Aletho News

Stuck between a wall and an occupation

Nora Barrows-Friedman writing from Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, Live from Palestine, 29 March 2010

Bilal Jadou standing atop a home in the Aida refugee camp. His house, on the other side of the wall, can be seen off in the distance.

When Bilal Jadou’s grandmother was sick last year, and in need of immediate medical care, the family called the Jerusalem emergency service and requested an ambulance — only to hear on the other end of the line that no Israeli ambulances would be permitted to reach the house without permission from the Israeli military. “Try the Bethlehem ambulance service,” the emergency dispatcher told Jadou. When he called the Bethlehem ambulance, they told him to have his grandmother meet them at the other side of the main Bethlehem-Jerusalem checkpoint because they weren’t allowed to cross. Jadou’s house is on the other side of the sprawling apartheid wall, separated from his community and the West Bank, and in a permanent state of oppressive bureaucratic and administrative limbo as nearby settlements are intended to spread onto his land.

The Electronic Intifada correspondent Nora Barrows-Friedman interviewed Jadou, 26 years old, about his situation. They spoke inside Aida refugee camp, in Bethlehem.

Nora Barrows-Friedman: Tell us about your situation and why this story is so important in the context of what’s happening here in the Bethlehem area, especially in Aida camp, which is right up against the wall, cutting the land of families here in half.

Bilal Jadou: My family is separated from each other. We used to live in the refugee camp here and in our other house that used to be within five minutes walking distance from here. Since the wall was built, we can’t communicate as a family. Some of us live in this house in Aida, and the others live in our other house on the other side of the wall.

I have six brothers and three sisters. Two of the brothers, including me, and one of our sisters, are allowed by Israel to live in the house on the other side of the wall. No one else is allowed to be there. Now it sometimes takes two hours to cross the checkpoint in Bethlehem to see our family in Aida camp. Other times, the Israelis close the checkpoint entirely and we can’t see each other at all.

NBF: How did the Israelis choose who was able to live in the house on the other side of the wall?

BJ: They said it was purely because of “security reasons,” and we still don’t know why some got permission and some didn’t. Also, we can’t add anything to the house; we can’t build onto the house. At any time, they can come and take my permission and say it’s for “security reasons.”

NBF: Do you have a special ID card now? Such as a Jerusalem residency card? How are you identified as someone who lives on the other side of the wall?

BJ: I still have a West Bank Palestinian ID, with a special permission slip for just the Tantur area [where the house is]. If Israeli police catch me anywhere else other than at my house, or if they catch me working inside Jerusalem, they will take my permission away. I can just be inside the house, and nothing more.

The Israeli wall runs along the Aida refugee camp

NBF: So, if you want to buy groceries, or go to the bank, or get gasoline for your car, or get to the hospital, what do you do?

BJ: We can’t do any of these things. I can’t even drive a car inside the area near the house. We’re not allowed. We can’t even take a taxi to the checkpoint. We have to walk. If we want to buy groceries, we can only buy them inside the Palestinian territories. But we are not allowed to bring anything from inside the Palestinian territories to my house. So the only way I can get food and supplies to my house is to have friends inside Jerusalem buy our groceries, or whatever we need, and bring them to us.

We have no services except water and electricity, which come from the Palestinian side of the wall. Israel won’t allow us to have anything else. It’s a way to push us to leave this area and go to the other side of the wall. This is the only reason they’re doing this to us.

My grandmother got sick and we called the Israeli ambulance. They told us to coordinate with the Israeli soldiers, who then refused to allow the ambulance to reach us. The Palestinian ambulance told us that since they couldn’t cross the checkpoint, we had to bring my grandmother to the checkpoint and they would take her to the hospital in Bethlehem. Since we couldn’t use a car to bring her to the checkpoint, we put her on a donkey and walked her over there. But before we reached the checkpoint, my grandmother died.

NBF: On the other side of the wall, there is a lot of land that was cultivated by families in Beit Jala and Aida camp until the wall was completed in 2004. And then you have Gilo and Har Gilo settlements, right next to your house on the other side. Talk more about this policy of taking land, using the wall to separate communities, and forcing Palestinians to stay inside these ghettos in the West Bank.

BJ: There is a lot of land near our house owned by Palestinians. But we’re the last family who are allowed to stay there. Just a few months ago, we tried to expand our house a little bit; we built a shed that was only two meters squared. The Israeli police came and told us that we had to stop building. If we want to fix the house, the police come. If we paint our house, the police ask us to remove the paint. But then you look across the street, and you see Gilo settlement with their cranes and bulldozers and construction teams building all the time, expanding all day long.

NBF: The police come often to check to see if you have put paint on the walls. But what about the treatment you receive by settlers?

BJ: The settlers attacked us once. They built a fence around our house and told us to leave. But we went to the court to prove that this was our house, with deeds and documents since the Ottoman period. The court gave us back our land and the permission to stay on our land. Most of the time, though, we get the most terrible treatment from the Israeli soldiers. They come and attack us. Once, they came and took all of our furniture from inside the house and threw it outside. They told us, “find another place to live!” They sometimes come at 2:00 in the morning, taking us outside of the house, and searching to make sure we haven’t built anything or fixed anything inside the house.

I was once told by a soldier, after he took my ID card one night, to go to the checkpoint to retrieve it. I got to the checkpoint, and the soldier called me on my mobile phone, telling me that he was outside of the house, and I should come back to get it. I went back to the house, and then he called and said that he was at the checkpoint. This went on until 6:00 in the morning. Sometimes they take my ID card to other checkpoints so I’m forced to travel a long distance to retrieve it. They’re trying to put a lot of pressure on us so that we leave the area and they can expand the settlement.

NBF: Tell me about your family’s history. We’re sitting inside your home in the refugee camp. Where was your family from, originally, before they were expelled in 1948?

BJ: Originally, we’re refugees from al-Malha. It’s just one kilometer away, five minutes away by car. Some of my family fled in 1948 and came here. Even part of the refugee camp is on al-Malha land, inside the West Bank borders. When the Israelis invaded and occupied the West Bank in 1967, some of the family decided to go back to the house in al-Malha, inside the so-called Israeli area. So now we’re separated into three parts — my family in Aida camp, my brothers and sisters inside the house on the other side of the wall, and the rest in al-Malha. We haven’t been together as a family — we haven’t all sat down to dinner together — for six years.

Sometimes, if something is happening inside the camp, like a wedding for a friend or neighbor, we have to leave our house at nine in the morning to be sure we’re at the wedding by three in the afternoon. We’re affected a lot by the separation.

NBF: It used to take you five minutes to get to the camp from the house before the wall was built.

BJ: Yes, five minutes, not more. Sometimes, if I walk quickly, it used to take three minutes. Now, it’s half an hour just to walk to the checkpoint. Then I spend sometimes two, three hours inside the checkpoint.

NBF: What do you think about the next generation of Palestinians who are facing similar situations? When you get married and have children, what do you want for them?

BJ: I hope everything changes. The situation is extremely difficult, and I hope that the new generation can live in peace without any conflicts. Actually, when you mentioned marriage, this is a very depressing issue for me. I tried to get married recently. But I can’t, because I’m living in this area. If I marry a girl from Bethlehem, I can’t live with her in Bethlehem because then I’d have to move to the city and lose my land and my house. If I want to marry a girl from Jerusalem, she’d refuse. I don’t have an Israeli ID and I can’t go anywhere inside Jerusalem. This is no way to make a family. So I’m stuck.

I think I’ll never get married, because I need to protect my house. Maybe there’ll be a solution soon, and things will change.

All images by Nora Barrows-Friedman.

Nora Barrows-Friedman is the co-host and Senior Producer of Flashpoints, a daily investigative newsmagazine on Pacifica Radio. She is also a correspondent for Inter Press Service. She regularly reports from Palestine, where she also runs media workshops for youth in the Dheisheh refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

March 29, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Israel’s latest provocation at al-Aqsa

By Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 25 March 2010

The Israeli government has indicated that it will press ahead with a plan to enlarge the Jewish prayer plaza at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, despite warnings that the move risks triggering a third intifada.

Israeli officials rejected this week a Jerusalem court’s proposal to shelve the plan after the judge accepted that the plaza’s expansion would violate the “status quo” arrangement covering the Old City’s holy places. Islamic authorities agreed to the arrangement after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967.

The site eyed by Israeli officials is located at the Mughrabi Gate, an entrance to the mosque compound known as the Haram al-Sharif, the most sensitive site in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Inside are al-Aqsa Mosque and the golden-topped Dome of the Rock.

