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Bedouins forced to leave their homes to make way for Israeli maneuvers

Palestine Information Center – 27/06/2012

JORDAN VALLEY — Israeli occupation forces (IOF) forced Bedouins inhabiting Wadi Al-Maleh in the northern Jordan Valley to leave their homes on Tuesday evening.

The municipal council of Al-Maleh and the Bedouin tribes said that the IOF command told the inhabitants that they should leave their homes for two days to make way for military exercises.

It said that the soldiers forcibly evacuated dozens of families from Wadi Al-Maleh.

The council said that the IOF regularly launches maneuvers near the area using live ammunition threatening lives of the inhabitants, adding that the Israeli army never launches such maneuvers near the Jewish settlements.

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June 27, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel Plans Demolition of Entire Palestinian Village

By Giulio Pusateri | IMEMC & Agencies | June 27, 2012

The Palestinian village of Susiya faces demolition orders for all of its 50 buildings after years of relative calm. The decision was contested with official and physical protests.

On the June 12 Israeli authorities told the villagers of Susya, a Palestinian village in the south Hebron hills, that the hamlet will be completely demolished, says news agency Ma’an. The demolition orders were preceded a week earlier by the prohibition of new construction in the village. The demolition is on behalf of a petition presented by a settler group who would like to exploit the village for itself.

The orders, which include the demolition of homes, a social center, a solar generator, and a health clinic, resulted in an official condemnation from the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Nearly 200 international protesters went to Susiya on June 22 to support the residents and contest the planned demolitions, reports the Palestinian News Network. Israeli forces stopped the demonstrators’ march using stun grenades and tear gas.

Demolition is nothing new Susiya, the village is neighbored by an Israeli settlement built on village lands. Israel declared the area an archeological site in the 1980s. In 1986 most of the Palesitian villagers were forced to the outskirts of their land. In 1999 the entire village was evacuated by the Israeli military before some residents were granted a temporary permission to return by the Israeli High Court.

Susiya is, under the Oslo Accords of 1993, defined as “Area C” and is in full Israeli control. During the last decade Israel has used this authority to expand settlements near Susiya and throughout Area C at the expense of Palestinians, who often see their villages and lands gradually and forcefully taken over.

Israel has ignored all domestic and international calls to stop the expansion of settlements despite having been found in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and various other binding international legal agreements in hundreds of cases.

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June 27, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli ex-top diplomat backs boycott

 Al Akhbar | June 27, 2012

Former top Israeli diplomat Alon Liel threw his backing behind renowned author Alice Walker’s decision to shun an Israeli publishing house, citing an international boycott against Israel for its oppression of Palestinians, the Times of Israel reported.

Liel, who served as Israel’s ambassador to South Africa between 1992 and 1994 and was also the director of Israel’s foreign ministry, said he supported the international campaign against Israel, adding that he too boycotted goods from illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

“If nobody speaks about the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict, nothing will happen. I think that such a move, boycotting products from Israeli factories in the settlements, is a kind of wake-up call,” he wrote in South Africa’s Business Day paper published on Sunday.

“I can understand the desire, by people of conscience, to reassert an agenda of justice, to remind Israelis that Palestinians exist. I can understand small but symbolic acts of protest that hold a mirror up to Israeli society,” he said

Liel went on to back Walker’s refusal to allow her best-selling novel “The Color Purple” be translated into Hebrew by an Israeli publishing firm to highlight the plight of the Palestinian people.

“I think it’s needed, yes. Unfortunately, I don’t see Israeli politicians waking up from these calls. But it’s better than nothing,” he said.

The former Israeli diplomat also defended South Africa’s decision to ban “Made in Israel” labels on products from the occupied West Bank.

“I cannot condemn the move to prevent goods made in the occupied Palestinian territory from being falsely classified as ‘Made in Israel.’ I support the South African government’s insistence on this distinction between Israel and its occupation,” he wrote in his column.

Palestinian children tortured

Britain is preparing to challenge Israel over alleged malpractices by the Jewish state of Palestinian children, which could amount to torture, The Independent newspaper reported on Wednesday.

An investigation by senior British lawyers – funded by the Foreign Office – included shocking acts of cruelty against detained Palestinian children, including solitary confinement, blindfolding and being forced to wear leg irons.

The findings, based largely on testimonies by Palestinian children from the West Bank, were published in Children in Military Custody.

“We were sitting in court and saw a section of a preliminary hearing when a very young looking child, a boy, was brought in wearing a brown uniform with leg irons on. We were shocked by that. This was a situation where we had been invited into the military courts for briefings from senior judges,” Greg Davies, a human rights barrister involved in the investigation wrote.

“To hold children routinely and for substantial periods in solitary confinement would, if it occurred, be capable of amounting to torture,” the report said.

The report also found Palestinian children were often dragged from the beds in the middle of the night, and subjected to verbal and physical abuse in jail in a bid to have them sign confessions they were not permitted to read, The Independent said.

Britain’s Foreign Office said it would “lobby” Israel “for further improvements” without clarifying.

“The UK government has had long-standing concerns about the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli detention, and as a result decided to fund this independent report. While recognizing that some positive recent steps have been made by the Israeli authorities, we share many of the report’s concerns, and will continue to lobby for further improvements,” The Independent quoted the Foreign Office as saying.

