Crack! Fizz! Then, even more alarmingly, WOOMF!! We can’t see what’s happening, but for the South African journalists tagging along it sounds ominously familiar.
A pitiless sun above, white dust and plastic litter underfoot, dry-stone walls, prickly pear thickets, ancient olive groves.
All around us on the dirt road are Palestinians, some as young as eight or nine, who seem unfazed by the noise of battle and almost six weeks of almost daily protest. They chant slogans in Arabic and wave Palestinian and green and white Hamas flags.
The turnout disappoints one of our Israeli hosts, Elan Orian from Anarchists Against the Wall. Perhaps 250 villagers from Nilleen are marching, instead of the expected thousand, accompanied by 40 or 50 Israeli sympathisers.
But he takes comfort from the fact that there is some support from nearby Palestinian settlements. “The biggest weakness is that each village protests on its own. It’s much easier for the military to deal with,†he says.
We top the ridge and the battlefield unfolds before us.
Visible through olive groves charred by past confrontations — hot teargas canisters start fires, our hosts say — is the parched valley that marks the route of the “separation barrierâ€. Beyond lies more Palestinian land, from which the barrier will soon divide them.
On the opposite ridge two bullÂdozers are busy uprooting olive trees to create a 70m-wide “exclusion zone†for the fence itself, gravel swathes to highlight footprints and access roads for Israeli security vehicles.
A long line of demonstrators is winding up the opposite hillside; with Israeli activists in the van to moderate security force violence, they plan to veer left and throw themselves in the path of the clanking behemoths.
Yesterday, a Palestinian proudly tells me, a small group of protesters broke through and inflicted some damage on the vehicles.
Nilleen, on the West Bank north-west of Jerusalem, near Ramallah, has just emerged from a four-day siege and curfew and the security forces are pumped for action. Having declared the valley a “closed military zoneâ€, about 100 soldiers and border police — the latter particularly feared for their brutality — are strung out along the ridge.
As the demonstrators toil upwards, they come under a steady shower of teargas canisters and stun grenades, which can blow off fingers if handled, an activist warns me.
There is no retaliation, not even stone-throwing. Wherever we have been on the West Bank the theme has been one of non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation and the wall.
We follow through the drifting wisps of teargas; my eyes and nose start to stream. I stop on the ridge and my companions move on.
Unknown to me, the advance guard of the protesters has been beaten back by the troops, who are now driving onwards to clear the ridge. Suddenly, at 50m or less, a khaki-clad, helmeted group is striding through the bushes hurling stun grenades and firing rubber bullets as they come.
Something hisses past my head and through the tree behind me. Just ahead, a vivid flash and thunderclap. Over the rocks, through the thorn-bushes, slip-sliding down the path and I’m at the bottom of the hill again.
Behind me, carried on a stretcher, is a middle-aged American member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, which “maintains a violence-deterring presence between Israeli settlers, soldiers and Palestiniansâ€. She has been hit in the buttock by a rubber bullet, indicating that her back was turned to her assailant.
Others are treated in the field by paramedics or moved to the clinic in Nilleen, while two Palestinians with “penetration wounds†are transferred to hospital.
In the past 16 days 220 protesters have been treated for injuries, according to a village spokesperson. In nearby Biddoo, where the wall has been completed, at least two have died.
Now begins the slow, straggling retreat, accelerated by an army flanking movement through the olive trees which harries the protesters back to the edge of the village.
The mood is bitterly defiant. A villager, holding aloft an olive branch, the resistance symbol of the Palestinian fellahin (farmers), proclaims the start of the third intifada. “Fuck you, soldiers!†screams another. An Israeli activist shouts up at the guardians of the bulldozers: “I’m ashamed of you! I’m ashamed to be Jewish!â€
A Palestinian loads a slingshot and hurls a desultory rock or two across the valley; they drop harmlessly short of the soldiers.
An ironic symbol of a grossly unequal contest: David the Palestinian and his slingshot versus the Israeli Goliath. Except that the ruthlessly efficient giant shows no sign of falling.
In many ways it is RSA circa 1988 — stones against guns in an elemental fight against injustice.
There is no compensation for the uprooted olive trees, which are the basis of the Palestinian economy, and we were told in Biddoo that the soldiers use every possible device to obstruct Palestinian access to the groves from which the barrier separates them.
The unstated aim, villagers insist, is dispossession.
There is, too, the larger picture. The International Court of Justice condemned the wall as unilaterally imposing a political boundary between Israel and the West Bank it occupied during the 1967 war.
Designed to secure the Israeli settlements set up on conquered territory in defiance of the Geneva Convention — at Nilleen it balloons around the religious settlement of Modi’in Illit — it will entrench the seizure of another 8,6% of Palestinian land.
But in other respects conditions are far more suggestive of South Africa in the 1960s. With Israel’s economy growing at more than 5% a year and the backing of the world’s superpower, it is buffered from international pressure.
But the obvious difference between the West Bank 2008 and South Africa 20 years back is that the security forces are comfortably holding the line. And this imposes a terrible strain on the strategy of non-violence.
Although many Nilleen villagers are sure to return to the barricades tomorrow, next week and next month, the shrinking turnout worries Orian.
What, in this daunting context, drives the Israeli activists loosely organised under the misleading banner of Anarchists Against the Wall?
A few may be youthful hell-raisers in heavy-metal T-shirts, but many, perhaps most, are not ideological anarchists — they are grown-ups with brains, skills and jobs.
Orian, for example, is a physicist and environmental scientist in his thirties; Kobi Snitz, hit above the ear by a teargas canister during the protest, is a 36-year-old mathematician at Technikon Haifa.
We interview them at the Nilleen clinic: Ivan, an Argentinian immigrant struck in the face with a rifle butt; Snitz, who complains that the Israeli vanguard was advancing with arms raised when it was attacked; Jonathan Pollak, with a suspected fracture after a baton was broken across his leg.
Pollak tells us he has sustained at least 10 injuries in wall-related protests, including a brain haemorrhage which prevented him from standing for weeks. But he’ll be back, he says. The others echo him.
Guilt, snorts an Israeli photographer when we return to our hotel, arguing that the activists have a perverse need to suffer. I reflect that guilt can be a fitting response, particularly to rights violations in one’s name.
For Orian resistance to the wall has cemented Israelis and Palestinians in a new and fragile bond. Anarchists Against the Wall may be dismissed as lunatics and traitors by the Israeli mainstream, but like South African whites in the mould of Joe Slovo and Neil Aggett, they have opened a tiny conduit of goodwill between two warring peoples.
There is another motive which one would expect to resonate with Jews everywhere. It was highlighted by Amos Goldberg, our tour guide at Yad Va’shem, Jerusalem’s remarkable Holocaust memorial.
A middle-aged Holocaust historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and member of Children of Abraham, which fosters ties between Jewish and Muslim youth, Goldberg was arrested a month ago while confronting Israeli security forces in the conflict-torn West Bank city of Hebron.
His focus is less on the perpetrators and victims of the European genocide than on the millions of ordinary, decent people, many of them not anti-Semitic, who watched from the sidelines.
“We blame the Poles for not helping the Jews,†he says. “I don’t want to be a bystander.â€
A very interesting and informative article by Uri Avnery, 29.03.08
“Death to the Arabs!”
TOMORROW WILL BE the 32nd anniversary of the first “Day of the Land” – one of the defining events in the history of Israel.
I remember the day well. I was at Ben Gurion airport, on the way to a secret meeting in London with Said Hamami, Yasser Arafat’s emissary, when someone told me: “They have killed a lot of Arab protestors!”
That was not entirely unexpected. A few days before, we – members of the newly formed Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace – had handed the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, an urgent memorandum warning him that the government’s intention of expropriating huge chunks of land from Arab villages would cause an explosion. We included a proposal for an alternative solution, worked out by Lova Eliav, a veteran expert on settlements.
When I returned from abroad, the poet Yevi suggested that we make a symbolic gesture of sorrow and regret for the killings. Three of us – Yevi himself, the painter Dan Kedar and I – laid wreaths on the graves of the victims. This aroused a wave of hatred against us. I felt that something profoundly significant had happened, that the relationship between Jews and Arabs within the state had changed fundamentally.
And indeed, the impact of the Day of the Land – as the event was called – was stronger than even the Kafr Kassem massacre of 1956 or the October Events killings of 2000.
THE REASONS for this go back to the early days of the state.
After the 1948 war, only a small, weak and frightened Arab community was left in the state. Not only had about 750 thousand Arabs been uprooted from the territory that had become the State of Israel, but those who remained were leaderless. The political, intellectual and economic elites had vanished, most of them right at the beginning of the war. The vacuum was somehow filled by the Communist Party, whose leaders had been allowed to return from abroad – mainly in order to please Stalin, who at the time supported Israel.
After an internal debate, the leaders of the new state decided to accord the Arabs in the “Jewish State” citizenship and the right to vote. That was not self-evident. But the government wanted to appear before the world as a democratic state. In my opinion, the main reason was party political: David Ben-Gurion believed that he could coerce the Arabs to vote for his own party.
And indeed: the great majority of the Arab citizens voted for the Labor Party (then called Mapai) and its two Arab satellite parties which had been set up for that very purpose. They had no choice: they were living in a state of fear, under the watchful eyes of the Security Service (then called Shin Bet). Every Arab Hamulah (extended family) was told exactly how to vote, either for Mapai or one of the two subsidiaries. Since every election list has two different ballot papers, one in Hebrew and one in Arabic, there were six possibilities for faithful Arabs in every polling station, and it was easy for the Shin Bet to make sure that each Hamula voted exactly as instructed. More than once did Ben Gurion achieve a majority in the Knesset only with the help of these captive votes.
For the sake of “security” (in both senses) the Arabs were subjected to a “military government”. Every detail of their lives depended on it. They needed a permit to leave their village and go to town or the next village. Without the permission of the military government they could not buy a tractor, send a daughter to the teachers’ college, get a job for a son, obtain an import license. Under the authority of the military government and a whole series of laws, huge chunks of land were expropriated for Jewish towns and kibbutzim.
A story engraved in my memory: my late friend, the poet Rashed Hussein from Musmus village, was summoned to the military governor in Netanya, who told him: Independence Day is approaching and I want you to write a nice poem for the occasion. Rashed, a proud youngster, refused. When he came home, he found his whole family sitting on the floor and weeping. At first he thought that somebody had died, but then his mother cried out: “You have destroyed us! We are finished!” So the poem was written.
Every independent Arab political initiative was choked at birth. The first such group – the nationalist al-Ard (“the land”) group – was rigorously suppressed. It was outlawed, its leaders exiled, its paper proscribed – all with the blessing of the Supreme Court. Only the Communist Party was left intact, but its leaders were also persecuted from time to time.
The military government was dismantled only in 1966, after Ben Gurion’s exit from power and a short time after my election to the Knesset. After demonstrating against it so many times, I had the pleasure of voting for its abolition. But in practice very little changed – instead of the official military government an unofficial one remained, as did most of the discrimination.
“THE DAY OF THE LAND” changed the situation. A second generation of Arabs had grown up in Israel, no longer timidly submissive, a generation that had not experienced the mass expulsions and whose economic position had improved. The order given to the soldiers and policemen to open fire on them caused a shock. Thus a new chapter started.
The percentage of Arab citizens in the state has not changed: from the first days of the state to now, it had hovered around 20%. The much higher natural rate of increase of the Muslim community was balanced by Jewish immigration. But the numbers have grown significantly: from 200 thousand at the beginning of the state to almost 1.3 million – twice the size of the Jewish community that founded the state.
The Day of the Land also dramatically changed the attitude of the Arab world and the Palestinian people towards the Arabs in Israel. Until then, they were considered traitors, collaborators of the “Zionist entity”. I remember a scene from the 1965 meeting convened in Firenze by the legendary mayor, Giorgio la Pira, who tried to bring together personalities from Israel and the Arab world. At the time, that was considered a very bold undertaking.
During one of the intermissions, I was chatting with a senior Egyptian diplomat in a sunny piazza outside the conference site, when two young Arabs from Israel, who had heard about the conference, approached us. After embracing, I introduced them to the Egyptian, but he turned his back and exclaimed: “I am ready to talk with you, but not with these traitors!”
The bloody events of the Day of the Land brought the “Israeli Arabs” back into the fold of the Arab nation and the Palestinian people, who now call them “the 1948 Arabs”.
In October 2000, policemen again shot and killed Arab citizens, when they tried to express their solidarity with Arabs killed at the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem. But in the meantime, a third generation of Arabs had grown up in Israel, many of whom, in spite of all the obstacles, had attended universities and become business people, politicians, professors, lawyers and physicians. It is impossible to ignore this community – even if the state tries very hard to do just that.
From time to time, complaints about discrimination are voiced, but everybody shrinks back from the fundamental question: What is the status of the Arab minority growing up in a state that defines itself officially as “Jewish and democratic”?
ONE LEADER of the Arab community, the late Knesset member Abd-al-Aziz Zuabi, defined his dilemma this way: “My state is at war with my people”. The Arab citizens belong both to the State of Israel and to the Palestinian people.
Their belonging to the Palestinian people is self-evident. The Arab citizens of Israel, who lately tend to call themselves “Palestinians in Israel”, are only one part of the stricken Palestinian people, which consists of many branches: the inhabitants of the occupied territories (now themselves split between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip), the Arabs in East Jerusalem (officially “residents” but not “citizens” of Israel), and the refugees living in many different countries, each with its own particular regime. All these branches have a strong feeling of belonging together, but the consciousness of each is shaped by its own particular situation.
How strong is the Palestinian component in the consciousness of the Arab citizens of Israel? How can it be measured? Palestinians in the occupied territories often complain that it expresses itself mainly in words, not deeds. The support given by the Arab citizens in Israel to the Palestinian struggle for liberation is mainly symbolic. Here and there a citizen is arrested for helping a suicide bomber, but these are rare exceptions.
When the extreme Arab-hater Avigdor Liberman proposed that a string of Arab villages in Israel adjoining the Green Line (called “the Triangle”) be turned over to the future Palestinian state in return for the Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank, not a single Arab voice was raised in support. That is a very significant fact.
The Arab community is much more rooted in Israel than appears at first sight. The Arabs play an important part in the Israeli economy, they work in the state, pay taxes to the state. They enjoy the benefits of social security – by right, since they pay for it. Their standard of living is much higher than that of their Palestinian brethren in the occupied territories and beyond. They participate in Israeli democracy and have no desire at all to live under regimes like those of Egypt and Jordan. They have serious and justified complaints – but they live in Israel und will continue to do so.
IN RECENT YEARS, intellectuals of the third Arab generation in Israel have published several proposals for the normalization of the relations between the majority and the minority.
There exist, in principle, two main alternatives:
The first way says: Israel is a Jewish state, but a second people also live here. If Jewish Israelis have defined national rights, Arab Israelis must also have defined national rights. For example, educational, cultural and religious autonomy (as the young Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky demanded a hundred years ago for the Jews in Czarist Russia). They must be allowed to have free and open connections with the Arab world and the Palestinian people, like the connections Jewish citizens have with the Jewish Diaspora. All this must be spelled out in the future constitution of the state.
The second way says: Israel belongs to all its citizens, and only to them. Every citizen is an Israeli, much as every US citizen is an American. As far as the state is concerned, there is no difference between one citizen and another, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, Arab or Russian, much as, from the point of view of the American state, there is no difference between white, brown or black citizens, whether of European, African or Asian descent, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or Muslim. In Israeli parlance, this is called “a state of all its citizens”.
It goes without saying that I favor the second alternative, but I am ready to accept the first. Either of them is preferable to the existing situation, where the state pretends that there is no problem except some traces of discrimination that have to be overcome (without doing anything about it).
If the courage is lacking to treat a wound, it will fester. At football matches, the riffraff shout: “Death-to-the-Arabs!” and in the Knesset far right deputies threaten to expel Arab members from the House, and from the state altogether.
On the 32nd anniversary of the Day of the Land, with the 60th Independence Day approaching, it is time to take this bull by the horns.
Today 18th of February 2008, in the third Student Union council meeting, Sussex University Student’s Union officers have voted numerously in favour of a motion that resolves to boycott Carmel Agrexco agricultural products in union outlets and its sponsored market.
The motion was proposed by the Friends of Palestine society, which has been campaigning tirelessly for years to demonstrate moral and practical solidarity with the Palestinian people and Palestinian students in particular. Last year, after the cross campus referendum saw a majority of votes in favour, the union endorsed a twinning initiative between University of Sussex Student Union (USSU) and Al-Quds Open University Student Union in Tubas, Palestine.
The motion noted that Agrexco is responsible for 60-70% of all settlement produce sold abroad, primarily selling produce from illegal settlements in the Jordan Valley, and is 50% owned by the Israeli state; and that the Palestinian villages of Al-Hadidiya and Humza in the Jordan Valley were bulldozed in August 2007 leaving families homeless, to expand settlement agricultural activities for Carmel Agrexco.
Sussex University has recently been granted fair trade status and today’s resolution will enhance the ethical practices which Sussex student demand. The passing of the motion also represents integrity as up until yesterday the union shops which sold goods exported by Carmel Agrexco made the students complicit in the dispossession of the very students they had twinned with. Many of the students in Tubas work on land from which their parents were expulsed and under conditions that violate European Human Rights Legislation, a clause integral to the EU-Israel Trade agreement that Carmel Agrexco violates by labelling produce from the illegally occupied West Bank as “Israelâ€.
A Sussex humanities student member of the Jewish Society commented: “It has been argued that this motion might put Jewish students on campus in an awkward position. I personally don’t understand why I would feel awkward being a Jewish student after such a decision that clearly states this university is progressive and stays attentive to what is happening in the world.â€
In today’s meeting 14 member of USSU council voted in favour of the motion, whilst three other members choose to abstain, no against votes have been registered, making it an overwhelming consensus among the highest decision making body within the Student Union.
*ENDS*
For more details on the motion, on our campaigns or direct quotes contact: palestinesociety@yahoo.co.uk
Friends of Palestine society, University of Sussex, 18/02/08
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.