Earlier encroachments by Israel on Islamic authority at the site have triggered clashes between Israeli police and Palestinians. A heavily armed visit to the compound by Ariel Sharon in 2000, shortly before he became prime minister, to declare Israeli rights there sparked the second intifada.

In recent weeks, analysts have grown increasingly concerned that a third intifada is imminent as Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has advanced settlement building in East Jerusalem and declared several places deep in the occupied West Bank as Jewish heritage sites.

Another assault on Muslim control so close to al-Aqsa Mosque risked “pouring fuel on the fire,” said Hanna Sweid, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament who filed the original planning objections to the Israeli scheme.

According to evidence presented to the Jerusalem court, Israeli officials used minor storm damage to a stone ramp leading to the Mughrabi Gate as a pretext to tear it down six years ago. The intention is to replace the ramp with a permanent metal bridge and then extend the Jewish prayer plaza into the area where the ramp was.

The scheme is the brainchild of Shmuel Rabinowitz, the rabbi in charge of the Western Wall, who declared the damage to the ramp in 2004 a “miracle” that had offered Israel the chance to take control of more land from Islamic authorities in the Old City.

The rabbi’s plan was approved in late 2007 by a special ministerial committee headed by Ehud Olmert, then the prime minister. The project has also won backing from Netanyahu, though he froze construction work in July under orders from the Jerusalem court.

The judge, Moussia Arad, proposed in January that the ramp be reinstated, or at the very least that the bridge follow the exact route of the ramp, and that all prayer at the site be banned. That position won the backing of United Nations officials monitoring Israel’s work at the Mughrabi Gate.

The Jordanian, Turkish and Palestinian Islamic authorities have all expressed deep concern at Israeli excavations at the Mughrabi Gate that are seen as a prelude to the plaza’s expansion.

Observers had hoped that, faced with the danger of another row with the United States so soon after the diplomatic crisis sparked by Israeli settlement building in East Jerusalem, Netanyahu might agree to the court’s compromise.

They have been proved wrong.

“Netanyahu has a history of trampling on Palestinian rights in the Old City,” Sweid said. “There is every reason to be worried about what he plans to get up to this time.”

In 1996, during his previous stint as prime minister, Netanyahu opened the Western Wall tunnel, another excavation close to the mosque compound, resulting in clashes in which 75 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers were killed.

Israel, which says the mosques sit on the ruins of two ancient Jewish temples, built by Solomon and Herod, refers to the site as Temple Mount and has staked a claim to a degree of sovereignty over the area in recent peace negotiations.

Last week, in a sign of the explosive consequences of tampering with the status quo concerning Jerusalem’s holy places, riots broke out in a “day of rage” in East Jerusalem following Israel’s announcement that it had rebuilt an old synagogue, the Hurva, close to the mosques.

“The Haram al-Sharif is a site of unrivaled Muslim sensitivity and the Israeli government is playing with fire here,” said Mohammed Masalha, a lecturer who heads a coalition of Islamic groups inside Israel that brought the court case.

In evidence presented to the court, Meir Ben Dov, an Israeli archaeologist and the excavations director at the Western Wall for nearly four decades, produced photographic evidence showing that the storm had caused only a minor landslide.

“I was asked by the government to inspect the damage two days after it occurred and I found maybe a dozen stones had been dislodged,” he said. “The ramp could have been repaired in less than a week but instead they decided to demolish it.”

Judge Arad, Ben Dov said, had been “shocked” when she saw the photographs.

Ben Dov said his recommendation that the walkway be repaired for $14,000 was ignored by Israeli officials, including the then-tourism minister, Benny Elon, a settler rabbi who heads a far-right party. Instead the government tore down the ramp and built a temporary wooden bridge to the Mughrabi Gate while excavations were carried out in the area exposed by the ramp’s destruction.

The Jerusalem comptroller, Shulamit Rubin, the city’s watchdog official, criticized the excavations at the time, saying they were illegal because the necessary authorizations had not been sought.

The secretive nature of the excavations was widely assumed by Islamic groups to be evidence of an Israeli intention to search for parts of the destroyed temples. With such evidence, Israel would have a stronger claim to extend its control.

The unscientific approach to the excavations was highlighted in early 2007 when it emerged that three years earlier Israeli archaeologists had unearthed at the site a Muslim prayer room from the time of the Saladin, dating to the 11th century, but had kept the discovery quiet.

In February 2007, when Israel brought heavy machinery to the Mughrabi Gate excavations, hundreds of Palestinians clashed with police while the Islamic Movements within Israel staged large demonstrations. Islamic Jihad said it had fired two Qassam rockets from Gaza in response, and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade threatened to carry out attacks if the work was not halted.

Islamic authorities also expressed fears that the compound of mosques might be damaged by the bulldozers, and that the heavy machinery might also destroy the as-yet-undiscovered al-Buraq mosque, believed to be located close to the Mughrabi Gate and marking the site where the Prophet Mohammed tethered his horse on his Night Journey between Mecca and Jerusalem.

To calm the situation, Israel allowed Turkish experts to examine the excavations a short time later. They reported that Israel was trying to sideline Jerusalem’s Islamic history so that its Jewish aspects could be emphasized.

Israel had another reason for pushing ahead with the illegal excavations, said Kais Nasser, the lawyer representing the Islamic groups. “They needed to unearth something, anything, that could be claimed as an antiquity to nullify Muslim demands for the ramp to be reinstated. Rebuilding the ramp would then be impossible because it would risk damaging an archaeological site.”

Nasser said Israel hopes that if it can present the bridge as the only feasible option, then there will be no obstacles to expanding the prayer plaza.

Ben Dov said he shared such suspicions about Israel’s activities at the site, adding that the goal of Israeli officials seemed to be to gain control over the whole 480-meter length of the Western Wall.

He and other observers have said this is just one more example of a long-standing policy to gradually encroach on Muslim control of the mosque compound.

Among the most significant has been the creation of the City of David, an Israeli archaeological park, directly south of al-Aqsa Mosque in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan. The site is run by Elad, an extremist settler group, that has taken over neighboring Palestinian homes and, along with the Jerusalem municipality and government officials, is pushing for dozens more to be demolished. It eventually wants to link up the park with the Temple Mount.

Jewish settlers have also been concentrating their efforts on taking over Palestinian homes in the Muslim quarter, close to the Haram al-Sharif, and have been supported by right-wing politicians, including in the past by Netanyahu.

One settler organization, Ateret Cohanim, has been especially active, and is known to be excavating under Palestinian homes around the compound in the hope of discovering traces of the temples.

“What we see here is an unholy alliance of government ministers, Jerusalem municipality officials and settler organizations trying to revive a supposed golden era of Jewish sovereignty from thousands of years ago,” Sweid said.

In addition, he said, Israel believed that a more significant Israeli presence close to the mosques would strengthen its hand in any final peace talks over the division of Jerusalem with the Palestinians, with Israel able to stake a bigger claim to sovereignty over the site.

At the Camp David talks in 2000, Bill Clinton, then US president, proposed dividing sovereignty so that Israel would have control over both the “subterranean spaces” of the mosque compound and the Western Wall. During the talks Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister of the day, alarmed observers by calling the whole compound the Jewish “holy of holies,” a term previously used in referring only to the inner sanctum of the destroyed temples.

There are additional fears among Palestinians, and the wider Muslim world, of darker plots being hatched by even more extreme groups.

Although Jewish religious purity laws have traditionally forbidden Jews from entering the Temple Mount, a growing number of rabbis are demanding that Jews be allowed to pray in the compound. Even more fanatical groups are known to favor blowing up the mosques and building a third temple in their place.

The recent rebuilding of the Hurva synagogue has added to such concerns. The Israeli media reported that, according to a 300-year-old rabbinical prophecy, the synagogue’s rebuilding would herald the construction of the third temple.

A sordid affair: The Mughrabi quarter’s ethnic cleansing

Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Mughrabi, or Moroccan, quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City after its capture in 1967 is one of the more sordid episodes of the 1967 war.

Until it was destroyed by Israel in 2004, the stone ramp that led to the Mughrabi Gate — one of the main entrances to the elevated compound of mosques known as the Haram al-Sharif — was the only visible reminder that the quarter, once home to 1,000 Palestinians, had ever existed.

At the end of the June 1967 war, as Israeli troops poured into the Old City, the Israeli government was presented with an opportunity not only to restore a Jewish presence to the walled city but to create a newly expanded Jewish quarter that would have the Western Wall at its center.

Before 1948, prayer at the Wall had been possible only at several points along a narrow alley at the margins of the densely populated Moroccan quarter, an area bequeathed in the twelfth century to Saladin’s followers by his son Malik al-Afdal.