Israel maintains a military occupation of the West Bank, and a siege on Gaza, subjecting the indigenous Palestinian population to extremely harsh measures that many activists have dubbed apartheid.

(Al-Akhbar, Times of Israel, The Independent)

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June 27, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

G4S in Israel: The Soldiers of Global Occupation

By Joe Dyke and Tarek Abboud | Al Akhbar | June 25, 2012

You may not know much about G4S, but they almost certainly know something about you. The world’s largest security firm, operating in over 125 countries and employing over 650,000 staff worldwide, are believed to be the second largest private employer worldwide, behind only Walmart. Globally they are responsible for security at over 150 airports, countless private companies, they do police work in the UK and are the main security firm for the 2012 London Olympics – so they make it their business to know who you are.

Known for their ruthless competitiveness, the British-Danish firm have recently been seeking to expand outside of their traditional base in Europe and the US. The Middle East is one of their main targets, with operations in the region worth $410 million and with just shy of 50,000 employees.

The contracts the secretive company have officially declared include private security for airports in Iraq, the UAE, and Qatar, while they are also known to guard US and European Embassies in countries across the Arab world, as well as in Afghanistan.

But G4S has a far darker side than the official brochures would have you believe. First there were the accusations that they were involved in the abuse of British detainees. More recently there has been damning evidence of their role in the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

A report from the WhoProfits? group, which aims to draw attention to the private companies making money from the ongoing occupation of historic Palestine, identifies four key roles that G4S carries out in the West Bank.“First, the company has provided security equipment and services to incarceration facilities holding Palestinian political prisoners inside Israel and in the occupied West Bank. Second, the company offers security services to businesses in settlements. Third, the company has provided equipment and maintenance services to Israeli military checkpoints in the West Bank. Finally, the company has also provided security systems for the Israeli police headquarters in the West Bank.”

Of these the first – their role in Israeli prisons both in the West Bank and Israel – has attracted the most criticism. Sahar Francis, head of the Palestinian prisoners’ charity Addameer, points out that the prisons in Israel and support for such institutions, are illegal under international law.

“According to the fourth Geneva Convention the occupying state cannot move occupied people – which means here the Palestinians – from the Occupied Territories to inside the occupying country,” she says.

Francis describes the conditions that Palestinian prisoners are often subjected to inside these prisons. “They face strip searches, isolation, attacks, and bans on buying stuff from the canteen,” she said. “Since last year they totally cancelled all the education systems – they are not allowed to study now and they can’t get books easily – and they are often banned from family visits, especially those from Gaza,” she added.

Europe Fights While Arabs Stay Silent

It is perhaps surprising that it is European politicians, rather than Arab ones, the majority of whom officially boycott Israel, who have led the campaign against G4S’ involvement in the occupation.

Until earlier this year G4S were responsible for the security of the buildings of the European Parliament but following a campaign led by Danish MEP Margrete Auken the contract was given to a rival firm. Officially the deal was not renewed, but Auken thinks the movement raised the profile high enough that the decision was inevitable.“I think it was clever of parliament officials to use this argument (that it was not renewed), otherwise they could have run into lots of court cases. I think that they would have hated to renew the contract with G4S after the campaign,” she tells Al-Akhbar.

While the company’s 2011 annual report acknowledges “criticism” of their role in the West Bank, Auken says she was amazed by the lack of interest from senior figures at G4S in their role in aiding an illegal occupation.

“We had meetings with G4S and they could not see the problem. It was as if they were not really aware that the settlements were illegal,” she says.

“When we told them ‘you are working for an occupying power in an occupied territory’ it was as though they thought it was open to political debate. But according to international law and EU law they (the settlements) are illegal. The EU considers the occupation illegal, the settlements illegal, the wall is illegal and having Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons is illegal,” she says.

The EU campaign stands in stark contrast to the silence of Arab states, even those that supposedly boycott Israel. The company’s annual review boasts about its role in Iraq, saying it is proud to have won a huge government contract to provide aviation security for the airport in Baghdad. In fact the Middle East is identified by the group as one of its key areas of growth in coming years.

“In the Middle East there was double-digit organic growth (excluding Iraq) – an excellent performance across the region. Qatar and Egypt performed particularly strongly, with Qatar helped by the new airport contract…In UAE, the business is being challenged by a shortage of labor supply and the general business environment in Dubai which has impacted our security systems business, but was successful at winning contracts such as Dubai Airport and in event security,” it says.

While Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and others have normalized relations with Israel to a greater or lesser degree, Lebanon is one of the few countries in the region that supposedly maintains the Arab League boycott of Israel with any severity. The terms of the boycott declare that businesses in non-Arab countries that operate in Israel should be prevented from doing so inside Lebanese borders.

While this rule is often largely ignored for Western conglomerates, Haitham Bawab, from the Lebanese Ministry of Economy’s Boycott department, thinks the nature of G4S’ involvement in Israeli jails means they should not be allowed to operate in the country.

“Allowing G4S to operate in Lebanon goes against Lebanon’s boycott rules. Following our investigations, we sent the main office a letter, asking for the banning of the company to be discussed during the upcoming Boycott Conference.”

Asked what sanctions were under consideration, Bawab said they “would include banning G4S from working on Lebanese territories and prohibiting Lebanese public and private companies and the government from working with G4S. In addition, no G4S products would be allowed to enter Lebanon.”

If a unity agreement were reached then it would be seriously damaging to G4S’ business across the Middle East, with countries such as Iraq being forced to change their policies.

