By Walid Batrawi
Nablus is the West Bank’s biggest city and the capital of its economy but as with other centres throughout the Palestinian territories, to put it mildly, times are tough.
The city is known for, among other things, its soap, made from pure olive oil, but like so many other products, the problem is getting them to market. A usual business day in one of the most famous soap factories in Nablus, an industry that goes back to the 19th century all hand made, stacked in piles and wrapped. The tradition of soap making has, for long, brought income to the city, now marketing is limited.
“10 years ago we used to produce more than 500 tons a year, but now we are producing 320 tons. It’s very difficult to sell the products here in Palestine, due to the checkpoints and the long time we have to spend on the roads,†Nael Qabaj, general manager, said.
Nablus has long been considered the capital of Palestinian economy, but today the continuous Israeli incursions and the Israeli checkpoints around the city have crippled its economy. Palestinians were hoping that the checkpoints would be removed after
the meetings between Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian president and Ehud Olmert, Israeli prime minister.
Factories cut off
Typical of the Palestinian businesses which are being strangled by the checkpoints is a factory situation just 200 meters away from an Israeli checkpoint outside Nablus. The factory used to be one of the biggest on the West Bank. It produced
40 kinds of candies and snacks, now only one production line is running. Ghassan Shbaro, the factory’s deputy manager, said: “We face many difficulties getting to the factory, we hardly get permits to cross the checkpoint, it’s also hard to get the raw material.
“We used to export 70% of our products to Gaza, now it’s zero, even getting goods to other parts of the West Bank is very difficult because of the Israeli roadblocksâ€.
Checkpoints have become a routine in the daily life of Palestinians, who still hope that its removal remains a main item on the agenda of any future meeting between Palestinian and Israeli leaders.
Nablus soap is available through www.zaytoun.org
By Robert D. Novak
Monday, April 9, 2007; 12:00 AM
(link)
BETHLEHEM, West Bank — Hani Hayek, an accountant who is the Christian mayor of the tiny majority-Christian Palestinian village of Beit Sahour, was angry last week as he drove me along the Israeli security wall. “They are taking our communal lands,” he said, pointing to the massive Israeli settlement of Har Homa. “They don’t want us to live here. They want us to leave.”
Har Homa, dwarfing nearby dwellings of Beit Sahour, seemed larger than when I saw it at Holy Week a year ago. It is. The Israeli government has steadily enlarged settlements on the occupied West Bank, and I could see both the construction at Har Homa and road building for a dual transportation system for Israelis and Palestinians.
Jimmy Carter raised hackles by titling his book about the Palestinian question “Peace Not Apartheid.” But Palestinians allege this is worse than the former South African racial separation. Nearing the 40th anniversary of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, the territory has been so fragmented that a genuine Palestinian state and a “two-state solution” seem increasingly difficult.
The security wall has led to virtual elimination of suicide bombings and short-term peace. But life is hard for Palestinians, whose deaths because of conflict increased 272 percent in 2006 while Israeli casualties declined. In a minor incident last week of the type that goes unnoticed internationally, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troopers killed a Palestinian man accused of illegally entering a firing zone while collecting metal scraps to sell. The Britain- based organization Save the Children estimates that half the children in the occupied territories are psychologically traumatized.
Palestinians argue that things have gotten worse because of pervasive feelings of hopelessness. Students at Bethlehem University (run by the Catholic Brothers of De La Salle, with an enrollment that is 70 percent Muslim) sounded more pessimistic and radicalized than a year ago. Ahmad al Issa, a fourth-year journalism student, was held for a year in an Israeli prison on charges of throwing stones at Israeli troops. Now he has bought into the libel that Jewish employees at the World Trade Center were warned in advance of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The U.S.-backed boycott following the election victory of the extremist group Hamas in early 2006 has made the Palestinian Authority destitute, crippling government services. Deprived of help from the authority, with the economy in a shambles, city governments are bankrupt. Bethlehem’s mayor, Victor Batarseh, has a special problem because tourists and pilgrims no longer stay overnight in the city of Christ’s birth. Out of money and credit, he is ready to lay off the city’s 165 staffers.
Batarseh, a U.S. citizen who practiced thoracic surgery in Sacramento, is pinned down in Bethlehem. A Christian and political independent who calls himself a private-enterprise democrat, Batarseh is on the Israeli blacklist because he contributed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which the State Department has designated a terrorist organization. Denied permits for Jerusalem, the mayor must drive to Amman, Jordan, to get to meetings in Europe.
Contact with the PFLP is not a requirement for being holed up by the Israel Defense Forces. Bethlehem University students cannot get to Jerusalem, a few minutes’ drive away, unless they sneak in illegally. The students from the separated Gaza enclave have to take classes from Bethlehem via the Internet.
Republican Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey was at the university the same day I was, and faculty members could hardly believe a real live member of Congress was there. Smith later was given a tour of Jerusalem to see with his own eyes that the separation barrier in most places is a big, ugly and intimidating wall, not merely a fence.
Smith, an active Catholic layman, was drawn here because of the rapid emigration of the Holy Land’s Christian minority. They leave more quickly than Muslims because contacts on the outside make them more mobile. Peter Corlano, a Catholic member of the Bethlehem University faculty, told Smith and me: “We live the same life as Muslims. We are Palestinians.”
Concerned by the disappearance of Christians in the land of Christianity’s birthplace, Smith could also become (as I did) concerned by the plight of all Palestinians. If so, he will find precious little company in Congress.
PRESS RELEASE
Vienna, April 10, 2007
As Israel comes under increasing pressure over its policies against Palestinians, an independent Swedish researcher today releases an extensive analysis of the Middle Eastern conflict since the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. According to Dr. Anthony Löwstedt, the vast majority of grave violations of human rights falls under the responsibility of the Jewish state.
In the third edition of his study, ‘Apartheid: Ancient, Past, and Present’, Löwstedt concludes that no less than 97.8 percent of gross human rights violations so far committed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are sole responsibilities of the Israeli Jews, and 2.2 percent, at the most, are Palestinian crimes.
Israel was accused of apartheid by John Dugard, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Special Envoy to the Occupied Palestinian Territories in February this year. In a report to the Council, Dugard recommended bringing the charge of apartheid, a crime against humanity under international law, against Israel to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Previously, two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and the former South African Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, had also raised accusations of apartheid against Israel.
According to all four and many others, Israel is implementing the same system of oppression that Whites used against the indigenous black majority in South Africa until 1994. And just like Blacks committed a number of violent crimes against Whites and occasionally incited people to violence against South African Whites in the liberation struggle there, Palestinians have carried out similar crimes against Israeli Jews.
However, the overwhelming majority of violent crimes as well as cases of incitement to violence are responsibilities of the privileged ethnicities in both countries, according to Löwstedt. Moreover, he points out seven kinds of systematic, racist crimes which he says are the sole responsibilities of the Israeli Jews and the South African Whites and of similar ethnic elites in other apartheid societies. These crimes include ethnically discriminatory repopulation, citizenship, land, work, access, education, and language policies and practices.
Löwstedt has worked in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as well as in South Africa as an academic and for the UN. He currently teaches at Webster University in Vienna, Austria.
Read the study:
Apartheid – Ancient, Past, and Present: Systematic and Gross Human Rights Violations in Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine, Vienna: Gesellschaft für Phänomenologie und kritische Anthropologie, 2007, 3 rd edition,
http://www.dada.at/gems/gesellschaft/Apartheid.pdf
The author is available for additional comments and interviews by return e-mail at lowstedt@gmail.com.
Staffordshire University students union twins with Palestine Polytechnic (Hebron). Staffordshire University Students Union passed a motion to twin their Students Union with Palestine Polytechnic (Hebron).
In an identical motion to the one passed by Action Palestine in Manchester University the motion stated that students in Palestine have had their right to education consistently denied by the Israeli Occupation: checkpoints, attacks on Universities and limitations on movement which seriously hinder the ability of students in Palestine to learn and that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that everyone has the ‘right to education’.
The union will now lobby Staffordshire University to provide at least 3 scholarships to Palestinian students who wish to study at the Staffordshire University as well as to support the Palestinian students in their “Right to Education†campaign and for their basic Human Rights within the territories of mandate Palestine and refugees.