Yesterday morning on the 8th June, Israeli police forces raided the village of Iqrit (located on the northern tip of Israel, within eyesight of Lebanon). The police uprooted trees, destroyed and confiscated all the personal belongings of Palestinian activists present in the village. Furthermore they beat and violently arrested 3 Palestinian men who were present in the village at the time. The 3 arrested are: Walla Sbait, Nidal Khoury and Jeries Khiatt. They were taken to the police station in Nahariyya, where they were kept in detention over night.
Today at 8:30 AM the three detainees were brought before the Kiryat Gat Magistrates’ Court, following a police request for an extension of their detention. The police have charged the detainees with trespassing the land owned by the ILA, obstructing the work of public officials, assaulting a public employee and endangering public order.
The court ruled that Nidal Khoury is kept in detention until Wednesday 11th of June. Walaa Sbeit and Jeries Khiatt was sentenced house arrest until Sunday 15th of June and they are not allowed to go back to Iqrit for 60 days.
As the season of Advent approached in November 1948, the Israeli military forced residents of Iqrit and the neighboring village of Kufr Bir’im —all citizens of the newly created state of Israel— to leave their homes near the northern border with Lebanon because of military operations in the area. The Israeli forces made a promise to the inhabitants, that they could return to their homes after 15 days. The people of Iqrit are still waiting. In July 1951, the Israeli High Court ruled that the people of Iqrit and Kufr Bir’im had the right to return to their homes. The military refused to comply, and on Christmas Eve 1951 blew up all houses in both villages.
Shortly thereafter, all village lands were confiscated by the state and has been rented out to the nearby Kibbutz for their cows to graze until this day. Since then, decades of demonstrations and legal appeals for the villagers’ right to return have seen a string of favorable decisions by courts and commissions that have resulted only in more broken promises and unenforced rulings.In the 1970s, the government had granted use of the cemetery —allowing only the dead to return to Iqrit after they lived and died in exile at Kufr Yasif, Rameh, Haifa or other places. The original villagers and their descendants —now around 1,500 people scattered across northern Israel— are allowed only to hold services in the church and bury their dead in the cemetery. Every first Saturday of the month there has been a mass held at the village church and every year a summer camp has been organised on the hillside. In August 2012 the third generation reclaimed their village.
Around 20 descendants from Iqrit took the initiative to begin resurrecting the village despite the village’s legal limbo. The activists make sure that the village is constantly inhabited, sleeping in tents, under the stars or in rooms attached to the church. The group consists of university students, factory and restaurant workers, and teachers.
Their attempts to construct or plant anything in the village have been met with immediate demolition by the Israeli authorities. But over time, they’ve been able to add a few amenities, including solar panels on the church roof, determined to bring back life to Iqrit.
Iqrit’s 80 homes are long gone, but the activists goal is to rebuild Iqrit for the villagers-in-exile, refusing only to return to their home in coffins, but alive. The activists have returned to the area and are discussing on how to proceed with their campaign, determined not to be intimidated by Israeli forces and their harassment.
An Israeli committee tasked with putting forward a law on the “Jewish State” is scheduled to be formed today, Sunday, 8 June.
The committee will be chaired by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and is expected to have among its members MK Ruth Calderon (Yesh Atid) and the initiators of the proposal MKs Oielit Shaked (Jewish Home) and Yariv Levin (Likud).
Livni and Yair Lapid had previously stated that they would oppose the bill.
The formation of the committee has been approved by the Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Haaretz said, adding that Netanyahu will adopt any agreement reached by the committee and will help adopt a legislation as proposed by the committee.
According to Haaretz, bills on the “Jewishness of Israel” proposed in recent years aimed at obliging courts to favor “Jewish identity” over “the Decmocratic nature” of decisions, since the Jewishness of the state contradicts with its being democratic.
The text of the bill describes Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people,” and that “the right to determine the destiny of the nation in Israel is owned by the Jewish people alone.” The bill also states that “The land of Israel is the historic home of the Jewish people.”
Potential 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says the United States made a tactical mistake to put pressure on Israel to freeze its settlement activities on the Palestinian territories.
The former US secretary of state made the remarks in her new book ‘Hard Choices,’ scheduled to be released on June 10.
“I was concerned that we not be seen as pushing a longtime partner out the door, leaving Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the region to an uncertain, dangerous future,” she wrote.
“In retrospect, our early, hard line on settlements didn’t work.”
Clinton said Washington’s demand only hardened the stance of the now President of the Palestinian National Unity Government Mahmoud Abbas.
Abbas himself ultimately rejected the freeze because it failed to include the East Jerusalem (al-Quds).
She noted that when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to resume settlement construction, it strained relations between Tel Aviv and Washington, leaving US President Barack Obama infuriated with Netanyahu.
Clinton is preparing for a presidential run in 2016 and in her new memoir she does not shy away from criticizing President Obama.