But here’s the rub. The boycott conference is usually held in Damascus every six months. The ongoing political turmoil in the country has forced all such events aside, with the conference due to take place in April being canceled. There are further complications as if it were to be hosted elsewhere several countries would be likely to prevent Syrian delegates from attending for political reasons, sparking a crisis with Damascus. As yet there is no set date for the next conference.It seems that Lebanon is the only country which has pushed for G4S to be considered abusers of the anti-boycott laws, and a proposal sent last year to the Central Boycott Committee has only recently been considered, with no other countries adding their input.

“We have enough information about G4S and the boycott rules apply to it. So there would be no need to postpone making a decision which will, most probably, be made during the upcoming Boycott Conference,” Bawab says optimistically.

Yet Bawab may even find opposition inside Lebanon against cutting back on the lucrative business. The scale of the work G4S do in Lebanon is unclear, with even Bawab saying he didn’t know exactly what they did in the country. But the head of a rival private security firm says they have “a couple of hundred guys” in the country, and it is not uncommon to see men in clothes with the company’s logo guarding private companies in Beirut’s Hamra.

Al-Akhbar discovered that the firm carried out a security review for the country’s preeminent university, the American University of Beirut. The 60-page confidential document details potential improvements that could be made to security and recommends that G4S operatives take over the running of the university’s security. It calls for much tighter security on the open-plan campus, with visitors to the site facing more strict regulations. The proposed changes, it says, will “significantly improve the interaction between AUB and G4S.”

In fact the company is backed by major political figures including the former Youth and Sports Minister Sebouh Hovnanian. Speaking to Al-Akhbar Hovnanian confirmed that his son had shares in the company but said he was not directly involved in the running of the company. He declined to comment on the company’s role in the West Bank.

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June 26, 2012 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Silent Ethnic Cleansing: A Glimpse Into the Plight of an “Invented” People

By Budour Hassan | Beyond Compromise | June 25, 2012

Jerusalem, Palestine – “Yes, Israel does violate international law and is far from perfect,” concedes the “enlightened” liberal Zionist, “But it is nowhere near as brutal or contemptible as the Assad regime.” The notion that Israel is somehow more tolerable than Arab tyrannies just because it does not bomb Palestinians in the West Bank or (gasp!) does not mass-murder demonstrators is virtually universal. This assumption, however, underlines a disturbing lack of understanding of the Israeli military occupation and the system of racial segregation governing the occupied west Bank. It goes without saying that those repeating this mantra have never lived under military occupation and have never experienced the constant fear of being abducted from their bedrooms and arrested without warrant, charges or trial.

In an attempt at refuting this notion, it’s necessary to explain the reasons for this shockingly pervasive ignorance. The vast majority of Israelis consistently and unashamedly clasp the charade that Israel is a democracy even if that means living in perpetual frugality, shrugging off horrendous crimes as singular incidents that do not represent the “most moral army in the world” and defending the indefensible under the guise of security. For a colonial society that thrives on a counterfeit sense of moral, intellectual and cultural superiority over an “invented” people, admitting culpability or complicity in the systematic annihilation of a defenseless, far less privileged community is unthinkable. So profound is the sense of denial enveloping Israelis that they take great offence at the very labeling of Israel as an apartheid state or, God forbid, condemning it in the same breath as Arab dictatorships. There is little to no outrage by Israelis about Israel’s atrocities because, remember, they are unrepresentative, rare – and for many they do not exist – no state is “perfect” and because human rights organizations are “biased” against Israel and want to wipe away the island of democracy surrounded by an ocean of oppressive, vulgar third world tribes.

The maligned genius of the Israeli occupation lies in its success to squeeze the lifeblood out of entire communities silently, gradually but brutally. Practices such as the rapidly increasing home demolitions; ceaseless construction and expansion of illegal settlements; blocking access to schools and agricultural fields; the frequent destruction of basic infrastructure like water wells and solar power plants; and the theft of land, identity and collective memory are hardly reported in the mainstream media. The discriminatory legal system and the racist bureaucracy that controls the tiniest minutiae of Palestinians’ daily life, including traveling to neighboring villages and even marriage, murder the soul of Palestinian society, but will never capture the headlines of the New York Times or CNN. The silent, invisible ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population does not possess the flash of missiles and explosions or the booming sound of mortar shells, but it is even more devastating and effective.

Such is the regularity of Israel’s human rights abuses that even Palestinians have normalized them, at times to the extent of desensitization. When asked whether she would like to write about her experience as a prisoner’s wife, a woman from Beit Ummar said no-one would be interested to read about it, likening the experience to cooking chicken.

The Palestinian victims of the Israeli occupation are often nameless and faceless. We read that there are over 4500 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli occupation jails but very few of us recognize their names, their faces or their stories. If it were not for the heroic hunger-strikes, the suffering of thousands of prisoners languishing in Israel’s dungeons would remain untold. We only heard of Khader Adnan because of his inspiring 66-day huger-strike. If it were not for her incredible 43-day hunger-strike, we would never know that Hana Shalabi spent the best years of her life detained in Israel without charges or trial. It is only thanks to his astonishing 78-day hunger-strike that we knew about Thaer Halahleh who, prior to his release on 5 June, had never kissed his beloved daughter Lamar. Even Palestinian national team footballer Mahmoud Sarsak, who has been detained in Israel without trial or charge since July 2009, would have never gained the support of FIFA and world renowned footballers if it had not been for a miraculous 92 days without food. Mind you, even that was not sufficient for the Palestinian Football Association to raise an eyebrow. All of us, on the other hand, are familiar with the Israeli occupation soldier who was captured by Palestinian resistance 6 years ago today. He did not have to go on for days without food to garner the world’s attention and sympathy.

