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Peace, not Apartheid, in Israel
Israelis Adopt
What South Africa Dropped
By John Dugard 30/11/2006
Former President Jimmy Carter's new book, " Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," is
igniting controversy for its allegation that Israel practices a form of
apartheid.
As a South African and former anti-apartheid advocate who visits the
Palestinian territories regularly to assess the human rights situation
for the U.N. Human Rights Council, the comparison to South African
apartheid is of special interest to me.
On the face of it, the two regimes are very different. Apartheid was a
system of institutionalized racial discrimination that the white
minority in South Africa employed to maintain power over the black
majority. It was characterized by the denial of political rights to
blacks, the fragmentation of the country into white areas and black
areas (called Bantustans) and by the imposition on blacks of
restrictive measures designed to achieve white superiority, racial
separation and white security.
The "pass system," which
sought to prevent the free movement of blacks and to restrict their
entry to the cities, was rigorously enforced. Blacks were forcibly "relocated," and they were denied
access to most public amenities and to many forms of employment. The
system was enforced by a brutal security apparatus in which torture
played a significant role.
The Palestinian territories — East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza —
have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Although
military occupation is tolerated and regulated by international law, it
is considered an undesirable regime that should be ended as soon as
possible. The United Nations for nearly 40 years has condemned Israel
's military occupation, together with colonialism and apartheid, as
contrary to the international public order.
In principle, the purpose of military occupation is different from that
of apartheid. It is not designed as a long-term oppressive regime but
as an interim measure that maintains law and order in a territory
following an armed conflict and pending a peace settlement. But this is
not the nature of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Since 1967
Israel has imposed its control over the Palestinian territories in the
manner of a colonizing power, under the guise of occupation. It has
permanently seized the territories' most desirable parts — the holy
sites in East Jerusalem, Hebron and Bethlehem and the fertile
agricultural lands along the western border and in the Jordan Valley —
and settled its own Jewish "colonists"
throughout the land.
Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories has many features of
colonization. At the same time it has many of the worst characteristics
of apartheid. The West Bank has been fragmented into three areas -north
(Jenin and Nablus), center (Ramallah) and south (Hebron) - which
increasingly resemble the Bantustans of South Africa.
Restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by a rigid permit system
enforced by some 520 checkpoints and roadblocks resemble, but in
severity go well beyond, apartheid's "pass
system." And the security apparatus is reminiscent of that of
apartheid, with more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons and
frequent allegations of torture and cruel treatment.
Many aspects of Israel 's occupation surpass those of the apartheid
regime. Israel's large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling
of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations
of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South
Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites.
Following the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, one might expect a
similarly concerted international effort united in opposition to Israel
's abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians. Instead one finds an
international community divided between the West and the rest of the
world. The Security Council is prevented from taking action because of
the U.S. veto and European Union abstinence. And the United States and
the European Union, acting in collusion with the United Nations and the
Russian Federation, have in effect imposed economic sanctions on the
Palestinian people for having, by democratic means, elected a
government deemed unacceptable to Israel and the West. Forgotten is the
commitment to putting an end to occupation, colonization and apartheid.
In these circumstances, the United States should not be surprised if
the rest of the world begins to lose faith in its commitment to human
rights. Some Americans — rightly — complain that other countries are
unconcerned about Sudan 's violence-torn Darfur region and similar
situations in the world. But while the United States itself maintains a
double standard with respect to Palestine it cannot expect cooperation
from others in the struggle for human rights.
John Dugard is a South
African law professor teaching in the Netherlands .
He is currently Special Rapporteur (reporter) on Palestine to the
United Nations Human Rights Council.
Does
It Matter What You Call It?
KATHLEEN and BILL
CHRISTISON , 27.11.2006
Genocide
or Erasure of Palestinians
During an appearance in late October on Ireland's Pat Kenny radio show,
a popular national program broadcast daily on Ireland's RTE Radio, we
were asked as the opening question if Israel could be compared to Nazi
Germany. Not across the board, we said, but there are certainly some
aspects of Israel's policy toward the Palestinians that bear a clear
resemblance to the Nazis' oppression. Do you mean the wall, Kenny
prompted, and we agreed, describing the ghettoization and other effects
of this monstrosity. Before we could elaborate on other Nazi-like
features of Israel's policies, Kenny moved on to another question.
Within minutes, while we were still on the air, a producer handed Kenny
a note, which we later learned was a request from the newly arrived
Israeli ambassador to Ireland to appear on the show, by himself.
Several days later, on the air by himself, the ambassador pronounced us
and our comparisons of Israeli and Nazi policies "outrageous."
What else? We were not surprised or disturbed by his outrage. We had
just spent two weeks in the West Bank witnessing the oppression, and it
was a sure bet that, even had he not been fulfilling his role as
propagandist for Israel, the ambassador would not have known the first
thing about the Palestinian situation in the West Bank because he had
most likely not set foot there in any recent year. In retrospect, we
regret not having used even stronger language. Having at that point
just completed our fifth trip to Palestine since early 2003, we should
have had the courage and the insight to call what we have observed
Israel doing to the Palestinians by its rightful name: genocide.
We have long played with words about this, labeling Israel's policy "ethnocide," meaning the attempt to
destroy the Palestinians as a people with a specific ethnic identity.
Others who dance around the subject use terms like "politicide" or, a new invention, "sociocide," but neither of these
terms implies the large-scale destruction of people and identity that
is truly the Israeli objective.
