Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Political suicide, Palestinian style, The Daily Star, August 2008

It is painful watching events in Gaza and the West Bank unfold, as Fatah and Hamas battle it out like a bunch of armed neighborhood gangs. The mood among Palestinians throughout the world is one of despair and gloom, tinged with embarrassment and occasional shame.

Arab and others supporters of the Palestinian cause throw their hands up in the air in bewilderment. It will not be surprising to see some friends of Palestine quietly walk away, mumbling that if the Palestinians wish to kill each other and destroy their own society, they are free to do so. The world will easily forget about them.

These are grim days for the Palestinians, but not unusual ones for the Arab world as a whole. The sight of clan-based political groups in Gaza killing each other is familiar in many parts of the Middle East, sadly. That does not make it any better. It simply is a sign that national dysfunctionality expressed in internecine political violence is a regional Arab ailment, not a peculiarly Palestinian one.

The Palestinians, especially their political leaders, must assume most of the blame for this round of fighting, which is absolutely incomprehensible at a time when economic pressures and sanctions have reduced Gaza not just to a prison-like encampment, but to a ward of paupers. Israel and other enemies of the Palestinians will be pleased to see them fighting each other. We will hear another chorus from the skinheads and racists in the world who will point to this round of fighting as proof that Israel withdrew from Gaza and all it got in return were rockets fired at it and hooligans running the show inside. They will be right, but superficially.

The rockets fired at Gaza are to be seen in the context of a war that still rages between Israelis and Palestinians, now more or less quiet due to a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. The fighting among the Palestinians is not so easy to understand. It is also not the first time that Palestinians have quarreled or fought each other. They did it in the 1940s, in the 1980s in refugee camps in Lebanon, and now they are doing it again in their squeezed little landscape in Gaza.

This is the latest and most troubling example of how a once grand and noble Palestinian national liberation movement has allowed itself to degenerate into ineptitude. The consequences of the fighting are unlikely to increase the chance of liberating Palestine, forcing Israel to negotiate an honorable and fair peace, or providing Palestinians opportunities to live more secure, stable and prosperous lives. All that will emerge from this is the functional equivalent of a child taking over a tree house, and claiming that as a great victory.

Mohammed Omer, Truth and Consequences Under the Israeli Occupation, The nation, July 31, 2008

This summer, at age 24, I was honored to learn that I had become the youngest journalist to receive the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, named for the famed American war reporter and awarded to journalists who counter propaganda with the truth. Although Israel has sealed Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians in what many now call the world’s largest open-air prison, Dutch MP Hans Van Baalen lobbied the Israeli government to let me leave Gaza to receive my award in person. Upon my return from London, I was surrounded by Israeli security officers. I was stripped naked at gunpoint, interrogated, kicked and beaten for more than four hours. At one point I fainted and then awakened to fingernails gouging at the flesh beneath my eyes. An officer crushed my neck beneath his boot and pressed my chest into the floor. Others took turns kicking and pinching me, laughing all the while. They dragged me by my feet, sweeping my head through my own vomit. I lost consciousness. I was told later that they transferred me to a hospital only when they thought I might die.

Today, I have difficulty breathing. I have abrasions and scratches on my chest and neck. My hands don’t function well; typing is difficult. My doctor informed me that due to nerve damage from one kick, I may be unable to father children and will need to have an operation.

Israeli attacks on journalists are not new; nor are they rare. In April, Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana was killed by fire from an Israeli tank. He was in a car, clearly marked as press. According to Amnesty International, “Fadel Shana appears to have been killed deliberately although he was a civilian taking no part in attacks on Israel’s forces.”

Reporters Without Borders has condemned the Israeli military’s widespread “abusive behavior” of Palestinian journalists. And the Committee to Protect Journalists reports that journalists covering Israeli military actions in the West Bank and Gaza “contend with perennial abuses at the hands of Israeli forces.” In 2007 alone, Israeli soldiers shot photographers from Agence France-Presse, Al-Ayyam newspaper and Al-Aqsa TV. The television cameraman, Imad Ghanem, fell to the ground when wounded. Israeli forces then shot him twice more in the legs. Both of his legs have been amputated.

Gideon Levy, Neither an officer nor a gentleman - Haaretz, July 31, 2008

Brigadier General Moshe “Chico” Tamir is a devoted and loving father who let his 14-year-old son drive a military all-terrain vehicle. Being the law-abiding organization that it is, the Israel Defense Forces probed the incident, calling it “serious.” As a result, Tamir’s promotion may be put on hold and he may be indicted. Certainly, a brigade commander who tried to cover up his son’s accident by lying deserves to be punished. But the commander of the Gaza Brigade deserves much more for acts considerably more serious - acts that the world defines as war crimes and for which no one has been held accountable.