We might scroll through news about the demolition of Palestinian-owned houses, tents, huts and animal shelters while drinking our morning coffee, but little do we know about the actual victims, the hundreds who are forcibly displaced every month for the crime of being Palestinian.

Have you ever heard of Sawsan Hamamdeh? She does not blog nor does she have a Twitter account; she does not introduce herself as an “activist” but she perfectly personifies the Palestinian struggle. Born in the cave-dweller village of Mfaggara in South Hebron Hills, Sawsan became the first girl from her village to attend collage in the city of Yatta. Denied access to electricity or running water like the overwhelming majority of South Hebron Hills’ residents, Sawsan studied for her Tawjihi exams under the light of an old lantern she inherited from her grandfather. On a dreary, rainy November afternoon last year, private Israeli contractors, hired by the “civil” administration, came to demolish her home. The pretext, as usual, is building without permit. Israel sweepingly and systematically refuses to grant residents of Area C, which comprises 60% of the West Bank, permits to build homes or tents to accommodate the natural growth. Sawsan’s father Mahmoud put up two rooms on top of his cave in 2002 after applying and failing to get a permit. Needless to say, the residents of the illegal, Jewish-only, nearby settlement of Avigail face no such problems. Settlers can expand, build parks and enjoy all the privileges that the indigenous Palestinians can only dream of. As this video shows, Sawsan’s punishment for trying to nonviolently prevent the demolition of the cave, wherein the best memories of her childhood reside, was brutal arrest, pepper-spray and a week in the infamous “Russian Compound”, a detention camp in occupied Jerusalem. “I’ve always dreamt of visiting Jerusalem,” Sawsan told me, “but not like that. They dragged me to the vehicle along with my 17-year-old cousin Amal. We were hand-cuffed and blindfolded. The week I spent in detention in Jerusalem was the worst in my life.”

Fighting back tears, Sawsan showed me the rubble of her demolished home. “I felt like an olive tree that was violently uprooted.” She said with agony. “The Israelis want all of us to leave Mfaggara and go to Yatta, but I would never leave my village even if I had sleep on the street.”

Budour Hassan, originally from Nazareth, is a Palestinian anarchist and Law student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. You can follow her on Twitter here.

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June 26, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Al-Nu’man – A Case of Indirect Forcible Transfer

June 26, 2012 by

In 1967, Israel illegally annexed East Jerusalem and surrounding areas, including the land of Al-Nu’man village. However, the inhabitants of the village were not recorded in the 1967 census of Jerusalem and many were given West Bank IDs. Villagers are considered by Israel to be illegally residing in Jerusalem simply by being in their homes.

In 2002 al-Nu’man’s residents were informed that the village lay adjacent to the planned route of the Wall and, with the settler bypass road passing through the village, they would have no access to Jerusalem or the West Bank. In 2006 a military checkpoint was established at the entrance to the village allowing only al-Nu’man residents to pass through.

The stunting of Al-Nu’man’s natural growth, the gradual enforced transfer of residents and the obstruction of any incoming residents can all be attributed to Israel’s systematic campaign to ultimately rid the area of its Palestinian inhabitants. This is a clear example of a policy of indirect forcible transfer, which is a war crime under international humanitarian law.

For more Virtual Field Visits go to – http://www.alhaq.org

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June 26, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Jordan Valley: Palestinian family’s water confiscated, internationals arrested

25 June 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

On Thursday, June 21, Israeli forces confiscated a water tank from a Bedouin Palestinian family in the Jordan Valley, leaving them with no access to water. Three Swedish women were arrested for standing in solidarity with Palestinian women and children who peacefully protested by standing in between the Israeli military and the water tank at risk of theft.

Israeli soldiers deal violently with a Palestinian woman peacefully protesting the theft of her water tank

The Jordan valley is a fertile area ideal for agricultural production. When Israel took control of the West Bank, it immediately took hold of water resources and began to target Palestinian communities and empty them from the Jordan Valley. The villages left are isolated from each other not only by distance but by Israeli checkpoints, closed military zones, and other restrictions on movement. The Israeli military performs military training in proximity to many communities, putting them at constant risk.

The illegal occupation of water resources has made water access an urgent problem. The United Nations declares water a basic human right. The World Health Organization has declared that each individual needs access to 100 litres of water per day,  but Palestinians use on average between 50 to 70 litres per day. Many Palestinians in the Jordan Valley however, receive as little as 10-20 litres per day. This is a figure lower than the absolute minimum daily consumption required to avoid ‘mass health epidemics.’ Families in the Jordan Valley are forced to buy water at incredibly inflated prices. Some households spend 40-50% of their income to buy water from Israeli companies.

“When we came to the Bedouin camp, children were crying and there were a lot of soldiers trying to drag them away from the tractor that they tried to block. There were no men, only women and children, and around 60 soldiers and policemen. The Bedouin men were scared to show any resistance because of the risk of administrative detention,” says Rosa Andersson, one of the women who was later arrested.
The Swedish women were released after 30 hours of arrest and they are now prohibited from being in the West Bank. No one, Palestinian or International, showed any violence. The Palestinian family dependent on the confiscated water tank now has no access to water as the driest season of the year has just begun.

