“Now it’s all gone”: Women cope with siege in Jordan Valley
By Nora Barrows-Friedman | The Electronic Intifada | 24 June 2011
Israeli military forces have demolished 27 houses in the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank over the last two weeks. More than 140 Palestinians have been rendered homeless by the demolitions, while Israeli settlement expansion continues to threaten more land and restrict water access — affecting the vitality of dozens of Palestinian villages in the area.
According to the Jordan Valley Solidarity (JVS) campaign, an organization working with local communities, Israeli military and police jeeps and two bulldozers invaded the Bedouin community of al-Hadidya on 21 June. The bulldozers “demolished seven residential tents, 18 animal shelters and four kitchens, leaving 32 people homeless,” the group reports (“Big wave of demolitions in the Northern Jordan Valley,” 21 June 2011).
Al-Hadidya is located near two illegal Israeli settlements, which are built partly on the village’s farmland, according to JVS. The area is surrounded by three military bases and is a designated “closed military zone” by Israeli forces. JVS adds that there have been nearly a dozen demolitions of Palestinian homes in the village since 2007 “with many of the residents having had their homes destroyed multiple times.”
“After the demolition of al-Hadidya, the bulldozers drove on to nearby Khirbet Yerza, where they demolished two homes and two animal shelters. As a result ten people were left homeless,” JVS reports. The group filmed the demolition in al-Hadidya, which left the Daraghmeh family homeless, and uploaded the video to YouTube (“Khirbet Yerza Demolition,” 21 June 2011).
In the video, JVS reports that this is the second time in five months that the Daraghmeh family suffered a demolition of their home, and that the family was not given a demolition order before the destruction of their property on Tuesday.
Wave of home demolitions in the Jordan Valley
The demolitions in al-Hadidya and Khirbet Yerza come on the heels of a massive demolition inside the village of Fasayil on 14 June. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) states in a report that more than 100 persons — including 64 children — were left homeless after Israeli forces destroyed 21 structures, including 18 homes (“Jordan Valley homes demolished, 103 left homeless,” 15 June 2011).
ICAHD co-director Itay Epshtain says in the report that the latest demolition of Fasayil “is part of an ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley … It is Israel’s overt policy to demolish Palestinians’ homes in the Jordan Valley to allow for land expropriation and for neighboring settlements to encroach on Palestinian land.”
Fasayil resident Khaled Abdallah Ali Ghazal added he was intent on rebuilding his destroyed home. “We have nowhere else to go, we will rebuild,” he says in the same report.
Meanwhile, on 20 June, demolition orders were handed out to Palestinian homeowners in Jiftlik, a village in the central Jordan Valley, months after Israeli officials came to “take pictures of the structures” that were listed for demolition, according to a JVS report (“3 new demolition orders in Jiftlik,” 20 June 2011).
The demolitions could happen on 11 July, JVS states, but the three families who were given the demolition orders are planning to challenge them in court.
“It happens very rarely that lawyers obtain a cancellation but sometimes they obtain a freeze. It enables people to stay in their house [until] the end of the freeze,” JVS reports. If the court rejects the appeal, 17 persons could be left homeless.
State of siege in Area C
These attacks on Palestinian villages are part of a wave of home demolitions across Area C in the West Bank. Under the Oslo accords signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mid-1990s, the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip were carved up into areas A, B and C, the last of which indicates full Israeli control.
Sixty percent of the West Bank is designated Area C, including East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley. Under the Oslo regulations, Area C is administered and controlled by the Israeli government and its military, which has declared three-quarters of the land as “closed military zones” or nature reserves, and therefore “off-limits” to Palestinians. Approximately 40,000 Palestinians live in Area C.
At the same time, illegal Israeli settlements are continuing to expand on Palestinian land in the Jordan Valley for the benefit of Jewish settlers and Israeli agriculture, resulting in an increase in home demolitions and land appropriation.
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reported recently that that there have already been more home demolitions in Area C in the first six months of 2011 than took place during all of 2010. The report states that since January more than 700 persons, including 341 children, were displaced after 103 homes were destroyed in Area C of the West Bank (“Sharp increase in West Bank home demolition,” 22 June 2011).
“This is a sharp increase in home demolitions in Area C,” B’Tselem states in the report. “In 2010, by comparison, the Civil Administration demolished 86 residential structures. In 2009, the figure was 28.”
Israeli settlement and resource theft in the Jordan Valley
In an in-depth report released by B’Tselem on Israeli policy in the Jordan Valley, released in May, the organization states that 9,400 Israeli settlers live in 37 different settlement colonies in the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea areas, including seven outposts not yet authorized by Israeli officialdom.
The report also finds that Israel has used the “absentee property law” enacted during the initial years of ethnic cleansing and dispossession in the 1940s and the 1967 war to take over more Palestinian land and allocate it to the settlements after Palestinians were driven out of their homes by military force and prevented from returning (“Disposession and Exploitation: Israel’s policy in the Jordan Valley and Northern Dead Sea,” 12 May 2011 [PDF]).
By the end of 2010, B’Tselem reports, the Israeli government had approved funding for the construction of dozens of housing units in two settlement colonies in the northern Jordan Valley. The government says that Jewish settler population growth in the Jordan Valley has been “modest” and is therefore trying to encourage more settlers to move into the area by providing economic incentives.
Along with the promise of cheap land in the Jordan Valley, those settlers are given massive amounts of water from the underground springs, which used to provide Palestinian communities with irrigation for abundant crops and running water in their homes year-round. Those springs have run dry in the last few years as Israeli settlements divert water systems for their own use.
In a summary of the report, B’Tselem says that those settlers are “allocated 45 million [cubic meters] of water a year from [wells], from the Jordan River, from treated wastewater and from artificial water reservoirs. This is almost one-third the quantity of water accessible to the 2.5 million Palestinians living throughout the West Bank. This generous water supply has enabled settlements to develop intensive farming methods and to work the land all year round, with most of the produce being exported” (“New report exposes scope of Israel’s economic exploitation of Jordan Valley,” 12 May 2011).
Effect of Israel’s policies on women and children
In interviews held in person in late April, residents of two villages in the Jordan Valley told The Electronic Intifada that these types of widespread demolitions and water restriction policies have a catastrophic effect on the village communities — especially on women and children.
The Electronic Intifada spoke with several women involved with the Auja-Fasayil Joint Women’s Center, a community organization based in Auja village that is helping to support local women and families with trade skills training, education and economic opportunities since Israeli policies have severely impacted farmers’ livelihoods.
Currently home to approximately 5,300 residents, Auja was known for its abundant crops of produce and grains. Farmers exported watermelons, bananas, citrus fruit and wheat to other areas in Palestine and across the border to Jordan as well. The area was famously rich with natural water springs, which would cascade down hillsides like waterfalls.
Residents told The Electronic Intifada that people had developed sustainable ways of sharing water resources amongst the communities through an intricate system of canals — some which date back to the ancient Roman era.
“Our main source for livelihood was the water itself,” Suheir Nujum, 37, and a member of the center’s General Assembly, said. “But now, with the development of settlements, central areas of the canals have been confiscated. [Israel] has diverted our water with irrigation systems to the settlements.”
Just in the past several years, Nujum said, most of the village’s land has become dust-dry and barren, forcing villagers to sell their parcels of empty land to large-scale chicken farmers who sell poultry meat elsewhere in the West Bank. The income for families in the Jordan Valley, in places like Auja, Nujum explained, was dependent on community agriculture. In a dramatically short period of time, since Israel began diverting water to illegal settlements within the last decade, their lands have dried up and unemployment has skyrocketed.
“We now have two options,” Nujum said. “The younger population either works with the Palestinian Authority, or works in agricultural farms in a nearby settlement.” She pointed out the shocking indignity of the latter option, as this is the first generation of indigenous people in the area to not enjoy their own economic sustainability drawn from their own land but rather forced to work on land that has been taken over and appropriated by foreign settlers.
“Israel is not allowing us to survive as people in Auja. They’re taking it away from us,” she added.
“Now we can’t grow the grain to feed the sheep”
Nujum said that the effect on women under this type of stress has become significant. “Women in Auja and other communities in the Jordan Valley are very well-educated,” she told The Electronic Intifada. “Many of us have finished college. But there are limited opportunities for women to generate income for our families, so that is why we built this community center.”
“However we used to be entirely self-sufficient. We used to have livestock, and we would feed them with grain that we grew,” Nujum said. “Now, we can’t grow the grain to feed the sheep. We don’t have sheep to make dairy products. There used to be so many options for feeding your family. So the women — well-educated women — are at home without jobs. We used to work side-by-side with the men on the land.”
Umm Hamza, 47, the center’s public relations officer, told The Electronic Intifada that she was formerly a farmer, along with her husband. Now that the water has been diverted to the nearby settlement, both she and her husband have been unemployed. “If you look at it, it’s all intertwined,” she said. “Our children used to take care of the land. Now there’s nothing for them. The land used to bring the whole family together to take part in farming. We didn’t need anyone from the outside to help us.”
These days, she said, the community is dependent on finding menial labor jobs from outside the village to bring in income, and women must buy lower-quality, imported produce at high prices in order to feed their families.
Umm Hamza also said that water for drinking, bathing, cooking and irrigation now must be brought in by truck, and bought from the Israeli water company Mekorot. The company is known for its discriminatory water policies and regularly cuts off water supplies to Palestinians across the West Bank, especially in the Jordan Valley.
“The water is filthy,” Umm Hamza explained. “Our children are getting sick from drinking it. And sometimes we wait days or months without water in the village.”
Umm Hamza and Nujum said that villagers in Auja and Fasayil are forced to pay Mekorot for the distribution of unclean water, while just a short time ago, abundant water used to be clean enough to drink from the canals and agricultural crops were well-irrigated.
Nujum said that everything has dramatically changed in her village. As her family and community struggle against the next home demolition, settlement encroachment or water cut-off, she explained that working alongside other women in similar situations at the women’s center is empowering, but that something needs to be done about Israel’s devastating policies in the Jordan Valley before it’s too late.
“We used to live the best life, with what we had here — from our own sources. We’d love to go back to our tradition of working on our land. It was our main source of income, it was a way of life. It wasn’t too long ago that we had this life, and now it’s all gone.”
Nora Barrows-Friedman is an award-winning independent journalist, and is a staff writer and editor for The Electronic Intifada. She also writes for Inter Press Service, Al Jazeera, Truthout and other outlets, and regularly reports from Palestine.
Siham Rashid translated for this article.
Detained Legislator Receives Extended Administrative Detention Order
By Saed Bannoura | IMEMC & Agencies | June 24, 2011
An Israeli military court decided Thursday to renew, for six more months, the administrative detention order against elected legislator, Mohammad At-Til, from Al Thaheriyya town, south of the southern West bank city of Hebron.
The Hamas’ Change and Reform Parliamentary Bloc, issued a press release denouncing the Israeli violation, and stated that this is the second time in a row that Israel renews the administrative detention order against the detained elected official.
It added that this decision reflects “the terrorist and criminal nature of the Zionist occupation and its ongoing violations against elected officials”.
The Bloc demanded that Arab and Islamic parliaments intervene and place real pressure on the international level to ensure the release of all elected legislators and officials.
At-Til was kidnapped by the army on December 28, 2010, and was placed in administrative detention without charges filed against him, for six month. The order was renewed for additional six months.
Throughout the years, especially after the first Intifada started in 1987, Israel detained thousands of Palestinians and placed them under administrative detention orders that were repeatedly renewed forcing hundreds of detainees behind bars for several years without even knowing what charges, if any, were brought against them under the so-called “security file” that even defense attorneys cannot view.
Following Hamas’ overwhelming victory in the 2006 legislative elections, Israel and the United States led a campaign to shun the new democratically elected cabinet. Israel then went on to arrest most of the elected legislators, mayors and officials in an attempt to force the collapse of the elected government.
Medicines for Gaza stuck at Israeli crossing
Ma’an – 24/06/2011
BETHLEHEM — Gaza’s medicine shortage has reached “alarming proportions,” international aid group Oxfam said Friday, quoting medical officials saying that drugs were held up at Israel’s crossing into Gaza.
Shifa Hospital in Gaza City has only five vials left to dissolve blood clots, the director of Gaza’s Central Drug Store told Oxfam, and kidney transplant patients are at risk of rejected organs due to drug shortages, a release from the international organization said.
“Can you imagine after going through all the hardships to find a compatible kidney, having it rejected because drugs did not enter Gaza?” Dr Mohammed Zamili said, noting that deliveries from the Ministry of Health in Ramallah were not meeting the huge shortage of medicines.
“There are also some trucks held up at the Kerem Shalom crossing and we don’t know exactly what’s in them,” he added.
Oxfam said that drug suppliers in the West Bank have held back medical supplies after the Ramallah government defaulted on payments, and the West Bank was also facing a shortage of 150 drugs.
In Gaza “a total of 178 types of medications and 123 types of medical supplies have already run out and others have reached their expiration date,” according to an Oxfam report last week.
A delivery of 20 truckloads of medicines from the Ramallah ministry in the past week was “nothing next to the enormous shortage we’re facing,” Zamili said.
On Saturday, the Ramallah Health Minister Fathi Abu Moghli accused the Hamas health ministry in Gaza of trying “to politicize the health sector” by blaming the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority for the shortages.
The Gaza ministry threatened to close hospitals and clinics “to disturb the reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah,” Abu Moghli said.
But the medical supply chief urged attention to those in need. “Patients are the ones suffering from all this,” Zamili said.
Four Decades of Cruelty and Inhumanity to U.S. Political Prisoners
By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Radio | June 23, 2011
For almost 40 years, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have been in solitary confinement at Louisiana’s infamous Angola State Prison, in what is thought to be the longest period of enforced solitude in America’s vast prison gulag. Amnesty International says their treatment is “cruel and inhumane and a violation of the US’s obligations under international law.” Woodfox is now 64 years old, and Wallace is 69. They are two of the original Angola 3, convicted of the murder of a prison guard in 1972. The other member of the trio, Robert King, was released after 29 years in solitary confinement after pleading guilty to a lesser charge.
Under the conditions of solitary confinement, Woodfox and Wallace are restricted to their tiny cells for 23 hours a day. Three times a week, for an hour, they are allowed to exercise in an outdoor cage, if weather permits. For 40 years, they have not been allowed access to work or to education. And there has been no legitimate review of their cases in all that time.
