way that continues to protect civilians and oppressed peoples against states, often their own. Kasher and Yadlin’s assault on IHL, sponsored and legitimized by the Israeli government “in the name of” other states engaged in so-called wars of terrorism, threatens to give powerful governments, their militaries and allied corporations a free hand in bringing about a global “order” friendly to their interests at the expense of the world’s peoples.
Given what Michael Klare calls “the new landscape of global conflict” – state-initiated resource wars (initiated or fueled, it must be noted, primarily by the powerful democratic states which control the global economic system and account for more than 80 percent of the world’s arms trade, whose revenues reached $1.46 trillion in 2008) – the prospect of states free of the constraints of IHL should give us all pause. For, as it turns out, the sites of future wars are largely in the very areas where people – framed as “terrorists” – are resisting the plundering of their resources, neo-colonialism and their own permanent warehousing. These sites, Klare (2001) tells us,
will be places that harbor particularly abundant supplies of vital materials – oil, water, diamonds, minerals, old-growth timber – along with supply routes that connect these areas to major markets around the world. These regions will command attention from the media, dominate the deliberations of international policy makers, and invite the heaviest concentrations of military power…. [They comprise] a wide band of territory straddling the equator.
Israel’s attempt to globalize its legal, moral, political and military justifications for what it did – and continues to do – in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon should concern us all. Just as Israel used Gaza as a laboratory for tactics and weapons of “counterinsurgency” and urban warfare, so, too, is it attempting to export its “new doctrines” in a way that fundamentally compromises the well-being of people caught in conflicts worldwide. As (Kasher and Yadlin 2005:4) write explicitly,
the proposed principles are meant to be justified and practically applicable under any parallel circumstances. Moreover, those principles are intended to be universal in an additional crucial sense…. The different defense agencies of a democratic state that faces terror should follow principles that rest on universal moral grounds and on the professional and organizational ethical grounds related to each of those state agencies on its own, be it military, regular police, combat police or preventive intelligence.
In this sense, everyone resisting oppression is a Palestine. The stakes involved in losing this second battle of Gaza are high indeed. A “globalized Gaza” imperils us all.
References
Avnery, Uri 2009 Operation Cast Lead and Just War Theory. Azure 38 (Autumn.
Cohen, Amichai 2010 Proportionality in Modern Asymmetrical Wars. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
Kasher, Asa 2010 A Moral Evaluation of the Gaza War – Operation Cast Lead. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs Brief 9(18).
---- 2009 Respnse to Uri Avnery. Azure 38 (Autumn).
---- 2009 Operation Cast Lead and the Ethics of Just War. Azure 37:43-75
Kasher, Asa and Amos Yadlin 2006 The Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: Principles.” Philosophia 34.
---- 2005 Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: An Israeli Perspective. Journal of Military Ethics 4(1):3-32.
---- 2005 Assassination and Preventive Killing. SAIS Review 25(1):41-57.
---- 2003 Ethical Counterterrorism.
Kearney, Michael 2010 Lawfare, Legitimacy, and Resistance: The Weak and The Law. ms.
Klare, Michael T. 2001 Resource Wars. New York: Henry Holt.
Margalit, Avishai and Michael Walzer 2009 Israel: Civilians and Combatants. New York Review of Books 56(8). (May 14).
McMahan, Jeff 2009 Killing in War. New York: Oxford University Press.
The Middle East Project 2009 Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A Re-assessment of Israel’s Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Under International Law. Capetown: Human Sciences Research Council.
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) 2009 No Second Thoughts: The Changes in the Israeli Defense Forces’ Combat Doctrine in Light of “Operation Cast Lead.” Jerusalem.
Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (“Goldstone Report”) 2009 Geneva: Human Rights Council.
Siboni, Gabriel 2008 Disproportionate Force: Israel’s Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War INSS Insight 74.
Smith, Rupert 2005 The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World. New York: Vintage Books.
Yadlin, Amos 2004 Ethical Dilemmas in Fighting Terrorism. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs Brief 4(8).
Rabbinic Letter to Goldstone: ‘your report is a clarion call to Israel and the Jewish people to awaken from the slumber of denial and return to the path of peace.’
April 21, 2010
Dear Judge Goldstone,
As rabbis from diverse traditions and locations, we want to extend our warmest mazel tov to you as an elder in our community upon the bar mitzvah of your grandson. Bar and Bat Mitzvah is a call to conscience, a call to be responsible for the welfare of others, a call to fulfill the covenant of peace and justice articulated in our tradition.
As rabbis, we note the religious implications of the report you authored. We are reminded of Shimon Ben Gamliel's quote, "The world stands on three things: justice, truth, and peace as it says ‘Execute the judgment of truth, and justice and peace will be established in your gates’ (Zekharya 8:16)." We affirm the truth of the report that bears your name.
We are deeply saddened by the controversy that has grown up around the issuing of the report. We affirm your findings and believe you set up an impeccable standard that provides strong evidence that Israel engaged in war crimes during the assault on Gaza that reveal a pattern of continuous and systematic assault against Palestinian people and land that has very little to do with Israel's claim of security. Your report made clear the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructures such as hospitals, schools, agricultural properties, water and sewage treatment centers and civilians themselves with deadly weapons that are illegal when used in civilian
centers.
This is the ugly truth that is so hard for many Jewish people to face. Anyone who spends a day in Palestinian territories sees this truth immediately.
Judge Goldstone, we want to offer you our deepest thanks for upholding the principles of justice, compassion and truth that are the heart of Jewish religion and without which our claims to Jewishness are empty of meaning. We regret that your findings have led to controversy and caused you not to feel welcome at your own grandson's Bar Mitzvah. We believe your report is a clarion call to Israel and the Jewish people to awaken from the slumber of denial and return to the path of peace.