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June 25, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Veteran Israeli soldiers speak out about service

Ma’an – 22/06/2012

BETHLEHEM – A group of veteran Israeli soldiers who served in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have spoken out on camera about their experiences in the army.

The Israeli organization Breaking the Silence has collected testimonies from 800 veteran Israeli soldiers who served in the West Bank and Gaza. In a new campaign, it has released video testimonies of six former soldiers describing their experiences.

Amit served in Ramallah, Hebron and the northern West Bank during the second intifada. He describes an incident in which an Israeli commander swung his rifle at the jaw of a Palestinian during a tense situation at a roadblock near Jerusalem.

“Beyond the fact that the guy fell to the ground, bleeding and screaming in pain, and of course all of the other Palestinians only grew angrier, it took us a long time to gain control of the mess and, of course, we had to more aggressive, cocking our weapons and such.”

He says witnessing first hand what goes on the West Bank shattered his worldview.

“Going from a place where I was sure that we are the scapegoat, the miserable ones being killed, I saw a reality that, most of the time, was the opposite.

“I saw me running after people, I saw myself pointing a gun at a 3-year-old girl, I saw me and my friends cuffing people, checking people, detaining people, questioning people, arresting people. In most cases, it was for nothing.”

Yehuda Shaul, one of the founders of Breaking the Silence, says he did everything he was required to as a fighter — and later a commander — in the Israeli army.

“If the mission right now is to keep the kids out of school, then the kids won’t go to school. If the mission is to disperse a funeral because of the curfew, then the family … will not finish burying their dead relative. It will leave the corpse there and leave. And if they don’t do it, they’ll get stun grenades and gas.”

“Can you even imagine a situation of an Israeli family at a funeral and the police comes to disperse them?”

Yehuda says he talks about his service because “if we don’t talk … none of us will know what goes on there.”

He says the most memorable part of his service was watching Palestinians getting beaten up by settlers in Hebron, while under orders not to touch them.

Another soldier, Sagi, who also served in Hebron, recalls a procession of Israeli children burning an effigy of a member of the anti-settlement organization Peace Now.

“I understood that all of the things that I thought — that there are boundaries, that at the end of the day we’re on the same side — that, from my point of view, is no longer the case. And from their point of view I’m not legitimate, and if they knew my political opinions they could replace the doll with me.”

Sagi says he finds people prefer not to listen to his experiences of the army, and those that do listen think that his experience was isolated, and perhaps he was “a soldier who transgressed” and should be put on trial.

“Maybe I really should be put on trial – but if I need to be tried, as one of the humane soldiers who served in the territories, I guess we should try all Israeli soldiers,” he says.

‘We’re ruining people’s lives on a daily basis’

Yael served as a scout in Gaza, monitoring a live video feed of the Gaza border.

“We’re kneaded and molded to see something suspicious in everything we see. I look into the cameras and I don’t see a donkey, a dog or a cart. I see a vehicle that can get a charge across, a vehicle that can get weapons across … It’s always suspicious.”

She explained: “There’s no routine there, it’s not someone throwing his garbage out, it’s an explosive.”

She recalls seeing an elderly shepherd, “a grandpa, a really old man with his sheep,” too close to the fence. She reported him to the combat engineering force. “I was conditioned to see shepherds and sheep herds as intelligence scouts.”

Israeli forces fired in the air, startling the sheep, but the shepherd remained. Soldiers then shot the ground near the sheep “and they were startled again but the shepherd was determined to stay there. He didn’t want to leave, he wanted to stay there.”

The soldiers shot a sheep.

“(The shepherd) went to the sheep and tried to pick it up and it was full of blood and he tried to pick it up and take it back and they continued to shoot.”

“The sheep didn’t die but he had to leave it there and run away, they would’ve shot him and the rest of the sheep. He ran back and the sheep stayed there until it died.”

“Seeing it from the other side, it was like a video game, so detached from reality. So what if we shoot animals.

“(For the Palestinians) it’s the exact opposite … people just come and shoot your animals, your livelihood, you. And it’s fine. It’s like it’s fine.”

She added: “We’re ruining people’s lives on a daily basis.”

Yael said she was testifying because she thought “people should know what’s happening there.”

“It’s not the Israeli Defense Force defending us against horrible terrorists who want to destroy the Jewish people. They are people who live here and who have lived here when we weren’t here and they’re trying to live and we’re the stronger power. And we use that power full on, without any problem. I think people should know that.”

In other testimonies, a soldier describes an incident in which a company of soldiers, including the battalion commander, assaulted a detained Palestinian.

A soldier in an elite unit recalls an officer being ridiculed for not following an order to shoot an elderly, sick Palestinian who had gone back into his home to get his medication during an arrest raid.

The full testimonies can be viewed at www.discovertheterritories.com

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June 22, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Palestinian Nationalism, Alive Despite Israeli Instruments of Control


(Artwork: Sauda Camo)
By Hasan Afif El Hasan | Palestine Chronicle | June 18, 2012

From day one after the 1967 war, Israel’s actions in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem suggest the occupation was not temporary and underscore Israel’s desire to erase the concept of the Palestinian nation by undermining the connection between the people and their land or history. In an effort to incorporate as much as possible of the occupied lands, Israel governed the occupied lands by making distinction between the land and its Palestinian inhabitants and referred to the Palestinians only as ‘Arabs’. The Israelis wanted to weaken the Palestinians’ claim to their country and suggest they belong to other Arab countries. A politically powerful segment of Israelis, perhaps a majority, perceive the occupied lands as biblical territory and the indigenous Palestinians as ‘hostile aliens’ or as “part of nature’s hardship to be conquered and removed.”

The concept of cleansing and transferring the Palestinians has been deeply rooted in the colonial Zionists political and military planning. It was practiced on a large scale in 1948 when top-ranking officers of the future leaders of Israel prepared and executed ethnic cleansing of half Palestine’s native population, and  the cleansing is being practiced today especially in Jerusalem. Israeli plans to expropriate land were developed, and other tools and practices were created to manage the lives of the people without integrating them into Israel’s citizenry. Israel used its own legal system to annex East Jerusalem immediately after the 1967 war; and in the West Bank, it carried out piecemeal confiscation by issuing orders from military commanders and employing Ottoman and British Mandatory laws and regulations from the Jordanian legal system.

Shaping the daily life of the people under occupation is one of Israel’s means of control to manage the population. Besides sealing the borders of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to crush internal resistance, Israel imposes curfews, arrests, deports, restricts movement, demolishes homes, and shuts down businesses and schools. The controlling system has manifested itself in legal regulations, permits and bureaucratic rules dictating forms of correct conduct everywhere. Thousands of orders have been issued by the Israeli military that deal with anything and everything as controlling apparatuses.

Within a few weeks of Israel’s swift success in capturing the West Bank and Gaza, the West Bank Palestinians began using strikes and demonstrations, and in Gaza, the opposition to the occupation assumed a violent character. Israel responded with military orders categorizing all forms of resistance as insurgency, including peaceful protests, political meetings, waving flags, displaying national symbols, even singing or listening to national songs.

Israel removed all activist leaders who showed opposition to the occupation, used administrative detentions and deported thousands suspected of supporting acts of resistance. Among the deportees were Abdel-Hamid a-Sayegh, the chief Islamic judge (Kadi) of the West Bank, and Nadim Al-Zaro, the mayor of Ramallah. In March 1982, the mayors of nine West Bank cities and Gaza were dismissed and military officers replaced them. The mayors’ dismissal, detention and deportation of community leaders failed to contain the Palestinian drive for emancipation and national opposition had to go underground. The Israeli journalists and authors Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari described the relationship between the Palestinians and the Israelis in their book ‘Intifada’ as “the relationship between a horse and its rider.”

Israel tried power-sharing agreement with Jordan, the military government, the village leagues and the civil administration to control the Palestinians, but it recognized that the methods it had employed to normalize the occupation and suppress Palestinian nationalism were not working. If anything, Palestinian nationalism resurged. Then Israel came up with the ingenious idea of outsourcing the responsibility for the population while continuing the occupation and colonization. Self-rule for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip under a Palestinian authority (PA) without renouncing Israel’s sovereignty over the two regions was the answer. The PA was a product of the occupation to control the population and reduce its economic and political cost on Israel. Noam Chomsky pointed out that the PA was not intended as an instrument of decolonization but rather a framework that changed the means of Israel’s control in order to perpetuate the occupation. According to Chomsky, Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin noted in an interview that the PA would be able to control the population “without all the difficulties arising from Supreme Court appeals, human rights organizations like B’Tselem, and all kinds of leftist fathers and mothers.”

Since the establishment of the PA, especially after the second intifada, Israel has been operating primarily to downgrade the value of the Palestinians to people whose lives can be taken with impunity, enforcing laws that legalize the incarceration and torture of political prisoners, permitted deportations, house demolitions, and curfews. The executive and judicial branches of government coordinated to rationalize the inhumane Israeli policies.

After the establishment of the PA, the Palestinians have even less autonomy in the economic field than in security. Constraints and restrictions enforced by the Israeli military hinder the development of an independent Palestinian economy and have transformed it into a captive market for Israeli producers. The leaders of the PA promised economic growth based on the assumption that productive economy would slowly be established, there would be large investments in infrastructure and industry and that the Palestinians would enjoy freedom of movement for themselves and their goods. They promised that the Gaza Strip would be transformed into “the Middle East’s Singapore” and the Palestinians would enjoy the fruits of their agreements with the Israelis. Ironically, these agreements have been reasons the wishful promises did not materialize.

The 1994 “Paris Protocol on Economic Relations” that was signed by the PA leaders replicated Israel’s colonial economic management of the occupied lands that had existed since 1967. It guaranteed that Israel would preserve its control of the occupied land’s economy and prevented the Palestinians from choosing their own trade policies according to their own interests. It has prevented the creation of an internal economic base with its own productive capacity and increased the Palestinians’ dependency on laborers who commute to Israel despite Israel’s use of the entry-permits and internal closures as an effective form of control weapon. Israel uses its power over the flow of laborers to collectively punish the public for any form of resistance. It was used to pressure the PA to clamp down on Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP and other groups that resist the occupation. Professor Sara Roy wrote in her book ‘Gaza Strip’ that Israel was able to reorient a large percentage of the Palestinian labor force away from domestic agriculture and industry and integrate it in Israel’s labor force. The productive capacity of the Palestinians is diminished because Israel has restricted the development of a viable infrastructure capable of stimulating development in the West Bank. And in the Gaza Strip Israel has destroyed the infrastructure and the people’s means for survival.