The major organizations that comprise the Israel Lobby are well known: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and Christians United For Israel (CUFI). All are well known, benefiting from large budgets and staffs. They are extremely effective, having excellent access to politicians and the media to promote their points of view, and are, as a group, regular visitors to the White House. AIPAC is without doubt the most powerful lobby in the United States that is focused on a foreign policy issue.
The institutional Israel boosters are in turn backed by a cluster of think tanks and institutes that spout a relentlessly pro-Likud line. They include Foundation for Defense of Democracies, The Emergency Committee for Israel, The American Enterprise Institute, The Hudson Institute, Brookings and The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. A recent op-ed at The National Interest (formerly the Nixon Center) “Why Israel Fears Containment of a Nuclear Iran,” written by two Israelis with government ties, illustrates to what extent spokesmen for Tel Aviv have access to the media across the political spectrum to make their points while contrary views rarely surface. It would be difficult to imagine a similar piece appearing advancing Iranian views on Israel, for example, and one might well question whose “National Interest” is being promoted by providing a platform to current or former foreign government officials.
And backing the think tanks up are the enablers in the media who suppress stories critical of Israel and consistently editorialize supporting policies favored by Tel Aviv. Israeli Ambassadors, uniquely, regularly write op-eds for publications like the Washington Post and The New York Times. Prominent among the consistently pro-Israel media are the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch publications in general and magazines like Mortimer Zuckerman owned US News and World Report, but it would be fair to say that nearly all mainstream media outlets are to some extent wary of offending Israel and its backers.
But as Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt noted in their groundbreaking expose of the Israel Lobby, the lobbying effort extends well beyond the organizational level to include friends of Israel who labor assiduously and voluntarily at state and local levels as well as at universities and from within professional organizations to maintain a positive viewpoint on Israel while promoting a negative narrative regarding its increasing number of critics. Most recently they have been focused on halting the growth of BDS, “boycott, divestment, and sanctions,” particularly in attempts to use “Lawfare” to make such activity illegal when it singles out Israel.
Israel’s friends quite rightly see Congress as their major ally in keeping the United States Israel-friendly, so much so that Pat Buchanan once dubbed America’s legislative body as “Israeli occupied territory.” And so it remains with legislation favorable to Israel passing by unanimous consent voice votes or grossly lopsided margins when a tally actually takes place. The White House too is into the charade that Israel is a major US ally and friend, in spite of mounting evidence that Tel Aviv consistently spies on Washington, is not interested in any peace process with the Palestinians and works against genuine American interests.
I have recently obtained a handout memo relating to a congressional race in Virginia that illustrates how the process works at the political entry level. Congressman Jim Moran has announced that he will not seek reelection in the heavily Democratic district that encompasses Alexandria Virginia. Moran has fallen afoul of the pro-Israel establishment by telling attendees at a 2003 antiwar forum, “If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this.” He added that Jewish leaders were “influential enough” to change the course of US policy. Moran inevitably apologized for those remarks, but the damage was done and he was considered to be unreliable on the issue of Israel, a view reflected in the handout which quotes Debbie Linick, Director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, asserting that Moran had been “lacking the nuances of understanding the peace process. It is crucial that the next representative from the 8th District be a strong supporter of Israel.”
The handout described a Jewish Community Relations Council Political Forum for the 8th District that was to be held on May 18th in Alexandria at the Council’s Early Childhood Learning Center. All prospective candidates for the 8th District were invited to participate to present their positions on various issues of interest to those attending. The access to the event was by paid tickets only, presumably to permit screening to control the make-up of the audience. The handout again quotes Linick as stating that “all area synagogues will be asked to participate” even if they were not in the voting district.
The memo suggests that someone at the forum might ask every candidate to publish his or her signed Israel Position paper, which AIPAC “requires” all candidates for office to personally sign. It also recommends that signs be placed on the street outside demanding release of the paper and notes that if there should happen to be demonstrators present they will not be allowed to block the entrance, which is behind the building on private property.
The Northern Virginia Council might well be more than usually politically active and is unlikely to have a counterpart in most congressional districts, but the handout reveals how AIPAC has an impact on all viable congressional candidates, often before they are even nominated. Once nominated, candidates go through a vetting process in which they meet with an AIPAC official and are asked to write and sign a position paper on Israel, if they have not already done so. Many of the papers are subsequently highlighted on the AIPAC website.
Few if any candidates refuse to cooperate because to do so would mean that AIPAC and its friends would find and fund an opponent and use their media access to distort the politician’s record. This type of blackballing most recently occurred in the case of Congressman Walter Jones of North Carolina, who was on the receiving end of a vicious and well-funded campaign because he is an anti-war candidate strongly opposed by the pro-Israel establishment.