"Genocide" -- defined by the UN Convention as the intention "to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial, or religious group" -- most aptly
describes Israel's efforts, akin to the Nazis', to erase an entire
people.
In fact, it matters little what you call it, so long as it is
recognized that what Israel intends and is working toward is the
erasure of the Palestinian people from the Palestine landscape. Israel
most likely does not care about how systematic its efforts at erasure
are, or how rapidly they proceed, and in these ways it differs from the
Nazis. There are no gas chambers; there is no overriding urgency. Gas
chambers are not needed. A round of rockets on a residential housing
complex in the middle of the night here, a few million cluster bomblets
or phosphorous weapons there can, given time, easily meet the UN
definition above.
Children shot to death sitting in school classrooms here, families
murdered while tilling their land there; agricultural land stripped and
burned here, farmers cut off from their land there; little girls
riddled with bullets here, infants beheaded by shell fire there; a
little massacre here, a little starvation there; expulsion here, denial
of entry and families torn apart there; dispossession is the name of
the game. With no functioning economy, dwindling food supplies, medical
supply shortages, no way to move from one area to another, no access to
a capital city, no easy access to education or medical care, no civil
service salaries, the people will die, the nation will die without a
single gas chamber. Or so the Israelis hope.
Surrender vs. Resistance
A major part of the Israeli scheme -- apart from the outright land
expropriation, national fragmentation, and killing that are designed to
strangle and destroy the Palestinian people -- is to so discourage the
Palestinians psychologically that they will simply leave voluntarily --
if they have the money -- or give up in abject surrender and agree to
live quietly in small enclaves under the Israeli thumb. You wonder
sometimes if the Israelis are not succeeding in this bit of
psychological warfare, as they are succeeding in tightening their
physical stranglehold on territory in the West Bank and Gaza. Overall,
we do not believe they have yet brought the Palestinians to this point
of psychological surrender, although the breaking point for
Palestinians appears nearer than ever before.
The anger and depression, even despair, in Palestine are palpable these
days, far worse than we have previously encountered. We met two
Palestinians so discouraged that they are preparing to leave, in one
case uprooting family from a Muslim village where roots go back
centuries. The other case is a Christian young person, also from an old
family, who sees no prospects for herself or anyone and who feels
betrayed by her Catholic Church for having abandoned Palestine's
Christians. She would rather just be elsewhere. A Palestinian pollster
who has tracked attitudes toward emigration recently reported that the
proportion of people thinking about leaving has jumped from about 20
percent, where it has long hovered, to 32 percent in a recent poll,
largely because of despair arising from intra-Palestinian factional
fighting and from Hamas' inability to govern thanks to crippling
Israeli, U.S., and European sanctions.
Nothing like one-third of Palestinians will ultimately leave or even
attempt to leave, but the trend in attitudes clearly points to the kind
of despair that is afflicting much of Palestine. One thoughtful
Palestinian writer with whom we spent an evening feels so defeated and
so oppressed by Israeli restrictions that he thinks Hamas should
abandon its principled stand and agree to recognize Israel's right to
exist, in the hope that this concession might induce the Israelis to
lift some of the innumerable restrictions on Palestinian life, end the
military siege on Palestinian territories and the land theft, and in
general ease the day-to-day misery that Palestinians endure under
occupation. Asked if he thought such a major Hamas concession would
actually bring meaningful Israeli concessions, he said no, but perhaps
it would ease the misery a little. It was clear he holds out no great
hope. His village's land is gradually disappearing underneath the
separation wall and expanding Israeli settlements.
We met westerners who have lived in the West Bank, working on behalf of
the Palestinians for various NGOs for a decade and more, who are
planning to leave out of frustration at seeing the situation worsen
year after year and their own work increasingly go for naught. Many
other western human rights workers and educators, particularly at
venerable institutions like the Friends' School in Ramallah and Bir
Zeit University, are being denied visas by the Israelis as part of
their deliberate campaign to keep out foreign passport holders,
including thousands of ethnic Palestinians who have lived in the West
Bank with their families and worked for years. The Israeli campaign to
deny residency and re-entry permits is a deliberate attempt at ethnic
cleansing, a hope that if a husband or wife is barred, he or she will
remove the rest of the family and Israel will have fewer Palestinians
to deal with. In addition, the entry denial campaign targets in
particular anyone, Palestinian or international, who might bring a
measure of business prosperity to the Palestinian territories, or
education, or medical assistance, or humanitarian assistance.
The campaign against foreigners who might help the Palestinians or bear
witness for them became particularly vicious in mid-November when a
19-year-old Swedish volunteer with the International Solidarity
Movement escorting Palestinian children to school was brutally attacked
by Israeli settlers in Hebron as Israeli soldiers watched. The young
woman, Tove Johansson, was walking through an Israeli army checkpoint
with several other volunteers when they were set upon by a group of
approximately 100 settlers chanting, "We killed Jesus, we'll kill you
too!" A settler hit Johansson in the face with a broken bottle,
breaking her cheekbone, and as she lay bleeding on the ground, the
settlers cheered and clapped and took pictures of themselves posing
next to her. The Israeli soldiers briefly questioned three settlers but
made no arrests and conducted no investigation. In fact, they
threatened the international volunteers with arrest if they did not
leave the area immediately. The assault was so raw and brutal that
Amnesty International issued an alert warning internationals to beware
of settler attacks. The U.S. media have not seen fit to report the
incident, which was clearly part of a longstanding effort to discourage
witnesses to Israeli atrocities and deprive Palestinians of any
protection against the atrocities.