There was never any physical evidence of the men’s guilt, only the very questionable testimony of other inmates, one of whom was bribed by officials and another of whom retracted his testimony. Woodfox and Wallace and King have been subjected to the greatest cruelties Louisiana has to offer because they became political prisoners after entering Angola, when they formed a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party. One prison official says flatly, that “there’s been no rehabilitation” from “practicing Black Pantherism.” In other words, the prison considers their politics to be their crime.
Albert Woodfox’s conviction has twice been overturned by lower courts on the basis of racial discrimination, prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate defense and suppression of evidence. But the U.S. Court of Appeals decided that Woodfox’s fate was Louisiana’s business. Amnesty International demands only that the two elderly prisoners be released from solitary. Woodfox and Wallace, it should be pointed out, became political prisoners after initially being incarcerated for criminal offenses.
There are scores of U.S. political prisoners that have languished behind bars for three or four decades. The National Conference of Black Lawyers has been pressing for their outright release, especially those who were wrongfully imprisoned due to the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation, which sought to “neutralize” and destroy radical political activists and organizations – most notably the Black Panther Party. In the cases of those targeted by COINTELPRO, it was the federal government’s lawlessness that led to a lifetime in prison. Therefore, the U.S. government is obligated to free them. But the United States continues to deny that there is such a thing as a political prisoner within its borders. The Obama administration is always eager to claim that other countries are abusing their political prisoners. It also says it wants to play an active role in the Human Rights Council of the United Nations. But that will require the U.S. to answer charges that it imprisons people for political reasons, holds them under cruel and inhuman conditions, and that racism pervades its criminal justice system.
Collective Apathy About Collective Punishment
By Meg Walsh for MIFTAH | June 22, 2011
It feels like my surroundings are rapidly closing in on me. The metal bars in which I am enclosed are ugly and the ground is littered with trash. Desperate children are trying to sell me gum and candy. Candy is the last thing I want right now; I want to escape. Bodies are pressing up against me as people struggle to make it through the revolving gate that only lets a few through at a time. If I am not aggressive, I will never get through. A teenage boy is getting yelled at by a soldier for some unknown reason, and a father is denied although his wife and children are granted passage. An old man in the car lane is taking out his groceries one by one from his trunk as a young soldier stands inspecting, finger on the trigger. Cars are backed up and people are getting impatient. I am angry.
I must pass through the checkpoint every time I wish to enter Jerusalem from Ramallah, even though east Jerusalem is Palestinian territory. I have to answer the familiar questions such as “What were you doing in the West Bank?” or “Do you have any Palestinian friends?” I hate being forced to lie. Having Palestinian friends should not be looked at as criminal. And I hate that they almost – almost make me feel that I am truly doing something wrong. Most of all, I hate the way the Palestinians are treated, and although I am uncomfortable, chances are I will get through without much problem. Their reality is much different. Any random checkpoint encounter could mean harassment, detainment, or worse. It seems to mostly depend on the mood of the soldier.
I had underestimated the anger and anxiety that I would feel in these scenarios. Some people around me appear visibly upset while others just look bored. Because of the freedom that I have enjoyed my entire life, I refuse to accept this dehumanizing process. As I stand there, I vow to never adjust, to never become desensitized to this. For me, that would signal complicity in the face of the injustice that is occurring: a complete domination of one group of people over another—a betrayal of humanity. Threat levels are determined by the color of your ID card and the language that you speak. I will not thank the soldiers when they return my passport. I will not grant legitimacy to their role by acting like they are doing me a favor. I will not be forced to equate human rights with privilege.
When they ask, I tell the interrogators that I have been in the city of Nablus, visiting Jacob’s Well, which is the biblical site where Jesus is believed to have had encountered a Samaritan woman. This falls in line with my Christian tourism story that most visitors have to use if they are planning on having any contact with Palestinians. Although with suspicious looks, I am allowed to pass through the gates with the others like herded animals.
When you witness the policies that are in place and the apartheid system that is occurring, it is hard to stay outside the cycle of hatred. It is hard to see the ‘other’, the one who is enforcing the rules, as human—they become robots, trapped inside a system that teaches you to follow orders, not to ask questions. It denies all natural laws of humanity, so the challenge then becomes to stay human in an inhuman situation. People are not meant to be kept in cages, both figuratively and literally, and race and religion should not be prioritized. The ironies are many in this ‘Holy Land’.
But how do I communicate to others what I have seen and felt when most people choose the comfort of ignorance over awareness in our unjust world? If words could accurately describe this oppression, I do not believe it would be allowed to continue unchecked. The gap between words and lived experience is vast, and those who may actually have the power to change things may never understand the reality—the reality of the nightmare that is occupation. It was only through my experience in this region that I was ultimately changed. It was from looking it in the eye, from feeling powerless, from experiencing a fear that the unexpected could happen at any given moment.
In Palestine, where most days I feel useless rather than useful, I still somehow feel that I have to be here no matter how outside of my comfort zone it lies. I cannot continue to be complicit or neutral, because I have seen what that means in this conflict and how collective apathy has embarrassingly allowed the occupation of Palestine to continue for 44 years. I am standing on a bridge between two worlds—one in which the powerful are silent, and the other in which the powerless are screaming, yet ignored. It is through this paradox that I am seeking answers. And some degree of hope.
~
Meg Walsh is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.
Resistance: The First and Only Fisherwoman of Gaza
Madeleine Kulab and her boat. (GuerrillaRadio Blog)
By Vittorio Arrigoni | Palestine Chronicle
(This article was originally published at Vittorio Arrigoni’s blog Guerrilla Radio. Translated by Daniela Loffreda.)
Her eyes are as deep as unexplored oceans and her movements are done with the grace of waterfowl, as when a marine creature submerges itself below the surface of the water. Even the heavy weight of her clothing and veil seem to vanish, because by tradition, she must wear them while she swims.
Her name is Madeleine Kulab, she’s 16 years old, and she is the first and only female fisherwoman in Gaza.
Her father Momahed became paralyzed ten years earlier and therefore was forced to hang up his fishing nets and now, it is his daughter who has taken his place at sea.
“We come from a family of fisherman, for whom the passion for fishing has been passed down from generation to generation. Fishing was our livelihood before we were forced to leave, in 1948, what is known today as the port city Ashkelon” explains the father.
Today this livelihood barely allows us to survive, since the siege and the sailing limit imposed by Israel (not beyond 3 nautical miles from the coast) has significantly impoverished the Gaza fisherman. According to a recent Red Cross report, 90 percent of the 4000 or so fisherman in the Gaza Strip are living below the poverty level and their situation continues to deteriorate.
The usual UN aid offered to the Kulab family was just no longer sufficient, and so for the last three years. Madeleine has been waking up at 6am, one hour before the start of her school lessons, pushing the oars of her tiny boat out into the waters to a place where can throw in her nets. The ritual repeats itself in the afternoon shortly after the end of the school day. Madeleine not only has books in her knapsack, but also a change of clothing so that she can get wet again.
Here, human needs must prevail over tradition and courage has created a new profession for survival. This is a paradigm to the region and to Madeleine. However, her new role has earned her the respect from other Gazawi women and even notoriety beyond the open air prison which is Gaza.
The daily catch never goes beyond the weight of 3 chilos, and most of it is made up of sardines and crab, a gain which is not comparable to the daily risks which she faces. The last fisherman killed by Israeli machine guns was last September 24 2010 and it was exactly in the same area where Madeleine goes, opposite Sudaniya beach.
When I went to meet her at the beach, there were two Arab TV broadcasters filming her while she prepared to embark on her fishing, but Madeleine doesn’t let this go to her head, she remains the down to earth girl that she always has been. Her dreams are the same as any other teenage girl.
“I will never leave the sea, it’s my natural element, but I want to become as fashion designer one day,” Madeleine says.
Who knows, maybe in the future these same hands, so skilled at unraveling nets and freeing small, insignificant shellfish that end up in a pan, will one day embroider fine cloth that will embody the memories and tell the stories of a life and a sea under siege.
Restiamo Umani – Stay Human
Vittorio Arrigoni from Gaza City.
Rafah chaos escalates as Gazans continue to wait for the border to open
By Ruqaya Izzidien | Mondoweiss | June 20, 2011
Waiting at Rafah. (All Photos: Ruqaya Izzidien)
Arms grappled through the black metal barrier that separates Palestinians from the Rafah terminal. A barrier which only ever shifts to let through ambulances, press and- very occasionally- a busload of travellers, successfully making it out of Gaza.
Elderly ladies wait for hours brandishing their passports through the bars. Welcome to the new, improved, siege-free Gaza.
When the gate opens, it traps those loitering beside it between its two frames, and people hurriedly look for a gap in the guards’ attention through which they could make a break for it. Those who found a seemingly unguarded exit route where manhandled back behind the fence.
Currently officials at the Rafah border are working their way through an ever-growing backlog of registered travellers. Until the quota of up to 400 travellers per day is lifted, the mayhem at Rafah will only intensify. “I know today is the 18th June,” a guard announced over a loudspeaker, “but today only people registered to cross between 6 and 10 of June will be crossing.”
When the border closed at around 2pm that day, it came with another announcement via loudspeaker, “this isn’t from us; it’s because of Egypt.”
When the Rafah ‘reopening’ was first announced in April, Gazans were promised a border that would permit women, children and the elderly to travel freely, as well as men who had registered to in advance. Currently none of this is true.
Qasem and Qayis Farah.
Qasem and Qayis Farah are two British-Palestinian children who are have been trying, with their mother, Wesam, to get home to Sheffield in the UK. I first met them on June 16.