To be sure Americans have a constitutional right to both demand to know and challenge the views of those running for office but the important thing to note here is that the discussion is not about healthcare, immigration or government programs – it is rather about unconditional support for the policies of a foreign country. I can think of no other advocacy group in the United States that is comparable to the Israel Lobby in terms of its promotion of positions that are demonstrably not beneficial to the United States with the only possible exception being the prominent Cubans in Congress who vet candidates based on their willingness to continue to punish the regime in Havana. The Cubans, unlike the Israel Firsters, have, however, only regional impact, mostly concentrated in Florida, though it is interesting to note that they – Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart, Joe Garcia and Robert Menendez – are also all passionate supporters of Israel.
Americans really have little choice when it comes to Congress and Israel as anyone who refuses to cooperate with AIPAC is unlikely to find himself in the running, but there should at least be some awareness of what happens routinely to prospective candidates to insure conformity with the Lobby’s viewpoint. If unconditional loyalty to a foreign country is a sine qua non for election to congress perhaps there should be some discussion of what that is likely to mean and the promoters of such policies should be held accountable when they produce a bad result, as they did in Iraq and are promising to do vis-a-vis Iran. It is one thing to be all for Israel due to cultural or familial affinity or even as an abstraction but it is quite another to persist in that view when it does genuine harm to the United States, regarding which a case certainly can and has already been made.
GAZA CITY – A Palestinian fisherman shot by the Israeli navy two weeks ago succumbed to his wounds Sunday morning, Gaza medical authorities said.
Spokesman for the Gaza Ministry of Health Ashraf al-Qidra told Ma’an that 52-year-old Imad Shukri Salim was announced dead Sunday morning.
Salim was shot in the chest by the Israeli navy two weeks ago while he was fishing off the coast in the area of al-Sudaniya in the northern Gaza Strip, al-Qidra said.
Israeli forces shot two Palestinian fishermen off the al-Sudaniya area coast in the month of May alone.
Palestinian fishermen are only being allowed to go three nautical miles from Gaza’s shore, even though an agreement previously settled on 20 nautical miles.
Israeli naval forces frequently harass Palestinian fishermen who near the three-mile limit, as well as those inside the zone.
There are 4,000 fishermen in Gaza. According to a 2011 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross 90 percent are poor, an increase of 40 percent from 2008 and a direct result of Israeli limits on the fishing industry.
Over 290 Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons have been on a hunger strike since April protesting their indefinite detention. Now UN’s Ban-Ki moon demands Tel Aviv to either charge administrative inmates or release them “without delay.”
“The Secretary-General is concerned about reports regarding the deteriorating health of Palestinian administrative detainees who have been on hunger strike for over a month,” Ban’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric,saidin a statement.
The UN Secretary-General “reiterates his long-standing position that administrative detainees should be charged or released without delay,” he added.
According to the spokesman, Ban has taken note of the recent concerns issued by different human rights bodies and “has responded, reiterating the United Nations’ well known positions.”
Meanwhile, UN Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has also expressed her concern over a legislative amendment before the Israeli Knesset to allow force-feeding of the inmates.
The legislation, if passed, “would permit force-feeding and medical treatment of prisoners on hunger strike against their will under certain conditions, in contravention of international standards,” Dujarric added.
On Thursday, members of a UN Special Committee which monitors human rights violations of the Palestinians on the occupied territories called upon Israeli authorities “to heed the demand of the hunger strikers to end the practice of arbitrary administrative detention of Palestinians,” a committee said in a statement.
“It is a desperate plea by these detainees to be afforded a very basic standard of due process: to know what they are accused of and to be able to defend themselves,” the committee said.
According to the UN body, the Israeli government has detained “a large number of Palestinians for reasons not explicitly indicated.”
“Initial administrative detention orders of six-month periods can be renewed an indefinite number of times without producing charges,” the committee said.
The first protests among the Palestinian detainees started April 24, when a group of about 100 prisoners launched a peaceful protest, the UN Special Committee said. The inmates were “inspired” by their months and years in detention in Israel without being charged with any crimes. Now the total number of hunger strikers has reached 290. At least 65 prisoners have been hospitalized as a result of the strike.
According to the UN committee, among the inmates there are currently 11 Palestinian legislators, including eight held under administrative detention.
“Given that there are more than 5,000 Palestinian detainees in Israeli custody, we strongly appeal to the Israeli authorities to allow all Palestinian detainees, especially women and children, to be periodically seen by Palestinian doctors in order to avoid losing more lives,” the Committee said.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday Israeli doctors said they wouldn’t begin force-feeding the detainees, a move that put them on a collision course with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Netanyahu reportedly asked the authorities to speed up the bill’s reading, saying that he is confident the force-feeding will eventually be carried out.
The Israeli PM is now citing controversial US policy of force-feeding of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, a move that prompted long hunger-strikes among the inmates. The Guantanamo policy has drawn criticism from the United Nations human rights office, which said it constitutes torture and is thus a violation of international law.
The Israeli Supreme court has recently ruled that there is no such thing as an “Israeli” recognized by the legal system of the State of Israel. You can be classified as a Jew, an Arab, a Druze, a foreign visitor, but nobody is “Israeli.” Just a short while ago the Knesset created a new status, “Christian.” So now a Palestinian Christian, who had previously been classified as merely an “Arab,” can now not be an Arab but a Christian and be accorded some rights that are currently denied to regular Palestinians, who are classified as Arabs. Israel has never wanted to give any credence to the fact that there ever was a place called Palestine that had people in it.
But now it has definitely been ruled that there is no common ground, no catch-all status of “Israeli.” Therefore, Israeli citizenship is an empty category. It does not resemble any idea of “citizenship” that we as citizens of the USA, or Canadian, or Mexican citizens can recognize. In Israel citizenship is meaningless and “Nationality” is everything (if you can get past the idea that a religion is also a nationality…I wonder if someone presenting a Unitarian Church passport would get through customs.)
This all makes sense if you are running a caste system in which the Nationality/Religion “Jewish” gets full rights and others get less, or no rights at all. This is what Israel is. It is not a modern Western style democracy that just happens to have a “discrimination” problem, or to have by accident acquired extra territory with some undesirable people on it.
In the news media when someone quotes an “Israeli” source, or a government representative they always mean “Jewish,” but they never say “a Jewish government source has said…” But according to the Supreme Court of the State of Israel (I don’t want to say “Jewish Supreme Court”) Israelis don’t exist. The leaders of the State of Israel are always thumping their chests proclaiming “we are the Jews!” “We are the only Jewish state in the world and we represent all the Jews of the world.”
But if some critic were to say, ” I don’t like what the Jews are doing in the West Bank.” The reaction would be, “Anti-Semite!!! Jew hater.” Well…maybe this isn’t an important point. After all, whenever someone says, “I don’t like what the Israelis are doing in the West Bank,” the response is “Anti-Semite! Jew hater!”
Many of us who support human rights for Palestinians have encountered retorts from defenders of Israeli Apartheid who say, “there are no Palestinians, they don’t exist.” This is a popular line. A lot of people who think they are clever, worldly and liberal like to say this (like ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg). Think about it though. There are over 5 million Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (about the same as the number of Jews living there). they are Arabs (native speakers of Arabic) whose ancestors have lived in a place known as Palestine at least since the 5th century BC (as attested to by Herodotus, who started the genre of History writing) and certainly longer than that.
For the Zionists to deny their nationality is to deny their right to exist..or to exist within the lands that the Jews of Israel claim as their exclusive property. This is an eliminationist, ethnic cleansing, rabid xenophobic point of view. There is no left, right or center here, just push them out. Get rid of them.
So now Israelis don’t exist and Palestinians don’t exist. Leaders of the state of Israel are always wailing about an “existential threat” to Israel presented by… everyone and everything. BDS, halting settlement construction, protest marches, African refugees (officially called “infiltrators”), you name it.
But how can there be an existential threat to non-existing Israelis from Palestinians who also don’t exist? Jean Paul Sartre seemed to corner the nothingness market with his tome “Being and Nothingness.” But now he’s been outdone.
One of the most important Palestinian feature films ever, Omar, is the deepest expose of the diabolical nature of the Israeli occupation and the inhuman situation imposed on Palestinians by the Jewish State. It also throws light on the tragic and depressing Palestinian struggle against a sophisticated, demonic enemy — an on-going battle that so far has led nowhere.
In his latest film, Palestinian director Hany Abu Assad sets Omar (Adam Bakri), a young freedom fighter in an impossible, yet common, Palestinian dilemma, caught in a devastating triangle between his patriotic commitment, romance and the omnipresent Jewish State – a brutal, Orwellian, Big Brother that sees everything, knows everything, sets people against each other and controls everything through a network of collaborators even within the resistance.
Once captured by the IDF and being subject to some horrendous physical and mental torture by Israeli intelligence, Omar is set into a hellish scenario. He eventually manages to buy the Israeli’s trust, he lets them believe that he is willing to cooperate. At that moment Omar pretty much seals his fate. He is destined to lose everything.
Though we, comfortable in our cinema seats, know that he never compromised his commitment to his people, one by one, the Palestinians around him, led to believe he is a traitor, they turn their backs on him. Losing the love of his life to his friend — clearly a collaborator — he is ostracised by fellow warriors and their families. Omar, a Palestinian patriot, becomes a pawn in an evil Israeli game. As his situation deteriorates and his tragedy unfolds in front of our eyes, he remains aware of it all, and we, who witness this emerging tragedy, also can see no way out.