Palestinian resistance does figure in this dismal story. In the same
small village where one of our acquaintances is uprooting his family,
others are building, building small homes and multi-story apartment
buildings, simply as a sign of resistance. International human rights
volunteers are still trying to reach the West Bank and Gaza to assist
Palestinians. When we told one Palestinian friend about our
conversation with the writer who wants Hamas to concede Israel's right
to exist, his immediate reaction was
"absolutely not." He is himself a secular Muslim, a Fatah
supporter, does not like Hamas and did not vote for Hamas in last
January's legislative elections, but he fully supports Hamas's refusal
to recognize Israel's right to exist until Israel recognizes the right
of the Palestinian people to exist as a nation. "Why should I recognize you until you get
out of my garden?" he wondered.
Our friend Ahmad's views reflect the general feeling among
Palestinians: a poll conducted in September by a Palestinian polling
organization found that 67 percent of Palestinians do not think Hamas
should recognize Israel in order to satisfy Israeli and international
demands, while almost the same proportion, 63 percent, would support
recognizing Israel if this came as part of a peace agreement in which a
Palestinian state was established -- in other words, if Israel also
recognized the Palestinians as a nation. Surrender is not yet on the
horizon.
On the possibility of pulling up stakes and leaving Palestine, Ahmad
was equally adamant. "Why should I
leave and then have to fight to get back later? Empires never last." He
mentioned the Turks and the British and the Soviets, "and the Americans and the Israelis won't
last either. It may take a long time, but we can wait." He was
angrier than we have ever previously seen him, and more uncompromising
-- and with good reason: the separation wall is now within a few yards
of his home and demolition is threatened. Ahmad and some neighbors have
been fighting the wall's advance in court and succeeded in stopping it
for over a year, but construction is moving ahead again. He already has
to drive miles out of his way to skirt the wall on his way to work and
will be able to exit only on foot when the wall is completed --
assuming his house is not demolished altogether.
But he is not giving up. He thinks suicide bombers are "a piece of shit," but he believes
the Palestinians have to resist in some way, if only by throwing
stones, and he sees some kind of explosion in the offing. If
Palestinians do nothing at all, he said, "the Israelis will just relax" and
will feel no pressure to cease the oppression. Palestinians everywhere
are keeping up the pressure. Haaretz correspondent Gideon Levy
described a cloth banner displayed in Beit Hanoun immediately after
Israel's devastation of that small Gaza city during the first week in
November. "Kill, destroy, crush --
you won't succeed in breaking us," declared the banner.
Palestinians in Beit Hanoun, as well as throughout Gaza and the West
Bank, have been putting up resistance to their own incompetent,
quisling leadership, as well as to Israel. It has not escaped the
notice of the Palestinian man in the street that, while Israel
slaughters men, women, and children in Beit Hanoun and continues its
march across the West Bank, Palestinian Authority President Mamhud
Abbas has been cooperating with the U.S. and Israel to undermine the
democratically elected Hamas government. The U.S. is arming and
training a militia that will protect Abbas' and Fatah's narrow
factional interests against Hamas' fighters, in what can only be termed
an open coup attempt against the legally constituted Palestinian
government.
Few Palestinians, even Fatah supporters, condone this U.S. interference
or Abbas' traitorous acquiescence. "Fatah
are thieves," a local leader who is a Fatah member himself told
us. "Hamas won because we wanted to
get rid of the thieves." He thinks that if there were an
election today, "ordinary people"
-- by which he means people not associated with either Fatah or Hamas
-- would win. In each house, he said, "we
find one son with Hamas, another son with Fatah, so how is a father
going to support one or the other?" It is perhaps this knowledge
that they cannot fight each other without destroying the nuclear and
the broader Palestinian family, and that they must not succumb to
Israeli and U.S. schemes to fragment Palestinian society, that have
motivated the intensive Palestinian efforts to achieve some kind of
unity government.
Around the West Bank
In Bil'in, the small town west of Ramallah that has seen a non-violent
protest against the wall by Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals
every Friday for almost two years, the village leader, Ahmad Issa
Yassin, talked about the lesson his youngest son learned after being
arrested last year at age 14 in an Israeli raid. "He is more courageous now, more ready to
resist," Yassin said. "So am
I."
We first met this boy a few months before his arrest, a particularly
friendly young man with a sweet smile. He greeted us again this year
with another warm smile and bantered with us as we took his picture. He
gave no hint of having spent two months in one of Israel's worst
prisons or of the horror of having been arrested in a Nazi-style
middle-of-the-night raid. Perhaps he threw stones at the Israeli
soldiers who converge on his village at least once a week and respond
to non-violent protests with live ammunition, rubber bullets, teargas,
concussion grenades, and batons. This boy was no terrorist. On the
other hand, the Israelis may have turned him into a young man willing
to fight terror with terror a few years from now.
Yassin walked us to his olive grove, half destroyed, on the other side
of the wall. The Israelis allow the villagers access to lands that now
lie on Israel's side of the wall, but there is only one gate, manned by
Israeli soldiers who may or may not bestir themselves to open it. The
villagers' names are all on a list of Palestinians authorized to pass
through the gate. At this particular village, one of many whose lands
have been cut off from the village, protesters have established an
outpost or, as they call it, a "settlement"
on the Israeli side to stake a claim to the land for the village even
though it now lies on Israel's side in the path of an expanding Israeli
settlement. The Palestinian "settlement"
consists of a small building, a tent where a couple of activists
maintain a constant vigil, and a soccer field for a bit of normality.
Yassin took us uphill on a dirt path running alongside the wall, which
in this rural area consists of an electronic fence, a dirt patrol road
on each side where footprints can be picked up, a paved patrol road on
the Israeli side, and coils of razor wire on each side -- encompassing
altogether an area about 50 meters wide, where olive groves once stood.
We waited at the gate in the electronic fence while Yassin called
several times to the Israeli soldiers, whom we could see lounging under
a tent canopy on a nearby hillside. When they finally came to the gate,
they checked Yassin's name against their list of permitees, recorded
our names and passport numbers, and officiously warned us against
taking pictures in this "military
zone." As we made our way across country to the Bil'in outpost,
Yassin pointed out olive trees burned and uprooted by Israelis and, at
the outpost right next to the stump of a tree that had been cut down, a
new tree sprouting from the old one.
We talked for a while with a Palestinian activist from the village and
a young British activist who had both been sleeping late into the
morning, after enjoying a Ramadan meal, the Iftar, late the night
before. When we returned to the gate, the Israeli soldiers were even
slower arriving to open it, obviously totally bored with their duty.
The following Friday at the weekly protest, they enjoyed a little more
excitement as protesters managed to erect ladders to scale the fence.
The soldiers responded with batons and teargas.
The resistance goes on, but so does the Israeli encroachment. We took
away with us two striking impressions: the little olive tree being
carefully nurtured as a sign of renewal and resistance, and in the near
distance the constant sound of bulldozers and earth-clearing equipment
working on the Israeli settlement of Modiin Illit, being built on the
lands of Bil'in and other neighboring villages.
Elsewhere, signs of the Israeli advance override the continuing signs
of Palestinian resistance. In the small village of Wadi Fuqin southwest
of Bethlehem, a beautiful village sitting in a narrow, fertile valley
between ridge lines that is being squeezed on one side by the wall,
still to be constructed, and on the other by the already large and
rapidly expanding Israeli settlement of Betar Illit, we saw more
destruction. The settlement is dumping vast tonnages of construction
debris down onto the village, so that its fields are gradually being
swallowed. This was more evident this year than when we visited last
year. The settlement's sewage often overflows onto village land through
sewage pipes evident high up on the hillside. Israeli settlers swagger
through the village increasingly, as if it were theirs, swimming in the
many irrigation pools that are fed by natural springs dating back to
Roman times.
In the village of Walaja, not far away to the north, nearer Jerusalem,
Ahmad took us to visit friends of his. The village is scheduled to be
surrounded completely by the wall because it sits near the Green Line
in the midst of a cluster of Israeli settlements. We sat in a garden of
fruit trees with a family whose house is on a hill overlooking a
spectacular valley and hills beyond. Jerusalem sits on another hill in
the distance. We commented that, except for the Israeli settlements
across the valley, the place is like paradise, but our host responded
with a cynical laugh that actually it is hell. Even beautiful scenery
loses its appeal when one is trapped and surrounded.
In another encircled village that we visited last year, Nu'man, the
approximately 200 residents are also trapped between the wall, now
completed, on one side and the advancing settlement of Har Homa, which
covets the village land, on the other. Although last year, with the
wall incomplete, we could drive in, this year we were denied entry at
the one gate in. With Ahmad, we tried to talk to four obviously
intimidated young Palestinian men waiting across the patrol road from
the gate to gain entry to their homes, but the Israeli soldiers told
them not to talk to us; one of them said a few words to Ahmad but never
took his eyes off the Israeli guardpost. We drove off and left them to
their plight. We could have tried to get to the village with an arduous
cross-country walk, but we did not.
"Grand" Terminals
With the near completion of the separation wall, the Israelis have
systematized the West Bank prison. Since August 2005, the number of
checkpoints throughout the West Bank has risen 40 percent, from 376 to
528, according to OCHA, the UN Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs, which carefully tracks the numbers and types of
Israeli checkpoints, as well as other aspects of the Israeli
stranglehold on the Palestinians. As part of the systematization, a
series of elaborate terminals now manage the humiliation of
Palestinians at major checkpoints, particularly around Jerusalem. The
terminals are huge cages resembling cattle runs, which direct foot
traffic in snaking lines that double back and forth. At the end of the
line are a series of turnstiles, x-ray machines, conveyor belts, and
other accoutrements of heavy security. Any Palestinian entering
Jerusalem from the West Bank to work, to visit family, to pray at
al-Aqsa Mosque or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, to go to school, or
for medical treatment must have a hard-to-obtain permit from Israel.
The turnstiles and other security barriers are controlled remotely by
Israeli soldiers housed behind heavy bullet-proof glass.
The cages are currently painted a bright, cheerful blue, but it's a
fair bet that when they are older and worn, the paint job will not be
renewed. Adding to the false cheer, the Israelis have erected
incongruous welcoming signs at the terminals. Most egregious is the
giant sign at the Bethlehem terminal.
"Peace be with you," it proclaims in three languages to
travelers leaving Jerusalem for Bethlehem.
This is on a giant pastel-colored sign erected by the Israeli Ministry
of Tourism, as if travel through this terminal were the ordinary
tourist lark. At the Qalandiya terminal between Ramallah and Jerusalem,
a large cartoon-like red rose welcomes Palestinians with a sign in
Arabic. Early this year when the terminal was opened, the rose was on a
sign that proclaimed, in three languages, "The hope of us all." Apparently
embarrassed at being caught so red-handed in their hypocrisy, the
Israelis removed the sign, preserving only the rose, after a Jewish
activist stenciled over it the words that once graced the entrance to
Auschwitz, "Arbeit Macht Frei"
-- work makes you free. There is still a sign saying in three languages, "May you go in peace and return in peace."