The “Agreement on Preparatory Transfer of Powers and Responsibilities [to the PA]” of 1994 outlined the reorganization of PA power in many spheres including jurisdiction, secondary legislation, the judicial and security. The agreement states that the PA does not have jurisdiction over Jerusalem, the settlements and the military locations. It gave Israel a veto power over any regulation or legislation enacted by the PA that Israel considers exceeding the PA powers or inconsistent with other agreements. Israel must approve all employees authorized by the PA to inspect and monitor compliance with the laws and regulations. The PA agreed not to have authority over settlers or any non-Palestinian residing or travelling within the occupied territory.

In order to repress all forms of Palestinian nationalism, the Israeli occupation authority took over the educational system immediately after the 1967 war. Officers in charge of education became responsible for licensing private and public schools, hiring and firing teachers, the curricula and text books. They wanted the text books to adopt the Zionist historical narrative on Palestine and systematically erase any reference to Palestinian nationalism and identity. The word ‘Palestinians’ was replaced with ‘Arabs’ and the word ‘Nakbah’ was not allowed in any textbook. ‘Nakbah’ was the displacement of the vast majority of the indigenous Palestinians in 1948. “More than 1,700 titles were banned over the years including history, geography, political, literature and poetry books.” The occupation authority issued instructions for teachers not to teach their students extracurricular material for fear that they might adopt a historical narrative depicting a national Palestinian past. When the Israeli civil administration surrendered the management of the school system including the higher education institutions and vocation schools to the PA, it was on condition that they refrain from incitement against Israel.

Efforts by the Israelis to repress Palestinian nationalism failed because the Palestinian youth learn who they are and where they came from in their daily life as non-persons in the refugee camps, or in disconnected enclaves under the shadows of the Jewish only settlements, dehumanized and humiliated by the occupation soldiers at the blockaded roads, or in Jerusalem under the threat of home-demolition and deportation, or living in Israel as second class citizens or in besieged and impoverished Gaza.

– Hasan Afif El-Hasan is a political analyst. His latest book, Is The Two-State Solution Already Dead? (Algora Publishing, New York), now available on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

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June 20, 2012 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Susiya: Another Casualty of Israeli Occupation?

By Patrick O. Strickland | Palestine Chronicle | June 18, 2012

Last week Israeli military forces delivered demolition orders to the residents of Susiya, a small village in the South Hebron Hills. The villagers were told that they have illegally erected over fifty buildings without the permission of the Israeli Defense Force.

The demolition order came a few short days after Regavim, a right-wing NGO dominated by Israeli settlers, filed a petition in Israel’s High Court, requesting that a building freeze be imposed on Susiya.

The village is situated, much to the dismay of its inhabitants, in Area C of the West Bank, the land which was designated for full Israeli administration after the Oslo Accords. It is nearly against the fence of a particularly hostile Israeli settlement, which is also named Susiya. Yatta, a much larger Palestinian village, is less than a kilometer, though there are several Israeli military outposts on the path there.

Allotted only three days to appeal, it appears that Susiya will be destroyed. The village’s legal representative intends to take the matter to Israel’s High Court.

The “illegal buildings” they have erected, in actuality, are tents which were hastily constructed from cinderblocks and rain tarps. For, this will be the sixth–not the first–time that Susiya will be demolished by the IDF. The village–which consists of Bedouins, cave-dwellers, and Palestinians who were displaced from the Negev Desert in the 1948 war–was razed in 1985, 1991, 1997, and twice in 2001.

Each time Susiya is destroyed, the neighboring settlement further usurps the land that legally belongs to its Palestinian owners. The villagers refuse to leave, and each time the village is crumbled, they resurrect it.

The villagers have been regular targets of attacks from the settlers next door. Their water wells have been poisoned on several occasions. Their sheep, on which they depend for butter and milk as their sole source of income, have frequently been slaughtered by their zealous neighbors. Settler attacks are generally treated with legal impunity, and this is to say nothing of the Israeli military’s repeated destruction of Susiya’s caves, in which Susiya’s residents have historically lived.

When I visited the village last fall, Nasser Nawajeh, a resident of Susiya and longtime activist, spoke of one occasion in which the IDF used a bulldozer to collapse his family’s water well. Under Israeli martial law, Palestinians in Area C of the West Bank are not allowed to dig deeper than three feet without a permit. After the well was destroyed, he recalled, they stuffed mangled car parts into its base in order to discourage them from rebuilding it.

In recent years, international activists and left-wing Israeli NGOs have helped draw attention to Susiya’s abysmal situation. Breaking the Silence, an organization of former IDF soldiers who have decided to speak out against the occupation, brings a regular tour of internationals to meet with the Nawajeh family in Susiya. Rabbis for Human Rights has also tried to raise awareness inside Israel of the struggle that Susiya faces at the hands of military occupation and continued settlement expansion.

Nonetheless, many international efforts to aid the residents of Susiya have been shortsighted and concerned more with the appearance of having helped, rather than fixing the roots of the problems. Little has been done, for instance, to help the villagers obtain water for their sheep. The Nawajeh family, because their wells are repeatedly destroyed, are expected to buy water from Yatta, which costs three times the price of water inside Israel, not including transportation fees.