Agent Rami (Waleed Zuaiter), the veritable ‘good cop’ is the Israeli intelligence operator who recruits Omar. He appears to be humane, he never uses physical pressure, he also has his own family matters to handle, wife, kid etc’. But all those ‘humane’ symptoms are there to cover a deeply sinister and hideous character. Rami is in fact a cold blood Israeli monster who shatters the lives of others in a mass scale. He systematically makes empathy and human affection into a highly functional instruments of total abuse.
One hardly need to say that Rami, like Omar, is a symbol of his people and indeed, there is a clear cultural and ideological continuum between Rami, Shimon Peres and the entire Jewish Left. I refer here to the deceitful nature embedded in contemporary Jewish political culture, that intention to present empathy and humanism only to conceal a sinister, self-centric agenda that cares only for the members of the tribe.
At the start of this film we meet a young, handsome and joyful, Palestinian patriot who leaps over the gigantic Israeli Wall and who, against all odds, lays claim to his land. Ninety minutes later, the same man is a defeated soul. Physically and mentally tortured, Omar simply can no longer climb the wall and bridge the divide imposed on his people by the Jewish State.
By the end of the film, Omar, like Palestine itself, is a tormented and defeated soul. For him, there is no hope but martyrdom.
The Israeli government and the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption are implementing a plan to encourage European Jews, especially from Ukraine, to immigrate to Israel under the pretext of the growing anti-Semitism in Europe. Yedioth Ahronoth news reported on Friday that the Israeli government has allocated 100 million new Israeli shekels (£17.2 million) to this plan. The plan also includes granting 15,000 new Israeli shekels (£2,577) to every Jewish family that flees these areas.
The newspaper added that the Israeli government decided to establish an independent company in order to encourage Jewish immigration to Israel from all over the world. In the past, The Jewish Agency for Israel dealt with the matters of Jewish immigration to Israel, but the new company will not have the same restrictions applied to state companies and it will be able to operate freely in European countries.
This company will also include representatives from Zionist organisations such as Keren Kayemet (The Jewish National Fund), the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Histadrut, and will work in accordance with the regulations of a specialised committee that will be formed and will be presided over by the head of the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption.
The newspaper also stressed that the new company “will market the plan in European countries in order to create a large increase in the number of Jewish immigrants to Israel.” According to the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption date, the number of immigrants from Ukraine to Israel doubled this year in comparison to the same period last year. This year 1,541 immigrants arrived in Israel compared to 697 immigrants during the first half of last year, Israel attributes this increase to the deteriorating security situation in Ukraine after its division.
The Israeli government recently approved the “France First” plan to encourage Jewish immigration to Israel from France. Yedioth Ahronoth stated that this plan led to the increase in the number of immigrants from France to Israel by 192 per cent compared to last year.
An official from the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption acknowledged the sensitivity of encouraging Jews in European countries to immigrate to Israel because they are citizens of a foreign country. He also said that the activity of the Zionist organisations in this context “is carried out in a quiet manner without drawing any attention”.
Hebron, Occupied Palestine – My plan for the morning was pretty simple, I wanted to enter the souq (market) and buy some bread for breakfast, and then walk home. That was it. As I made my way towards the souq entrance I was stopped by two Israeli border police officers and asked for my religion. This is not an unusual experience in this city, the military are a common sight and as well as the regular checkpoints, they can and often do stop you at any time, demanding your identification, asking your religion, and any other questions they desire to ask.
I am neither ashamed nor proud of my religion. It is part of who I am in the same way my hair colour is a part of me. It is also a question I have been asked before and, as in the past, I told the truth.
“I’m Jewish,” I said.
The two border police officers spoke to each other in Hebrew, a language I have very little understanding of.
“Where are you going?” They asked.
“The souq,” I said. “I just want to go to the market.”
“No, you can’t go in. No Jews allowed.”
I wasn’t completely shocked, this has also been something stated to me before.
“Come on, I’ve been in there a thousand times, is it illegal for me to enter?”
“You can’t go in, you’re Jewish, it’s not allowed, it’s dangerous.”
I wanted to laugh, I may well have done. “It’s not dangerous, I have many friends in there, just let me go.”
This continued on for a few more minutes, the blood heating in my face as I tried to argue my case to no avail. The real irony was instead of walking through the market to go home, I was forced to walk Shuhada street, a perfect example of the apartheid that exists within this military occupation, a street where Palestinians have been barred from walking since the year 2000, where many people lost their homes and livelihoods after they were forced to leave and never return. Only the Israeli military, settlers, and internationals are allowed to walk Shuhada Street, it is often christened “Ghost Town” by the Palestinians, and indeed the sight of so many closed shops and houses, is haunting. It is also a street where I have been assaulted twice by settlers, so the idea that this was a safer alternative for me than the market, is laughable.