The Israelis still don't really get it.
Nor do the Americans.
The terminals, advertised as a way to "ease life" for Palestinians by
prettying up the checkpoints of old and making passage more efficient,
were paid for out of U.S. aid monies designated originally for the
Palestinian Authority (before the Hamas election) but diverted to
Israel's terminal-building enterprise -- helping Israel make
Palestinian humiliation more efficient. Steven Erlanger in the New York
Times, among others, fell for the scam, noting when the Bethlehem
terminal opened in December last year that the terminals were aimed at "easing the burden on Palestinians and
softening international criticism." He labeled the Bethlehem
terminal a "grand" gateway for
Christians visiting Jesus' birthplace -- not acknowledging that
Christians had been visiting for two millennia without benefit of
turnstiles and concrete walls.
The burden on Palestinians has not been significantly eased as far as
we could tell. We spent some time watching at several of the terminals
-- feeling like voyeurs of Palestinian misery. At Qalandiya, about 100
people stood waiting to pass through three locked turnstiles. A young
Israeli woman soldier sat in a glassed-in control booth barking
commands at them. Our friend Ahmad speaks Hebrew as well as Arabic and
could not even make out which language she was speaking in. There was
no reason for her anger or for her decision to lock the turnstiles.
When she saw us observing, carrying a camera, she shook her finger in
an apparent warning against taking pictures. They don't like witnesses.
Immediately after this, she unlocked the turnstiles.
We walked through after everyone else who had been waiting, and Ahmad
took us to the waiting area on the other side where Palestinians from
the West Bank apply for permits to enter Jerusalem. About 50 people
were waiting. A middle-aged man walked up to us and began telling his
story. He was scheduled for neurosurgery at Maqassad Hospital in East
Jerusalem in two days, according to a certificate from the hospital,
written in English and clearly intended for Israeli permit authorities.
He had already been waiting for six days -- three futilely sitting in
this waiting area and a previous three when the Israelis had closed the
terminal altogether for Yom Kippur. He was beginning to fear he would
never get his permit and, as he expressed his frustration and
desperation, he began to cry. He asked that we take his picture holding
the certificate and tell the world. We did, but we will never know if
he obtained his permit in time, or at all.
At another terminal, leading from al-Azzariyah, the biblical Bethany,
into Jerusalem, a soldier screamed at us -- quite literally, his face
red, blood vessels standing out on his neck -- when he saw us taking
pictures of his soldier colleagues questioning Palestinians before they
entered the terminal area, a pre-screening for the screening at the
terminal. We told the soldier we thought pictures would be all right;
this terminal was run after all by the Ministry of Tourism and so must
be a tourist attraction. But our flippancy didn't go over well. He
pushed us toward an exit gate, screaming that this was the "Ministry of Gates" and that we had
to get out. We managed to remain inside until Ahmad, who was talking to
another Israeli soldier, finished and exited with us. Maybe we saved
one or two Palestinians from scrutiny by distracting a couple of
soldiers -- or maybe unfortunately we just delayed them further.
At a third checkpoint, this a makeshift one set up temporarily at an
opening in the wall where the concrete barrier is still incomplete, we
watched as a growing crowd of Palestinians wanting to enter Jerusalem
to pray at al-Aqsa Mosque tried to negotiate with two young Israeli
soldiers. It was a Friday in Ramadan and, although these Palestinians
had permits to enter Jerusalem, their names were not on the authorized
list at this particular checkpoint. They had to go, according to
Israel's administrative fiat, to the main terminal from their area into
the city. As the crowd gathered, more Israeli soldiers arrived. The
crowd included women as well as men, and several children. Being
watched by a couple of Americans who probably appeared more patronizing
than helpful clearly did not improve the mood of most of the crowd.
One little boy of about five, dressed neatly in a tie and pressed white
shirt, stood looking at the commotion for a few minutes, standing
slightly apart from his father, and suddenly burst into tears. A few
minutes later, the soldiers exploded a concussion grenade, and most of
the crowd dispersed. It's the Israeli way: make them cry, run them off
in fear. We left, embarrassed by our own inadequacy.
Terminology
Is it genocide when a little boy is made to cry because belligerent
armed men intimidate him, intimidate his father, and ultimately run
them off; when they are forbidden from performing their religious
ceremonies because a belligerent government decides they are of the
wrong religion; when their town is encircled and cut off because a
racist state decides their ethnic identity is of the wrong variety?
You can argue over terminology, but the truth is evident everywhere on
the ground where Israel has extended its writ: Palestinians are
unworthy, inferior to Jews, and in the name of the Jewish people,
Israel has given itself the right to erase the Palestinian presence in
Palestine -- in other words, to commit genocide by destroying "in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial, or religious group."
As we debate about and analyze the Palestinian psyche, trying to
determine if they have had enough and will surrender or will survive by
resisting, it is important to remember that the Jewish people, despite
unspeakable tragedy, emerged from the holocaust ultimately triumphant.
Israel and its supporters should keep this in mind: empires never last,
as Ahmad said, and gross injustice such as the Nazis and Israel have
inflicted on innocent people cannot prevail for long.
Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and
has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of
Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.
Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a
National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of
Regional and Political Analysis. They spent October 2006 in Palestine
and on a speaking tour of Ireland sponsored by the Ireland Palestine
Solidarity Campaign.
