<html>
<body>
<img src="http://www.zcommunications.org/graphics/zNetLogo.gif" width=332 height=75 alt="ZNet">
<font size=3>
<img src="http://www.zcommunications.org/graphics/zNetLogoThin.gif" width=317 height=44 alt="ZNet">
<br><br>
<img src="http://www.zcommunications.org/graphics/icons/print_ico.gif" width=16 height=15 alt="[]">
Print <br>
<hr>
<br>
</font><h1><font size=4><b>Palestine at the
Crossroads</b></font></h1><font size=3>January 08, 2010 <br><br>
By <b>Stephen McCloskey</b> <br><br>
"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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b>Palestinian Prisoners<br><br>
</b>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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<b>Internment by another name<br><br>
</b>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'. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b>Checkpoints<br><br>
</b>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
(<a href="http://www.machsomwatch.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.machsomwatch.org</a>).<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<b>Settlements<br><br>
</b>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<b>Security Wall<br><br>
</b>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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
<b>Bil'in<br><br>
</b>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<b>Balfour Declaration<br><br>
</b>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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b>International Pressure<br><br>
</b>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'.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b>Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions<br><br>
</b>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<b>References<br><br>
</b><i>Administrative Detention in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: A
Legal Analysis Report</i>, Addameer: Palestinian Prisoner's Support and
Human Rights Association, Ramallah, November 2008,
<a href="http://www.addameer.info/" eudora="autourl">www.addameer.info<br>
<br>
</a>Amnesty International, ‘Thirsting for Justice: Palestinian Access to
Water Restricted', Index: MDE 15/028/2009, October 2009,
<a href="http://www.amnesty.org/" eudora="autourl">www.amnesty.org<br><br>
</a>B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the
Occupied Territories, visit
<a href="http://www.btselem.org/" eudora="autourl">www.btselem.org</a>
for statistics on the use of Administrative Detention<br><br>
Checkpoint Watch,
<a href="http://www.machsomwatch.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.machsomwatch.org<br><br>
</a>Defence for Children International - Palestine, Jerusalem,
<a href="http://www.dci-pal.org/" eudora="autourl">www.dci-pal.org<br><br>
</a>Global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement,
<a href="http://www.bdsmovement.net/" eudora="autourl">
www.bdsmovement.net<br><br>
</a>Halper, Jeff, Johnson, Jimmy and Schaeffer, Emily, ‘Counter-Rhetoric:
Challenging "Conventional Wisdom" and Reframing the Conflict',
ICAHD, Jerusalem, 2009<br><br>
Human Rights in the Occupied Territories', B'tselem Annual Report 2008,
Jerusalem, <br><br>
‘In Need of Protection: Palestinian Female Prisoners in Israeli
Detention', Addameer: Palestinian Prisoner's Support and Human Rights
Association, Ramallah, November 2008,
<a href="http://www.addameer.info/" eudora="autourl">www.addameer.info<br>
<br>
</a>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
<a href="http://www.icj-cij.org/" eudora="autourl">www.icj-cij.org<br><br>
</a>Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign - the web site has details of
Israeli goods that can be boycotted by consumers.
<a href="http://www.ipsc.ie/campaigns_consumer_boycott.php" eudora="autourl">
www.ipsc.ie/campaigns_consumer_boycott.php<br><br>
</a>‘Israel putting forth "unprecedented" concessions',
<i>Washington Post</i>, 1 November 2009,
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/" eudora="autourl">
www.washingtonpost.com<br><br>
</a>Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions,
<a href="http://www.icahd.org/" eudora="autourl">www.icahd.org<br><br>
</a>‘So what should we do? ICADH's Advocacy Packet on the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict', Israeli Committee Against House
Demolitions (ICADH-Israel), Jerusalem, July 2009<br><br>
‘The Impunity of Israel and its allies will carry a price', Seumas Milne,
<i>Guardian</i>, 17 December 2009<br><br>
‘The most effective stick to use with Israel', Michael Jansen, 21
May 2009,
<a href="http://www.alarabiya.net/" eudora="autourl">www.alarabiya.net<br>
<br>
</a>‘Tzipi Livni arrest warrant prompts Israeli government travel
"ban" ‘, <i>Guardian</i>, 15 December 2009<br><br>
Trocaire,
<a href="http://www.trocaire.org/" eudora="autourl">www.trocaire.org</a>,
an Irish aid agency working in Palestine<br><br>
‘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<br>
<br>
United Nations Human Development Report 2005, United Nations Development
Programme, New York, 2005,
<a href="http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2005" eudora="autourl">
http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2005<br><br>
</a>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
<i>From the Local to the Global: Key issues in Development Studies</i>,
Pluto Press, London and New York, 2009.<br>
<hr>
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives <br>
URL:
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/23576">
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/23576</a> <br><br>
<br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#008000">415 863-9977<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#0000FF">
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.Freedomarchives.org</a></font><font size=3> </font></body>
</html>