I have been fortunate enough to live in Palestine for several months, mainly living in the city of al-Khalil (Hebron). Al-Khalil is a city with many problems, mostly due to the illegal settlement in the heart of the city [all settlements in occupied territory are illegal under international law], and the huge Israeli military presence there to enable the settlers.
The Israeli military commits terrible crimes against the Palestinian people. I have seen them arresting and detaining adults and children for no reason, physically and verbally harassing the people of the city, using their military weapons against adults, youths and children, as well as a hundred and one other injustices that impact the daily lives of Palestinians in al-Khalil.
The settlers in al-Khalil are above the law. They attack Palestinians and steal their land and property on a regular basis. The Israeli military not only does nothing to stop this, but in many cases they condone and encourage it. I have seen settler youth throwing stones at Palestinian homes, while Israeli soldiers watched on. When we asked the soldiers to do something to stop this, they replied they would do nothing, as they are “children”. However Israeli soldiers have no qualms in using violence against Palestinian children. I have come to al-Khalil as a solidarity activist; one of the activities I participate in almost daily is ‘school checkpoint watch’. This is where I would assist in monitoring a specific checkpoint the children of the city are forced to go through on their way to school. I have witnessed Israeli soldiers harassing and searching children as they go through the checkpoint, firing tear gas and stun grenades at them and into their schools, and detaining children, some as young as six-years-old.
After the two border police officers denied me entry into the market in the morning, I tried again several hours later. The result was the same. I was angry, and I was upset, and while I am in Palestine as a solidarity activist, all I wanted to do was to go through the souq and visit one of my friends.
However, I have no intention of writing that I now “understand” what the Palestinians experience due to the military occupation, and the complete control that exists over their freedom of movement. My experience today was frustrating, and also unfair, but it is nothing compared to what the Palestinian people experience on a regular basis.
Due to the colour of my skin, and my nationality, I am incredibly aware of the privilege I have in Palestine, and all over the world. The very fact that I am able to enter Palestine is a huge privilege within itself; so many Palestinians in the diaspora were forced away from their homeland and have never seen it again. The fact that, if I so wish, I can travel to Yaffa, and one of my closest friends, a Palestinian woman whose family is originally from the city, can never see her home.
I have never been denied entry to any area due to my religion by Palestinians, or any other time in my life. It is telling that the first time this happens is by the Israeli military, under the façade of my ‘safety’. Unless Israeli soldiers or settlers enter, which they frequently do, the most dangerous thing that could happen to me in the souq is that I could overdose on tea, forced on me by my friends.
Pope Francis’ “pilgrimage” to the Holy Land last week proved to be an unbalanced impossible mission. The pontiff failed to strike a balance of neutrality between contradictory and irreconcilable binaries like divinity and earth, religion and politics, justice and injustice and military occupation and peace.
Such neutrality is viewed by the laity of Christian believers, let alone Muslim ones, in the Holy Land as religiously, morally and politically unacceptable.
The 77-year old head of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics “is stepping into a religious and political minefield,” Naim Ateek, the Anglican priest who founded the Palestinian liberation theology movement and runs the Sabeel Ecumenical Center in Jerusalem and Nazareth, was quoted as saying by Time on last May 24, the first day of the pope’s “pilgrimage.”
Ironically, the symbolic moral and spiritual power of the Holy See was down to earth in Pope Francis’ subservient adaptation to the current realpolitik of the Holy Land in what the Catholic Online on May 26 described as “faith diplomacy.”
The pontiff’s message to the Palestinian people during his three-day “pilgrimage” to the Holy Land boils down to an endorsement of the Israeli and U.S. message to them, i.e.: “The only route to peace” is to negotiate with the Israeli occupying power, refrain from unilateral actions and “violent” resistance and recognize Israel as a fait accompli.
The UK-based Jordanian-Palestinian journalist Lamis Andoni, a Christian herself, wrote on May 27: “We don’t need the Vatican blessing of negotiations … Whoever sees occupation and remains neutral has no justice in his vision.”
The Vatican and the pope himself had insisted that his visit to the birthplace of the three monotheistic “Abrahamic faiths” of Islam, Christianity and Judaism was “purely spiritual,” “strictly religious,” a “pilgrimage for prayer” and “absolutely not political.”
But the Vatican expert John Allen, writing in the Boston Globe a week ahead of the pope’s visit, had expected it to be a “political high-wire act,” and that’s what it truly was, because “religion and politics cannot be separated in the Holy Land,” according to Yolande Knell on BBC online on May 25.
Pope Francis would have performed much better had he adhered “strictly,” “purely” and “absolutely” to making his trip a “pilgrimage for prayer” and one that is committed to Christian unity and to helping indigenous Christians survive the highly volatile and violent regional environment.
Instead he had drowned his spiritual role in a minefield of symbolic political semantics and semiotics.
