Israeli Unassailable Might and Unyielding Angst: NY Times
By ROGER COHEN, Published: April 22, 2010
JERUSALEM — For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his people are not traumatized by some wild delusion. No, there are facts: the rise of Iran, the fierce projection of Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, and the rockets that have been fired by them.
Netanyahu is firm in his core self-image as the guarantor of threatened Israeli security. Israeli withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza, led only, in his view, to the insecurity of life beneath a rocket threat.
The question he poses himself, contemplating the West Bank, is how to stop this happening a third time.
To enter Israel is to pass through a hall of mirrors. A nation exerting complete military dominance in the West Bank becomes one that, under an almost unimaginable peace accord, might be menaced from there.
A nation whose army and arsenal are without rival in the Middle East becomes one facing daily existential threat. A nation whose power has grown steadily over decades relative to its scattered enemies becomes one whose future is somehow less secure than ever.
It’s not easy to parse fact from fiction, justifiable anxiety from self-serving angst, in this pervasive Israeli narrative. I arrived on Independence Day, the nation’s 62nd birthday. Blue and white flags fluttered from cars on the superhighways. A million festive picnickers were out. “If a war takes place, we will win,” the chief of the Israel Defense Forces assured them. Did annihilation anguish really spice the barbecue?
I guess so. The threat has morphed since 1948 — from Arab armies to Palestinian militants to Islamic jihadists — but not the Israeli condition. The nation “wallows in a sense of existential threat that has only grown with time,” the daily Haaretz commented. Netanyahu, in a 20-minute interview, told me of “the physical and psychological reality” of a nation whose experience is that “concessions lead to insecurity.”
Part of the insecurity right now stems from the troubles with Israel’s ultimate guarantor, the United States. President Obama, for all his assurances about unbending American commitment, has left Israelis with a feeling of alienation, a sense he does not understand or care enough. Has he not visited two nearby Muslim states — Turkey and Egypt — while snubbing Israel?
I think what is really bothering Israelis, the root of the troubles, is that Obama is not buying the discourse, the narrative.
Instead of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with little Israel against the jihadists, he’s talking of how a festering Middle East conflict ends up “costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.” Instead of Iran, Iran, Iran — the refrain here — he’s saying Iran, yes, but not at the expense of Palestine. Instead of Israeli security alone, he’s talking of “the vital national security interests of the United States” and their link to Israeli actions.
This amounts to a sea change. I don’t know if it will box Israel into a defensive corner or open new avenues, but I do know an uncritical U.S. embrace of Israel has led nowhere. For now, Israeli irritation is clear.
Before meeting Netanyahu, I spoke with Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. “We are the ones suffering most in terms of blood and treasure,” he told me, reprising the Obama line. “This is the difference, we are the ones that have to live through an agreement and survive afterward. Of course we want peace but not at the price of our existence.”
He dismissed as “totally false” the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict feeds an environment inimical to U.S. interests. On the contrary, he said, “We pay the price for defending U.S. values in this area.”
For Ayalon, the proximity talks with the Palestinians that the Obama administration is struggling to revive are a “waste of time” and should be replaced by direct talks without preconditions. As for Obama’s demands, believed to include a complete Israeli building freeze in Jerusalem, Ayalon said, “Any demand without a quid pro quo is a mistake. Why should the Palestinians negotiate if others negotiate for them?”
So here we are, 62 years on, negotiating about negotiations whose prospects of leading anywhere seem fantastically remote. I think Ayalon’s right about getting to the table, but peace involves embracing risk over fear, no getting around that, and with the Iranian nuclear program rumbling, Israelis look more risk-averse than I’ve ever seen them. Life’s not bad in affluent, barrier-bordered Israel even if threats loom.
The prime minister insists that he is ready to move forward, that he will not use the Iran threat as a delaying tactic, and that he and Obama respect each other’s intelligence.
What is imperative for him right now is that the United States and Israel talk to each other.
But about what exactly? The trauma of 9/11 bound the Israeli and American narratives. They have now begun to diverge with putative Palestine hanging in limbo between them.
Netanyahu amenable to Palestinian state within temporary borders: Haaretz
By Aluf Benn
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is amenable to an interim agreement in the West Bank that would include the establishment of a Palestinian state within temporary borders.
Netanyahu considers such an interim step a possible way to unfreeze the stalled political process that was created because of the Palestinian leadership’s refusal to resume talks on a final settlement. However, the prime minister insists on delaying discussion on the final status of Jerusalem to the end of the process, and refuses to agree to a freeze on Jewish construction in East Jerusalem.
Netanyahu and his aides have held intensive contacts in recent days with representatives of the U.S. administration in an effort to contain the crisis in the relations between the two countries.
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The prime minister will meet Friday with U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, who is visiting Jerusalem, and will continue talks that senior Israeli officials held with White House official Dan Shapiro. Mitchell met with Defense Minister Ehud Barak earlier Friday, and was to head to Ramallah later in the day for talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
There have been signals from the White House in recent days of a willingness to see an improvement in relations with Netanyahu. The signals included appeasing messages highlighting U.S. commitment to Israel’s security, and peaked with President Barack Obama’s Independence Day greeting. Senior aides to the president, including his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and National Security Adviser, General James Jones, also publicly expressed their support of the strong ties between the two countries.
Both public and private pronouncements of senior figures in the U.S. and Israel suggest that the formula for bringing an end to the crisis comprises a number of elements: advancing an interim stage and a Palestinian state within temporary borders; delaying the discussion on Jerusalem, with an Israeli commitment to avoid provocations; identifying the areas in which Netanyahu and Obama differ, with construction in East Jerusalem topping the list; and a certain American toughening of its attitude toward Iran and Syria.
General Jones said on Wednesday in a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a well known pro-Israeli forum, that the differences between Israel and the U.S. will be resolved as allies do. Jones called on both sides, Israel and the Palestinians, to avoid provocations such as Israeli activity in East Jerusalem and Palestinian incitement.
The formula of a Palestinian state within temporary borders was included in the second stage of the road map of 2003, but the Palestinians, and Mahmoud Abbas at their head, opposed it then and oppose it now, considering it a recipe for keeping Israeli occupation of the territories in place.
Three Israeli politicians – Defense Minister Ehud Barak, President Shimon Peres and MK Shaul Mofaz of Kadima – tried to advance the idea of a Palestinian state within temporary borders during the past year, as a reasonable recipe for breaking out of the current political stalemate that was created since elections in Israel. Netanyahu is now leading toward their view, after losing hope of moving toward a permanent settlement with Abbas.
If this initiative progresses, it is expected to result in objections from the parties on the right, who oppose any concession to the Palestinians. Establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank, or even a partial framework with temporary borders, will require Israel to withdraw from more territory and perhaps even evacuate settlements. But if the Palestinians reject the idea – as is expected – Netanyahu will be able to claim that they are once more missing an opportunity for a settlement by being stubborn and rejectionist.
In an interview to Udi Segal and Yonit Levy on Channel 2 Thursday, Netanyahu said “there will be no freeze in Jerusalem.” He said that “the peace process depends on one thing: removing preconditions to negotiations.”
Netanyahu warned that if Israel withdraws from Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, “Iran will be able to enter there,” as it did in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, “but this will be as part of a final settlement. Meanwhile they tell me that I cannot build and plan on French Hill.”
Netanyahu said that in his talks with Obama, “I tell him I can go with you on this – willing and able – but there are things I am not willing and do not do.”
He called on the U.S. not to wait for the UN Security Council and impose severe sanctions against Iran on its own. “We prefer that the U.S. lead the confrontation with Iran,” Netanyahu said, “but Israel always reserves the right to self-defense.”