“We are trying to get out of this terrible place” eight-year-old Qasem explained. Every time the family was given a window in which to cross, it was retracted. Qasem added, “I miss my dad, I miss all my friends, I miss my best friend, I miss my house, I miss my home; home sweet home.”
The Farah family made it through the Rafah barrier but after waiting for six hours, they were returned to Gaza. They were back at the Rafah crossing when it reopened on 18 June, determined to cross once more.
“When we finally got through last time,” Qasem said, “they just took us back and we had to go through the border again. They just surrounded us and every time we wanted to get through the guards would tell us that your passport is not in, you’ve not got any permission to come through.”
The line at the Rafah crossing.
This experience is typical for Gazans wanting to cross into Egypt. Shahd Abusalama has a summer leadership programme scholarship in the University of Delaware, USA. She was registered to cross the border on June 18, five days before her flight out of Cairo.
“I feel so worried, I’ve been working hard to get this scholarship and everything depends on the border. I can’t leave and move freely, it’s really hard. After the Egyptians said that Rafah border is going to be open permanently, we had lots of hope that we would be able to leave freely and have no more difficulties but everything was an illusion. The reality is far different to what the media and leaders say, the reality is that sometimes the border is open, sometimes it is closed, and sometimes not all buses are allowed to enter. I’ve heard of people who come to the border every day for a whole week in order to enter. It’s like a torment. It makes me feel like I’m less than human.”
But inhumane border regulations are just part of the humiliation that Gazans face at the border. Before being allowed to enter the Gazan Rafah terminal, they must wait in a metal shed, filled with plastic chairs and toilets which are so smutty-looking that they make you want to wash your eyes for just looking at them. A Gazan must stay seated:
“Sit in your chairs and an explanation will be given to you,” the loudspeaker rang out. A Gazan cannot challenge the guards without being escorted from the building. It was like being transported into George Orwell’s mind; people are crammed into an eerie shed which still bears bullet holes I could fit my fist through as the Rafah sub-culture takes hold of everyone by the wrist.
“If you want to get out, sit down in your chairs” the loudspeaker dictated again. Shahd Abusalama’s father looked at me, “This is the system; this is their system.”
Qasem Farah recalled, “We had to stay sitting down because if we didn’t, they would take us back to the border. I don’t think we need permission, we just came in to see our family.”
Border control forces are overwhelmed by the numbers crossing and while the travellers quota remains (currently permitting between 300 and 400 out of Gaza per day), the situation will only escalate as Palestinian authorities attempt to work their way through the ever-increasing backlog of registered travellers.
Shahd Abusalama was sent back from the border, twice, like hundreds of other Palestinians. She is still trying to make it out in time for her scholarship.
Ruqaya Izzidien is a British journalist and cartoonist based in Gaza.
Don’t Look Away: The Siege of Gaza Must End
By Kathy Kelly | Palestine Chronicle | June 17, 2011
In Late June 2011, I’m going to be a passenger on ‘The Audacity of Hope,’ the USA boat in this summer’s international flotilla to break the illegal and deadly Israeli siege of Gaza. Organizers, supporters and passengers aim to nonviolently end the brutal collective punishment imposed on Gazan residents since 2006 when the Israeli government began a stringent air, naval and land blockade of the Gaza Strip explicitly to punish Gaza’s residents for choosing the Hamas government in a democratic election. Both the Hamas and the Israeli governments have indiscriminately killed civilians in repeated attacks, but the vast preponderance of these outrages over the length of the conflict have been inflicted by Israeli soldiers and settlers on unarmed Palestinians. I was witness to one such attack when last in Gaza two years ago, under heavy Israeli bombardment in a civilian neighborhood in Rafah.
In January 2009, I lived with a family in Rafah during the final days of the “Operation Cast Lead” bombing. We were a few streets down from an area where there was heavy bombing. Employing its ever-replenished stockpile of U.S. weapons, the Israeli government sought to destroy tunnels beneath the Egyptian border through which food, medicine, badly-needed building supplies, and possibly a few weapons as well were evading the internationally condemned blockade and entering Gaza.
Throughout that terrible assault, Israel pounded civilians in Gaza, turning villages, homes, refugee camps, schools, mosques and infrastructure into rubble. According to Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, the attack killed 1,385 Palestinians, nearly a quarter of them minors, with an uncountable number more to succumb, in the months and years following, to malnutrition, disease, and suicidal despair, the consequences of forced impoverishment under a still continuing siege that salts Gaza’s dreadful wounds by preventing it from even starting to rebuild.
All I could feel at the time was that the people in the Gaza Strip were horribly trapped, almost paralyzed.
The day of the cease-fire, when the sounds of bombing stopped, my young friends insisted that we must move quickly to visit the Al Shifaa hospital in Gaza City. Doctors there were shaken and stunned, after days of trying to save lives in a hopelessly overcrowded emergency room, with blood pooling at their feet. Dr. Nafez Abu Shabham, head of Al Shifaa’s burn unit, put his head in his hands and spoke incredulously to us. “For 22 days, the world watched,” he lamented, “and no country tried to stop the killing.”
