Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Gideon Levy, Twilight Zone / Caught on camera – Haaretz, August 28, 2008

This is Israeli justice in a nutshell: Lt. Col. Omri Burberg, the battalion commander suspected of giving an utterly illegal order to shoot a bound Palestinian, is wandering free and being considered for a senior training post in the Israel Defense Forces. Meanwhile, Jamal Amira, the father of Salam, the amateur camera operator who filmed the shooting, spent 26 days in an Israeli jail, until a military judge was so kind as to release him on bail last week.

“Although the claim that the IDF sought revenge is weak,” wrote Lt. Col. Yoram Haniel, the military judge, “one cannot overlook the fact that out of all the protestors, only the complainant was arrested.”

Indeed, it can’t be overlooked. Jamal Amira was arrested just after after B’Tselem released the video, filmed by his daughter, of the horrible shooting of the bound Palestinian man. He says that when the Border Police officers arrested him, they called out to one another, “We caught Salam’s father.” Amira, 53, a father of nine, has many Israeli friends, including a senior IDF reserves officer. Amir was thrown into Ofer Prison in what can only be interpreted as an act of revenge by those who presented themselves as “friends of Omri.”

In Na’alin, the village presently embroiled in a resolute and brave civil struggle over the remainder of its land, on which Israel seeks to build the separation fence, celebrated Amira’s release this week.

Gideon Levy, Twilight Zone / ‘Tossed out like a dog’ – Haaretz, August 21, 2008

In the lawless South Hebron Hills, things are wild as usual: The settlers continue to attack shepherd children with clubs and stones, to steal their sheep and to make their lives miserable, while the Israel Police continue to abuse anyone who tries to file a complaint against the settlers.

Mahmoud Abu Kabaita, whose children and flocks were the targets of settlers from Beit Yatir and Susia, was left outside the Kiryat Arba police station in the burning sun for four hours, until they even allowed him to enter. The members of the Abu Awad family, some of whose children suffer from a serious skin disease, have already been victims of a cruel pogrom by the settlers of Asael, as described here three weeks ago. Relatives waited outside the police station for two hours, and left without filing a complaint, after being attacked once again last Shabbat. That is how the Israel Police enforces the law here.

After writing in this column about the Abu Awads, all of whose meager property was destroyed and looted by the rioters from Asael, some readers offered to help the penniless family. One prominent figure, who is well known in the political establishment and not necessarily from the left, and who wanted to remain anonymous, gave the family a personal financial contribution which is considered huge by local standards. There was great joy in the miserable encampment, but it was short-lived: Last Shabbat the children and their sheep were attacked once again by the Asael people. A wonderful way to welcome the “Sabbath bride,” as is customary every week.

The Abu Kabaitas, whom Israel decreed would have to live outside the separation fence, along with and adjacent to Beit Yatir, were not very fortunate either. They were also attacked by rioters from the neighboring settlement. They were also abused by the Israel Police, which are supposed to protect them.

Thus there exists, with a distance of an hour and a half from Tel Aviv, a region with its own rules: The settlers rampage as much as they please, and the police don’t lift a finger and even treat the victims of the violence rudely when they want to complain. In the past weeks, as everyone knows, the rioting has mounted, for some reason, but for the police it’s business as usual.

Dan Izenberg, High Court ruling keeps Palestinian village in limbo, Jerusalem Post, July 10, 2008

The 200 Palestinians living in El-Nu’man, a village in the extreme southeast corner of Jerusalem, will continue to live in their never-never land, trapped without status between the West Bank and Jerusalem, in the wake of a High Court of Justice decision handed down earlier this week.

Israel does not recognize the residents of Nu’man as living in Jerusalem and has never granted them residency status. It claims that they moved illegally from the West Bank into the city after a post-Six Day War census that determined exactly which Palestinians lived in areas annexed to Jerusalem as a result of the war. Since the war, the city of Jerusalem has not provided the village with municipal services, including water and garbage collection, nor has it collected city taxes.

Since for many years there were no travel restrictions between Jerusalem and the West Bank, Nu’man residents had strong day-to-day ties there, including employment, commerce, social, family and religious connections.