But in the immediate wake of the “miraculous” victory in 1967, the Israeli government saw the chance to create a wide prayer plaza in front of the Wall, making it the symbolic heart of an expanded Jewish state that could unite religious and secular Jews.

All that stood in their way were the quarter’s 135 homes.

On the night of 10 June, Uzi Narkiss, head of the army’s central command, authorized 15 private demolition crews to raze the quarter under cover of dark. He, like the politicians, knew that neither the international community nor the Israeli courts would consent to such a brazen violation of international law.

When Teddy Kollek, the mayor of West Jerusalem, had consulted the justice minister, he had been told: “I don’t know what the legal status is. Do it quickly and may the God of Israel be with you.”

Uzi Benziman, an Israeli journalist, described the “near-mystic” compulsion that drove those behind the act of ethnic cleansing: “The officers and the contractors considered themselves emissaries, come to renew Jewish statehood as it had been 1,897 years earlier.”

An officer went from house to house ordering the residents to evacuate. According to observers, those who refused finally fled when the walls of their homes came down. One old woman, found amid the rubble, died a short time later.

As the ruins were cleared and the ground leveled to create an expansive plaza in front of the Western Wall, the contractors were told to use the rubble from the homes to build a ramp up to the Mughrabi Gate. The gate is the only entrance to the compound for which Israel kept the key. Today it is the access point for all non-Muslim visitors, including the Israeli police.

The Western Wall and the plaza, on land that had previously fallen under the control of the Islamic authorities, was placed under the jurisdiction of the Israeli religious affairs ministry. A few days later, on the Jewish holy day of Shavuot, an estimated 200,000 Israeli Jews — one in 10 of the population — came to visit the Wall.

Although Israel had effectively annexed East Jerusalem, its leaders were still troubled by the possible international repercussions of being seen to seize control of the Old City’s holy places, especially the compound of mosques. Under a so-called “status quo” agreement, Muslim officials were supposed to continue controlling the mosque compound, with Israeli oversight.

But that did not stop the rapid emergence of a movement in Israel seeking control of the compound too. Many Jews believe the ruins of the temples of Solomon and Herod can be found under the mosques.

From the early 1970s, extremist rabbis — led by the Shlomo Goren, then the chief rabbi of Israel — began lobbying for Jews to be allowed into the compound to pray, despite traditional rabbinical rulings against such a practice.

Jewish groups soon sprang up demanding more: that the mosques be blown up to make way for a third temple that would bring nearer the arrival of the Messiah.

Since the outbreak of the second intifada, little of the status quo agreement remains. Israeli movement restrictions affecting both Gaza and the West Bank mean that today only a tiny number of Palestinians can reach the mosques. Palestinian institutions are also barred from operating inside Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, settlers and Israeli officials have encroached on more and more land around the mosque compound. At the Camp David talks with the Palestinians in 2000, Israel proposed for the first time that Jews be allowed to pray in the compound and that Israel have a degree of sovereignty over the site.

In recent years Jews have started to be escorted by Israeli police inside the compound through the Mughrabi Gate, though praying so far has not been sanctioned.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net

March 25, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

47 Residents Wounded In Hebron

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – March 20, 2010

Palestinian medical sources in the southern West Bank city of Hebron reported Friday evening that 47 residents were wounded during clashes with Israeli soldiers in the city and the nearby Beit Ummar town.

21 residents received treatment after inhaling gas fired at them in Hebron, and nine others were wounded by rubber-coated bullets. The clashes took place near the Ibrahim Mosque.

Similar clashes took place in Al Zahed area in the city while the army fired gas bombs and rubber-coated bullets.

Sources at the Red Crescent in the Hebron reported that some of the wounded residents were moved to the local governmental hospital, and the Muhammad Al Muhtasib Hospital, while the rest received treatment by field medics.

The sources added that the army fired a gas bombs at one of the ambulances while transporting some wounded residents. The gas bombs hit the windshield of the ambulance and shattered it.

Soldiers also occupied rooftops of several homes and used them as military posts and monitoring towers.

Twenty residents received treatment after inhaling gas fired by the army while six others were wounded by rubber-coated bullets in Beit Ummar town.

Several youths hurled stones at settler vehicles causing damage to three cars; the army invaded the town and prevented local ambulances from reaching the wounded residents.

March 21, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment