Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism
By Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Sarah Ihmoud and Suhad Dahir-Nashif | Jadaliyya | November 17, 2014
They not only invaded our home, took over our space, and evicted us—they even arrested me and took me to the Maskubya—the police station. I was put in room number four, alone, for a long time. Then, a big and tall man, a police officer, entered the interrogation room. I was alone, and started shivering from fear as he closed the door, started moving things around in the room and examining me from head to toe. I was terrorized, and my heart was beating so fast. His eyes penetrated my body, as he was opening the drawers looking for something. Then, he left the room and came back five minutes later holding a box. He pulled out a pair of blue plastic gloves, and put one on each of his hands, while looking at me and saying “…Come here…” I must tell you that I was terrorized when they invaded the house and evicted us. I was extremely anxious when they arrested my son. But my fears of ‘you know what’… You know… being abused… being raped by his blue big hands and more…were the most terrifying moments of my life.[1]
These were the words of Sama, a thirty-six-year-old Palestinian woman who lost the intimate familial and physical space of her home, only to experience further terror with the threat of sexual abuse. Sama’s narrative is not uncommon, as colonized women living under severe deprivation and dispossession are subject to daily attacks against their sexuality and bodily rights. Sexual violence is central to the larger structure of colonial power, its racialized machinery of domination, and its logic of elimination. This is readily apparent in the history of settler colonial contexts, where the machinery of violence explicitly targets native women’s sexuality and bodily safety as biologized “internal enemies” since they are the producers of the next generation.
Settler colonialism, as a “structure, not an event” operates through a “logic of elimination” that seeks to erase indigenous presence on a specific territory (settler colonialism’s “irreducible element”). Settler colonialism “destroys in order to replace.” The invasion of indigenous land seeks to permanently erase the indigenous presence on the land, in order to replace it with the new settler society and polity. Scholars have argued that settler colonialism’s logic of elimination may culminate in indigenous genocide. In its European formations, both settler colonialism and genocide have “employed the organizing grammar of race.” Since its inception, the Jewish state has been embedded in a racialized colonial logic. This logic constructs the Palestinian as a dangerous other in opposition to the white/Jewish subject and polis. As numerous authors have noted, this racial configuration is articulated through early Zionist thinkers’ Orientalist ideology that framed the Jewish people as bearers of European civilization in the face of a culturally backward region and people. Such a “modernizing” project or “civilizing” mission relied on a Zionist imaginary of exclusively Jewish labor cultivating an empty, uncultivated land, and “making the desert bloom.” Early Zionist leadership attempted to actualize the foundational Zionist myth of a “land without people for a people without land” through systematic ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians in 1948. The Zionist entity continues to evict native Palestinians today. The massacres in Gaza of July- August 2014, and the repressive “iron fist” policies targeting Palestinian Jerusalemites at the time we write this article, are contemporary modes of settler colonial eviction of the Palestinian native.
The targeting of Palestinian women’s bodies and sexuality, we contend, is structural to the Israeli settler colonial project’s racialized logic of elimination. Rape and other forms of sexual violence against Palestinian women have always been an element of the settler colonial state’s attempts to destroy and eliminate indigenous Palestinians from their land. In addition to rape and other forms of sexual violence, the racialized logic of sexual violence energizes the very imaginary and project of conquering and cultivating Palestinian land, in transforming it into the Jewish polis. Hence, our discussion of sexual violence is embedded not only in the sexualized practices and politics of the Zionist state, but also in the nature of Israeli settler colonial violence itself.
As Palestinian feminists, we assert that the Zionist movement’s imaginary of conquering and settling the Palestinian body is inseparable from the project of conquering and settling Palestinian land, and erasing indigenous presence. Here, we build on native scholar Andrea Smith’s assertion that the logic of colonial sexual violence “establishes the ideology that Native bodies are inherently violable—and by extension, that Native lands are also inherently violable.” It is the logic of settler colonial sexual violence that we center in our analysis of the continuous Nakba that targets our people. We trace the logic of sexual violence, in its historical and present context, as machinery, hidden and apparent, of colonial patriarchy against indigenous communities in Palestine. The logic of sexual violence attempts to fragment Palestinian family and communal life, as it severs the connection to the Palestinian homeland. The Zionist project is inherently based on the destruction of Palestinian native bodies and land, which cannot be separated from the colonial logic of elimination. Sexual violence is not simply a byproduct of colonialism, rather “colonialism is itself structured by the logic of sexual violence.”
Sexual Violence and Palestinian Genocide Since the Nakba
Understanding the intensified attacks on Palestinian women’s bodies in times of heightened attacks by the settler colonial regime requires a feminist analysis. Such an analysis takes the Nakba as its analytical point of departure. Israel was built on the ruins of the Palestinian homeland, on its land, pain, and displacement. It was built on the destruction of our communal social ties, the violation and invasion of our homes and bodies.
Rape and killing of Palestinian women was a central aspect of Israeli troops’ systematic massacres and evictions during the destruction of Palestinian villages in 1948. During the Deir Yassin massacre, for instance:
All the inhabitants were ordered into the village square. Here, they were lined up against a wall and shot. One eyewitness said her sister, who was nine months pregnant, was shot in the back of the neck. Her assailants then cut open her stomach with a butcher’s knife and extracted the unborn baby. When an Arab woman tried to take the baby, she was shot… Women were raped before the eyes of their children before being murdered and dumped down the well.
David Ben Gurion, like other Zionist leaders, openly discussed the rape and sexual torture of Palestinian women in his diary entries during 1948. At the same time that he advocated the killing of Palestinian women and children, constructing them as a threat to the Jewish settler polity, he awarded a prize to every Jewish mother on her tenth child. Ben Gurion ensured that the Jewish Agency, not the state, administered such pronatal incentives in order to guarantee the exclusion of Arabs.[2] The fetishization of fertility has made Palestinians, especially women, targets of nationalist rhetoric that deeply politicizes their reproduction. For Zionists, Palestinian women have always been, and continue to be, as we have seen in the latest attacks on Gaza, targets of the Zionist killing machine.
Feminist scholars have also suggested that the Zionist state mobilizes violence against Palestinian women’s bodies and sexuality to strengthen indigenous patriarchal structures and aid in the eviction of Palestinians from their land. Militarized sexual abuse has been rampant under Israeli occupation. The Israeli state and military forces have exploited the threat of sexual violence against Palestinian women, and patriarchal perceptions of sexuality and “honor” to “recruit Palestinians as collaborators” during periods of uprisings and deter attempts at organized resistance. This practice has been so historically prevalent that it gained its own term in the Arabic language as isqat siyassy, meaning the sexual abuse of Palestinians for political reasons. The state’s security apparatus continues to use Palestinians’ sexual identities and Orientalist conceptions of “Arab culture” to recruit collaborators and fragment Palestinian society. Recent revelations by Israel’s secret military intelligence Unit 8200 have revisited this fact. The literal and figurative “rape” of Palestinian women’s bodies, framed as inherently violable by the Zionist entity, is inherently structured by the same logic of sexual violence that energizes the settler colonial project’s violation and continued confiscation of Palestinian natives’ land.
Unmasking the Logic of Sexual Violence
The silence on the Zionist machinery’s use of sexual violence against Palestinian women[3] and their communities has been further revealed since the inception of the state’s most recent military operations. The logic of sexualized violence that structures the Israeli settler colonial project has become more visible during the last period of military invasion. Slogans such as “Death to Arabs” and “Arabs out” have become more usable and tolerable in the Israeli public sphere, exposing the necropolitical drive against Palestinian natives at the core of the so-called Jewish democracy.
On 1 July, just after discovery of the bodies of three Jewish settler youth who had gone missing in the occupied West Bank, Israeli professor Mordechai Kedar of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies remarked on public radio: “the only deterrent for … those who kidnapped the [Israeli] children and killed them, the only way to deter them is their knowledge that either their sister or their mother will be raped if they are caught … this is the culture of the Middle East.” His comments suggested that raping Palestinian women was the only deterrent to Palestinian resistance and “terrorism.”
We as Palestinian feminists were not surprised to hear Kedar advocating rape as an antidote to anti-colonial resistance. Making such comments on public radio, in the open, where it would be heard by a wide Israeli Jewish public, women as well as men, including Israeli Jewish feminists, reflects the settler’s mentality and socialization towards Palestinians. Discussing the rape of Palestinian women as a military strategy by a so-called scholar from one of the prominent universities in Israel reveals the mode in which colonizers portray colonized women. The presentation of a sexualized Orientalist discourse positions Palestinians as culturally “backward,” non-human Others.
Lest the sexualized discourses Kedar mobilized appear an aberration, it is important to note that he was not the only performer in this latest theater of sexualized violence. Israeli soldiers on their way to killing Palestinians in Gaza read slogans of support prepared by their fellow Jewish-Israeli civilians stating: “Go pound their mothers, and come back to your mother.” Israeli Jews gathered on hillsides to watch and cheer as the military dropped bombs on Gaza. One young Jewish woman’s Facebook post summed up the sexualized pleasure they received in spectatorship of our collective lynching: “What an orgasm to see the Israeli Defense Forces bomb buildings in Gaza with children and families at the same time. Boom boom.” Even their Prime Minister Netanyahu received a post, which circulated widely among the Israeli public via social media, showing a veiled woman labeled “Gaza,” naked from the waist down, holding a message: “Bibi, finish inside this time! Signed, citizens in favor of a ground assault.” This is in addition to Knesset member Ayelet Shaked’s public declaration that Palestinian mothers should be killed.
The rape of the land as the rape of women’s bodies has thus come to the fore in Israel’s most recent eliminatory attacks against the Palestinian people. As the massacres of the Palestinian people in Gaza continued, the sexualized nature of Israeli invasion and racial terror against Palestinian natives came to the forefront of nationalist politics and discussion among the public sphere within 1948 Palestine as well. Palestinian women took to the streets with their communities throughout historic Palestine to demonstrate against the continuous massacres in Gaza. Public demonstrations took a sexualized turn, as crowds’ calls for “death to Arabs” quickly turned to chanting “Haneen Zoabi is a whore!” naming a female Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament who stood up for her people’s right to life. Israeli police attacked Palestinian women’s bodies, along with their male counterparts, and dragged them out of protests in Haifa and Nazareth, where they were arrested or beaten by racist crowds. Leading religious and military figures on the state’s payroll issued religious edicts which stated that during times of war it is permissible to bomb Palestinian civilians in order to “exterminate the enemy.” The city council of Or Yehuda, a settlement in Israel’s coastal region, hung a banner supporting Israeli soldiers that suggested the rape of Palestinian women: “Israeli soldiers, the residents of Or Yehuda are with you! Pound their mother and come back home safely to your mother.” [4]
We argue that the logic of sexual violence exhibited during attacks on indigenous Palestinians throughout historic Palestine, both historically and during the Israeli state’s most recent attacks, pervades both the Israeli settler state and settler society. Indeed, the state and settler society are inseparable entities, connected through a visceral psychological and political imaginary that exceeds the commonly framed state/civil society divide. As Lorenzo Veracini notes, settlers “carry their sovereignty with them.” Both the state apparatuses (including public elected officials, academic and military institutions) and settler society (including Israeli publics—situated along the continuum of Zionist ideology) embody the machinery of settler colonial violence. It is no surprise then, that both the official state apparatuses and unofficial settler spheres have exhibited grave attacks on Palestinian women’s sexuality, bodies, and lives in the context of the latest invasions of our people in Gaza, in the daily attacks today in Jerusalem, and throughout historic Palestine.
Israeli officials’ repressive policies and incitement against the Palestinian people work to empower and embolden Israeli settler society to embody the power of the state and viciously attack Palestinians. This is clearly exhibited in the attacks on Palestinian women’s bodies inside Al Aqsa mosque these last weeks in Jerusalem, by both settler publics empowered by the state’s military protection, and members of the state security forces. A recent example of the daily scene of sexual violence is Israeli border police’s violent beating and arrest of Aida, a Palestinian woman from the old city of Jerusalem. When she tried to enter Al-Aqsa mosque, border police attacked and brutally beat Aida. They tore off her hijab and pulled her by her hair, as they continued to beat her through the streets of the old city, and dragged her into the police car. She was then taken to the police station, where she was violently interrogated, further beaten and accused of attacking a police officer. Security forces’ brutalization and violation of Aida’s body, and attempts to mark her as an inherently criminal other, are a form of gendered and sexual violence. The legalization of such forms of violence marks the Israeli legal system itself as deeply embedded in the settler colonial project’s machinery of elimination.
Palestinian women’s brutalization and violation by the settler colonial state also takes on more mundane forms. When Samera was arrested for participating in a demonstration in occupied East Jerusalem, her release by authorities was conditional upon her completing what they termed “community service.” Samera’s “community service” required her to scrub the bathrooms of a facility for Israeli border police and soldiers. As she explained to us:
I could not afford to pay the huge fine, and needed to be released [from prison] to go back to my kids. I had no other choice but to scrub their bathrooms…. Just by being there, in men’s bathrooms, in the Israeli men’s toilets felt like rape. I did it to avoid payment, but I can’t avoid feeling that I allowed them to keep me there, in their bathrooms, in a constant state of terror, fearing being sexually abused, then trashed like we trash toilet paper in toilets.
Samera’s words and analysis further illustrate the gendered and sexualized aspects of the complex machinery of settler colonial violence. Yet as Samera concluded: “Sometimes I feel I was their slave, but some other times I tell myself no, this is resistance, this is sumud, this is power… I did what was needed to come back to my children, without being touched or violated sexually…. yes hard, complex… our situation is complex.” Even in the face of such violent inscription of settler colonial violence, Palestinian women’s daily acts of resistance and survival demonstrate their power and sumud, or steadfastness.
In sum, sexual and gender violence are not merely a tool of patriarchal control, the byproduct of war or intensified conflict. Colonial relationships are themselves gendered and sexualized. We contend that sexual violence, a logic embedded in the Israeli settler colonial project, follows two contradictory principles that operate simultaneously: invasion/violation/occupation and supremacy/purification/demarcation. That is, the Zionist settler colonial project’s invasion, violation, and occupation of indigenous Palestinians’ bodies, lives, and land is intimately intertwined with its demarcation of racialized geographical and physical boundaries between Jewish citizenry and Palestinian natives as well as attempts to “purify” the Jewish national body of the Palestinian body, which is framed as a biopolitical contaminant. It is thus that the logic of sexual violence, embedded in the Zionist regime, energizes historical and continuous attacks on Palestinian bodies and lives.
Thus our struggle for indigenous sovereignty within anti-colonial activism as feminists is necessarily situated in the protection of Palestinian women’s bodily safety and sexuality, family, and communal right to life. It is a struggle against the hypermasculine Zionist military and settler apparatuses that frame Palestinian women as inherently threatening racialized Others whose bodies must be violated and destroyed as the internal enemy and “reproducers of Palestinians.” This logic is inseparable from the settler colonial logic of elimination.
As Palestinian feminists concerned about the safety of women’s bodies and lives, the continuity of our people and our future generations, we call on local and international feminists to join our struggle, challenge the settler colonial culture of impunity and raise their voices against the ongoing Israeli state crimes.
Endnotes
[1] This quote was taken from a group discussion with Palestinian women in Jerusalem, 2014.
[2] In the 1950s Ben Gurion, as the first prime minister of Israel, turned the issue of women’s fertility into national priority, arguing that “increasing the Jewish birthrate is a vital need for the existence of Israel” and that “a Jewish woman who does not bring at least four children into the world is defrauding the Jewish mission.” See Sharoni, S. (1995). Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: the Politics of Women’s Resistance. Syracuse University Press. Also see Davis, U. & Lehn, W. (1983). “And the Fund Still Lives: The Role of the Jewish International Fund in the Determination of Israel’s Land Policies”, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 7 (4), p.3, at pp.4-6(1978).
[3] While centering our analysis on Palestinian women, we also note the Zionist state’s use of sexual violence as a tactic to curb the “demographic threat” over some Jewish women’s bodies, including black women (from the Ethiopian community) and women from impoverished backgrounds. While attempting to curb the birth rates of black and/or poor Jewish women, a practice we analyze as connected to the racialized project of curbing Palestinian reproduction and life, Israel has simultaneously sought to increase European Jewish birth through modernized practices such as buying ovum for human reproductive cloning from poor, Eastern European women. Besides, the Israeli state suggested that the law for preventing human reproductive cloning (1999) had expired and many of Israel’s physicians, politicians and social researchers are embracing this practice as yet another strategy for maintaining a Jewish demographic advantage on the land of Palestine.
[4] In addition to the posts and declarations against Palestinian mothers, Jewish girls and women encouraged men serving in the Israeli Occupation Forces by sending them semi-nude or pornographic pictures as an expression of love and support (see http://www.pitria.com/israeli-girls-support-zahal).
Tennessee Cop Arrested Twice in Four Months Still on Paid Leave
By Carlos Miller | PINAC | January 3, 2015
Already on paid administrative leave since September from a previous arrest, a Tennessee cop was arrested again Wednesday, this time accused of striking his mother-in-law with an open hand across the face.
Chattanooga police detective David Catchings figured he would have gotten away with it because of his badge.
“Go ahead, call the cops. They will believe me before you, because I’m a cop,” his mother-in-law accused him of saying after striking her.
She called the cops anyway, landing the 34-year-old cop back in jail. But this time, he was smiling for his mugshot.
Catchings, who is married, was arrested in September for DUI along with his girlfriend after he was spotted weaving in and out of traffic as well as driving into oncoming traffic.
He tried to use his cop status to get out of the arrest, but the Hamilton County sheriff’s deputy took him to jail anyway.
According to the Times Free-Press :
Catchings attempted to get out of the arrest and charges by using his status as an officer.
“It should be noted during that during this entire incident, [his] mood changed from compliant to hostile,” the affidavit read. “He advised several times that he was a cop and asked to try and work things out.”
Catchings refused to give his phone number to the officer on the scene or the jail, and he also refused to submit a blood test to determine his blood alcohol content.
“He advised we were brothers and I should be arresting bad guys,” the police officer present wrote in the affidavit. “He stated his aunt signs my paycheck and advised I was a rookie and didn’t know anything about police work.”
He’s been on paid administrative leave ever since, collecting his $42,000-a-year salary while he continues to drink.
On Wednesday, he was out on another bender when he walked into his mother-in-law’s house and passed out on the couch, then refused to leave when ordered to do so.
According to the Times Free-Press :
David Catchings, 34, has been charged with domestic assault after allegedly striking his mother-in-law in the face. Catchings is already under investigation and on paid administrative leave from the police department after he was arrested in September on suspicion of driving under the influence.
Catchings’ mother-in-law, Janet Ashford, told police that she woke up to find Catchings drunk on her couch around 3 a.m. When she told him to leave, she said, Catchings struck her with an open hand across her face.
Catchings called her a liar when she threatened to call police and said, ‘Go ahead, call the cops. They will believe me before you, because I’m a cop.”
Ashford said she considered not calling because she was worried nothing would happen to Catchings because he is a police officer. She said she’s terrified of Catchings. Eventually, though, she did call for help.
The Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office arrested Catchings because Ashford’s home is outside the city limits.
Police Chief Fred Fletcher assured that he will be thoroughly investigated by internal affairs, even though the previous internal affairs investigation is still pending.
Israeli forces shoot 3 Palestinian shepherds near Nablus
Ma’an – 03/01/2015
NABLUS – Three Palestinian shepherds were injured on Saturday after Israeli forces and private security guards at a Jewish settlement opened fire on a crowd near Nablus.
Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official who monitors settlement activity in the northern West Bank, told Ma’an that several Israeli settlers attacked a group of shepherds in the area of Khirbet Yanun near the village of Aqraba and opened live fire at them after the group entered the area.
Israeli soldiers later entered the area and opened fire as well, hitting three men.
The injured were identified as Falah Youssef Bani Jaber, hit in the hand, Ahmad Bani Jaber, also hit in the hand, and Judeh Bani Jaber, who was hit with a rubber-coated steel bullet in his stomach.
An Israeli military spokeswoman told Ma’an that the Palestinian shepherds gathered near the Gidonim outpost of the Itamar settlement north of Aqraba, claiming that their herds had been stolen.
Israeli residents of the settlement then called army forces, she said, and the local security guards and the army forces “fired in the air to disperse the riot.”
She said that the herds were subsequently found and that they had not been “stolen,” as the Palestinians had claimed. However, she refused to comment on whether the herds had been found inside the settlement or not.
She added that the military was looking into reports that Palestinians had been injured in the incident.
The villages south of Nablus are frequent sites of settler violence and Palestinian clashes with Israeli forces as they are located beside the notoriously violent Israeli settlements of Yitzhar, Bracha, and Itamar.
Settlers frequently attack a number of local villages and prevent farmers from reaching their lands, according to UNOCHA, in addition to attacks on local olive trees themselves.
Settler violence against Palestinians and their property in the occupied West Bank is systematic and ignored by Israeli authorities, who rarely intervene in the violent attacks or prosecute the perpetrators.
In 2014, there were at least 329 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Abuse, neglect killed more than 100 Egyptian detainees in 2014: Report
Mada Masr | January 2, 2015
More than 100 people died while detained in Egyptian prisons in 2014, according to a year-end report produced by Al-Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence.
The report included a timeline of documented cases of torture in prisons, which showed that torture occurred almost daily in the past year. The timeline was accompanied by prisoners’ testimonials, which revealed the inhumane conditions for detainees.
In the report’s introduction, Al-Nadeem claimed that the cases detailed therein represented only a fraction of the violations committed against many more unknown detainees. Torture is a crime, the center declared, whether it’s practiced against a political detainee, a murderer or a terrorist.
Most deaths that occurred in police stations or prisons were caused by torture, untreated health conditions or the brutal conditions in which the detainees were held, according to the report.
Al-Nadeem lambasted the government for shirking its legal responsibility to safeguard the health and lives of anyone detained in Egyptian facilities.
“You are responsible for all of them — whether they died from electric shocks or brutal beatings; or died from hunger as a result of a hunger strike that you ignored; or died of suffocation because of overcrowding; or of diseases that you delayed treatment for, or because you refused to transfer them to hospitals,” the report said.
“In all cases, their deaths are premeditated murder in your prisons,” the center concluded, “and you will be held accountable for it sooner or later.”
Jewish settlers attack Palestinians south of Jenin
Palestine Information Center – January 2, 2015
JENIN – A group of Jewish settlers attacked Palestinian vehicles traveling on Jenin-Nablus road near the junction of Jaba village south of Jenin at dawn Friday.
Around 12 vehicles carrying settlers stormed the evacuated settlement of Tarsleh and blocked Jenin-Nablus road today under military protection.
The settlers spread among nearby olive trees and began attacking and stoning passing Palestinian cars in the presence of Israeli soldiers, eyewitnesses said.
During the attack, the settlers chanted racist slurs against the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, Israeli media sources claimed that three Molotov cocktails were thrown at a home appropriated by settlers in Ras Amoud neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem overnight. The sources said that Palestinian young men threw three Molotov cocktails at the house, with no reported injuries.
The Israeli police launched a wide manhunt following the incident.
Extremist Israeli Settlers Burn Palestinian Home Near Hebron
By Saed Bannoura | IMEMC & Agencies | December 31, 2014
A Palestinian family from a village east of the town of Yatta, near the southern West Bank city of Hebron, narrowly escaped death on Wednesday at dawn, when a number of fanatic Israeli settlers hurled Molotov cocktails into their home as they slept.
The head of the Yatta City Council Mousa Makhamra told the Maan News Agency that the attack is a very serious and dangerous escalation, adding that it is an attempt to annihilate a family of seven; five children and their parents.
Makhamra added that the fanatic settlers, from Karmiel illegal settlement, infiltrated into ad-Deerat village, east of Yatta, at approximately 3 am, and throw the Molotov cocktails into the Palestinian home after writing racist graffiti on its outer walls.
Makhamra further stated that the family woke up in time, and their neighbors rushed in when they saw the house on fire, and rescued the family.
The fires consumed the furniture in the living room, but was controlled before it spread.
The settlers wrote racist anti-Arab graffiti, including the infamous statement “Death To Arabs”, and other graffiti.
Image Shehab News
Jewish settler runs over Palestinian child walking to school in Tuqu
Ma’an – 31/12/2014
BETHLEHEM – A 10-year-old Palestinian boy was injured after an Israeli settler ran him over on the main road of the Palestinian village of Tuqu south east of Bethlehem early Wednesday.
Bethlehem region emergency services official Muhammad Awad told Ma’an that Amir Majed Ahmad Suleiman, 10, received a number of bruises after being hit by an Israeli settler’s car as he was heading to school in the town.
Awad said that the settler immediately fled the area despite the fact that Israeli forces were deployed on the main road of the village.
He added that Suleiman was taken to the Beit Jala Governmental Hospital in Bethlehem for treatment.
The incident comes only three days after an Israeli settler ran over an seven-year-old Palestinian boy from the village of Zif south of Hebron.
Recent months have seen a wave of hit-and-runs against Palestinians by Jewish settlers living in the occupied West Bank, as well as reprisal car attacks in Jerusalem.
In October, a settler ran over two Palestinian children as they walked near near Ramallah, killing 5-year-old Einas Khalil.
PLO: Israel has detained 1266 Palestinian children in 2014
Al-Akhbar | December 30, 2014
Israeli forces detained over 1,000 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank and annexed Jerusalem in 2014, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) said Tuesday.
Abdul-Nasser Farawna, head of Authority of Prisoners’ Affairs, a PLO body, said that Israel detained 1,266 Palestinian children, below the age of 15, in the West Bank and Jerusalem in 2014.
“The vast majority of the arrests happened in the second half of the year,” Farawna said in a statement, adding that at least 200 children are still detained in Israeli jails on various charges.
Israeli forces routinely conduct arrest campaigns targeting Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and annexed Jerusalem on claims they are “wanted” by Israeli authorities.
According to the PLO, more than 10,000 Palestinian minors in the occupied West Bank and annexed Jerusalem have been held by the Israeli army for varying periods since 2000.
“The number of Palestinian children arrested by Israeli forces, especially in annexed East Jerusalem, has sharply risen,” Farawna declared, saying that the number of children detainees had increased by 87 percent over the past three years.
“The majority of the detained children were subjected to beatings and torture by Israeli security personnel while in detention,” he asserted.
Farawna’s statements echoed similar comments last month by another PLO official, Issa Qaraqe, who said that around 95 percent of children detainees were subjected to beatings and torture by Israeli security personnel while in detention, while many were forced to make confessions under duress and undergo unfair trials.
Violent practices by Israeli soldiers as well as settlers against Palestinian children is endemic and often abetted by the authorities.
“Israel does not provide any immunity for children and regularly violates international agreements on children’s rights by humiliating and torturing them and denying them fair trials,” Qaraqe explained.
A report by Defense for Children International (DCI) published in May 2014 revealed that Israel jails 20 percent of Palestinian children it detains in solitary confinement.
DCI said that minors held in solitary confinement spent an average of 10 days in isolation. The longest period of confinement documented in a single case was 29 days in 2012, and 28 days in 2013.
A report by The Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights Israeli forces arrested nearly 3,000 Palestinian children from the beginning of 2010 to mid-2014, the majority of them between the ages of 12 and 15 years old.
The report also documented dozens of video recorded testimonies of children arrested during the first months of 2014, pointing out that 75 percent of the detained children are subjected to physical torture and 25 percent faced military trials.
The most excruciating violations are seen in the psycho-physical torture methods, including the act of forcing children to sit on the investigation chair chained hand and foot and covering their entire heads with foul-smelling bags, in addition to depriving them of sleep.
In 2013, the UN children’s fund (UNICEF) reported that Israel was the only country in the world where children were “systematically tried” in military courts and gave evidence of practices it said were “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.”
The UNICEF report said in a 22-page report that over the past decade, Israeli forces have arrested, interrogated and prosecuted around 7,000 children between 12 and 17, mostly boys, noting the rate was equivalent to “an average of two children each day.”
Palestinian children as young as five years old have also been detained in the past.
In 2013, Israeli forces in the West Bank detained four Palestinian children aged five to nine years.
Palestinian activist Murad Ashtiye told AFP at the time that “Israeli soldiers arrest the children and tie their hands behind their backs using plastic strips.”
Meanwhile in Gaza, a 51-day Israeli aggression last August left at least 505 children dead, 20 percent of the total civilian death toll.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA said 138 of its students were killed during the assault. The organization’s spokesperson Christopher Gunness said an additional 814 UNRWA students were injured and 560 have become orphans due to the Israeli onslaught.
The worst massacre took place in the Abu Hussein School of the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north killing and injuring dozens even after the agency said that it gave the school’s coordinates to the Israelis more than 17 times so they won’t hit it.
(Anadolu, Al-Akhbar)
Chronicle of impunity for unprovoked shooting by ‘security’ forces
Yesh Din | December 29, 2014
Someone shot a bullet at Ashraf Muhammad Jamal Tufiq’s foot in Bil’in in 2009. The IDF’s investigatory bodies did their best to make sure they will never find the shooter.
On Friday, January 16 2009, someone – a member of the Israeli security forces – fired a bullet into the foot of Ashraf Muhammad Jamal Tufiq from the West Bank village Bil’in. According to Tufiq, the shooting occurred without any provocation and came after the weekly demonstration ended. As a result of his injury, Tufiq had to undergo an operation and had to give up on being a professional a soccer player. On November 4, 2013, the Operational Affairs Prosecution closed the case, reaching the conclusion that it contains no evidence whatsoever.
Hold on, you say, you’ve made an error. You’re saying the shooting took place on January 2009, but the case closed in November 2013. That’s more than four years between one event and another. You must have made a mistake.
No mistake. This is the heart of the issue. I’ll present the chronology of events based on the work of Adv. Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man. But before we start, we should note that Tufiq’s testimony is not bereft of problems, and that at certain points he even contradicts himself. The fact, however, is that he was shot and became a cripple. A quick investigation might have found out what actually took place. But, as we can see from the flow of events below, that did not exactly happen.
January 16, 2009 – A Friday demonstration in Bil’in, and it’s more violent than usual. The soldier in question will later remember the events because, unusually, another soldier was wounded. After the demonstration, a member of the security forces shoots Tufiq. He is taken to a hospital and, with our aid, submits a notice (the equivalent of a complaint to the police) to the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division (MPCID).
May 24, 2009 – More than four months after the incident, the Jerusalem branch of the MPCID confirm they have received the notice.
July 7, 2009 – The Operational Affairs’ prosecution informs us that it is dealing with the case.
August 4, 2009 – The Operational Affairs’ prosecution informs us that it has frozen the investigation in order to “clarify the issue with military officials.” This, in effect, means the investigation is delayed while the case is referred to an operation debriefing.
February 14, 2010 – Thirteen months after the incident: the Operational Affairs’ prosecution says the case is under consideration.
October 14, 2010 – Twenty-one months after the incident: the Operational Affairs’ prosecution says the case is under consideration.
April 14, 2011 – Two years and three months (!) after the incident: the Operational Affairs’ prosecution says the case is under consideration.
November 29, 2011 – Two years and 10 months after the incident: reports that Atlantis has risen from the sea, fish are climbing trees, cats and dogs have foresworn their ancient enmity, and MPCID has re-opened its investigation.
Which is nice, but there are two main problems with opening an investigation so late in the game:
1. The chances of finding evidence is nil. There is no crime scene to speak of, particularly since the incident took place before the IDF has deigned to obey the ruling of the High Court of Justice and moved the separation fence in Bil’in. Also, human memory blurs rapidly.
2. Even if there was evidence, once a soldier has been discharged from the army for six months (or a year, in extreme cases) he or she is no longer under the jurisdiction of military law. Given that mandatory military service in the IDF lasts for three years for men, even if the MPCID had found the culprit on the day in which it began its investigation (which, naturally, did not happen) chances are that they would not have been able to bring him to trial. Only the Attorney General can decide to do so – which hardly ever happens in practice.
And after this methodical break, back to our chronicle:
December 8, 2011 – MPCID Jerusalem contacts us and wants to set up an interview with the victim. After a series of delays – including one case in which Tufiq comes to a meeting set up by MPCID and finds no one who can take his statement – MPCID finally takes a statement from him on December 30, 2012, i.e. two months after the resurrection of the investigation.
February 9, 2012 – The MPCID interviews the operations officer of the battalion involved in the incident. He says he doesn’t remember anything, which sounds perfectly plausible. After all, this was a negligent incident from a military point of view, not to mention the fact that more than three years have passed since it happened.
February 20, 2012 – The MPCID receives the translation of the medical reports regarding Tufiq’s wound, which the Operational Affairs’ prosecution could easily have obtained some three years earlier. But let’s not be petty.
March 11, 2012 – Three weeks later, the MPCID interviews the operations officer once again. He says he doesn’t even remember which forces were involved in the incident. Since, well, three years have passed, and it wasn’t exactly the Battle of the Bulge.
8.3.12 – The MPCID interviews the battalion commander. He claims there was no shooting during the incident, much less live shooting. He adds that it is inconceivable his patrol troops would lie on this issue.
March 11, 2012 – The MPCID interviews the battalion commander again, who says that given the time that has gone by, his outfit no longer has any documents relating to the incident.
March 13, 2012 – The MPCID tries, without success, to gain access to the operational logs. Given the passage of time, they were not kept.
July 25, 2012 – More than four months after the last investigative action took place, the MPCID interviews another officer – this time a major. He does not think there was live fire.
July 31, 2012 – The MPCID investigators interview another officer, a Lt. Colonel. He does not even remember over whom he presided at the time. After all, this was more than three years since the incident.
August 1, 2012 – After a delay of three years and seven months, the MPCID decides to interrogate the platoon commander under legal warning. He remembers the soldier who was wounded, thinks there may have been a Ruger bullet fired but is not certain and remembers that there was a report about a wounded Palestinian when he got back to base. The officers interviewed earlier did not remember this detail. One should note that his testimony, where he says a live bullet may have been fired, contradicts the testimony of his battalion commander. And since he was closer to the incident, we should give more weight to his testimony.
October 28, 2012 – Nearly three months after the latest investigation, the MPCID interrogates the wounded soldier. He us convinced there was no live fire, not by him at any rate. He claims that he kept asking for permission to use live fire. His request was denied and he used rubber bullets instead.
November 11, 2012 – The MPCID interrogates another soldier in the section under warning. The soldier also remembers that they fired rubber bullets – not live ones.
November 16, 2012 – The MPCID interrogates the sergeant major of the force under warning. He denies any sort of shooting, saying the forces used only tear gas grenades. This testimony is contradicted by all the other testimonies.
December 18, 2012 – The MPCID interrogates yet another soldier, who says they fired rubber bullets and believes there was no live fire.
December 18, 2012 – The MPCID interviews a medical officer, a Lt. Colonel, who says there is no point in interviewing Border Policemen, since their outfit carries out such actions on a weekly basis, and thus they won’t remember a thing. He seems to be right; there is no evidence of MPCID trying to interview Border Policemen.
November 4, 2013 – We’ve come to the end of this comedy of errors: nearly a year after the last investigation, and four years and 10 months after Tufiq was shot, the Operational Affairs’ prosecution closes case, citing lack of evidence.
So what had we here? A failure from beginning to end. The investigation began almost three years after the incident, and from the start it was doubtful whether it ever stood a chance. Too much time had passed.
But there is an even more important point to make here. Almost all the witnesses contradict each other. The battalion commander says only rubber bullets were fired – but the platoon commander thinks there may have been a Ruger bullet fired. The sergeant major thinks only gas was used, while all other witnesses report the use of rubber bullets. The medical documents speak clearly of a live bullet. Did someone pull the Beitunia trick by firing a live bullet and masquerading as if it were a rubber bullet? We’ll never know.
The IDF keeps telling us it needs to hold an operational debriefing – that it needs its soldiers to tell the truth during the debriefing. Therefore, it claims, the debriefing must not be turned over to MPCID as evidence. But note what happened: after almost three years wasted by the Operational Affairs’ prosecution, nobody has a clue as to what happened. The officers cannot even remember their order of battle. No one is sure about what kind of ammunition was actually used. There is a vague Border Police force in the area of operations, but no one knows what it did. The operational logs no longer exist.
If this the situation, what is the purpose of the operational debriefing? Ostensibly it is supposed to provide the forces with insight into the events so they can improve their tactics. But if no one remembers what was said in it, what is it really good for? And why can’t the MPCID investigation run parallel to it, rather than months afterward?
The Turkel Commission, which dealt with the behavior of the military investigative bodies, recommended that an investigation ought to be swift. Two years before Turkel’s recommendations, the JAG decided to hold MPCID investigations (after an appeal by B’Tselem and ICRI) – in cases of death only – in parallel to the operational debriefing. We have some indications that MPCID is beginning to internalize and implement the Turkel Commission recommendations, with an emphasis on speedier investigations. But in the meantime, the investigation of the shooting of Ashraf Muhammad Jamal Tufiq stands as Exhibit A that the IDF doesn’t know how and perhaps doesn’t want to investigate itself.
Photo: Israeli border police officers shooting tear gas canisters during the weekly protest against the Wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in, November 1, 2013
Photo by Activestills
Israeli Forces Train with Live Ammo in West Bank Civilian Areas
IMEMC News & Agencies | December 30, 2014
Israeli occupation forces, since the early hours on Monday, have been holding military training sessions with live ammunition, in the Khirbet Taweel area, South Nablus.
Member of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee of Aqraba, Yousef Deriyyah, said that Israeli occupation forces, Sunday evening, bulldozed and damaged several dunams of wheat fields in preparation for the training.
The PNN further reports that military training has often targeted Palestinians, including children, causing injuries and home evictions.
Back in August, Israeli authorities evicted 1,300 Palestinians from their homes in the south Hebron hills, of the occupied West Bank, claiming that they are located in a military training zone.
In October, Israeli forces stormed Aida refugee camp without any provocation and began firing tear gas canisters, sound bombs and rubber-coated steel bullets at children in the streets.
Eyewitness said that soldiers were training by using families, children and homes as military practice.
Also in October, Israeli authorities distributed eviction notices to 19 Palestinian families in the Northern Jordan Valley area, in order to use the area for military purposes.
Outgoing senator urged to release full CIA torture report
RT | December 29, 2014
Calls for Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colorado) to reveal the entire, unredacted CIA torture report have increased, with a group of former intelligence analysts issuing a memo that urges the outgoing legislator to read the report on the Senate floor.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) released the letter, asking Udall to use his constitutional protection as a still-sitting member of Congress to introduce the full 6,000-plus-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee into the congressional record by reading it on the Senate floor. The current version is heavily redacted.
“We, the undersigned are veteran intelligence officers with a combined total of over 300 years of experience in intelligence work,” the letter begins. “We send you this open letter at what seems to be the last minute simply because we had been hoping we would not have to.”
“You seem on the verge of leaving the Senate without letting your fellow Americans know all they need to know about CIA torture,” the memo continues. “In the eight weeks since you lost your Senate seat you gave off signs that, during your last days in office, you would provide us with a fuller account of this sordid chapter in our country’s history, exercising your right to immunity under the “Speech or Debate” clause in Article 1 of the Constitution.”
VIPS is not the first to call on Udall to introduce the unredacted report into the congressional record. On November 5 ‒ the day after the incumbent senator lost his re-election bid to Republican Rep. Cory Gardner, and over a month before the Intelligence Committee published their findings ‒ Trevor Timm wrote an op-ed in the Guardian urging the “lame-duck transparency advocate” to grab the “rare opportunity to truly show his principles in the final two months of his Senate career and finally expose, in great detail, the secret government wrongdoing he’s been criticizing for years.”
The Speech or Debate clause in the US Constitution states that so long as legislators are “acting in the sphere of legitimate legislative activity,” they are “protected not only from the consequence of litigation’s results but also from the burden of defending themselves” from retribution from the government’s executive branch.
The senator has said he is considering the option.
“Transparency and disclosure are critical to the work of the Senate intelligence committee and our democracy, so I’m going to keep all options on the table to ensure the truth comes out,” Udall told the Denver Post in an interview.
“I mean, I’m going to keep all options on the table,” said Udall, when asked specifically about using his position in Congress to reveal the unredacted document.
Udall would not be the first to use his constitutional immunity to reveal classified materials on the Senate floor. In 1971, then-Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) released the Pentagon Papers – the secret official study that revealed the lies and manipulations of successive US administrations that misled the country into the Vietnam War. His action was in response to the Nixon administration’s move to block any further publication of the report and to punish any newspaper publisher who revealed the contents, after The New York Times published portions of the leaked study.
“From the floor of the senate, Gravel (a junior senator at the time) insisted that his constituents had a right to know the truth behind the war and proceeded to read 4,100 pages of the 7,000 page document into the senate [sic] record,”the biography on his website reads.
Gravel’s recitation lasted for three hours before he almost collapsed. He then entered thousands of more pages into the record after he couldn’t speak any longer from exhaustion.
The former Alaskan senator has also joined the calls for Udall to follow in his footsteps.
“If Udall wants to call me, I can explain this to him,” Gravel told the Intercept in early November. “What he’d have to do is call a subcommittee meeting like I did, late at night.”
The two biggest reasons not to do it, Gravel said, are no longer relevant.
“The biggest fear you have is peer pressure: What are my members of the Senate going to think of me? But I’ve got to say, if you lose office, like he has, he’s got no more peer pressure,” he said.
The Senate has rules against disclosing classified information, and could punish Udall with “censure, removal from committee membership, or expulsion from the Senate.”
Since Udall was already voted out of office, none of those punishments would affect him, Gravel noted.
Transparency advocates hoped that Udall would use his December 10 speech on the Senate floor, as Timm wrote, to “go out with a bang.” Instead, he blasted both the CIA and the White House over what the lawmaker considers to be complicity with regards to propagating long-standing lies about the United States’ use of torture against foreign detainees.
Udall’s last day as a US senator will be January 2. The 114th Congress begins the following day.
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Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda
Dr. Joseph Mercola | July 9, 2022
“Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda,” is the fourth vaccine-related documentary by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. It tells the story of an intentional infertility vaccine program conducted on African women, without their knowledge or consent.
While it’s been brushed off as a loony conspiracy theory for years, there’s compelling evidence showing it did, in fact, happen, and there’s nothing to prevent it from happening again. … continue
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