I would like Tamir, the dedicated father, to meet a girl the same age as his beloved son whose world fell apart when she was 14 years old. I saw her in mourning in November 2006, in the courtyard of her destroyed house in Beit Hanun. Islam Athamneh lost eight family members: Her mother, grandmother, grandfather, aunts, uncles and cousins. They fled their house when it was struck by a shell and were killed by another onslaught. The legs of Abdullah, her three-year-old brother, were blown off. Islam, whose father had died years earlier, became an orphan.

The soldiers who fired the 11 shells at houses in Beit Hanun were under the command of Tamir, the dedicated dad who let his son take a Tomcar for a joyride. Some 22 people were killed in the shelling and another 40 were hurt. Most lost limbs or sustained head wounds.

It was the Gaza Brigade commander, Tamir, who was responsible for that atrocity, but the IDF quickly absolved him of blame. Instead, they placed it on a faulty electronic component in the gun barrel. It was the chip, not Chico, who was to blame. In the seven days before the heinous shelling, which violates international law, Tamir’s troops managed to kill 80 Palestinians, 40 of whom were innocent civilians, as part of Operation Autumn Clouds.

Eve Spangler: The Deaths of Children, Counterpunch, July 18, 2008

We are not shown that far more Palestinian than Israeli children live in daily danger: lacking medical treatment in Gaza, on the verge of malnutrition, caught up in brutality at check points or simply walking home from school. We learn little of what every Israeli might easily know from consulting the B’Tselem web site (B’Tselem is dedicated to documenting and contesting human rights violations in the Occupied Terrirtories). Their data show, for example, that in the seven years between September, 2000 and August, 2007, the Israeli defense forces killed 4233 Palestinians and Israeli civilians killed an additional 41. During that same period, which includes the suicide bombings of the second Intifada, 320 Israeli soldiers and 471 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians. Even more to the point for people who wish to base their political arguments on the lives of children: during those same years, 857 Palestinian children were killed by Israelis and 119 Israeli children were killed by Palestinians.

And, of course the death toll is merely the tip of the iceberg. It does not count the school closures or ill-stocked clinics. It does not count the cost of watching the grown-ups in your world being humiliated. It does not count the fear that there is no reliable economy to sustain your future. It does not count the cost of sleep interrupted by missiles and rocket-fire.

Perhaps those 857 dead Palestinian children are best represented by the life and death of 9 year old Abir Aramin. On January 16, 2007, Abir Aramin was walking home from school when the Israeli Border Police, a branch of the Israeli army, swept through the town, as they had on many other days right around the time of school closing. Children fled before their jeeps. Abir took shelter against a store and was shot in the back of the head at close range. She died soon thereafter at Hadassah Hospital. She was the child of Bassam and Salwa Aramin. Her father, a member of Fateh, had been labeled a terrorist and served 9 years in an Israeli jail for his attempt to throw a grenade at an Israeli jeep. Upon emerging from prison, he became one of the Palestinian founders of Combatants for Peace and continues to work with his Israeli counterparts to bring an end to the occupation, even after Abir’s death. No Israeli soldier has been charged in the case.

An account of Abir’s death was written by Nurit Elhanan-Peled [Peled-Elhanan] , an Israeli mother whose daughter Smadar was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber . Nurit Elhanan-Peled is one of the founders of Parents Circle-Family Forum, a grassroots organization for bereaved Palestinians and Israelis. She offers these observations:

“I sit with her mother Salwa and try to say, ‘We are all victims of occupation.’ As I say it, I know that her hell is more terrible than mine. My daughter’s murderer had the decency to kill himself … The soldier who killed Abir is probably drinking beer, playing backgammon with his mates and going to discotheques at night. Abir is in a grave.”

What’s Driving the Jerusalem Attacks - by Uri Avnery, AW, July 28, 2008

From the utterances of the commentators this week, one can gather that they cannot even imagine the anger that accumulates in the mind of a young Arab in Jerusalem throughout the years of humiliation, harassment, discrimination and helplessness. It is easier and more amusing to go into pornographic descriptions of the 72 virgins waiting for the martyrs in the Muslim paradise - what they do with them, how they do it to them, who has enough energy for them all.

One of the main contributing factors for the stirring up of hatred is the demolition of “illegal” homes of Arab residents, who are quite unable to build “legally”. The dimension of official stupidity is attested to by the demand of the Shin-Bet chief, voiced this week again, to destroy the homes of the attackers’ families, for the sake of “deterrence”. Apparently he has not heard about the dozens of studies and the accumulated experience, which prove that every destroyed home becomes an incubator for new hate-driven avengers….

This week, a lot of proposals were presented, such as building a Berlin-style wall through the middle of Jerusalem (in addition to the one going around it). To punish whole families for the acts of their children, much like the Nazi “sippenhaft”. To expel the families from the city or to cancel their resident status. To demolish their homes. To take away their social insurance benefits, even if they have paid for them.All these “solutions” have one thing in common - they have been tried in the past, here and in other places, and found wanting.

Except one, clear solution: to turn East Jerusalem into the capital of the State of Palestine, to enable its inhabitants to set up their own municipality, while keeping the whole city as an urban entity united under one super-municipality in which the Arabs will be equal to the Jews….

The attacks are the result of despair, frustration, hatred and the sense that there is no way out. Only a solution that will remove these feelings can bring security to both parts of Jerusalem.

An IDF soldier and a Palestinian man arguing as West Bank residents wait to cross a closed checkpoint into Hebron on Sunday. (AP) Haaretz, July 27, 2008.

No Judge and No Law, The Magnes Zionist, 27 Jul 2008

There is an article in Haaretz today (in Hebrew) about the findings of the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din (”There is Law”), that less than 10% of the complaints of Palestinians against West Bank settlers result in indictments. Most of the files are closed by the police for lack of evidence, because the perpetrators are unknown, etc.

Here is the blurb concerning the report from Yesh Din’s website :

Yesh Din’s monitoring of the handling of investigations into offenses committed by Israeli civilians against Palestinians in the West Bank exposes that the rate of failure of the Samaria and Judea (SJ) District Police investigations is at 90%. This and other statistics are published in a data sheet which tracks 205 investigation files opened in recent years and which have been followed closely by Yesh Din. Out of the 205 investigations opened into offenses committed against Palestinians which Yesh Din is following, police processing and prosecutorial review have concluded in 163 files. Out of those 163, only in 13 (8%) of the cases were indictments filed against defendants. One case file was lost and never investigated, and 149 (91%) investigation files were closed without filing any indictments against suspects.

Additional findings in the data sheet show that out of the 149 investigation files that were closed, 91 were closed on grounds of “perpetrator unknown” (61%) and 43 cases were closed on grounds of “lack of evidence” (28%).

To read Yesh Din’s Report, please click here . From its monitoring, it seems that the police “investigations” are the stuff of farce. On rare occasions, appeals have been successful. But one can only marvel at the amount of Sysiphisian labor performed by the tiny Yesh Din organization. They work so hard in the face of such adversity.

According to Haaretz, the response of the state’s attorney in charge of law enforcement in these cases was to challenge Yesh Din’s statistics – not 13 but 30 indictments resulted. That means 78%, rather than 92%, of the investigation files were closed without an indictment.

Whew, now I can sleep at night….

Of course, I don’t believe the state’s attorney. If you read Yesh Din’s report, you will see that no official statistics are kept that track complaints of offenses against Palestinians; they are mixed with settler’ offenses against the police. Yesh Din documents its cases; when they have requested the state’s attorney’s documentation, they have been stonewalled.

On the Wild West Bank, settlers move against Palestinians with impunity. Small wonder that most Palestinians don’t even bother to report complaints to the police

Gershom Gorenberg, The Extremists of Your Own City Come First, southjerusalem.com, July 24, 2008

This week Nadav Shragai - the Ha’aretz reporter who often writes like a spokesman for the Council of Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza - provided a feature on Ze’ev Hever, a.k.a. Zambish. Hever, a convicted member of the 1980s Jewish terror underground, is the head of Amana, the organizational child of Gush Emunim. Amana builds settlements. Hever worked closely with Ariel Sharon to expand the settlement map. Outside of Sharon himself, he may have done more than anyone else to move Israelis in the West Bank - though admittedly there’s lots of competition.

Now Hever is thinking of moving out of Kiryat Arba, Shragai reports. Young fanatics are slashing his tires and posting posters denouncing him for negotiating on the outposts. The young fanatics believe the old fanatic isn’t fanatical enough.

Yesterday the army did make a minor gesture toward controlling the outpost settlers: It removed a bus being used as an ersatz mobile home from Adei Ad, an outpost near Shilo, between Ramallah and Nablus. Settler extremists reportedly retaliated with a series of violent incidents. Settlers from Yitzhar, near Nablus, tossed stones at Palestinian cars on a main road. Ha’aretz reported:

Regarding the trailer’s removal, a Yitzhar resident said: “The police and the Civil Administration think they can come and evacuate like a ‘hit and run.’ So we decided that for every attempt to evacuate, we would exact a price throughout the area. The tiniest evacuation will result in incidents all day long, so it will be clear we don’t give up easily.”

Meanwhile, also at Yitzhar, the army has dismissed the settlement security coordinator. According to Ma’ariv (dead tree edition), the man had advance knowledge that a member of the settlement had built a home-made rocket and were going to fire it, apparently emulating Hamas et al in Gaza. The security coordinator did nothing about it, and refused to help in the investigation. The settlement doesn’t accept the dismissal, and has retaliated by throwing out the soldiers there to protect them….

Dick Norton posted a good piece on Samir Kuntar (al-Quntar) on his blog on July 15, 2008. Israel is releasing Kuntar as part of its deal with Hezbollah. In return for Israel’s release of Kuntar and four other Lebanese prisoners–as well as the bodies of eight members of Hezbollah and those of four Palestinians–, Hezbollah is giving Israel what remains of the bodies of Israeli army reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev–as well as the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah provoked by the latter’s abduction of Rosenwasser and Regev. Smadar Haran Kaiser describes Kuntar’s role in slaughtering her family on April 22, 1979 in the following article published in the Washington Post on May 18, 2003:

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border. Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer. As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

At his trial in 1980, Kuntar claimed that Israeli gunfire killed Danny Haran as soldiers burst in the Haran home and that he did not smash Einat Haran’s head with his rifle butt as her mother claims. Kuntar obviously wanted to minimize his own guilt in this case and his testimony does not seem credible.

According to Haaretz, the government of Lebanon has declared Wednesday a national holiday to celebrate the “liberation of prisoners from the jails of the Israeli enemy and the return of the remains of martyrs.” Also according to Haaretz, Kuntar and the other prisoners are to be welcomed at Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport by Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, President Michel Suleiman, and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri.

Such a welcome for a man involved in the murder of a four-year-old girl is obscene. It is sickening. Such a welcome for a man involved in an attack that forced a mother to cover her little daughter’s mouth so she would not scream and reveal her presence is obscene. It is sickening.

Haaretz also describes people in Gaza celebrating Kuntar’s release. This too is obscene. This too is sickening.

Jaber Weshah, deputy director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, used to be Samir Kuntar’s cellmate. Haaretz quotes him as saying: “Today is a true day of joy for all Palestinians and all freedom lovers across the world.” This too is obscene. This too is sickening. By celebrating Kuntar’s release, Palestinians simply reinforce right-wing Israeli attempts to deflect the world’s attention from what Israel does to the Palestinians every day.

According to Haaretz, “Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called Kantar an ‘Arab nationalist hero’ and said his release was a great day for the Arab nation.” This too is obscene. This too is sickening. The fact that Kuntar’s release is being celebrated by Palestinians is a great victory for all those determined to deflect attention away from the everyday agony of the Palestinians. It is a great victory for those who seek to make the world forget what Palestinians endure at checkpoints. It is a great victory for all those who seek to portray Palestinian resistance to occupation as mere barbarism.

All of us who condemn what Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem must also condemn the murder of little Israeli girls by men like Samir Kuntar. And we must condemn all portrayals of such men as great heroes.

Anne Paq: Photostory, Breaking the Silence’s tour disrupted, EI, July 14, 2008

On 27 June, I took part in one of the regular tours of the West Bank city of Hebron and its settlements organized by the organization Breaking the Silence. Breaking the Silence is a group of Israeli army soldiers and veterans who work to expose the injustice of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Once more, the tour was disrupted because of the settlers.

Before the start of the tour, organizer Yehuda Shaul — one of the founders of Breaking the Silence and a former Israeli soldier who served 14 months in Hebron — warned the group that it was uncertain if the tour would proceed as planned. During the previous tour of Hebron, on 17 June, Israeli settlers attacked the tour group and threw boiling liquid at them, injuring a Spanish photographer. Nevertheless, Yehuda asked that we not answer answer to the settlers’ provocations no matter what happened.

At the first stop in Kiryat Arba settlement next to Hebron, a group of settlers, including children, were already waiting for the bus to arrive. As soon as we exited the bus, they quickly surrounded us and started to shout and prevented Yehuda from moving and talking about the settlement. Israeli police intervened but let the settlers continue their disruption.

One of the settlers was speaking through a loudspeaker so loud that it made it impossible to hear Yehuda. The tour was also prevented from visiting the grave of Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Israeli settler who massacred 29 worshipping Palestinians and injured many more when he attacked Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994. He is seen by many settlers as a hero and his gravestone celebrating the massacre has become a site of pilgrimage.

After the group returned to the bus to leave for the Old City of Hebron, the settlers sat on the road and stood in front of the bus to prevent it from moving. They blatantly disrupted public order and the police who stood nearby had no intention to fine them or intervene to allow the tour to proceed. In Hebron, there seems to be no law enforcement to keep the settlers in order, despite the impressively large number of soldiers and police available in the streets, greatly outnumbering the settlers.

The first time I spoke with Hilda Silverman, and the only time we ever had a real conversation, we were walking to the Harvard Faculty Club with Sara Roy and several other people. Hilda told me that Sara’s moving essay “Living with the Holocaust” was originally supposed to be published in both Tikkun and the Journal of Palestine Studies, but Michael Lerner refused to publish it in Tikkun because he felt it was too critical of Israel. We were both outraged by this.

Hilda Silverman

Photo: Linda and Steven Brion-Meisels.

JWA - We Remember - Hilda Silverman, 1938 - 2008

Remembering Hilda Silverman

by Alice Rothchild, Co-chair, Jewish Voice for Peace, Boston

My first memories of Hilda date back to the late 1990s as she climbed the three flights of stairs in my home to join in the formative meetings of a political group that became Jewish Voice for Peace, Boston. Slightly breathless, she was usually in animated conversation with Ruchama Marton, an Israeli psychiatrist doing a fellowship at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and Elaine Hagopian, Professor Emerita of Sociology from Simmons College and a scholar and activist on Middle East affairs. These three women can best be described as the political mothers and mentors for many of us in the Jewish peace movement.

Hilda quickly distinguished herself as an extremely knowledgeable, thoughtful, moral voice who was able to maintain a strong sense of her own Jewish identity and a painful awareness of the Holocaust while articulating a consistent and powerful critique of Israeli policy. In a 2002 op-ed published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hilda wrote, “I am a Jew with a profound consciousness of Jewish victimization through history. But for me, victim and victimizer, oppressor and oppressed are not mutually exclusive categories.”

As a younger activist trying to find my way in the bewildering maze of history, politics, trauma, and conflicting narratives, Hilda’s voice was a critical part of my education. In the book, Culture and Resistance, Edward Said told this story: “It was in 1988. There was a Tikkun conference in New York…I, and my friend Ibrahim Abu-Lughod were on a panel with Michael Walzer. At one point, in a moment of exasperation, Walzer said, ‘All right, you’re going to get your state, so I think it’s important to stop thinking about the past. You go have your state, we’ll have ours, and that’s the end of it.’ At which point, a woman in the audience, who I’ll never forget – her name was Hilda Silverman – got up in a state of rage, railing at Walzer, saying, ‘How dare you tell a Palestinian that he should stop reminding us of the past, when you and I belong to a people that is always reminding the world of how much we suffered, and asking people never to forget? How dare you tell a Palestinian to forget?’”

Levy, Twilight Zone / ‘Worse than apartheid’ - Haaretz, July 10, 2008

I thought they would feel right at home in the alleys of Balata refugee camp, the Casbah and the Hawara checkpoint. But they said there is no comparison: for them the Israeli occupation regime is worse than anything they knew under apartheid. This week, 21 human rights activists from South Africa visited Israel. Among them were members of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress; at least one of them took part in the armed struggle and at least two were jailed. There were two South African Supreme Court judges, a former deputy minister, members of Parliament, attorneys, writers and journalists. Blacks and whites, about half of them Jews who today are in conflict with attitudes of the conservative Jewish community in their country. Some of them have been here before; for others it was their first visit.

For five days they paid an unconventional visit to Israel - without Sderot, the IDF and the Foreign Ministry (but with Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial and a meeting with Supreme Court President Justice Dorit Beinisch. They spent most of their time in the occupied areas, where hardly any official guests go - places that are also shunned by most Israelis.
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On Monday they visited Nablus, the most imprisoned city in the West Bank. From Hawara to the Casbah, from the Casbah to Balata, from Joseph’s Tomb to the monastery of Jacob’s Well. They traveled from Jerusalem to Nablus via Highway 60, observing the imprisoned villages that have no access to the main road, and seeing the “roads for the natives,” which pass under the main road. They saw and said nothing. There were no separate roads under apartheid. They went through the Hawara checkpoint mutely: they never had such barriers.

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.