The pope finished his “pilgrimage,” which was announced as a religious one but turned instead into a political pilgrimage, with a call for peace.
However, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Hussein, while welcoming the pontiff inside Islam’s third holiest site of Al-Aqsa Mosque on May 26, said: “Peace in this land will not happen until the end of the [Israeli military] occupation.”
Palestinian-American Daoud Kuttab on May 25 wrote in a controversial column that the pope “exceeded expectations for Palestinians.”
He flew directly from Jordan to Bethlehem in Palestine without passing through any Israeli entry procedures, implicitly and symbolically recognizing Palestinian sovereignty.
He addressed the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as the head of the “State of Palestine,” announced that there must be “recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to a sovereign homeland and their right to live with dignity and with freedom of movement” and met with Palestinian children whose parents were refugees whom Israelis displaced from their homes in 1948.
And in an undeniable expression of solidarity with the Palestinians, he made an unplanned stop to pray at Israel’s apartheid wall of segregation in Bethlehem, because, as he said, “the time has come to put an end to this situation which has become increasingly unacceptable.”
However, the word “occupation” was missing in more than thirteen of his speeches during his “pilgrimage” as was any reference to the world’s “largest open-air prison” in Gaza Strip or to Dahiyat a-Salam (literally: Neighborhood of Peace) and five other neighbourhoods in eastern Jerusalem, including the Shu’fat Refugee Camp, where some eighty thousand Palestinians have been cut off from the city services, including water, since March 2014 and isolated from Jerusalem by Israel’s segregation wall. His itinerary did not include the Galilee and Nazareth where most Palestinian Christians are located.
Eight papal messages
However, within less than twenty four hours the pontiff was to offset his positive overtures to Palestinians and his call for a “just solution” and a “stable peace based on justice” for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with eight messages to them.
The pontiff’s arrival in the Palestinian Holy Land came three days before Israel’s celebration of its 47th anniversary of its military occupation and annexation of the Christian and Muslim holy sites in the Arab east Jerusalem and ten days after the Palestinian commemoration of the 66th anniversary of their Nakba on the creation of Israel in 1948 on the ruins of more than 500 towns and villages from which the Zionist paratroops ethnically cleansed forcefully more than 800,000 Arab Muslim and Christian native Palestinians.
The pope had nothing to say or do on both occasions to alleviate the ensuing plight of the Palestinians except prayers, because “the concrete measures for peace must come from negotiations … It is the only route to peace,” according to the pope aboard his flight back to Rome.
That was exactly the same futile message the Israeli occupying power and its U.S. strategic ally have been sending to Palestinians for sixty six years, but especially since 1967: Palestinians should be held hostages to exclusively bilateral negotiations with their occupying power. This was the pope’s first message to Palestinians.
For this purpose, the pope invited Palestinian and Israeli presidents, Abbas and Shimon Peres, to pray for peace at “my home in the Vatican as a place for this encounter of prayer” on June 8. The pope’s spokesman, Federico Lombardi, told the BBC it was “a papal peace initiative.” This was his second message.
His third message to Palestinians was to “refrain from initiatives and actions which contradict the stated desire to reach a true agreement” with Israel, i.e. to refrain from unilateral actions, which is again another Israeli and U.S. precondition which both allies do not deem as deserving Israeli reciprocity.
By laying a wreath at the grave of Theodor Herzl, the atheist founder of Zionism who nonetheless believed in God’s promise of the land to His Jewish “chosen people,” the pope legitimized Herzl’s colonial settlement project in Palestine. This was his fourth message: Israel is a fait accompli recognized by the Vatican and blessed by the papacy and Palestinians have to adapt accordingly. The Washington Post on May 23 went further. “Some are interpreting” the pope’s act “as the pontiff’s tacit recognition of the country’s Jewish character.”
The pope sent his fifth message to Palestinians when he addressed young Palestinian refugees from the Dehiyshe Refugee Camp in Bethlehem: “Don’t ever allow the past to determine your life, always look forward.” He was repeating the Israeli and U.S. call on Palestinian refugees to forget their Nakba and look forward from their refugee camps for an unknown future in exile and diaspora.
On the same occasion he sent his sixth message: “Violence cannot be defeated by violence; violence can only be defeated with peace,” the pope advised the young Palestinian refugees. This is again the Israeli and U.S. message to them, which after more than two decades of Palestinian commitment produced neither peace nor justice for them.
The pope prayed at the Holocaust memorial, the western al-Buraq Wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which Israelis call “The Wailing Wall,” the memorial of the Israeli victims of Palestinian resistance, laid a wreath at Herzel’s grave, visited Israeli president at his residence where he “vowed to pray for the institutions of the State of Israel,” which are responsible for the Palestinian Nakba, and received Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Notre Dame complex. The pontiff was in fact blessing and granting the Vatican legitimacy to all the Israeli symbolic casus belli claims to the land, which justify the Palestinian Nakba. This was his seventh message.