He may well be putting his head in his hands again, today as too many of us have stopped even watching. “Human rights groups in Gaza are urgently requesting international aid groups and donor groups to intervene and deliver urgent medical aid to Palestinian hospitals in Gaza,” according to a June 14 Al Jazeera report. “Palestinian officials say that Gaza’s medicinal stock is nearly empty and is in crisis. This affects first aid care, in addition to all other levels of medical procedures.”
After the attack, I visited the Gaza City dormitory of a young university student with two of his friends. It was a shambles. We sifted through broken glass and debris, trying to salvage some notebooks and texts. Their lives have been like that. They’ve since graduated but there is no work. “The Gaza Strip enters its fifth year of a full Israeli blockade by land, air and sea with unemployment at 45.2%, one of the highest rates in the world,” according to a UN aid agency report. (June 14, 2011). Harvard scholar Sara Roy, in a June 2, 2009 report for Harvard’s Crimson Review, noted that:
“Gaza is an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into one of aid-dependent paupers….After Israel’s December (2008) assault, Gaza’s already-compromised conditions have become virtually unlivable. Livelihoods, homes, and public infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed on a scale that even the Israel Defense Forces admitted was indefensible. In Gaza today there is no private sector to speak of and no industry.”
When the bombing had stopped, we visited homes and villages where the unarmed had been killed. Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times would later verify that, in the village of Al Atatra, IDF soldiers had fired white phosphorous missiles into the home of a woman named Sabah Abu Halemi, leaving her badly burned and burning to death her husband and three of her children. I visited her in the hospital, watching a kindly Palestinian doctor spend his greatly needed time off sitting at her bedside, offering only wordless comfort as she gripped his hand.
We must not turn away from suffering in Gaza.
We must continue trying to connect with Gazans living under siege.
There is some risk involved in this flotilla. The Israeli government threatens to board each ship in the flotilla with snipers and attack dogs. A year ago the Israeli Navy fired on the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, from the air, then documented its passengers’ panicked response as their justification for executing nine activists, including one young U.S. citizen, Furkhan Dogan, shot several times in the back and head at close range. It then refused to cooperate with an international investigation.
The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, amounting to what is internationally recognized as an apartheid system, could end in peace, with Israel abandoning paranoia and racial violence to allow peace. Apartheid ended in South Africa without the wave of bloodshed and reprisals that its supporters claimed to fear as their excuse for holding on to the wealth and power which their system afforded them. They achieved greater peace and safety for themselves and their children by finding the courage to finally allow peace, safety, and freedom to their neighbors. It’s a lesson the U.S. government has all too often missed. This June, the governments of Israel and, (above all), the United States must finally embrace the audacity of hope.
– Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org).
Egyptian authorities refuse entry of 6 bus-loads out of 8 at Rafah
Palestine Information Center – 17/06/2011
GAZA — Egyptian authorities on Thursday refused entry of six busloads of Palestinian passengers and allowed in only two bus-loads during the hours of opening.
Palestinian security sources told PIC correspondent that the Egyptian authorities, in an unexplained step, returned six buses out of eight at the Rafah crossing denying dozens of passengers to travel on Thursday.
The sources added that a state of discontent prevailed amongst the affected passengers and expressed surprise at the deterioration of the Egyptian declared policy of facilitating the travel of Palestinians through the Rafah crossing.
Many passengers who were denied travel on Thursday have visas to third countries and air tickets which could mean they miss their flights or their visas run-out before they could reach their destination.
Dozens of Palestinians held a sit in on Thursday outside the Rafah border crossing calling for the permanent opening of the crossing which is the only gateway for Gaza residents to the outside world.
Bahrain’s Dictatorship and the Pentagon
By Jacob G. Hornberger | June 14, 2011
Sometimes it’s good to look at foreign dictatorships to see what the president and the U.S. military have done to our country. Consider, for example, the trial of 20 doctors that is currently taking place in Bahrain.
As most everyone knows, Bahrain is ruled by a brutal dictatorship, just as many other countries in the Middle East are. Bahrain is also besieged by anti-government demonstrations, just as other countries in the Middle East are. Like other dictatorships in the Middle East, Bahrain’s dictatorial regime is using brute force to suppress the protests.
What distinguishes the Bahrain dictatorship from, say, the Libyan or Syrian dictatorships, is that the U.S. government supports the dictatorship in Bahrain while opposing the Libyan and Syrian dictatorships. Thus, not only does U.S. foreign aid flow into the Bahrain dictatorship, the U.S. military also has a major base there.
The Bahrain dictatorship is accusing those 20 doctors of participating in anti-government protests in Bahrain. Guess what type of court the doctors are being tried in. You got it: a military tribunal, just like those employed by the Pentagon at Guantanamo Bay.
