[News] Palestine at the Crossroads

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Palestine at the Crossroads

January 08, 2010

By Stephen McCloskey

"Some of my students are walking time bombs" said Reem Al-Shareef, 
principal of Qurtuba school in the West Bank town of Hebron.  She was 
explaining the psychological and physical torment of life under 
occupation for the young people under her care.  Hebron was part of a 
busy and wide-ranging itinerary for a 22 strong delegation from the 
island of Ireland to the West Bank to assess the human rights 
situation for Palestinians living under occupation.  The closed 
physical environment of Qurtuba school with its raised perimeter 
walls designed to repel missiles from two adjacent Israeli 
settlements captured in microcosm the anger, frustration, dangers and 
limitations of life in the occupied territories.

A quarter of Qurtuba's 132 students have to pass through Israeli 
Defence Force (IDF) checkpoint 56 to get to school and regularly run 
a gauntlet of abuse from a settlement at the foot of a hill beneath 
the school.   The students have to suppress their emotions and lack 
the safe physical space to assemble and play.  The settlement 
opposite their school has 400 inhabitants with its own garrison of 
2,000 Israeli soldiers.  Many of these settlers are ideologically 
fundamentalist and openly hostile toward their neighbours.  They have 
the freedom to arm themselves and operate within a wide latitude of 
legal impunity.

If students retaliate to settler provocation they could face up to 
six months imprisonment (for 12 year olds) rising to a year for 14-15 
year olds.  According to the non-governmental organisation (NGO), 
Defence for Children International, a total of 350 Palestinian 
children are currently serving sentences in Israeli prisons with 
Israel designating a Palestinian child as up to 16 years rather than 
the United Nations (UN) recommendation (and Israeli practice for 
their own children) of 18 years.

Palestinian Prisoners

Our delegation was based in Bethlehem and from there visited Beit 
Sahour, Bil'in, East Jerusalem, Hebron, Nablus and Ramallah.  We met 
with human rights activists and NGOs based in Palestine and Israel 
and the recurring issues that surfaced in these discussions were the 
notorious security wall that is devouring Palestinian land, the 
expanding settlements that 'create new facts on the ground', the 
checkpoints that disrupt everyday life for Palestinians, and the 
arbitrary imprisonment of men, women and children.

According to prisoner support organisation Addameer, over 650,000 
Palestinians have been detained by Israel since the 1967 occupation 
of the Palestinian Territories.  There are currently 7,300 
Palestinians defined as 'security prisoners' including women and 
children.  Addameer estimates that over 120 women have been 
imprisoned by Israel since 2004, 17 of them mothers, with two women 
giving birth while in Israeli custody.  Women have not been spared 
the mental and physical torture applied to Palestinian prisoners 
including ritual humiliation, sexual harassment and beatings.  The 
prison regime of poor food, lack of sunlight and limited physical 
exercise creates severe health problems including joint pain, asthma, 
skin complaints and anaemia.

Since 2000, some of the women prisoners have undertaken hunger 
strikes to improve their conditions and gained concessions on 
recreation time, library access, and opportunities in higher 
education.  However, many of their demands remain unaddressed such as 
family visits and gender-sensitive health care.   Also because of 
their smaller number, women prisoners tend to be more isolated and 
less well organised than their male counterparts.

Internment by another name

The arbitrary imprisonment of Palestinians is mostly carried out 
under the legal auspices of Administrative Detention, whereby 
detainees are held without charge or trial for a period of up to six 
months.  The period of detention is frequently renewed and this 
process can continue indefinitely.  This is internment by another 
name, the form of detention disastrously used by the British 
government in the north of Ireland in the 1970s.  Indeed, the legal 
basis for Administrative Detention is emergency legislation enacted 
under the British Mandate of 194; similar procedures have been 
introduced by the apartheid regime in South Africa and more recently 
by the United States government in Guantanamo Bay.  At the end of 
2008, there were 700 administrative detainees in Israeli prisons and 
detention centres including 5 women and 13 children under 18 
years.  Addameer believes Administrative Detention to be used by 
Israel in a 'highly arbitrary manner'...that 'leads to other, grave 
human rights violations, such as degrading and inhuman treatment and 
torture'.