US to resume talks with Israel despite Netanyahu’s refusal to halt settlements: The Guardian
George Mitchell to combine meeting with PM with trip to Ramallah to see Mahmoud Abbas
A Palestinian worker prays at the site of a new house-building project at the settlement of Har Homa in East Jerusalem. Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images
The US envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, will hold talks tomorrow with Binyamin Netanyahu, despite the Israeli prime minister’s formal rejection of White House demands for a freeze on Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem.
Both the US and the Palestinians are calling for a halt on construction as a precondition for a resumption of peace talks with Israel. But according to Israeli officials, Netanyahu wrote to Barack Obama at the weekend rejecting the demand.
Today Netanyahu told Israel’s Channel 2: “I am saying one thing. There will be no freeze in Jerusalem. There should be no preconditions to talks.”
Relations between Israel and the US sank to a new low last month after a tense meeting in Washington in which Obama gave Netanyahu an ultimatum to respond to US calls for a freeze.
After a lengthy delay that will have further irritated the White House, Netanyahu responded at the weekend, aides told Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal.
Tension between the US and Israel resulted in Mitchell putting on hold for a month his shuttle diplomacy between the Israelis and Palestinians. He arrived in Israel today and is due to resume diplomatic efforts tomorrow, combining his talks with Netanyahu with a trip to Ramallah to see the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said he hoped Mitchell would bring the right formula to allow indirect talks to start.
Although Netanyahu ruled out a halt on settlement-building, he was reported to have offered other proposals as concessions to the Palestinians. There was media speculation in Israel that Netanyahu may have publicly ruled out a freeze but will privately impose one.
Earlier this week General James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, expressed disappointment that direct negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians had not yet begun. He said it was “time to begin those negotiations and to put an end to excuses”.
Obama’s Middle East adviser, Dan Shapiro, is also in Israel, another sign that, in spite of the reported rejection by Netanyahu, negotiations are continuing behind the scenes.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Netanyahu, would not discuss the details of Israel’s talks with the US administration but he said: “We want this process to succeed and to see the restart of talks. We hope that this is possible soon.”
There have not been direct peace negotiations between the two sides since before Israel’s war in Gaza early last year.
Israel claims sovereignty over East Jerusalem, which it captured in the 1967 war and later annexed, and Netanyahu has insisted construction must continue there. Internationally, East Jerusalem is regarded as under Israeli military occupation and settlement on occupied land is illegal under international law.
“It is just impossible and unacceptable that people try to impress us that we should limit construction in Jerusalem,” said Benny Begin, a senior cabinet minister.
The US administration spent much of last year trying to convince Netanyahu to halt all settlement construction. Netanyahu refused and agreed only to a 10-month partial halt to construction in the West Bank – a moratorium which expires this autumn. Mitchell then spent many months trying to prepare indirect negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, but a day after an agreement on so-called “proximity talks” was announced, Israeli officials gave approval for 1,600 new homes in an East Jerusalem settlement during a visit by the US vice-president, Joe Biden. Biden condemned the decision and the indirect talks collapsed before they had begun.
Israel has yet to restore its relations with the US and a refusal by Netanyahu to halt East Jerusalem settlement building would only prolong the confrontation. However, the Wall Street Journal said Netanyahu would offer other incentives instead, including the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, the lifting of some checkpoints in the occupied West Bank and allowing some more goods to enter Gaza, despite the long Israeli economic blockade.
Several US officials have emphasised the importance for the US of progress in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Jones indicated this week that progress in the Middle East would help Washington curb Iranian nuclear ambitions. “Advancing this peace would … help prevent Iran from cynically shifting attention away from its failures to meet its obligations,” he said.
Israel has long argued that confronting Iran ought to be an international priority. But Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, this week resisted any suggestion that a peace agreement should be imposed on Israel and the Palestinians.
“Any attempt to force a solution on the parties without establishing the foundation of mutual trust will only deepen the conflict,” Lieberman told diplomats in Jerusalem.
Envoy’s troubles
A high point in the lives of Tony Blair and former US senator George Mitchell was their successful negotiation, against the odds, of the Northern Ireland peace process in 1997.
The two have worked together again for more than a year, trying to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mitchell as Barack Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East and Blair as the representative of the Quartet, comprising the US, UN, EU and Russia. Both are finding the Middle East harder to crack – so hard that for months there have been rumours on the diplomatic circuit that they have each considered quitting. However, Mitchell returned to the Middle East today for talks scheduled for to try tomorrow with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, trying to find a compromise that will open the way for peace talks.
Mitchell was appointed within days of Obama becoming president, a sign that the new administration saw the conflict as a priority. But it has proved slower and more frustrating than the administration had anticipated, with an Obama plan falling apart in September and talks deadlocked since then.
Mitchell’s success in Northern Ireland, the result of patiently listening to both sides and winning their trust, does not guarantee him respect these days in Washington or the Middle East. He has already been criticised publicly by Israelis and Palestinians as a flop. And he has been criticised too in DC, against a background of infighting between advisers from the White House and state department over the way forward, one of the reasons that fuelled rumours he might quit. Mitchell faced criticism in the early days in Northern Ireland too, particularly from the Unionists, but painstakingly kept on going, just as he is doing in the Middle East.
On the Charlie Rose programme in January, he recounted a story about a lecture he delivered in Israel a year before his appointment, telling of his involvement in Northern Ireland. Asked afterwards by a member of the audience about the length of the Northern Ireland conflict, Mitchell confirmed it had been 800 years. His questioner replied: “No wonder you settled, it’s such a recent argument.” Mitchell went on to say on the programme that it would be naive for anyone to expect an early resolution.
Access denied: Haaretz
By Amira Hass
Defining a Palestinian with a Gaza Strip address as a punishable infiltrator if he is found in the West Bank – as implied by a military order that has now gone into effect – is one more link in a chain of steps that Israel has taken, whose cumulative effect is to sever the Strip from Palestinian society as a whole.
Space limitations prevent listing more than a sampling of these measures here. But even looking at them in abridged form can serve as a reminder that one needs to analyze every regulation of the military occupation in the context of its predecessors and their implementation on the ground. Indeed, this is what the legal experts at the organization Hamoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual did when they warned against the ramifications of the new Order No. 1650 regarding Prevention of Infiltration (Amendment No. 2).
1972
The Israel Defense Forces permits Palestinians to move throughout the country (Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank), by means of a “general exit permit.” The hope in Israel is that economic integration will cause national aspirations to be forgotten. But the unintended result is freedom of movement for all Palestinians. For the first time since 1948, the Palestinians throughout Israel and the territories experience themselves as one people living within the same borders, under the same regime. Family ties, work ties, friendships and school ties – all are forged and renewed on both sides of the Green Line.
The general rule: The right of all Palestinians to freedom of movement is respected, aside from certain categories determined by the Israeli authorities.
1988-1989
The first intifada: A magnetic card, valid for one year, is introduced in the Gaza Strip for those who have security clearance to enter Israel. In the absence of checkpoints, it is relatively easy to get around this restriction.
1991
January 15, on the eve of the Gulf War: The general exit permit from the West Bank and Gaza Strip is cancelled. From now on individual permits are required.
Gazan students who are enrolled in studies in the West Bank do not receive permits to enter Israel, and cannot attend school. “Split” families (between the West Bank and Gaza) see each other less and less often, in the absence of permits.
The police conduct daily searches for Palestinian laborers in Israeli cities, and check whether they have valid permits for being in Israel (as the Worker’s Hotline organization discovers, people are frequently considered permit violators even if they are caught in a movie theater or a cafeteria, instead of at the workplace listed on the permit. Hundreds are arrested and fined, although generally the policy is easy to circumvent. Also, the policy is not enforced in East Jerusalem, and people are convinced that there is no need for a permit to stay in their religious, cultural, and economic capital.