It probably won’t surprise you to know that the doctors are accusing Bahrain’s military of torturing them while in custody and forcing confessions out of them — and that the military is denying it.
The tribunal is actually a special national-security court that was established last March as part of the emergency rule that the dictatorship imposed on the country to deal with the anti-government protests. Emergency rule essentially means martial law, with the military wielding the power to protect “national security” by establishing “order and stability” within the country.
Not surprisingly, in previous prosecutions in Bahrain’s national-security court, defendants have been charged with “terrorism.” Moreover, since the trials pertain to “national security,” some of the proceedings have been held in secret.
Sound familiar?
Well, of course it does. All this is familiar ground for Americans, who have seen the Pentagon under both President Bush and President Obama engage in this same sort of conduct.
Consider, for example, the Pentagon’s military tribunals. Are they any different in principle from those employed in Bahrain? Consider also the circumstances under which the Pentagon’s tribunals came into existence — during the emergency known as 9/11.
As in Bahrain, many of the accused have been tortured by U.S. military personnel while in the custody of the military or the CIA. Of course, oftentimes the U.S. military authorities take the same position as their Bahrain counterparts — that they don’t torture and that the defendants are lying.
While the Bahrain dictatorship recently lifted its emergency rule, 11 years after the 9/11 attacks the U.S. military still wields the authority to take the American people (and foreigners) into custody as suspected terrorists in the global war on terrorism — the authority to them with water-boarding, sensory deprivation, and other “harsh-interrogation” techniques — and the authority to hold them indefinitely without trial. Why, the Pentagon and the CIA can now even assassinate Americans whom they label terrorists.
Indeed, about the same time that Bahrain was recently lifting its emergency rule, the U.S. Congress was renewing the USA Patriot Act for another four years. And yesterday, the New York Times reported that the FBI is expanding the authority of its 14,000 agents to monitor the activities of Americans who are even not suspected of breaking the law.
By the way, Bahrain and the United States aren’t the only ones to employ special courts to deal with acts of suspected terrorism. After the Reichstag Fire trials in which some of the accused terrorists were acquitted by the regular German courts, Adolf Hitler established what was known as the “People’s Court,” a special national-security court to deal with cases of terrorism and treason, one in which the chances of any suspected terrorist getting off were virtually nil.
Is it any wonder that the president and the Pentagon continue to partner with and support dictators in the Middle East? I don’t think so. When it comes to emergency dictatorial powers, they have lots in common.
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Israel Is A Genocidal Society
The Israeli Political Spectrum From The “Liberal Left” To The Far Right, Is United In Genocide
The Dissident | May 5, 2026
… The fundamental issue of Israel is not Benjamin Netanyahu, but the fact that Israel is overwhelmingly a bloodthirsty, war-ready, genocidal society.
Historian Zachary Foster has documented that the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis have supported every Israeli war since the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, writing:
2006
86% of the Israeli adult population justified “the IDF operation in Lebanon against Hizbollah,” or 2006 Lebanon War, in which Israel killed 1,191 people, the vast majority civilians according to HRW (Note that the % of Jewish Israelis who supported the war was even higher)2008-2009
82% of the Israeli public thought that the 2008-9 war on Gaza was justified (in which Israel killed 1,417 Palestinians, the vast majority civilians.) Note that the % of Jewish Israelis who supported the war was even higher2012
90% of Israeli Jews supported war on Gaza ( in which Israel killed 160 Palestinians, 66% civilians)2014
95% of Jewish Israelis believed the war on Gaza was justified (in which Israel killed 2,310 Palestinians, 70% civilians)2021
72% of Israelis believed the war on Gaza should continue (as of May 21) after Israel had already killed 250 Palestinians in Gaza, vast majority civilians. The % of Jewish Israelis who supported killing more Palestinians was much higher.2024
A January poll found 95% of Jewish Israelis thought the Israeli military was using either the “appropriate” amount of force or “too little” force in Gaza at a time when Israel had already killed >25,700 Palestinians in Gaza.2024
In September, 90% of Jewish Israelis supported the war on Lebanon (in which Israel killed 800+, including hundreds of civilians)2025
In March, 82% of Israeli Jews supported the forced expulsion of residents of Gaza, Israel’s main goal in it’s genocide & war on Gaza.2025
In June, 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the war on Iran known as the “twelve day war”2026
On March 4, 93% of Israeli Jews expressed support for the war on Iran. 97% of “right-wing” Jewish Israelis support it, compared with 93% in the center and 76% on the left.
The overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis also have openly genocidal views towards Palestinians.
Polls in Israel have shown that:
- 84% of the (Israeli )public gives the IDF an excellent or very good grade regarding the moral conduct of the army
- 75% of Jewish Israelis agree with the idea that ‘there are no innocents in Gaza.’
- A vast majority of Israeli Jews – 79 percent – say they are ‘not so troubled’ or ‘not troubled at all’ by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.
The fundamental problem in Israel is Zionism, not Benjamin Netanyahu. – Full article
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