The plight of Susiya is indicative of the larger dialectic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israeli officials will continue to accuse the Palestinians of being unprepared for peace negotiations, while its military and settlement enterprise employ the force of arms to wrangle the West Bank from its native inhabitants. Western governments and the international community will continue to portray the situation in an absurd light: a fragile democracy attempting to quell restive “terrorists.”

However, Susiya’s struggle is of another stripe. The villagers, possessing none of the violent and fanatical traits of the settlers that so often attack them, are committed to living on their land. None of the colonial arguments to the contrary will persuade them otherwise.

Susiya, though facing another impeding annihilation, refuses to be the next casualty of Israel’s suffocating 45-year military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

“We’ve been kicked displaced and kicked off our land five times,” Nasser Nawajeh told me. “We’re not leaving again.”

– Patrick O. Strickland is a freelance writer living and traveling on both sides of the ‘Green Line’ in Israel and the Palestinian territories. He is a weekly Israel-Palestine correspondent for Bikya Masr and writes regular dispatches on his blog, http://www.patrickostrickland.com.

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June 19, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , | Leave a comment

Palestinian target practice for US tourists in the West Bank

albawabaNEWS | June 19th, 2012

Stay in a kibbutz, go out clubbing in Tel Aviv, say a prayer at the Western Wall and then go to a settlement to practice killing Palestinians.

This is the new summer camp for American tourists keen to get shooting at ‘terrorists’ in illegal settlements in the West Bank. At Gush Etzion, Israeli residents, who run activities, offer the chance to hear tales of ‘battles’, watch simulated assassinations and fire guns.

At the end of the thrill-filled day, tourists get a certificate to record that they “completed a basic shooting course in Israel.”

“Suppose that the terrorist in front of me has an automatic weapon,” Shay, one of the guides, told Ynet. “He can spray a cartridge within 2.8 seconds, which means I have less than three seconds to take him down. And that is what I will do.”

The location of the course – over the green line and in Palestinian territory – is the main draw for the danger-seeking tourists. Although guides are clear that there is no actual threat.

Just outside the settlement, Palestinians who live in and around Bethlehem must go through checkpoints manned by Israeli soldiers. The security presence means gun-toting tourists would be unlikely to meet a ‘terrorist’.

Conversely, attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians are on the increase. According to The Jerusalem Fund: “Israeli settler violence is growing and is a consistent threat to Palestinian livelihoods.” The attacks span from burning olive trees to breaking into Palestinian homes, carrying automatic weapons.

And it’s not just adult tourists who are taking part in the shooting practice course. According to an investigation by Ynet, children as young as five were allowed to shoot at the range:

Michel Brown, 40, a Miami banker, chose to take his wife and three children to the range with the purpose of “teaching them values.”

Upon entering the range, his five-year-old daughter, Tamara, bursts into tears. A half hour later, she is holding a gun and shooting clay bullets like a pro.

“This is part of their education,” Michel says as he proudly watches his daughter. “They should know where they come from and also feel some action.”

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June 19, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Jewish Extremists Burn Mosque Near Jerusalem

IMEMC & Agencies | June 19, 2012

A number of extremist Israeli settlers burnt a local mosque in Jaba’ Palestinian village, in occupied East Jerusalem, and defaced some of its walls on Tuesday at dawn.

Local sources reported that the settlers wrote racist graffiti on some of the walls of the mosque, including the “Price Tag” graffiti that they frequently use when attacking and burning Palestinian mosques, and property.

Settlers are responsible for numerous similar attacks against the residents, their homes, lands and property in several parts of the West Bank, including in occupied East Jerusalem, including the following:

On Monday, January 16, 2012, settlers torched the car of a Palestinian Authority Intelligence officer, Mohammad Ghannam, in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

On Tuesday, January 10, 2012, a group of fundamentalist Israeli settlers burnt three Palestinian cars in Dir Estia village, in the West Bank district of Salfit, and defaced the local mosque with “Price Tag” graffiti.

On Wednesday morning, January 4th 2012, settlers set fire to two Palestinian trucks and spray-painted anti-Arab racist graffiti.

On February 20, 2012, settlers spray-painted racist graffiti on a church in occupied East Jerusalem in the third such incident since January 2012.

The graffiti included “Death to Christians” and the phrase “price tag” was found on the walls of the Baptist Narkis Street Congregation. Furthermore residents of the area found their car tires slashed.

This attack follows a similar such incidents, occurring on the same day in February, where the bilingual school Hand In Hand and the Monastery of the Cross were vandalized, also promoting violence against Christians.

On December of 2011, settlers carried out four attacks against mosques in several parts of the occupied West Bank, and set ablaze five Palestinian cars near the central West Bank city of Ramallah.

In the attack on the mosque, the settlers spray-painted slogans including ‘Price Tag’, (a reference to the idea that Palestinians must all ‘pay a price’ for the dismantling of illegal settlement outposts by the Israeli military).

In mid-December of last year, a group of fanatic Israeli settlers burnt a mosque in Borqa village, east of the central West Bank city of Ramallah, and wrote racist graffiti on its walls.

The attack came only one day after a similar arson attempt targeted the historic mosque of Okasha in Jerusalem. Before setting parts of the mosque ablaze, the settlers spray-painted racist graffiti targeting the Palestinians and the Muslim prophet.

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June 19, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , | Leave a comment

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