It was encouraging for our group to meet with Israeli human rights 
groups similarly critical of Administrative Detention and wider human 
rights abuses.  For example, B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center 
for Human Rights, states that Israel has 'made a charade out of the 
entire system of procedural safeguards in both domestic and 
international law regarding the right to liberty and due 
process'.  It is clearly important that groups like B'Tselem create 
pressure within the state of Israel for reform and respect for human 
rights and provide the intellectual framework for the increasing 
level of activism in Israeli civil society.

Checkpoints

This activism includes the courageous women of Machsom Watch who 
monitor IDF checkpoints for human rights abuses on a daily basis and 
post their reports on the internet (www.machsomwatch.org).

Our group met with a 64 year old woman activist from Machsom 
monitoring the Bethlehem checkpoint.  She stands at checkpoints every 
day at 6am and 2pm keeping a careful eye on the treatment of 
Palestinians.  The presence of these women can prevent serious abuses 
and shines a light on the daily grind and humiliation created by the 
checkpoints.

We spent an early morning going through the Bethlehem checkpoint and 
saw hundreds of men queuing patiently, some of them there from 3.30am 
to start work at 6.00am.  They can spend one to two hours waiting to 
enter the checkpoint and then need to show a pass with a magnetic 
strip that is swiped followed by a fingerprint and work permit 
check.  With security resembling that of an airport terminal, 
permanent checkpoints like Bethlehem also have an x-ray machine to 
check bags and possessions and those who make it through to the other 
side are the fortunate ones - they have a permit to work somewhere 
in  the West Bank.

Settlements

Navigating the checkpoints adds several hours to an ordinary working 
day and undoubtedly pummels the resistance of the Palestinians and 
their capacity to mobilise for change.  The political context could 
hardly be more depressing with feuding between the two main 
Palestinian movements Hamas and Fatah resulting in the former 
assuming control of Gaza and being forced out of the West Bank.  This 
followed Hamas's election victory in early 2006 which has never been 
accepted by the European Union and United States who have served to 
bolster a discredited Fatah movement mired in corruption and devoid 
of leadership.  While the divisions sparked by the chauvinism of the 
West may appear to strengthen Israel's hand in the region it further 
delays the possibility of meaningful negotiations.

A major Palestinian pre-condition for the initiation of negotiations 
is a halt to the construction of settlements in the West Bank and 
Jerusalem.  We received a tour of settlements in East Jerusalem and 
Palestinian homes taken over by settlers following forced 
evictions.  Some of our group visited a Palestinian family living in 
a tent opposite their home now occupied by a settler family.  Israel 
is intent on annexing East Jerusalem and scuppering any possibility 
of a shared capital as part of a Palestinian state.  The Israeli 
strategy is simplicity itself amid the complexities of land disputes, 
border demarcations and the region's history - talk up negotiations 
to the world's media proclaiming democratic credentials and good 
intentions while flooding the West Bank and East Jerusalem with so 
many settlements and settlers that make a Palestinian state infeasible.

There are 135 settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and 
450,000 settlers who are refused entry by their state to Palestinian 
run areas (17 per cent of the West Bank).  Settlement construction 
means loss of homes and possessions, livelihoods and income for 
Palestinians.  The United Nations estimated poverty to extend to 65 
per cent of the Occupied Territories in 2005 with one million 
citizens considered 'subsistence poor'.   The Israeli Committee 
Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), an advocacy and human rights group 
based in Jerusalem, resists demolitions and helps to rebuild homes 
'as an act of resistance and solidarity'.  ICAHD estimates that 
24,145 homes have been demolished in the Occupied Territories since 
1967 with 4,247 alone destroyed in the Gaza Strip during Operation 
Cast Lead, Israel's three week military bombardment in the winter of 
2008-09 which killed 1,400 Gazans.

Security Wall

The traditional Israeli standby for its punitive judicial apparatus 
and network of checkpoints and barriers in the West Bank is 
security.  Security is also the rationale for the variously named 
'separation barrier', 'security fence' or 'apartheid wall' allegedly 
under construction to prevent attacks in Israeli territory.   The 
wall is approximately 700km long (60 per cent completed) and up to 
eight metres high and has, on average, a 60 metre wide exclusion 
area.  Around 1.5million trees were uprooted to clear a path for the 
wall that only 20 per cent of which runs along the recognised border, 
the Green Line.

If Israel's primary reason for constructing the wall is security then 
it would adhere to the existing border between Palestine and Israel, 
and ensure that the entire Palestinian population was on one side of 
the wall.  In fact the wall deviates substantially from the Green 
Line to make major incursions into Palestinian land and annexes large 
tracts of fertile farming land.  Many Palestinian farmers have lost 
their livelihoods, dispossessed of a generational source of work and 
income, and forced to live in open prison-like conditions surrounded 
by the wall.  In 2004, the International Court of Justice gave an 
advisory opinion that stated that the construction of the wall is 
'contrary to international law' and called for it to be removed.

The wall not only restricts freedom of movement, but limits 
commercial activity, the right to worship, and access to work.  It is 
one of the means used by Israel to restrict Palestinian water supply 
as the fragmentation of the West Bank into isolated enclaves impedes 
the development of efficient water and sanitation infrastructure.  A 
recent Amnesty International report states that 'Palestinian water 
consumption barely reaches 70 litres a day per person' which is well 
below the recommended World Health Organisation intake of 100 litres 
per day.  It adds that 'Israel controls and restricts Palestinian 
access to water in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to a level 
that neither meets their needs nor constitutes a fair distribution of 
shared water resources'.  The report found that Israel uses 80 per 
cent of the Mountain Aquifer, the Palestinians' sole remaining water 
resource, and that Israeli settlers use 20 times more water per 
capita than their Palestinian neighbours.

Bil'in

The wall has become the focus of a sustained and courageous 
non-violent resistance campaign in Bil'in, a small village 12 km west 
of Ramallah.  It is an agricultural village, 988 acres in size with a 
population of 1,780.  More than half of Bil'in's agricultural land 
has been declared 'State Land' by Israel and confiscated for the 
construction of a settlement bloc, Modi'in Illit occupied by over 
42,000 residents.  When Israel began constructing the separation wall 
on Bil'in's land, the village was cut in half to ensure that Modi'in 
Illit and its future growth would be on the 'Israeli side' of the wall.

In March 2005, the residents of Bil'in began organising direct 
actions and demonstrations against the construction of the wall which 
pushed this small village into the cockpit of resistance against 
Israel.  Bil'in has become an internationally recognised and 
supported popular movement with large numbers of foreign nationals 
joining residents in their weekly protest against the wall.  Our 
group participated in the demonstration which coincided with the 20th 
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.  With the imagination and 
creativity that has characterised the Bil'in protests, the villagers 
created their own mock Berlin wall that contrasted the collapse and 
failure of one failed means of separation and division with the 
continued construction of another.

Since the protests started, the Israeli forces have used sound and 
shock grenades, water cannon, rubber-coated steel bullets, tear gas 
grenades, tear gas canisters and 0.22 calibre live ammunition against 
protesters.  On 17 April 2009, local activist Bassem Abu Rahma was 
shot and killed by the Israeli military during a Bil'in protest when 
hit in the chest by a high-velocity tear gas projectile.  The 
non-violent actions during the protests aim to dismantle the fence 
and protestors regular suffer tear gas inhalation, as was the case 
with our group.   But the importance of the protests resonates beyond 
the local struggle in Bil'in. They maintain the international profile 
of the Palestinian struggle and highlight the injustice of the wall, 
the settlements and land annexations with Bil'in encapsulating the 
struggle of wider Palestine.