All those events took place in Jerusalem, which Israel annexed as the “eternal” capital of the Hebrew state and the “Jewish people.” Reuven Berko, writing in Yisrael Hayom, said that the Pope’s meetings with Peres and Netanyahu were “de facto expressions of the Vatican’s recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel.”
The pope’s eighth message to Palestinians was on the future of Jerusalem: “From the negotiations perhaps it will emerge that it will be the capital of one State or another … I do not consider myself competent to say that we should do one thing or another.”
Normalization with Israel
The “greatest importance” of Pope Francis’ visit “may lie in the fact that it reflects the normalization of relations between the Vatican and the State of Israel,” head of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, wrote on May 23.
The Second Vatican Council early in the sixties of the last century rejected the collective Jewish guilt for Jesus Christ’s death. Since then the Vatican’s “normalization” of relations with the Jews and Israel has been accumulating.
Rabbi David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs at the American Jewish Committee, was quoted as saying by the USA Today on May 26: There “has been a revolution in the Christian world.”
At Ben-Gurion airport on May 25, Pope Francis reiterated his predecessor Benedict’s call for “the right of existence for the [still borderless] State of Israel to be recognized universally,” but was wise enough not to reiterate his “thanks to God” because “the Jews returned to the lands of their ancestors.”
To emphasise interfaith coexistence he broke the precedent of including a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim sheikh in his official delegation. “It’s highly symbolic,” said Rev. Thomas Rosica, a consultant to the Vatican press office.
By laying a wreath of white and yellow flowers, the colours of the Vatican, on the Herzl’s grave, the pope broke another historic precedent. It was an unbalanced act, 110 years after Pope Pius X met Herzl and rejected the idea of a Jewish state.
The pontiff’s “pilgrimage” could not dispel the historical fact that lies deep in the regional Arab memory that papacy is “still linked to the Crusades of the 11th through 13th centuries” when the successive popes’ only link to the Holy Land was a military one, according to the international editor of NPR.org, Greg Myre, on this May 24.
Of course this does not apply to Christianity. The indigenous oriental churches’ link to the land has never been interrupted while the Catholic Church was cut off from the region since the end of the Crusades until it came back with the European colonial domination since the nineteenth century.
No pope ever travelled to Jerusalem until Paul VI spent one day in the city, on January 4, 1964, when the holy sites were under the rule of the Arab Jordanians. John Paul visited thirty six years later and established a new papal tradition that has been followed by Pope Benedict, who visited in 2009, and now Pope Francis.
It doesn’t bode well with the Arabs and the Palestinians in particular that the new papal tradition is building on the background of recognizing Israel, which is an occupying power and still without constitutional demarcated borders, as a fait accompli that the Palestinian people should recognize as well.
~
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. An edited version of this article was first published by the Middle East Eye. nassernicola@ymail.com
Yesterday, at 4:30 am, Popular Resistance activist Mahmoud Zwahre was again arrested by the Israeli army, at his house in Al Ma’asara, just southwest of Bethlehem.
An attempt to arrest Zwahre was made previously during the weekly Friday protest in the village. This week, on Wednesday, a large group of Israeli soldiers raided Zwahre’s home, just before dawn.
Mahmoud Zwahre, according to the Palestinian News Network (PNN), is an activist and coordinator for the Popular Committee Against the Wall and the Settlements in Al Ma’asara. Soldiers surrounded the Zwahre residence and declared it a closed military zone, as they proceeded to tear through the contents of the house, terrorizing the children and abusing Mahmoud in front of his family.
He was arrested, blindfolded, and taken to an unknown destination — essentially, and by all rights, amounting to a kidnapping.
(Al Ma’asara is a small Palestinian village located in Area B of the central occupied West Bank. Though Area B is officially recognized to be under joint Israeli-Palestinian security control, the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem has yet to be granted legitimacy by the international community.)
Munther Amira, director of the board of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee Against the Wall and the Settlements (PSCC) in the Palestinian territories, explained in an interview with the PNN that the Israeli occupation increasingly targets activists of Popular Resistance and their activities:
The activities of Popular Resistance are peaceful and designed to highlight the suffering of the Palestinian people through the Israeli occupation practices of racism and violation of international law. Nevertheless, the PSCC has documented the rough and violent reactions by Israeli soldiers against the protests and marches organized by the Popular Struggle Committees in the various provinces of the country.
The committee denounces the arrest of its coordinator Mahmoud Zwahre, and calls for his release.
1. “There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies, not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.” Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
2. “The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more”…. Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time – August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post, August 30, 2000
3. ” [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs.” Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the Beasts”. New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
4. “The Palestinians” would be crushed like grasshoppers … heads smashed against the boulders and walls.” Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
5. “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
6. “How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.” Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.
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