Despite the de facto exclusion of Nu’man from Jerusalem, Israel built the West Bank separation barrier to include the village within the city, cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank. In order to maintain their West Bank ties, residents have had to pass through the fence gate and be subjected to security checks by soldiers. The residents claimed that the soldiers would regularly abuse their power and humiliate the residents.

Under this article’s title “It Takes a Village,” The Guardian has this phrase: “The iron resistance of one Palestinian hamlet to Israel’s ‘ring of steel’ has caught the imagination of the world’s media.” But the ongoing protests against the wall are not getting much coverage in the mainstream print and broadcast media in the US.

Seth Freedman: The village defying Israel’s wall, guardian.co.uk, July 11, 2008

After four days of curfew, the village of Nilin is not a pretty sight. Torched cars lie strewn on the sides of the road, bedroom windows sport gaping bullet holes, and debris is scattered the length and breadth of the town: evidence of the brutality meted out indiscriminately by the army against the locals.

As I followed the trail of destruction, the tales of woe grew ever darker and ever more indicting of the Israel Defence Force’s cruelty. “Look what they did to me!” screamed an elderly grandmother, hoisting up her robes to display the raw wounds inflicted by soldiers who had thrown her against a stone wall during a raid. She began sobbing as she recounted the events of earlier in the week, utterly bewildered as to how she had come to be mistreated so.

Upstairs, her middle-aged son clutched his two children to his side as he recounted the night the troops burst into his home.

“Imagine what it does to your son and daughter when they see you beaten by a soldier,” Hillal Khawaja said flatly. He showed us the wreckage of a room that had borne the brunt of the military’s ire: computers ripped from their sockets, beds smashed and furniture overturned, nothing had been spared the wrath of the marauding infantry.

A Palestinian family crosses through a gap in the barrier in the village of Al-Ram on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Photograph: Gali Tibbon

Toni O’Loughlin, The great divide: Life in east Jerusalem, guardian.co.uk, July 9, 2008

Sufian Odeh used to be able to see his cousin’s house across the street from his apartment window – until Israel built a wall of concrete down the middle of their neighborhood two years ago.

Standing eight metres high and just 13 metres from his building, it overshadows Sufian’s second-floor apartment like the wall of a prison, darkening this once thriving Palestinian district.

“When I look from the window and see the wall, I immediately close the blinds and smoke a cigarette. It’s like living at the end of the world,” says Sufian, who asked to change his name to preserve his family’s privacy.

His neighbours fled long ago, as the West Bank barrier crept down the main street of al-Ram, dividing families, separating children from schools and patients from clinics, and severing the road back to Jerusalem. Stranded outside Jerusalem by the barrier, al-Ram has become a virtual ghost town.

Akiva Eldar, A binational reality – Haaretz, July 7, 2008

How nice that this time, too, the terrorist was a “lone wolf,” a drug addict or just a nut case. Just so long as Jerusalemite murderers are not acting on behalf of terrorist groups. “Wild weeds” can grow in any garden. We also once had a strange doctor who carried out a massacre in a mosque; his family erected a glorious tombstone in honor of the “saint.” No one proposed razing the family’s home for the purpose of “deterrence” – and justifiably so. If we assume that this was the case of a deviant, demolishing the home of his family will deter the next deviant in the same way that the death penalty deters people who decide to blow themselves up in a bus, in the hope of having fun with 70 virgins in paradise. Deterrence is relevant when it is applied to trends in the mainstream, not in the sidelines of society.

The murderer at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva and the terrorist with the bulldozer did not represent an organization. Worse still: They reflect the mood of thousands of residents in Israel’s capital. A terror organization can be tracked down, declared illegal and its leadership can be arrested. Discontent that originates at the grassroots needs no guidance, is not controlled by anyone’s decisions, and it is much more difficult to contain.

Bernard Avishai Dot Com, July 3, 2008

Abed has a quick mind, infectious smile and Zhivago-like eyes. He could have been anything he set his mind to becoming. He once told me the story of how he and his closest friends had dreamed of studying the law, that a couple of them actually went to Cairo to get law degrees, but that he wanted to start making money and missed the boat, you know, for reasons young men later come to regret. But he did go to work and did begin saving his money–6 a.m. to 4 p.m., every day for 20 years.

When Abed had finally squirreled-away enough, just around the turn of the millennium, he started building himself a stately house in the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, just beyond Shuafat, but before the Jewish neighborhood of Neve Yaacov. He and his family finally moved into the house, his dream palace, in 2003. This was, of course, the height of the Al-Aqsa Intifadah.

In 2004, the government announced that the security wall was going up. Beit Hanina was going to be on the other side of it. Abed and his family were given days to find a place inside the wall, or he would be considered a resident of the Palestinian territories, not Jerusalem; he would lose his job, and they would lose their social insurance and health benefits (which his taxes had paid for all those years).

Abed told me this story with resignation. Who lives in the house?, I asked him at the time? “The birds,” he said, and added: “God is great.” His family squeezed into a two bedroom flat. The only time his eyes teared up was when he explained how he had to pull his kids from school and tell them they could no longer play with their friends. In all the years I have known him, I’ve heard nothing but words of revulsion for violence of any kind.

A Palestinian farmer waiting at the West Bank Barrier gate separating him from his olive groves located behind the Barrier, in the area of Ariel settlement.
©ICRC/E. Linklater/il-e-01265

Palestinians queuing at Huwara checkpoint, one of the two entry passages along the main road connecting Nablus to the rest of the West Bank. Private vehicles are not allowed through this check point, unless the owner holds a special permit.
©Associated Press/N. Ishtayeh

A Palestinian family crosses Huwara checkpoint, one of the two entry passages along the main road connecting Nablus to the rest of the West Bank. Private vehicles are not allowed through this check point, unless the owner holds a special permit.
©Associated Press / M. Mohammed

ICRC, The occupied Palestinian territories: Dignity Denied, December 13, 2007

“To be a Palestinian means to face limits in every aspect of life. We are blocked everywhere: we lose our jobs, we cannot travel freely, we are separated from our families. To be a Palestinian means to be deprived of many things that to others are normal.”
Mohammed, a Jerusalemite

Throughout the occupied Palestinian territories, in the Gaza Strip as well as in the West Bank, Palestinians continuously face hardship in simply going about their lives; they are prevented from doing what makes up the daily fabric of most people’s existence. The Palestinian territories face a deep human crisis, where millions of people are denied their human dignity. Not once in a while, but every day.

While the Gaza Strip is sealed off, the conflict between militants and Israel continues inexorably. Palestinian militants are launching rockets towards Israel almost every day. The Israeli army regularly carries out incursions deep into the Strip, air strikes and attacks from the sea. The civilian population remains trapped, with no escape possible, and is also affected by continued intra-Palestinian clashes.

An aerial view of the separation fence, near Jerusalem. (AP)

UN: West Bank fence severs Palestinian farmers from fields, AP, Haaretz, Nov. 17, 2007

Only 18 percent of some 30,000 West Bank farmers who used to work the lands cut off by Israel’s separation fence now have Israeli permits to reach their fields, the United Nations said in a report on the lives of some 230,000 Palestinians in 67 communities close to the fence.

The report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs looked at 15 communities with about 10,000 residents trapped between the fence and Israel, and at 52 communities with 220,000 residents on the Palestinian side of the divider.

Those in the hemmed-in villages require permanent residency permits, while those on the east side of the fence need Israeli-issued visitors permits to reach lands or visit family in the enclosed communities.

Jared Malsin, Walled in? openDemocracy, November 9, 2007

In towns and villages all over the West Bank, Palestinians demonstrate every week, usually on Fridays after the noon prayer. The spirit and persistence of these protests have generated a small international buzz about a nonviolent resurgence in Palestine, a return to the days of the First Intifada when a largely peaceful uprising brought renewed attention to the Palestinian cause in the late 1980s.

Hoping to gauge the alleged revival of nonviolent resistance in Palestine, I visited the small village of Al-Walajeh, four kilometres north of Bethlehem. Every Friday, Al-Walajeh’s residents gather in protest of the construction of the controversial wall around the West Bank. The planned route of a 30-foot high concrete section of the barrier will slice the village in half. Shireen Al-Araj, a member of Al-Walajeh’s municipal council, says the wall, which has already been raised in parts of the village as a barbed wire fence, will result in the annexation of much of the village’s land by Israel.

One blazing hot September day, the villagers, joined by eight Israeli anarchists, a young activist from Japan, and a few elderly women with Christian Peacemaker Teams, prayed, then marched on the construction site. They set about blocking the access road used by Israeli construction vehicles. Israeli soldiers watched from their post higher on the hillside, but held their fire. The protesters built mounds of rocks, sand, and tree branches, eventually setting one of the piles ablaze: a literal firewall against invading bulldozers and trucks.

Bil’in – Four nonviolent activists wounded in Bil’in’s weekly protest, October 26, 2007
Source : IMEMC

by George Rishmawi

At least four nonviolent activists have been wounded in the weekly nonviolent anti-wall demonstration in the village of Bilin, near the West Bank city of Ramallah on Friday.

A number of International and Israeli peace activists joined the villagers of Bilin in their weekly protest carrying banners condemning the harassment of the Palestinian prisoners by the Israeli police. The protestors demanded the international committee of the Red Cross to pressure Israel to probe the death of one of Mohammad al-Ashqar few days ago in the desert jail of Ketsiot.

Protestors walked through the streets of the town and attempted to go to the olive orchards behind the annexation wall. However, they were stopped by the Israeli soldiers who placed barricades on the way to prevent the villagers from reaching their olive trees.

Troops threatened to shoot anyone who attempts to go through the barricade. As the protestors attempted to walk through, troops fired several gas and sound bombs and rubber-coated metal bullets at them wounding four.

Like Gideon Levy, Amira Hass is not simply a great journalist. She is a great human being.

Amira Hass, Disrupting the separation policy, Haaretz, September 25, 2007

Last Friday morning, the eve of Yom Kippur, Machsom Watch activists had to spend hours making frantic telephone calls and using their connections with high-ranking officials to enable three sick people to traverse the Qalandiyah checkpoint and reach Jerusalem for urgent treatment. Media reports had promised that despite the hermetic closure, humanitarian cases would be allowed through the checkpoints, but by noon, most of those cases had given up and returned home.

In other cases, Machsom Watch’s female volunteers try to alert commanders when soldiers are harassing people passing through the checkpoints. Months of correspondence and requests, reports in Haaretz and monitoring by B’Tselem resulted in two commanders being removed from the Taysir checkpoint. This did not stop a soldier from harassing people at that checkpoint a few months later, nor did it prevent similar abusive conduct at other checkpoints.

Haaretz, September 6, 2007

Its noon on Thursday and Khaled, a lawyer, noticed immediately: The older soldier checking IDs at the Zaatra checkpoing – south of Nablus – is being nice to people. The soldier looked inside the car, saw the three children, smiled and gave them candy.

Khaled’s first impulse was to refuse the sweets. Later he decided to give the soldier a break and not explain that the candy and the politeness do not alter the reality: this checkpoint, at the foothill of the sprawling settlement of Tapuah, is part of the whole complex of fences along roads, obstacles in side roads and dislocation of villages from their land and often isolating Palestinians living in the northern West Bank from the south.

Israel’s Supreme Court orders change in wall route BBC, September 4, 2007

Israel’s supreme court has ordered the government to redraw the route of the West Bank barrier near Bilin village, a key focus of anti-barrier protest.

The court accepted an appeal by Bilin residents, who had argued that the barrier prevented them from reaching 50% of their agricultural land.

Weekly protests against the barrier have been held there for two years.

The Israeli government says the barrier is a security measure but Palestinians view it as an illegal land grab.

The International Court of Justice issued an advisory ruling in 2004 that the barrier breached international law where it is built on occupied territory and should be dismantled.