Balfour Declaration

In addition to the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, our 
visit also coincided with another significant date from history, the 
Balfour Declaration of 2nd November 1917 in which the British Foreign 
Secretary announced that the government viewed with favour 'the 
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish 
people'.  The Declaration was subsequently put into effect by the 
1922 'British Mandate for Palestine' which created new boundaries for 
the 'two new states' and paved the way for the 1948 'Nakbah' or 
cataclysm that resulted in the uprooting and dispossession of 750,000 
Palestinians from their homes and villages.

Despite Britain's complicity in the events that unfolded after the 
Balfour Declaration which led to the creation of a Jewish state and 
forced over 700,000 Palestinians (now 4 million) into exile and a 
permanent refugee status, it has failed to meaningfully address the 
outcomes of its actions.  Britain and its partners in the EU have 
largely followed Washington's line of supporting Israeli 'democracy' 
against Palestinian 'insurgency' and 'terrorism'; language which 
falls neatly into the post-September 11 (2001) 'us and them' paradigm 
of the Bush presidency.  Bush's successor, Barack Obama, has thus far 
failed to manifest any significant divergence from the previous 
administration on the Palestinian question.  His insistence on a 
freeze of settlement construction to assist negotiations has been 
blithely batted away by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin 
Netanyahu.  At the end of October 2009, Obama's Secretary of State, 
Hillary Clinton, praised Netanyahu's 'unprecedented concessions' on 
West Bank settlement construction toward supporting peace 
talks.  This almost comical statement showed how far the US position 
has yet to travel toward meaningful engagement with the Middle East conflict.

In the course of our discussions with human rights activists, the 
power of the Israeli lobby in Washington repeatedly raised itself as 
a major obstacle to peace negotiations.  Why, for example, does 
Palestine not step up its own lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill?  A 
persuasive answer to this question came from Mazin Qumsiyeh, an 
activist and academic, who suggested that the Israeli lobby was an 
abuse upon the US political system that led to wrongheaded policies 
on the Middle East and resulted in disastrous outcomes for Americans 
as well as Palestinians.  To mirror the activities of the Israeli 
lobby in Washington would weaken rather than strengthen 
democracy.  Moreover, addressing the impact of the Jewish lobby was a 
matter for American civil society rather than the Palestinians.

International Pressure

Nonetheless, the Israeli political lobby and US aid to Israel 
(amounting to $3 billion per annum) are major stumbling blocks to 
negotiations and justice for the Palestinians.  So, how do we begin 
to create the conditions necessary for dialogue between all relevant 
parties and an agreement that will hold?  Well, there have been 
indications of late that international pressure is beginning to 
mount.  Israel was genuinely stung by the findings of the Goldstone 
Report based on investigations into the Israeli military's conduct of 
Operation Cast Lead.  The report is unequivocal in stating that the 
military campaign was 'carefully planned' and 'designed to punish, 
humiliate and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its 
local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and 
to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and 
vulnerability'.  It adds that 'Responsibility lies in the first place 
with those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw the operations'.

One of those responsible, Israel's former foreign minister Tzipi 
Livni was the subject of an arrest warrant issued in December 2009 by 
a London magistrates court for war crimes at the request of lawyers 
acting for victims of the Gazan bombardment.  The warrant was 
subsequently withdrawn when Livni cancelled her planned trip to 
Britain.  Similar legal moves have been made toward Ehud Barak, 
Israel's defence minister at the time of the Gaza operations and, in 
2005, a retired Israeli general Doron Almog, returned to Israel after 
landing in London having been warned about a warrant for his arrest 
for overseeing a separate bombing incident in Gaza.

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions

The scandal of Israel's blockade of Gaza which preceded Operation 
Cast Lead has prevented the reconstruction of Gaza since it 
ended.  Israel has thwarted effective aid efforts to tackle the 
effects of the bombardment which targeted factories, schools, wells, 
hospitals and other public buildings.  What Goldstone describes as 
the 'collective punishment' of Gaza demands that Israeli ministers 
should be made legally accountable for their actions.  But we need to 
go further in implementing a wide-ranging Boycott, Divestment and 
Sanctions (BDS) strategy toward isolating Israel academically, 
culturally, politically and economically to ensure its compliance 
with international law and human rights conventions.

Students should follow the example of Sussex University's Student 
Union to boycott Israeli goods following a referendum and we should 
all use our power as consumers to boycott Israeli produce and 
positively promote Palestinian alternatives.  Divestment means 
encouraging financial institutions and companies to shed their 
investments in Israel, particularly those companies complicit in the 
construction of settlements and the security wall.  In regard to 
sanctions, the Global BDS Movement believes that Israel's dependency 
on global markets, particularly in research and technology, make this 
arguably the most effective method for exerting real pressure on the 
Israeli economy.  Campaigners and activists need to use all methods 
at their disposal from consumer boycotts to political lobbying and 
public education to extend solidarity to Palestine and spur on 
efforts toward reconciliation.

The Irish delegation's visit to the West Bank saw Palestine at a 
crossroads which could lead toward another intifada or result in the 
completion of the Zionist programme toward the erosion of any 
possibility of a coherent Palestinian society.  The political vacuum 
in the West Bank and divided Palestinian resistance, combined with 
the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and a complicit EU and US, make the 
activism of supporters around the world a paramount factor in the 
struggle for an end to injustice in Palestine.  Only the accelerated 
isolation of Israel through diplomatic, economic and cultural 
sanctions and pressure can make it become a serious participant in 
negotiations worth their name.

References

Administrative Detention in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: A 
Legal Analysis Report, Addameer: Palestinian Prisoner's Support and 
Human Rights Association, Ramallah, November 2008, www.addameer.info

Amnesty International, 'Thirsting for Justice: Palestinian Access to 
Water Restricted', Index: MDE 15/028/2009, October 2009, www.amnesty.org

B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the 
Occupied Territories, visit www.btselem.org for statistics on the use 
of Administrative Detention

Checkpoint Watch, www.machsomwatch.org

Defence for Children International - Palestine, Jerusalem, www.dci-pal.org

Global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, www.bdsmovement.net

Halper, Jeff, Johnson, Jimmy and Schaeffer, Emily, 'Counter-Rhetoric: 
Challenging "Conventional Wisdom" and Reframing the Conflict', ICAHD, 
Jerusalem, 2009

Human Rights in the Occupied Territories', B'tselem Annual Report 
2008, Jerusalem,

'In Need of Protection: Palestinian Female Prisoners in Israeli 
Detention', Addameer: Palestinian Prisoner's Support and Human Rights 
Association, Ramallah, November 2008, www.addameer.info

International Court of Justice, 'Legal Consequences of the 
Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory', 9 July 
2004, General List no. 131.  The Court decided that the wall was 
contrary to international law and should be dismantled.  Visit www.icj-cij.org

Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign - the web site has details of 
Israeli goods that can be boycotted by 
consumers.  www.ipsc.ie/campaigns_consumer_boycott.php

'Israel putting forth "unprecedented" concessions', Washington Post, 
1 November 2009, www.washingtonpost.com

Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, www.icahd.org

'So what should we do? ICADH's Advocacy Packet on the 
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict', Israeli Committee Against House 
Demolitions (ICADH-Israel), Jerusalem, July 2009

'The Impunity of Israel and its allies will carry a price', Seumas 
Milne, Guardian, 17 December 2009

  'The most effective stick to use with Israel', Michael Jansen, 21 
May 2009, www.alarabiya.net

'Tzipi Livni arrest warrant prompts Israeli government travel "ban" 
', Guardian, 15 December 2009

Trocaire, www.trocaire.org, an Irish aid agency working in Palestine

'United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict', the 
Mission was led by Justice Richard Goldstone, 
www2.ohchr.org/English/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/FactFindingMission.htm

United Nations Human Development Report 2005, United Nations 
Development Programme, New York, 2005, 
http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2005

Stephen McCloskey is the Director of the Centre for Global Education, 
a non-governmental development organisation based in Belfast that 
uses education as a means of challenging the causes of poverty and 
inequality in local and global contexts.  He is editor (with Gerard 
McCann) of From the Local to the Global: Key issues in Development 
Studies, Pluto Press, London and New York, 2009.

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