Rabbi Everett Gendler
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb
Rabbi Brant Rosen
Rabbi Brian Walt
Rabbi Haim Beliak
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Rabbi Michael Feinberg
Rabbi Shai Gluskin
Rabbi David Shneyer
Rabbi David Mivassair
Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman
Rabbi Douglas Krantz
Rabbi Margaret Holub
Rabbi Rebecca Alpert
Rabbi Mordecai Liebling
Rabbi Phyllis Berman
Rabbi Zev-Hayyim Feyer
Rabbi Eyal Levinson
Rabbi Doron Isaacs
More names added:
Rabbi Gershon Steinberg-Caudill
Rabbi Erin Hirsh
Rabbi Michael Rothbaum
Rabbi Benjamin Barnett
Rabbi Julie Greenberg
Rabbi Linda Holtzman
Rabbi Ayelet S.Cohen
Rabbi Jeffrey Marker
Rabbi Nina H.Mandel
Rabbi Victor Reinstein
Details of Gaza blockade revealed in court case
By Tim Franks
BBC News, Jerusalem
BBC News has seen documents, submitted to an Israeli Court, which give more detail than ever before about how and why Israel maintains its Gaza blockade.
In one document, Israel describes the import curbs as "a central pillar in the armed conflict with Hamas".
It also confirms estimates were made of how many calories Gazans need, but says these were not used for policy-making.
Israel says the blockade is to pressure Hamas, which does not recognise Israel and backs attacks on its citizens.
Three years ago, after the Islamist Hamas movement seized power, Israel and Egypt tightened their closure of Gaza's borders, leaving the territory's 1.5 million inhabitants facing acute shortages.
But Israel has never published a list of banned items, saying it approves requests on a case-by-case basis.
Items allowed have changed over time, which has left humanitarian organisations and commercial importers constantly attempting to guess what will be approved.
The court case has been brought by the Israeli human rights group, Gisha.
The group has been trying, for more than a year, using freedom of information legislation, to squeeze information from the state about what exactly is allowed for import to Gaza, and why.
GOODS ALLOWED INTO GAZA Canned meat and tuna, but not canned fruit Mineral water, but not fruit juice Sesame paste (tahini) but not jam Tea and coffee but not chocolate Download the full list [89.9 KB] Most computers will open this document automatically, but you may need Adobe Reader |
In January, Gisha, took the Israeli authorities to court, to try to force them to provide the information.
Gisha's director, Sari Bashi, says she is no security expert, "but preventing children from receiving toys, preventing manufacturers from getting raw materials - I don't see how that's responsive to Israeli security needs."
And she says that some of the prohibitions appear to be absurdly arbitrary: "I certainly don't understand why cinnamon is permitted, but coriander is forbidden. Is there something more dangerous about coriander? Is coriander more critical to Gaza's economy than cinnamon? This is a policy that appears to make no sense."
She argues that if there is a logic behind such decisions, the military should reveal what it is.
'Conflict against Hamas'
Now, after several months' waiting, the state has given its response to the court, in a written submission, seen by the BBC.
It throws a small pool of light on the process behind the blockade.
The overall rationale is set out, in bold type: "The limitation on the transfer of goods is a central pillar in the means at the disposal of the State of Israel in the armed conflict between it and Hamas."
The Israeli authorities also confirm the existence of four documents related to how the blockade works: how they process requests for imports into Gaza, how they monitor the shortages within Gaza, their approved list of what is allowed in, and a document entitled "Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip - Red Lines" which sets out the minimum calorie intake needed by Gaza's million and a half inhabitants, according to their age and sex.
This paper was however, the state insists, just a draft power-point presentation, used for "internal planning work", which "never served as a basis for the policy of the authority".
But while the first three documents promise a great deal of detail, that detail is not delivered.
In each case, the state argues that disclosure of what is allowed in and why would, in their words, "damage national security and harm foreign relations".
It offers, instead, to reveal the contents of the documents to the court in a private session with the judge.
'Collective punishment'
The lack of clarity causes immense frustration not just among Gazans, but among aid groups, diplomats, and the United Nations - which has described Israel's blockade as "collective punishment"
The problem, they say, is not just the shortages themselves, but the unpredictability and changing nature of what is permitted for import.
Israeli officials have said, in the past, that they are concerned that building materials in particular could be misappropriated by Hamas for military ends.
But some Israeli commentators - even those who advocate a tough stance against Hamas - say that the strategy behind the much wider blockade is ill-defined, and harmful to Israel's international standing.
The BBC has received information from reliable sources that there are currently 81 items that are approved for import - from kidney beans to tinned meat - and as of March, shoes.
Among the large range of goods currently forbidden are jam, chocolate, wood for furniture, fruit juice, textiles, and plastic toys.
The 13-page submission by the Israeli authorities to the Tel Aviv District Court raises more questions than it answers.
It does set the context for the blockade: in what Israel considers to be its existential conflict with Hamas.
But it will not satisfy those noisily calling for Israel to be more open about one of its most contentious policies.
1 opmerking:
Hello Everybody,
My name is Mrs Sharon Sim. I live in singapore and i am a happy woman today? and i told my self that any lender that rescue my family from our poor situation, i will refer any person that is looking for loan to him, he gave me happiness to me and my family, i was in need of a loan of $250,000.00 to start my life all over as i am a single mother with 3 kids I met this honest and GOD fearing man loan lender that help me with a loan of $250,000.00 U.S. Dollar, he is a GOD fearing man, if you are in need of loan and you will pay back the loan please contact him tell him that is Mrs Sharon, that refer you to him. contact Dr Purva Pius,via email:(urgentloan22@gmail.com)Thank you
Een reactie posten