Would HRW Have
Attacked Martin Luther King, Too?
By JONATHAN COOK 30 Nov
2006
Palestinians
Are Being Denied the Right of Non-Violent Resistance?
If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in
human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the
news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties -- a grandmother -- chose
last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a
group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.
Despite the "Man bites dog" news value of the story, most of the
Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly: it is
difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only the
destruction of Israel.
It is equally difficult not to pause and wonder at the reasons for her
suicide mission: according to her family, one of her grandsons was
killed by the Israeli army, another is in a wheelchair after his leg
had to be amputated, and her house had been demolished.
Or not to think of the years of trauma she and her family have suffered
living in a open-air prison under brutal occupation, and now, since the
"disengagement", the agonising
months of grinding poverty, slow starvation, repeated aerial
bombardments, and the loss of essentials like water and electricity.
Or not to ponder at what it must have been like for her to spend every
day under a cloud of fear, to be powerless against a largely unseen and
malign force, and to never know when death and mutilation might strike
her or her loved ones.
Or not to imagine that she had been longing for the moment when the
soldiers who have been destroying her family's lives might show
themselves briefly, coming close enough that she could see and touch
them, and wreak her revenge.
Yet Western observers, and the organisations that should represent the
very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of
understanding what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide
bomber. Their empathy fails them, and so does their humanity.
Just at the moment Fatma was choosing death and resistance over
powerlessness and victimhood -- and at a time when Gaza is struggling
through one of the most oppressive and ugly periods of Israeli
occupation in nearly four decades -- Human Rights Watch published its
lastest statement on the conflict. It is document that shames the
organisation, complacent Western societies and Fatma's memory.
In its press release "Civilians Must
Not Be Used to Shield Homes Against Military Attacks", which was
widely reported by the international media, HRW lambasts armed
Palestinian groups for calling on civilians to surround homes that have
been targeted for air strikes by the Israeli military.
Noting almost as an afterthought that more than 1,500 Palestinians have
been made homeless from house demolitions in the past few months, and
that 105 houses have been destroyed from the air, the press release
denounces Palestinian attempts at non-violent and collective action to
halt the Israel attacks. HRW refers in particular to three incidents.
On November 3, Hamas appealed to women to surround a mosque in Beit
Hanoun where Palestinian men had sought shelter from the Israeli army.
Israeli soldiers opened fire on the women, killing two and injuring at
least 10.
And last week on two separate occasions, crowds of supporters gathered
around the houses of men accused of being militants by Israel who had
received phone messages from the Israeli security forces warning that
their families' homes were about to be bombed.
In language that would have made George Orwell shudder, one of the
world's leading organisations for the protection of human rights
ignored the continuing violation of the Palestinians' right to security
and a roof over their heads and argued instead: "There is no excuse for calling
[Palestinian] civilians to the scene of a planned [Israeli] attack.
Whether or not the home is a legitimate military target, knowingly
asking civilians to stand in harm's way is unlawful."
There is good reason to believe that this reading of international law
is wrong, if not Kafkaesque. Popular and peaceful resistance to the
oppressive policies of occupying powers and autocratic rulers, in India
and South Africa for example, has always been, by its very nature, a
risky venture in which civilians are liable to be killed or injured.
Responsibility for those deaths must fall on those doing the
oppressing, not those resisting, particularly when they are employing
non-violent means. On HRW's interpretation, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson
Mandela would be war criminals.
HRW also applies a series of terrible double standards in this press
release.
It refuses Palestinians the right to protect homes from attack,
labelling these civilians "human shields", even while admitting that
most of the homes are not legitimate military targets, and yet it has
not said a word about the common practice in Israel of building weapons
factories and army bases inside or next to communities, thereby forcing
Israeli civilians to become human shields for the army.
And HRW prefers to highlight a supposed violation of international law
by the Palestinians -- their choice to act as "human shields" -- and to demand
that the practice end immediately, while ignoring the very real and
continuing violation of international law committed by Israel in
undertaking punitive house demolitions against Palestinian families.
But let us ignore even these important issues and assume that HRW is
technically correct that such Palestinian actions do violate
international law. Nonetheless, HRW is still failing us and mocking its
mandate, because it has lost sight of the three principles that must
guide the vision of a human rights organisation: a sense of priorities,
proper context and common sense.
Priorities: Every day HRW has to choose which of the many abuses of
international law taking place around the world it highlights. It
manages to record only a tiny fraction of them. The assumption of many
outsiders may be that it focuses on only the most egregious examples.
That would be wrong.
The simple truth is that the worse a state's track record on human
rights, the easier ride it gets, relatively speaking, from human rights
organisations. That is both because, if abuses are repeated often
enough, they become so commonplace as to go unremarked, and because, if
the abuses are wide-ranging and systematic, only a small number of the
offences will be noted.
Israel, unlike the Palestinians, benefits in both these respects. After
four decades of reporting on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians,
HRW has covered all of Israel's many human rights-abusing practices at
least once before. The result is that after a while most violations get
ignored. Why issue another report on house demolitions or "targeted assassinations", even
though they are occurring all the time? And, how to record the
individual violations of tens of thousands of Palestinians' rights
every day at checkpoints? One report on the checkpoints once every few
years has to suffice instead.
In Israel's case, there is an added reluctance on the part of
organisations like HRW to tackle the extent and nature of Israel's
trampling of Palestinian rights. Constant press releases denouncing
Israel would provoke accusations, as they do already, that Israel is
being singled out -- and with it, the implication that anti-Semitism
lies behind the special treatment.
So HRW chooses instead to equivocate. It ignores most Israeli
violations and highlights every Palestinian infraction, however minor.
This way it makes a pact with the devil: it achieves the balance that
protects it from criticism but only by sacrificing the principles of
equity and justice.
In its press release, for example, HRW treats the recent appeal to
Palestinians to exercise their right to protect their neighbours, and
to act in soldarity with non-violent resistance to occupation, as no
different from the dozens of known violations committed by the Israeli
army of abducting Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect its
troops.
Women vounteering to surround a mosque become the equivalent of the
notorious incident in January 2003 when 21-year-old Samer Sharif was
handcuffed to the hood of an army Jeep and driven towards
stone-throwing youngsters in Nablus as Israeli soldiers fired their
guns from behind his head.
According to HRW's approach to international law, the two incidents are
comparable.
Context: The actions of Palestinians occur in a context in which all of
their rights are already under the control of their occupier, Israel,
and can be violated at its whim. This means that it is problematic,
from a human rights perspective, to place the weight of culpability on
the Palestinians without laying far greater weight at the same time on
the situation to which the Palestinians are reacting.
Here is an example. HRW and other human rights organisations have taken
the Palestinians to task for the extra-judicial killings of those
suspected of collaborating with the Israeli security forces.
Although it is blindingly obvious that the lynching of an alleged
collaborator is a violation of that person's fundamental right to life,
HRW's position of simply blaming the Palestinians for this practice
raises two critical problems.
First, it fudges the issue of accountability.
In the case of a "targeted
assassination", Israel's version of extra-judicial killing, we
have an address to hold accountable: the apparatus of a state in the
forms of the Israeli army which carried out the murder and the Israeli
politicians who approved it. (These officials are also responsible for
the bystanders who are invariably killed along with the target.)
But unless it can be shown that the lynchings are planned and
coordinated at a high level, a human rights organisation cannot apply
the same standards by which it judges a state to a crowd of
Palestinians, people gripped by anger and the thirst for revenge. The
two are not equivalent and cannot be held to account in the same way.
Palestinians carrying out a lynching are commiting a crime punishable
under ordinary domestic law; while the Israeli army carrying out a "targeted assassination" is
commiting state terrorism, which must be tried in the court of world
opinion.
Second, HRW's position ignores the context in which the lynching takes
place.
The Palestinian resistance to occupation has failed to realise its
goals mainly because of Israel's extensive network of collaborators,
individuals who have usually been terrorised by threats to themselves
or their family and/or by torture into "co-operating" with Israel's
occupation forces.
The great majority of planned attacks are foiled because one member of
the team is collaborating with Israel. He or she not only sabotages the
attack but often also gives Israel the information it needs to kill the
leaders of the resistance (as well as bystanders). Collaborators,
though common in the West Bank and Gaza, are much despised -- and for
good reason. They make the goal of national liberation impossible.
Palestinians have been struggling to find ways to make collaboration
less appealing. When the Israeli army is threatening to jail your son,
or refusing a permit for your wife to receive the hospital treatment
she needs, you may agree to do terrible things. Armed groups and many
ordinary Palestinians countenance the lynchings because they are seen
as a counterweight to Israel's own powerful techniques of intimidation
-- a deterrence, even if a largely unsuccessful one.
In issuing a report on the extra-judicial killing of Palestinian
collaborators, therefore, groups like HRW have a duty to highlight
first and with much greater emphasis the responsibility of Israel and
its decades-long occupation for the lynchings, as the context in which
Palestinians are forced to mimic the barbarity of those oppressing them
to stand any chance of defeating them.
The press release denouncing the Palestinians for choosing collectively
and peacefully to resist house demolitions, while not concentrating on
the violations committed by Israel in destroying the houses and using
military forms of intimidation and punishment against civilians, is a
travesty for this very same reason.
Common sense: And finally human rights organisations must never abandon
common sense, the connecting thread of our humanity, when making
judgments about where their priorities lie.
In the past few months Gaza has sunk into a humanitarian disaster
engineered by Israel and the international community. What has been
HRW's response? It is worth examining its most recent reports, those on
the front page of the Mideast section of its website last week, when
the latest press release was issued. Four stories relate to Israel and
Palestine.
Three criticise Palestinian militants and the wider society in various
ways: for encouraging the use of "human shields", for firing home-made
rockets into Israel, and for failing to protect women from domestic
violence. One report mildly rebukes Israel, urging the government to
ensure that the army properly investigates the reasons for the shelling
that killed 19 Palestinian inhabitants of Beit Hanoun.
This shameful imbalance, both in the number of reports being issued
against each party and in terms of the failure to hold accountable the
side committing the far greater abuses of human rights, has become the
HRW's standard procedure in Israel-Palestine.
But in its latest release, on human shields, HRW plumbs new depths,
stripping Palestinians of the right to organise non-violent forms of
resistance and seek new ways of showing solidarity in the face of
illegal occupation. In short, HRW treats the people of Gaza as mere
rats in a laboratory -- the Israeli army's view of them -- to be
experimented on at will.
HRW's priorities in Israel-Palestine prove it has lost its moral
bearings.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He
is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of
the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and
available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press.
His website is www.jkcook.net
Ethnic Cleansing and
Israel’s Racist Discourse
It is important that when we examine the subject of ethnic cleansing in
Palestine, we take into account its various dimensions, one of which is
the accompanying racist discourse, which has become part and parcel of
Israel’s ethnic cleansing policies, says Ramzy Baroud.
“The term ethnic cleansing
refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of another
ethnic group. At one end of the spectrum, it is virtually
indistinguishable from forced emigration and population transfer, while
at the other it merges with deportation and genocide.”
According to this definition, and others including those emerging in
the 1990s, following the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, Palestinians
have been and remain victims of a determined and unwavering ethnic
cleansing policy that began in 1947-48 and continues until today.
However, it is important that when we examine the subject of ethnic
cleansing in Palestine, we take into account its various dimensions,
one of which is the accompanying racist discourse, which has become
part and parcel of Israel’s ethnic cleansing policies.
Any act of collective punishment — whether ethnic cleansing or genocide
or any other — is often preceded and or adjoined by a racist discourse
that dehumanizes the victim and justifies the crime on baseless
grounds, a concoction of lies and fibs that may appeal to national or
religious psyches, but fails the test of law, morality or basic human
norms and expectations.
Without such discourse, which depicted the original inhabitants of
Palestine as cancerous, subhuman and a nuisance in the face of
civilization and progress — as defined by the founders of the Zionist
movement — it would not have been possible to carry out a systematic
campaign of murder and ethnic cleansing in 1947-48, which saw the
killing of an estimated 13,000 Palestinians, the forcible eviction of
850,000 and the depopulation and subsequent destruction of nearly 500
villages and localities.
Without such a racist discourse it would have been difficult, to say
the least, to carry out scores of preempted massacres, including Deir
Yassin, Tantoura, Abbasiyya, Beit Daras, Bir Al-Saba’, Haifa and so
forth.
Were it not for a decided campaign of institutionalized racism that
occurred on such a large scale and which is maintained until today, it
would have been impossible and implausible to gun down scores of
innocent people after lining them up against the crumbling wall of the
old Tantura mosque in May of 1948, or to bulldoze the home of a
crippled man in Jenin in April 2002 without giving his mother the
chance to evacuate him. Or to describe as a “great success” the killing of 14
civilians, including children when a one-ton Israeli bomb slammed into
their apartment building in the Zeitun neighborhood in Gaza in July
2002. Or the wanton murder of 19 people, most of them women and
children of the same extended family in Beit Hanoun earlier this
November.
But according to Israeli officials, every other method has been tried,
and failed. “With murderous,
bloodthirsty terrorism that wants to wipe you off the map, you have to
respond accordingly: Wipe it out,” as Ben Caspit commented
following the brutal massacre of Beit Hanoun.
But if what purely motivates Israel is the fear of its own
annihilation, then, how can the Zionist state’s morally flexible
supporters explain Israel’s continuous colonization of the West Bank
and Jerusalem? According to a 2004 Foundation for Middle East Peace
report, the total settler population in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem has neared 420,000: 220,000 settlers in the West Bank and
200,000 in East Jerusalem.
Expectedly, the number stands at a much higher figure.
New settlements are being erected while existing settlements are
ever-expanding. According to a recent report drafted by the PLO’s
Negotiations Affairs Department, Israel approved tenders for 690 new
settlement units in two major east Jerusalem settlements: Ma’aleh
Adumim and Beit Illit. The housing units could accommodate up to 2,800
new Jewish settlers.
If the idea was indeed to shield Israel from Palestinian attacks, then
why is 80 percent of the wall being built on ethnically cleansed
Palestinian land? Why encircle the Palestinian population of the West
Bank from east and west, and those of Qalqilia from all directions? Why
do thousands of Palestinian schools kids have to stand for hours in
front of their gated villages to acquire permission from an Israeli
soldier to allow them access to their schools and back?
Ethnic cleansing is indeed back on the Israeli political agenda, as
Avigdor Lieberman, an Israeli politician who has for long advocated the
ethnic cleansing of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, was recently
appointed as Israel’s new deputy prime minister. One of his early ideas
since the new post, aside from sending Palestinians packing, was the
killing of the entire leadership of the elected Palestinian government.
“They...have to disappear, to go to
paradise, all of them, and there can’t be any compromise,” he
told Israeli radio last week.
The unfortunate reality is that Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing,
though it might have changed tactics and pace throughout the years, has
never stopped and is now more active than it has been for decades. It’s
also clear that the adjacent racist discourse that made such a policy
sustainable for six decades is also at work, making advocates of war
crimes heroes in the eyes of most Israelis.
Moreover, amid unabashed American backing of such policies and almost
total silence or helplessness of the international community, Israel
knows that the success of its colonial project in the West Bank is
dependent on the element of time.
What’s even more disheartening is the fact that Palestinian infighting
is distracting and wasting energies that should be put to work to
provoke and sustain an international campaign against Israeli
atrocities. Infighting over governments that have no sovereignty, the
lacking of any national cohesion or consensus or a clear political
program that unifies Palestinians at home and in diaspora around one
political and national agenda, will certainly ensure the success of the
Israeli program and further contribute to the racist discourse that
sees Palestinians as incapable of taking on the task of leadership and
self-determination.
This article is based on a speech delivered by the author
at a London conference entitled: “Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine:
Methods and Consequences” and broadcast by Al-Jazeera television.
Ramzy Baroud's latest book: The Second Palestinian Intifada: A
Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London) is available at
Amazon and from the University of Michigan Press. He can be reached at ramzybaroud@hotmail.com
See also
Israeli massacre
The forgotten crisis
Destruction of
Palestine
War crimes, Syria and lasting
peace
We are being set up for a
wider war in the Middle East
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