Peace talks are launched at the Madrid Conference.
1993
March. A “general closure” is imposed on the territories (existing permits are revoked), after which the ban on leaving without individual permits is applied more stringently in East Jerusalem (which is why to this day West Bankers erroneously say that the actual closure policy began in March 1993).
September. The Declaration of Principles between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel stipulates that both sides recognize Gaza and the West Bank as a single territorial unit.
There is intensive construction at the northern exit of the Gaza Strip, which is transformed into a checkpoint that vets thousands of people a day. It is operated by the Civil Administration and the IDF. Other crossings in the Gaza Strip are shut down.
The closure becomes a permanent reality that exists to the present. The number of travel permits Israel grants changes occasionally, but the principle remains the same: Freedom of mobility is denied to all Palestinians, except for those who fall into in a number of categories that Israel determines (laborers, businessmen, patients, collaborators, Palestinian Authority officials, etc.)
1994
May. Civil powers in Gaza are transferred from Israel to the Palestinians. A partial solution to the problem of exit permits is found: Gazans depart through the Rafah crossing, travel from there to Jordan, and enter the West Bank via the Allenby Bridge. This solution is used mainly by students and people with families in the West Bank.
1995
October. The Interim Agreement (civil powers also transferred in the West Bank ). Clause 28 of the agreement stipulates that the Palestinians have the authority to change an address on the identity card, but the change must be reported to the Civil Administration.
1996
Contrary to what is stated in the Oslo Accords, Israeli officers from the Civil Administration inform Palestinians that a change of address from Gaza to the West Bank requires Israeli authorization. Authorization is granted only to some of those who apply for a change of address, based on unknown criteria.
1997
Gazans are barred from going abroad via the Allenby Bridge or from using it to enter the West Bank, without individual permits from Israel.
1999
October. A “safe passage” between Gaza and the West Bank is introduced along one southern route.
2000
End of September. The second intifada breaks out.
The safe passage is closed.
Israel bars Gazan students from attending school in the West Bank (the ban becomes clear retroactively, several years later).
Israel puts a freeze on change of addresses from Gaza to the West Bank.
2001
Entry into the Gaza Strip of anyone who is not Gazan is reduced to a minimum (mainly in cases of deaths of first-degree relatives).
2002
For the first time, the authorities declare Gazans in the West Bank to be illegal residents. Many are deported to Gaza having been incidentally discovered during IDF raids or when crossing checkpoints.
2004
November. Army forces raid an apartment in Bir Zeit, near Ramallah, arrest and deport to Gaza four engineering students.
2005
The “disengagement.” Gaza Strip crossings are declared “international” crossings.
2007
Departure from Gaza is permitted only in extreme humanitarian cases (and to those with connections in the PA).
For the first time since 1967, Israel institutes a permit giving permission to stay in the West Bank intended for Gazans in the West Bank (along the lines of the residence permit required of those who are in Israel). Many applications for the permit are declined. Thousands of Palestinians without permits are scared to go through internal West Bank checkpoints, lest they be caught and deported. They live like prisoners in their towns of residence.
2009
March. The state declares that Palestinians from Gaza are not entitled to live in the West Bank. This is done by means of a new regulation that comes to light through Hamoked petitions to the High Court of Justice. The state is willing to process applications to reside in the West Bank only for the following groups: chronically ill patients who can only be treated in the West Bank; minors under 16 with only one parent who lives in the West Bank, and who do not have a relative to look after them in the Gaza Strip; people over 65 who require nursing care and do not have a caregiver available in the Strip. All others – those who are healthy, not orphans, not solitary old people in need of nursing care – do not have the right to live in the West Bank.
2010
April. A military order goes into effect that defines anyone staying in the West Bank without a permit as an infiltrator and a punishable offender.
The environmental impact of Israeli military activities in the occupied Palestinian territory: IOA
Palestine – An often-overlooked factor in the field of sustainable development and resource management is the impact of the military on the environment and unfortunately this is no exception in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). Whilst there have been many studies and reports on the economic, social and political repercussions of the continued Israeli occupation, there has been scant attention paid to the detrimental effects on the environment from Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) activities and the military infrastructure which supports them. This is in no small part because of the lack of information provided by the Israeli authorities and the high level of secrecy surrounding the IOF. For example, whilst conducting research for this paper it was not possible to view any images of the military bases in the oPt post 2004 because all sources have been doctored to erase any evidence of their presence.
Nonetheless, this report will strive to provide a historical background and legal framework to the IOF presence in the oPt and assess some of the consequent environmental implications.
A historical perspective
With the routing of the Arab forces in June 1967 the Israelis began their illegal occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. During more than 40 years of occupation the Israelis have confiscated a considerable proportion of the territory in the oPt under the auspices of military needs. This is in addition to the extensive settlement developments which currently house around half a million illegal settlers in the oPt.
Israel has confiscated approximately 1000km2 of land to create closed military zones, which amounts to more than 20% of the West Bank territory. Excluding the areas that fall between the green line and the segregation barrier, Palestinians are barred entry to all of the military zones which are mainly on the eastern slopes of the Bethlehem and Hebron Governates in the Jordan Valley. In 2004 the Israeli authorities declared a buffer zone of 150-200 meters around the segregation zone resulting in an additional 252km2 of territory becoming inaccessible to Palestinians. Map 1 on the following page illustrates how the closed military zones compromise large chunks of the eastern west bank and strategic areas along the green line.
In these lands reside some of the most vulnerable Palestinian communities including large numbers of small scale herding farming communities. As well as severely impacting upon the livelihoods of these communities it is also forcing them to overgraze on their diminished territories leading to desertification of the terrain. According to recent research by OCHA the expansion of existing military zones or the creation of new ones continues. In May 2009 over 300 people, including 170 children, were issued with evacuation and demolition orders because of the expansion of the Israeli military zones in the West Bank[i].
________________________________________
[i] Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA, Occupied Palestinian Territories – Humanitarian Update, May 2009 (17 June 2009): n. pag. Web. 13 Jan 2010.
Read the Full Report HERE
Source: ARIJ (Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem)
UMD – POICA project
Netanyahu isn’t, and never will be, a true leader: Haaretz
By Yoel Marcus
“Dear Mr. Prime Minister, I have known you for 14 years. Time after time, I believed you. But something very bad has happened this year. Your time is running out; this is your last chance. You must put an end to the occupation.” Thus wrote Ari Shavit in an open letter to Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu that appeared in Haaretz’s holiday supplement. I don’t know what my colleague was expecting of Bibi, who in their 14-year-long acquaintance, and despite Shavit’s considerable support for him, has never heeded the authoritative advice he heaped upon the politician in his columns.
I have known Netanyahu for more than 14 years, from back when he would invite journalists to a restaurant and then forget to pay the bill. I knew him when he was Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. At the time he was planning his return to Israel and insinuation into the Likud leadership. He selected me, as one of the political correspondents he called from New York, in order to choose the right time to return to Israel and join the top ranks of Likud, with an eye to succeeding Yitzhak Shamir as prime minister.
As a political strategist, his timing was right. He was appointed deputy foreign minister, and later on deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, under Shamir. Netanyahu defeated Shimon Peres in the 1996 election, which was conducted against the background of frequent terror attacks. His campaign slogan promised to achieve “secure peace.” I especially remember a lunch at the Sheraton Hotel in which he tried to persuade me that he had to watch his words in order not to lose Likud voters. “But after I’m elected,” he promised me, “even Haaretz will be pleased with me.” As time progressed it became clear that he did not back any of his words with actions. The “secure peace” slogan became fodder for “Hahartzufim,” the Israeli version of the British satirical television show “Spitting Image.” This was the period in which Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef referred to Netanyahu as “a blind goat.”
We will not recount here Netanyahu’s conduct during his first term as prime minister. In addition to failing as a leader, he was seen by perceptive observers to have a tendency to panic. Fears of a second attack on Iraq by the United States under President George H.W. Bush were kindled, and he ordered the replacement of the gas masks issued to all Israelis. It was Ariel Sharon (who was national infrastructures minister at the time) who told me in utter confidence that “the prime minister asked to examine the possibility of using a weapon type that must remain nameless.” Sharon called Rafael “Raful” Eitan, and “the two old warriors,” as he called them, warned Bibi that if he merely asked what and how, “we won’t have it any more.” The implication is clear.
In addition, Netanyahu came very close to being tried in the Bar-On-Hebron affair, and was saved from shame by attorney general Elyakim Rubinstein’s sharp speech in his defense. Netanyahu was roundly defeated by Ehud Barak in the election. When the results became known, Bibi extinguished his big Cuban cigar in a dish of delicacies prepared by the Hilton Hotel for his headquarters and resigned from the Knesset, and even his close aides said that he had left the country in a fix, inside and out.
Why do I mention these events? To emphasize that politicians of his kind never change. Were he to have undergone that same kind of philosophical revolution as Ariel Sharon, to wean himself of the dream of a Greater Israel, Likud would not have split up and he would be Sharon’s heir today. A year after his comeback, however, he has been revealed as a leader without an agenda, other than survival, not to go too much toward the extreme right, in order to maintain relations with the United States.
So he used a certain phrase in his speech at Bar-Ilan University about two states for two peoples, but there’s been no trace of that since. He must have seen the statistical data published last week showing that one out of every four Israelis today is Arab. In a generation or two, we will pay a very heavy price for not leaping at the opportunity offered by a strong American president like Barack Obama who wants to build a Middle East of sane people.
Bibi remembers an America where presidents could be pressured through Jewish public opinion and the Congress. At his bidding, Ron Lauder, Elie Wiesel and others volunteered to bring pressure to bear on the president through newspaper advertisements and public appearances. Bibi himself went to war in a series of interviews to U.S. television networks, saying that freezing construction in East Jerusalem was impossible. And so the issue of Jerusalem, which was supposed to wait until the end under all circumstances, was placed at the very beginning by Avigdor Lieberman, Eli Yishai and Bibi.
Bibi is deluding himself that Obama will not be reelected. But even in the three years remaining in his first term the president can impose uncomfortable sanctions on Israel – a step that should scare Israel more than Iran. Bibi has not yet grasped that what the U.S. administration wants is a change to the composition of the ruling coalition in Israel. So long as Bibi does not replace Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas with Kadima, there is no chance of moving in any direction. It was in vain that my colleague wrote him an impassioned letter asking him to show leadership. It surprises me that he was unable to see that he does not have it. Netanyahu was not a leader during his first term and he is not a leader now. He is simply incapable of being one.
Raja Shehadeh looks forward to Palfest: The Guardian
‘We try to keep going, hosting literary festivals and getting on with our lives’
On 1 May the third Palestine festival of literature will bring international authors to Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron and Jenin, and, hopefully, to besieged Gaza. Last year both the opening and closing sessions in Jerusalem were met by an order from the Israeli minister of internal security prohibiting “any such meeting from taking place in the Hakawati theatre in Jerusalem or at any other place within the borders of the state of Israel”. Authors with “suspicious” names or the wrong colour skin met with long delays at border crossings.
Yet despite these hitches the festival was a great success. It held different sessions in the various universities around the West Bank and, with the guidance of such writers as Henning Mankell and Michael Palin, exercises in play writing and directing at local theatres. My own mission was less technical: I was asked to take the visiting authors for a walk in the hills around Ramallah, where I live. Whether or not they knew what they were up against, I couldn’t be sure.
Over the years I must have taken hundreds of walks down this valley northwest of Ramallah towards the village of A’yn Qenya. Going on a walk with a few companions is one matter, but taking dozens of writers with varying experience of walking over terrain as rough and stony as ours is quite another.
I spent days planning a walk that wouldn’t be too arduous and would not attract the attention of the new guardians of the hills, the Israeli settlers and soldiers stationed on hilltops, from which they can observe the valleys now surrounded by 12 Jewish settlements.
At a festival panel in Ramallah, the architect and author Suad Amery explained: “To be Palestinian now means never to feel at home, because you have no control over time or space. A mere 20-mile journey might consume a whole day, depending on the checkpoints and the whim of the soldiers you encounter. You can live a lifetime in one place and yet not master its geography: routes long-familiar will suddenly be blocked off by barriers of checkpoints.”
Most of the walking trails, though they have been used for centuries, are now being destroyed by Israeli settlement building. They were formed by the work of nature – through the chance path of a raindrop impregnated with traces of acid falling on limestone – causing hairline cracks that in time turned into runnels and eventually footpaths. In the higher terraces closer to Ramallah fossilised corals can still be seen, making it possible for the onlooker to imagine how these upper regions formed a reef, below which water once filled the valley. The land is like an open book on which nature and humans continuously write. But over the past four decades Israeli settlers have been sedulously writing their own script, causing tremendous destruction to the natural beauty of these hills.
In the 1970s Ariel Sharon declared his policy was to create a new map of the area. Tons of concrete have been poured to level hills in order to build settlements and roads that have changed forever the character of this ancient land. To secure the hastily built illegal structures barbed wire, watch-towers and walls have been erected, making a simple walk in these hills a challenge, requiring courage and patience. The possibility of a violent encounter with the army or the Jewish settlers is never too remote.
Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the hills and valleys around Ramallah have been designated “Area C”, and in order to enter it, a permit is required from the military.
There were around 40 authors participating in the walk down the valley close to Ramallah. It was a warm, clear May day, and we started our trip through Area C by bus on the road just recently made accessible to Palestinians, though still criss-crossed by districts under direct Israeli control. To our right, I pointed out the ruin of Yad Yair, one of the so-called outposts that the Israeli army had removed in September 2008, provoking violent protests from settlers who burned 200 olive trees in a nearby Palestinian village to restore what they called “the balance of terror”.
How could I communicate to my fellow writers the pain I felt at the sight of this small area of levelled ground where a freight container had been used as a synagogue by the settlers, who came every morning from Dolev to pray there, thus blocking our right to drive down this road and walk through the valley? These few acres of newly decreed “holy ground” so close to our city acted as a stopper placed on the northwest of Ramallah. Not only was passage through the road leading to the villages north of Ramallah prohibited, no buildings were allowed to be constructed in the lands on this side of the city. It became the town’s new boundary.
“The settlers have their own network of roads (which Palestinians are not allowed to use),” Palin wrote on his return to Britain, “their own water and electricity resources and the right to carry arms in defence of their homes. In all aspects of their everyday life the Palestinians are made to feel inferior. Power is wielded by the gun, the watchtower, the arbitrary search, and ultimately by the separation wall which breaks up centuries-old communities and cuts farmers off from their lands. This isn’t security, it’s conquest.”
We left the bus just under the hill where the army camped for the past 14 years before relocating to a nearby watchtower. Once in the valley, we could relax and begin our walk. Claire Messud described it in an article in the Boston Globe: “We scrambled up rocks among terraced olive groves to a stone shepherd’s hut, from which we could see the green and gold hills interlaced to the horizon. We picked our way along a dry riverbed, surprising a tortoise, and on to a small village, where a mangy donkey gazed balefully from its tether and ruddy-faced children demonstrated their tree-climbing prowess.”
This baleful donkey is one of a contingent that used to be in high demand in this village, which until recently has not had running water. It was now enjoying a well-earned retirement. Our weary authors refused to climb any more hills; the day was getting too hot. Had we gone further we would have been within sight of the army who might have asked us for the permit to be in Area C, which we simply did not have. At the festival’s closing celebration the defiance was more pronounced. Despite the Israeli police order, the British consulate decided to allow an event to take place at the beautiful garden of the British Council in East Jerusalem. International writers who participate in Palfest are standing up to Israeli intransigence: a walk in the hills is a small return for their solidarity.
We Palestinians try to keep going, walking in the hills, hosting festivals and getting on as best we can with our lives. As Messud has observed: “What is a world where you cannot go for walk, cannot assemble to read and discuss literature in public, cannot be certain of visiting your grandmother in a neighbouring city? What is a world where you cannot lose your temper, cannot laugh in the wrong place? For us, the French and British consulates opened their doors; but they can’t always do so for the Palestinians.”
If our leaders can’t talk …: Haaretz
By Hillel Schenker
During the height of the Cold War, in the early 1980s, when tens of thousands of Europeans were demonstrating in the streets against the possibility of a nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers – in the wake of the American plan to place cruise and Pershing nuclear-warhead bearing missiles in Europe – a small group of American and Soviet cardiologists led by Dr. Bernard Lown and Dr. Evgeny Chazov founded what became International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Because of its efforts to promote civil society dialogue between Americans and Russians about the nuclear danger, and its educational work, IPPNW was awarded the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for its “considerable service to mankind by spreading authoritative information and in creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare.”
There are times when civil society has to take the initiative when government leaders are unable or unwilling to do so. Indeed, today, with tensions rising between Israel and Iran, while Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad imagines “a world without Zionism” and says Tehran will react strongly to any possible Israeli attack, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares that “the world is indifferent to Iranian statements about Israel” and is not doing enough to stop Iran’s nuclear program – it is time to talk, before it is too late.
Since there are no signs that the Israeli and Iranian governments are interested in talking with each other, and civil society has to take up the challenge, just as American and Soviet physicians did in 1980.
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Such dialogues between members of Israeli and Iranian civil society have been taking place, quietly, in recent years in such forums as the conferences in Amman of both Global Majority, an international initiative to promote nonviolent conflict resolution, and the Middle East Citizens Assembly, an organization that works to advance individual citizens’ rights, tolerance and mutual understanding in the region, as well as in other venues and frameworks.
I have no illusions that at this moment in history, members of Iranian civil society will be capable of entering into such a dialogue with Israelis. However, Iranian-born academics living in the West, who are in touch with the realities of their native country, can do so. That is how the recent dialogue between Israelis and Syrians began, with the participation of Syrian-American businessman Ibrahim Suleiman.
An Iranian-born political scientist, Prof. Anoushiravan Ehteshami, recently participated in a written exchange with Israelis and others on “A Nuclear Free Zone in the Middle East: Realistic or Idealistic?” in the Palestine-Israel Journal, and two other Iranian-born scholars took part together with Israelis and others in a conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London last month, on the same topic. A similar conference will be held in Jerusalem on May 10, to bring the discussion home to the Middle East, the eye of the storm and focal point of fears about nuclear proliferation. It will also be intended to provide input to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which will be taking place at the same time in New York.
The level of anxiety in both Israeli and Iranian societies is growing, and there are many mutual misconceptions. Can anyone find an authentic quote in which Ahmadinejad actually threatened to attack Israel? Does Israel really intend to attack Iran?
Dr. Moshe Vered of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University recently published a paper entitled “The length and conditions for ending a future war between Iran and Israel.” He noted that the Iran-Iraq war went on for eight years, and the Iranians’ willingness to sacrifice many lives would make a potential Iran- Israel war very prolonged and difficult to end. The clear conclusion to be drawn from reading the paper is that such a war would have catastrophic consequences for both peoples.
Israel and Iran were once allies. Even though much water has run through the Straits of Tiran and of Hormuz since then, doesn’t that suggest that there are some fundamental common interests between the two nations, which one day may be revived? Many members of Iranian society are not happy with the current regime, to put it mildly, and they long to rejoin the international community.
Constructive dialogue between members of Israeli and Iranian civil societies can only help to promote positive change, while reducing the tensions, for the benefit of both peoples – even if it doesn’t yield immediate fruits.
What does it say in Ecclesiastes 3:1-15? There’s “A time to be silent, and a time to speak.”
Shouldn’t this be a time for Israelis and Iranians to speak to each other?
Hillel Schenker is co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal (www.pij.org).
The logic of power: Al Ahram
Obama’s foreign policy is dominated by Iran and therefore by Israel, deduces Graham Usher in New York
Whatever the practical impact of the Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) held in Washington last week, it consecrated one fact: the emergence of a distinctly Barack Obama foreign policy free from the Iraq and Afghan legacies of his predecessor George W Bush.
The “cornerstone” of that policy is a revamped Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT), says Obama. It’s driven by his belief that the “single biggest threat” to American and global security is potential “nuclear terrorism” by groups like Al-Qaeda and/or proliferation by “outlier” states that, like North Korea, have abandoned the NPT or, like Iran, are in alleged violation of it or, like Syria, are impugned to have “nuclear ambitions” beyond it.
The fear of a nuclear armed Iran pervades all parts of the policy. Prior to the NSS Obama unveiled the so-called Nuclear Posture Review (NPR): a new strategy document where the United States pledges to reduce its nuclear arsenal, refrain from nuclear testing and ever-so-slightly narrow the circumstances in which it would go to nuclear war. But the key warning is to Tehran.
The US “will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons’ states that are party to the NPT and in compliance with their non-proliferation obligations”, says the document, even were those states to attack it with biological and/or chemical weapons.
The flip side of course is the US could use nuclear arms against non-nuclear weapons’ states like Iran that are in alleged NPT violation, even were they not to attack the US. This at least is how the clause was read by Iran.
“Such inflammatory statements … are tantamount to nuclear blackmail against a non-nuclear weapon state signatory to the” NPT, railed Mohammed Khazaee, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. He called on the UN to “strongly oppose (this) threat of the use of nuclear weapons”.
The uninvited Iran likewise dominated the NSS. While the 47 participant countries agreed non-binding vows to lockdown “loose” nuclear materials within four years, Obama met Chinese President Hu Jintao in the wings. Hu finally agreed to join discussions on a possible fourth round of UN Security Council sanctions against Iran without, however, making any pledge to support them.
Not surprisingly — the differences between the two global powerhouses are wide. The US wants a new UNSC resolution hard enough to deter Iran from going for any nuclear weapons capability, with sanctions on its energy, shipping, financial, arms and Islamic Revolutionary Guard sectors.
China — and to a lesser extent Russia — want sanctions so mild they leave untouched their immense economic and military ties to the Islamic Republic. Both countries raised objections to “pretty much” everything in the US-drafted sanctions resolution, said one diplomat.
The outcome is likely to be a resolution stronger than previous rounds but not as strong as the US, Britain, France and Germany would wish. For now that probably will do. The importance of the resolution was “less the specific content than the isolation of Iran by the rest of the world,” said US Defence Secretary Robert Gates on 14 April.
It was partially to break out of that isolation that Iran held its own international conference on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation in Tehran on 16-17 April. Entitled “nuclear energy for everyone, nuclear weapons for no one” it was a rejoinder to the NPR and sanctions discussions.
But it was also a dress rehearsal for the NPT review conference in New York next month, which Iran will attend, together with 200 other governments, overwhelmingly non-nuclear and non-aligned.
There Tehran will make one fundamental charge: the “double standards” of Western nuclear armed states sanctioning a non-nuclear armed state and NPT signatory like Iran while doing little to cut their own nuclear arsenals and granting billions in military aid to India, Pakistan and Israel, all three non-NPT signatories and currently expanding their nuclear weapons production. Iran will also revive the call for a nuclear-weapons free Middle East.
Both calls will resonate. That is why Obama’s signature foreign policy of isolating Iran has become increasingly tied to attempts to revive a Middle East peace process.
At the NSS he became only the latest American leader to underscore how failure to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict hurt US interests in the region. “It is a vital national security interest of the US to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower,” he said. “And when conflicts break out, one way or another, we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”
He also made the even rarer utterance of mentioning Israel and the NPT in the same breath. “Whether we’re talking about Israel or any other country, we think becoming part of the NPT is important.”
For the American president the logic is unassailable: isolating Iran requires Arab support and Arab support requires progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which now hinges on Israel halting settlement in occupied East Jerusalem.
For the current Israeli government the logic is the reverse: peace will be possible, if at all, only after “the West” has removed the threat posed by Iran. As for nuclear disarmament, that will never be possible.
Pro-American Arab states are obliged to watch this struggle for influence in the region like extras in their own historical drama. For their peoples only one thing will count: the seriousness with which the US goes about containing the alleged nuclear ambitions of Iran will be measured by the seriousness with which it contains Israel’s actual colonisation of the Arab occupied territories.
Abbas to Obama: Impose Mideast peace solution: Haaretz
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged the Obama administration on Saturday to impose a solution to the Middle East conflict that would give his people an independent state.
“Mr. President [Barack Obama] and members of the American administration, since you believe in this [an independent Palestinian state], it is your duty to take steps toward a solution and to impose this solution,” Abbas said in a speech.
Abbas made the remarks to members of his Fatah party in the West Bank city of Ramallah a day after talks there with Obama’s Middle East envoy. George Mitchell is in the region to try to revive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
“We’ve asked them [the Obama administration] more than once: ‘Impose a solution,'” Abbas said.
Abbas also rejected the establishment of a Palestinian state within temporary borders, an idea he said was recently proposed for restarting peace talks.
In his speech, Abbas referred to recent proposals – apparently from Israel – for a temporary state but did not elaborate. Frankly, we will not accept the state with temporary borders, because it is being offered these days, he said.
He said the Palestinians were being asked to take a state with provisional borders on 40 or 50 percent, and after that we will see.
Abbas aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh denied that Israel officially raised the idea.
However, a Palestinian academic said Israel offered Abbas such a state on more than 50 percent of the West Bank. The academic said he served as a go-between for the two sides and spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters.
A Palestinian state with provisional borders is part of the U.S.-backed road map peace plan as an interim step toward full independence.
Mitchell told Israel and the Palestinians on Friday that Obama wants a comprehensive peace deal to be a reality soon and not in some vague and distant future time.
Pressing both sides to end a 16-month suspension of negotiations, Obama wants “proximity talks” on a deal to start within weeks. He has said peace is a vital strategic interest of the United States as it battles Islamic militants abroad.
Abbas’ appeal to Obama came amid widespread media reports that the U.S. president was considering floating a proposal that would set the contours of a final peace deal.
Any such move would likely be opposed by Israel, which says only negotiations can secure a final settlement to the conflict.
Report: Netanyahu agrees to new gestures toward Abbas
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, to remove several roadblocks in the West Bank, and to ease the blockade on the Gaza Strip, as a series of gestures towards Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the London-based Arabic Language news agency Al-Hayat reported on Saturday.
During his meeting with United States special Mideast envoy Mitchell on Friday, Netanyahu also agreed to enable the Palestinian Authority to act in Area C, which contains most Israeli settlements, in the West Bank.
However, Netanyahu refused the U.S. demand to freeze construction in East Jerusalem as well as the request to return all territories classified as Area C in the West Bank to PA control, Al-Hayat reported.
The West Bank was divided in 1995 into Areas A, B and C, in accordance with an Israeli-Palestinian interim agreement. More than 70,000 Palestinians live in Area C, which according to the Oslo Accord gives Israel full civilian and military control of the area.
Palestinian sources quoted by the London-based paper said that, despite the new gestures, Abbas rejected Netanyahu’s recent offer to establish a Palestinian state within temporary borders on over 60 percent of West Bank territories, as he believed that the offer was an attempt to drag him into sterile negotiations in order to perpetuate the PA as a temporary borders.
Israeli and American officials reportedly conveyed the offer to Abbas, while President Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Ehud Barak both attempted to convince the U.S. that this was the only way to prevent a continuous Middle East conflict, Al-Hayat reported.
Six decades of dispossession: Al Ahram
Founded on ethnic cleansing, erasing the Palestinians remains the modus operandi of the state of Israel, writes Khaled Amayreh in the West Bank
With a strange combination of self- righteousness and self-gratification, Israel this week celebrated its 62nd anniversary. Using skilfully fabricated sound bites, Israeli leaders sought to deflect blame for the lingering conflict with the Palestinians and the stalemated political process, invoking the old mantras about the Jewish homeland and the miraculous establishment of Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel was extending one hand towards peace while the other was holding a sword in self-defence. Meanwhile, Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders used the occasion to assert Israel’s determination to continue to build settlements on occupied Palestinian land, including in occupied East Jerusalem.
“We are a peace seeking nation that prays for peace,” he said.
Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, also claimed that Israel wanted peace: “On this blessed occasion, I want to say in the name of the state of Israel at large: We don’t seek war. We are a nation that yearns for peace, but knows, and will always know, how to defend ourselves.”
Peres’s words came less than 24 hours after one Israeli official warned that Israel would “send [Syria] back to the Stone Age” in any military confrontation. Israel continues to occupy the Syrian Golan Heights taken in 1967.
Overlooking Israel’s decades-old repressive occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as last year’s relentless campaign against the Gaza Strip, Israeli leaders tried to draw a rosy picture of a state that stands falsely accused by extremists in the international community. Meanwhile, though singing the praises of Israeli democracy, the rampant discrimination against Israel’s Palestinian citizens — who make up more than a quarter of Israel’s population — was equally ignored.
Last week, Israel announced plans that would lead to the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and places of residence in the West Bank. The plans were viewed by most Palestinians, including the Western-backed Palestinian Authority (PA), as a revival of the policy of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians — the policy upon which Israel’s existence was founded.
Some Palestinian officials argue privately that despite 62 years since Israel’s creation in Palestine, ethnic cleansing remains Israel’s ultimate if undeclared strategy towards the Palestinians, both in Israel proper and the territories occupied in 1967. Israeli officials deny the charges. However, Israeli behaviour on the ground fully vindicates the Palestinian view.
In East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally declared part of its “eternal and undivided capital,” Israeli authorities have continued meticulous efforts aimed at emptying the town of its non-Jewish inhabitants. There are nearly half-a-million Palestinians living in Jerusalem and its vicinities.
Similarly, Jewish settler thugs, often in tacit coordination with the occupation army, are stepping up attacks on and acts of vandalism against Palestinian villagers, especially in areas adjacent to Jewish settlements. This week, several Arab cars were torched and a mosque desecrated in the Nablus region, apparently by gangs from nearby settlements.
What is more alarming about these Jewish terrorist attacks against Palestinians is that the attacks do not come in response to Palestinian resistance, but rather as a “price tag” in response to half-hearted efforts by the Israeli government to partially freeze settlement expansion in response to American pressure.
Israel’s Independence Day ceremonies saw Israeli leaders reiterating familiar rejections of any equitable resolution to the enduring conflict with the Palestinians, such as the creation of a viable and territorially contiguous Palestinian state. At the same time, the majority of Israelis reject the idea of annexing the West Bank into Israel, fearing that Israel would lose its Jewish identity as a result.
Some Israeli leaders, such as Moshe Yaalon, former army chief of staff who now holds the post of minister of strategic affairs, say openly that the war of 1948 has not really ended. In interview this week with the rightwing Israeli paper, The Jerusalem Post, Yaalon suggested that Israel would first have to achieve total victory over the Arabs before contemplating a lasting solution.
Like Netanyahu, Yaalon is frustrated that many Europeans and Americans have come to view the Israeli occupation as the cause of instability in the Middle East. The problem, Yaalon suggests, is “Jihadi Islam”.
On the other hand, Yaalon — who epitomises the current Israeli government view — doesn’t reject the concept of a Palestinian state outright, so long as this state doesn’t encompass East Jerusalem or lead to the dismantlement of Jewish colonies in the West Bank. “I don’t care, then, if they would call it a state or even an empire,” he said.
For the current Israeli leadership, the “neutralisation” of the “Iranian threat” is taken as a precondition for any progress on the Palestinian front. Israel is widely believed to possess 200- 300 nuclear warheads. Overemphasis of the Iranian “threat” is seen by many as a “red herring” aimed at retaining Israeli military supremacy and hegemony in the region.
Indeed, most Palestinian and Arab observers dismiss the Israeli “Iran scare” as a mere a “tactical trick” aimed at disposing of any potential foe in order to further enhance Tel Aviv’s manoeuvrability on the Palestinian issue. In other words, Israel wants to strip the Palestinians and Arabs of real or potential assets while delaying as long as possible the quest for a lasting solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict.
IDF fires at group of demonstrators on Gaza border: Haaretz
The IDF opened fire Saturday on a group of demonstrators that approached the security fence on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
The IDF reported that one Palestinian was wounded while Palestinian sources reported that six people were wounded, including one in serious condition. According to the Palestinian reports, the demonstrators were unarmed.
The Palestinians reported that a foreign activist Bianca Zammit was shot in the leg.
“They had no reason to shoot us. We posed no threat to them whatsoever,” Zammit told AP Television News from a hospital bed.
The demonstrators were protesting what they call “the IDF’s intention to create a security buffer zone around the Gaza Strip.”
Israel has declared areas of Gaza near its border to be no-go zones, citing security concerns. Palestinian militants frequently approach the border fence to try to plant explosives. However, the order also keeps Palestinian farmers from their fields.
In recent months, farmers and foreign supporters have frequently marched
toward the border to protest the restrictions.
An IDF official told Army Radio that troops were called to the area to disperse a group of several dozen Palestinian demonstrators approaching the fence and fired into the air after demanding the demonstrators leave the area.
When the demonstrators still did not disperse, soldiers fired toward the lower part of their bodies.
The incident in Gaza comes a day after an Israeli protester was injured after being hit in the forehead with a teargas canister during a weekly protest against Israel’s West Bank security fence in Bil’in
Who will protect Palestinians from growing settler extremism?: Haaretz
By Lisa Goldman
Last week in Hawara, a town near Nablus, someone defaced a mosque with spray paint. The graffiti included Hebrew writing and a Star of David. Residents of a Jewish settlement nearby had vandalized Palestinian property in Hawara on previous occasions, so both the Israel Defense Forces and the Palestinian villagers accused settlers of committing the latest crime. Israel’s official position is that it is a deserving, ecumenically-minded custodian of religious sites of all faiths, so the IDF Spokesman was quick to issue a condemnation and promise an investigation.
The defacing of mosques in the West Bank is relatively rare – “only” four incidents were brought to the attention of Yesh Din, an Israeli NGO that monitors law enforcement in the West Bank, over the past five years. But destruction of Palestinian property and acts of violence against Palestinian civilians occur frequently, often several times per week. Over the past few months, they have become more frequent and more violent. Many of these incidents are known as “price tag” operations, whereby settlers destroy Palestinian property as a response to the IDF’s having dismantled an illegal outpost. The settlers, say West Bank field workers for various NGOs, are becoming bolder.
The more egregious acts of settler violence are reported in the Israeli media, although rarely with prominence, but most incidents fail to attract the attention of the major news outlets at all – because they occur so frequently that they have become unremarkable, because most Israelis are numb to these stories, and because Palestinians are increasingly reluctant to file a police complaint. Why bother to enlist the help of the police when, as Yesh Din has documented, more than 90 percent of legal cases involving settler violence end with their being closed due to “lack of evidence”?
When Jews, Muslims and Christians deface one another’s holy sites or places of worship, the story is reported widely by the Western media – especially when the culprits are members of the group backed by military and political might, as is the case of the Jewish settlers in the Palestinian-majority West Bank. And so the story of the defaced Hawara mosque was reported widely in major news outlets, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, with accompanying photos. But the chances of the perpetrators being arrested and put on trial are very slight. In the cases of the four mosques previously vandalized, allegedly by settlers, two investigations are officially ongoing, and two have been closed for lack of evidence.
Lior Yavne, Yesh Din’s research director, says that investigations into complaints filed against settlers by Palestinians fail for a number of reasons. The civil police of Judea and Samaria are understaffed and underfunded. Jewish suspects are almost never included in police lineups. The police frequently fail to verify the alibis of Jews, or to make arrests.
Investigations fail to result in convictions even when eyewitnesses provide accurate descriptions of Jewish suspects seen at or fleeing the scene, holding incriminating evidence – as in a case reported earlier this month by the Jerusalem Post’s Dan Izenberg. According to the April 6 article, a settler from Kedumim was caught by police last summer, fleeing a burning Palestinian orchard while holding a jerrican filled with flammable liquid, and with the smell of the liquid on his hands. The suspect refused to answer police questions during interrogation; and less than a year later, the courts dismissed the case for “lack of evidence.” Michael Sfard, Yesh Din’s legal advisor, described the court’s decision as “scandalous.”
Palestinian villages are increasingly unprotected by the IDF, which does provide extensive protection for Jewish settlements. At the same time, however, Palestinians are not allowed to possess weapons; the IDF arrests people caught with knives or guns in their possession. Settlers, on the other hand, are permitted by law to carry weapons.
Meanwhile, the IDF is acting according to increasingly draconian orders to suppress non-violent demonstrations against the occupation that are organized and led by grassroots Palestinian movements. Leaders of popular resistance organizations are dragged from their beds during night raids, arrested and jailed – often indefinitely. The villages in which demonstrations take place on Friday mornings have been declared closed military zones. Those who violate the army’s orders and come out to demonstrate are regularly shot at with rubber bullets, doused with skunk gas, beaten and arrested.
For Palestinians in the West Bank, the sense of helplessness and frustration must be enormous. When they are attacked, they can almost never hope for justice within the framework of the legal system. Nor are they allowed to defend themselves. Nor can they expect the IDF to protect them. And even when they protest these injustices using nonviolent methods – marching, chanting and waving flags – they are punished with arrests and violence, with dehumanizing skunk gas and beatings. So what happens when there is no legal recourse or justice for the injured and no real civic structure, and when the moderates are systematically crushed? Surely these are the ideal psychological circumstances that make people vulnerable to the beckoning finger of extremism.
Lisa Goldman is a freelance journalist and blogger, and a social media consultant for Yesh Din.
“Sowing hate and reaping death” – The words of Rami Elhanan on the eve of Alternative Remembrance Day of Combatants for Peace.
18 April 2010
Shalom and good evening.
My name is Rami Elhanan. Thirteen years ago, on the afternoon of Thursday the fourth of September 1997, I lost my daughter, my Smadar, in a suicide attack on Ben-Yehuda street in Jerusalem. A beautiful sweet joyous 14 year old girl. My Smadar was the granddaughter of the militants for peace, General (Ret.) Matti Peled, one of those who made the breakthrough to Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. And she was murdered because we were not wise enough to preserve her safety in Matti’s way, the only correct and possible way – the way of peace and reconciliation.
I do not need a Remembrance Day in order to remember Smadari. I remember her all the time, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, 60 seconds a minute. Without a pause, without a rest, for 13 long and accursed years now, and time does not heal the wound, and the unbearable lightness of continuing to exist remains a strange and unsolved riddle …
But Israeli society very much needs Remembrance Days. From year to year, like clockwork, in the week after Passover, it is drawn into the annual ritual: from Holocaust to the Rebirth of the nation, a sea of ceremonies, sirens and songs – an entire people is swept into a whirlpool of addictive sweet sorrow, eyes tearful and shrouded; mutual embraces accompanied by “Occupation songs” and sickle and sword songs [1] against the background of images of lives that were cut short and heart-rending stories … and it is
hard to avoid the feeling that this refined concentration of bereavement, fed directly into the vein, is intended to fortify our feeling of victimhood, the justice of our path and our struggle, to remind us of our catastrophes, which God forbid we should forget for a single moment. This is the choice of our lives – to be armed and ready, strong and resolute, lest the sword fall from our grasp and our lives be cut short.[2]
And when all this great sorrow is dispersed with the smoke of the barbeques, [3] when Israelis return to their daily routines, I am left enveloped in great sorrow. I miss the old good Land of Israel that never existed, and I have feelings of alienation and estrangement that keep increasing with the passage of years, from war to war, from election to election, from corruption to corruption.
And I think about the stations of my life, on the long journey that I have taken on my way to a redefinition of myself, of my Israeliness, of my Jewishness and of my humanity. About the light-years that I have travelled, from the young man who 37 years ago fought in a pulverized tank company, on the other side of the Suez Canal, from the young father who 28 years ago walked the streets of bombed Beirut, and it did not at all occur to me that things could be otherwise. I was a pure product of a cultural-educational and political system that brainwashed me, poisoned my consciousness and prepared me and others of my generation for sacrifice on the altar of the homeland, without any superfluous questions, in the innocent belief that if we did not do it, they would throw us – the second generation after the Holocaust – into the Mediterranean Sea.
Nearly 40 years have passed since then, and every year this armour of victimhood continues to crack. The self-righteousness and the feeling of wretchedness keep dissipating, and the wall that separates me from the other side of the story keeps crumbling.
When Yitzhak Frankenthal recruited me to the Bereaved Families Forum 12 years ago, for the first time in my life I was exposed to the very existence of the other side – to this day I am ashamed to say that for the first time in my life (I was 47) I encountered Palestinians as normal human beings, very much like me, with the same pain, the same tears and the same dreams. For the first time in my life I was exposed to the story, the pain and the anger, and also to the nobility and the humanity of what is called “the
other side.”
The climax of that journey was the meeting between me and my brother, the “terrorist” who spent seven years in an Israeli prison, the peace-warrior Bassam Aramin, who wrote to us, among other things, the following moving words:
“… Dear Nurit and Rami. I wanted to express my identification with you as a brother on this sad day, the anniversary of the death of your beautiful and pure daughter, Smadar. There is no doubt that this is one of the saddest days, and from the moment we met I did not have the courage to write to you about it, for fear of adding more sorrow and pain to your hearts. I thought that time would likely heal that deep wound. But after I myself drank from that same bitter cup that you drank from before me, when my daughter Abir was murdered on 16 January 2007, I understood that parents never forget for a moment. We live our lives in a special way that others do not know, and I hope that no other human beings, Palestinians or Israelis, will not be forced to know …”
Today my perception of the two sides is completely different from what it was 40 years ago.
For me, the line that separates the two sides today is not between Arabs and Israelis or Jews and Muslims. Today the line is between those who want peace and are ready to pay the price for it, and all the rest. They are the other side! And today, that other side, to my dismay, is the corrupt group of politicians and generals that leads us and behaves like a bunch of mafia dons, war criminals, who play ping-pong in blood among themselves, who sow hatred and reap death.
But this evening I want to talk specifically to those who are in between, who are sitting on the fence and watching us from the sidelines, I want to talk to the satiated Israeli public that does not pay the price of the Occupation, the public that sticks its head in the sand and does not want to know, that lives within a bubble, watches television, eats in restaurants, goes on vacation, enjoys the good life and looks after their its own interests, shielded by the pandering media that help it to hide from the bitter reality that is concealed only a few metres from where they live: the Occupation, the theft of lands and houses, the daily harassment and
oppression and humiliation, the checkpoints, the abomination in Gaza, the sewage on the streets of Anata …
On this evening, especially, I want to address the Left public in all its shades, those who are disillusioned and angry, those who are afflicted with apathy, with despair and weakness, those who enclose themselves in the bubble of themselves and grumble on Friday nights, but are not involved with us in this hard war against the aggressive pathogen of the Occupation that threatens to destroy the humanity of all of us. And on this evening, the evening of Remembrance Day for the dead on both sides, I want to ask them to
join us in our war against this fatal affliction! I want to tell them that being to be bystanders is to be complicit in crime! I want to tell them that there are many who are not willing to stand aside, who are not willing to be silent in the face of evil and stupidity and the absence of basic accountability and justice!
And I want to tell them about the true anonymous heroes of our dark age!
About those who are willing to pay a high personal price for their honesty and decency, those who dare to stand in front of the bulldozers with rare and amazing courage, the refusers who say no to the omnipresent militarism, the combatants for peace who discarded their weapons in favour of non-violent resistance, the resolute demonstrators who crush against the terror of the police and the army in Bil’in, in Ni’lin, in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan every weekend, the lawyers who struggle every day in the Ofer camp
military Court, and in the High Court of Justice, the heroic women of Mahsom Watch, the dedicated peace activists from abroad, like the late Rachel Corrie who gave her life, and also the those who blow the whistle on crimes and conspiracies, from Anat Kam to Gideon Levy and Akiva Eldar, and also the peace organizations of both peoples, and especially the bereaved Palestinian and Israeli families who are bringing about the miracle of reconciliation despite their tragedies.
The darker the sky gets, the more visible are these stars gleaming in the darkness! [4] The more the oppression becomes opaque and evil, the more they, with their heroism and their noble struggle, save the honour and the humanity of all of us!
And today we desperately need to expand the circles of non-violent opposition to the Occupation! This evening I call on you from here and from the bottom of my heart: get out of your bubble! Join the mosquito that buzzes unceasingly in the ears of the Occupation, that annoys and irritates and harasses, and does not let Filth prevail in silence[5] Don’t let the other side steal the future of all of us! Don’t let the other side continue to endanger the security of our remaining children.
Notes:
[1] The sword and sickle songs of the singing company of the Nahal (a brigade in the Israeli army).
[2] Moshe Dayan’s Eulogy for Roi Rutenberg (April 19, 1956).
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Quote/dayan1.html
<http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Quote/dayan1.html>
[3] Israelis traditionally have barbeques on the eve of Independence Day.
[4] Martin Luther King
[5] Ali Abu Awad
[6] Ze’ev Jabotinsky: Betar Song.
http://www.saveisrael.com/jabo/jabobetar.htm
Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent.