EDITOR: Storm Clouds Gather Around Continuous Israeli Intransigence
More and more are now declaring their stand against Israeli atrocities: countries, organisations, companies and individual artists and intellectuals, with many more under moral and political pressure to join the movement to end Israeli Apartheid, occupation and injustice. This week, Gil Scott-Heron was only the latest artist to announce that he will not play in Israel. Now Volvo and Caterpillar are under intense pressure to stop trading with Israel. 3000 European Jewish intellectuals called today on the European Parliament to stop supporting Israel automatically, and UC student Governors have called upon the university to disinvest from Israeli companies and other trading or supporting the occupation. The international pressure is building up against Israeli atrocities, and is likely to further intensify; the US is reportedly acting towards passing a UN resolution towards a nuclear-free Middle East, something Israel will fight tooth and nail against, as they would against any of Obama’s limp attempts to bring about the defunct two-state solution.
While this is all excellent news, it is really a very dangerous moment; Israel is now preparing its response to this pressure, and it is the normative one – a military strike of enormous damage and destruction, against the ‘usual suspects’. Currently, the targets discussed are Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and now also Iran. While such a reaction to political pressure sounds (and is) criminally misguided, it is the only type of reaction Israel is used to, and is apt at, or feels secure with. The time of great danger is upon us.
Caterpillar equipment used in extrajudicial killing near Hebron: The Electronic Intifada
Press release, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 29 April 2010
The following press release was issued by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights on 26 April 2010:
On Monday 26 April 2010, Israeli occupation forces killed a Palestinian man, Ali Ismael Ali Swaiti, 45, in Beit Awwa in the West Bank district of Hebron, after demolishing a house while he was inside. Israeli occupation forces claim that Ali Swaiti had been wanted for several years. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemns this crime — which constitutes an extrajudicial execution — and calls upon the international community to work towards bringing to trial those Israeli politicians and commanders suspected of committing war crimes.
According to investigations conducted by PCHR and eyewitness testimony, Israeli occupation forces entered Beit Awwa town in the far south of Hebron at approximately 3:00am on Monday 26 April 2010, supported by military armored vehicles, a bulldozer and a Caterpillar digging vehicle. Israeli forces surrounded the house in which Ali Swaiti was located, using sound bombs. The home belongs to Mahmoud Abdul Aziz Swaiti and is located in Khellet al-Foulah, in the north of the town. During the operation, Israeli soldiers broke into numerous other houses in the area and turned them into observation points and firing posts.
After some minutes, Israeli occupation forces (IOF) evacuated at gunpoint the family living in the targeted one-story house as well as a family living in another two-story house, which belongs to the family of Ahmed Abdul Aziz Swaiti. The two families were detained outdoors for some time before they were taken to an adjacent house belonging to Abdul Jalil Swaiti. They were detained there with other families, all of whom were interrogated regarding the whereabouts of the targeted person.
At approximately 5:40am, an Israeli bulldozer began to destroy the fences surrounding the targeted house. It progressed towards the house and started to demolish it, but it retreated as it was fired at from inside the house. Israeli forces stationed in the neighboring houses opened fire at the house for 15 minutes from all sides before an explosion took place inside the house. Residents of the area reported that the explosion resulted from the shelling of the house.
At approximately 6:00am, the Caterpillar vehicle began to drive into and destroy the fences of the targeted house. After that, a digging vehicle continued demolishing the house, and then retreated to allow the renewed advance of the bulldozer and the search for the body of Swaiti.
At approximately 7:00am, the bulldozer lifted the body of Swaiti out of the rubble and dropped it onto a road close to the demolished house before moving it another 10 meters away. At approximately 7:30am, an Israeli soldier fired at least two shots at the body of Swaiti from a distance of three meters. At approximately 8:00am, Israeli occupation forces left the homes in which they had taken position.
In the meantime, Palestinian civilians had left their homes and many of them hurried towards the area of the attack. They carried Swaiti’s body to take it indoors. However, some people clashed with Israeli forces as they withdrew. Israeli occupation forces fired at those people using rubber-coated metal bullets, wounding five Palestinians including a boy and a young woman. The wounded are as follows:
1. Mohammed Mahmoud Masalmah, 23, wounded by a bullet to the head;
2. Baha Mohammed Akimi al-Amareen, 20, wounded by two bullets to the legs;
3. Hussein Yusuf Swaiti, 18, wounded by a bullet to the leg;
4. Hammam Ismael Masalmah, 17, wounded by two bullets to the legs; and
5. Asma Murshed Swaiti, 19, wounded by a bullet to the right shoulder.
The IOF spokesperson said that Swaiti had been wanted by the Israeli Security Service for eight years, as he was held responsible for carrying out a number of shooting attacks against Israeli targets near Hebron, including opening fire near the Ethna-Tarqumiya intersection on 26 April 2004, i.e. exactly six years prior to yesterday’s killing of Swaiti. The said attack resulted in the death of an Israeli soldier and the injury of two others.
PCHR reiterates its condemnation of such acts and:
1. Confirms that this act constitutes part of a pattern of Israeli war crimes perpetrated in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), which reflect Israeli occupation forces disregard for the lives of Palestinians and for the requirements of international law.
2. Reiterates its condemnation of the illegal policy of extrajudicial executions carried out by IOF against Palestinian activists. It also confirms that this policy raises tension in the area and increases the likelihood of civilian victims among the Palestinian population.
3. Calls upon the international community to immediately intervene to stop these crimes which constitute violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.
4. Calls upon the international community, particularly the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention, to fulfill their obligations under Article 1 of the Convention to ensure respect for the Convention in all circumstances, and their obligation under Article 146 to search for and prosecute those responsible for committing grave breaches of the Convention. PCHR also calls on the High Contracting Parties to uphold their responsibilities as signatories to the protocol Additional to the Convention, such as breaches, which constitute war crimes according to Article 147 of the convention.
3,000 European Jewish intellectuals urge end to Israeli settlements: Haaretz
A new leftist European Jewish group, JCall, has written a letter to be delivered Sunday to the European Parliament calling for a cessation of what it calls systematic support for Israeli government decisions.
JCall, which describes itself as “the European J Street” and is to be officially launched Sunday with the presentation of the letter, has raised a storm with its call to stop construction in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem.
The letter is signed by some 3,000 Jewish intellectuals, among them philosophers Bernard Henri-Levy and Alain Finkielkraut, considered some of Israel’s strongest defenders among French intellectuals. Signatories also include Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the student protests in the 1960s and now a member of the European Parliament, as well as other Jewish members of the European Parliament.
The letter calls occupation and settlements “morally and politically wrong,” noting that they “feed the unacceptable delegitimization process that Israel currently faces abroad.”
According to Prof. Zeev Sternhell, “The French Jewish left has decided that the official institutions do not represent most French Jews, and following the example of J Street, have decided that the time has come to do the same thing in Europe.” He supports the letter but hasn’t signed it.
Richard Prasquier, the chairman of CRIF, the committee representing French Jewish organizations, harshly criticized the document, saying that the petition will serve Israel’s enemies.
The document calls on the European Union and the United States to pressure both parties “and help them achieve a reasonable and rapid solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict.”
It says that systematic support of Israeli government policy is dangerous.
Meanwhile, Israel has repeatedly protested that the PA is using money from donor countries to promote a ban on products from the settlements.
A second meeting of the Knesset Economics Committee on the matter is to take place today. In the first meeting, Foreign Ministry official Yael Rabia-Tzadok told the MKs that the campaign to confiscate goods manufactured in settlements has moved ahead since the new economics minister in the PA government has taken office, Hassan Abu-Labda. She said PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad supports the campaign
Volvo equipment: Israel’s weapons to destroy al-Walaja homes: The Electronic Intifada
Adri Nieuwhof, 29 April 2010
On 16 April, approximately 100 Palestinian villagers and internationals walked towards the construction site of Israel’s wall in the occupied West Bank village of al-Walaja, four kilometers northwest of Bethlehem. When the protesters were leaving the village, four Israeli army jeeps and one police vehicle entered and surrounded a Palestinian home. At least 40 persons, including women and children, were trapped for two hours.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces raided several other homes, detaining three young men for allegedly throwing stones at Israeli forces. During the raids al-Walaja was closed off, and soldiers prevented the media from entering the area.
Six days later, Israeli bulldozers were working full speed deeper inside the village’s lands, leaving destruction in their wake. Ma’an news agency reported that border guards and soldiers had imposed a curfew early in the morning. A cameraman was denied entry to the village by the army, according to representatives of the village’s Popular Committee.
The following day approximately 200 villagers, together with a few internationals, came together for yet another demonstration. They walked from the mosque, which has an Israeli-imposed demolition order against it, to the lands which were bulldozed the previous day. Standing on the bulldozed lands, representatives of the village held speeches calling for more demonstrations. Youths used boulders to block the road used by the Israeli bulldozer operators.
A day later, approximately 50 Palestinians and internationals managed to stop the work of the bulldozers for several hours. The Israeli soldiers had to violently drag the villagers away one by one.
History of injustices
The residents of al-Walaja have protested the confiscation and demolition of their property for many years. The Israeli settlements of Har Gilo and Gilo, established in the 1970s, are built on land confiscated from the village. While Israeli forces try to silence the protesters with harsh measures, Volvo and Caterpillar equipment is used by the Israeli forces in the illegal construction of the wall on the village’s land.
The old village of al-Walaja was occupied and destroyed by Zionist forces in October 1948 and its 1,200 Palestinian residents expelled. The 1948 Armistice line passed through the southern lands of the village and while most of the villagers fled to Jordan and Bethlehem, some villagers stayed on the lands of the village that were unoccupied at the time and eventually rebuilt a new town.
The remains of the old village of al-Walaja are two kilometers outside the new town, on the western side of the armistice line between Israel and the West Bank. According to Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, a few stone houses still stand on the old village site. Today the old village of al-Walaja is used by Israeli settlers for picnicking and bathing.
Following the June 1967 war, Israel annexed the rest of al-Walaja’s lands, bringing them under the authority of the Israeli-controlled Jerusalem municipality. The villagers did not receive the right to live in Jerusalem, however, and they live under constant threat of expulsion. And while the villagers of al-Walaja are not allowed to build on their own lands, the settlement of Har Gilo is expanding.
After the Oslo accords of 1993, al-Walaja was designated “Area C,” giving Israel full military and administrative control. As a consequence, villagers who want to build a house on their own land have to ask permission from Israel. Israel denied 94 percent of the building permit requests of Palestinians in Area C of the West Bank from 2000 to 2007, according to Peace Now.
Villagers are facing increased pressure from the Israeli occupation forces to leave their land. The wall which is currently under construction will surround the village from all sides, isolating the villagers completely from their land, East Jerusalem and the old village.
Volvo equipment destroying homes
At the end of the 1980s Israel started to demolish Palestinian homes in al-Walaja and residents had to pay fines for their “illegally”-built homes. Since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada, Israeli forces demolished more than 24 houses in the village, according to the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem.
On 18 March two house owners in al-Walaja found military orders in Hebrew on the front doors of their homes. The orders concern the demolition of the two houses because they are located too close to the path along which the wall will be built. The following day, volunteers from the Stop the Wall Campaign, the YMCA and other international volunteers gathered with the owners of the houses under demolition in order to show their solidarity.
ActiveStills photographer Anne Paq witnessed Volvo equipment being used to destroy a home in the nearby village of al-Khader. Two days earlier she had taken pictures of Volvo and Caterpillar equipment working between the road and the fence of Har Gilo settlement, just a few meters away from Palestinian houses in al-Walaja. There was an Israeli police car parked next to the works. When Paq asked what they were building, they refused to answer.
Two years ago The Electronic Intifada first reported the use of Volvo equipment in Israel’s violations of international law in the occupied West Bank. So far the company has taken no action to investigate the use of its equipment in Israeli violations of Palestinian rights.
Volvo Group’s vice president of media relations and corporate news, Marten Wikforss, wrote in response to The Electronic Intifada’s report: “we do not have any control over the use of our products, other than to affirm in our business activities a Code of Conduct that decries unethical behavior.”
While the villagers of al-Walaja steadfastly continue their protest against the construction of the wall, the confiscation of their land and the destruction of their property, Israeli forces are increasing the oppression. Some houses have been rebuilt three or four times. Director of the Joint Advocacy Initiative of the East Jerusalem YMCA and YWCA, Nidal Abu Zuluf, explained: “Israel’s current repressive policies aim to prevent acts of popular resistance. They don’t want the media and internationals to be around.”
Perhaps neither does Volvo, as its equipment continues to be photographed destroying Palestinian homes and violating Palestinian rights.
Adri Nieuwhof is a consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland.
Even Israel’s biggest lovers are growing impatient: Haaretz
By Yossi Sarid
Thankfully, we have lived long enough. For 2,000 years – or at least 43 – we expected to hear this voice from the heights, but it tarried. No one can accuse the 3,000 Jewish intellectuals who signed a letter to be presented to the European Parliament Sunday calling on Israel to cease construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem of being Israel-haters. No one can depict French Jewish philosophers Bernard-Henri Levy or Alain Finkielkraut as self-hating Jews.
These are people who seize every opportunity to defend Israel publicly and remain faithful to it. Even during Operation Cast Lead and after the Goldstone report they were on Israel’s side. The State of Israel is the apple of their eye in good times, and especially in bad.
But even their patience is running out and their hearts are filled with sincere concern. They listen to French President Nicolas Sarkozy and hear someone who feels disappointed and betrayed. Sarkozy feels cheated, and he’s angry. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face also reveals anger over the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took advantage of her and her goodwill.
In Britain hostility is growing; more and more Israelis are viewed there as personae non gratae. Our official and semi-official representatives are fleeing campuses by the skin of their teeth. A cool Scandinavian breeze is blowing from one end of Europe to another like hot volcanic ash. Even Berlusconi is showing the first signs of Italian impatience.
The signatories to the petition, all of them Shimon’s friends, have concluded that they no longer have a choice: Their Israel has no idea where it’s living. It doesn’t realize how cut off it is from the world, from America, Europe and the Arab countries that have made peace with it, just when it needs them more than ever.
They deliberated, consulted, formulated and reformulated. It’s not easy for them. But in the end they decided to stand up and make their statements, to write an unprecedented document. “European Jewish Call for Reason” is its title. They call on the Israeli government to immediately freeze construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in order to “ensure the survival of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
They plan to submit this important document to the European Parliament on Sunday. Would Herzl, whom we are now commemorating, have joined the call and the delegation out of concern about the loss of his vision?
As is the way of thinking people, the signatories have finally managed to distinguish between the government of Israel and the State of Israel. Governments come and go, while the state will always be there. That’s what we hope, and that’s the way we should act, so the state doesn’t fall.
Not all people who who flatter Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman and Eli Yishai – flatterers who blindly and deafly say “amen” to their policies – truly seek Israel’s good. On the contrary, such people could bring great evil upon us and all of Israel. Too much responsibility is sometimes a lack of responsibility. As the signatories state: “Systematic support of Israeli government policy is dangerous and does not serve the true interests of the state of Israel.”
Therefore, to paraphrase Amos 5:13, the prudent shall not keep silent at such a time. The signatories are already being attacked. Because they don’t live here with us, they don’t have the right to interfere in our internal affairs, to criticize an elected government, their detractors will say.
For a moment I was prepared to agree with this argument, if I had not suddenly recalled Elie Wiesel’s open letter to the president of the United States last month. Those who applauded Wiesel will now find it hard to excoriate Finkielkraut. And perhaps the open letter from America is what, thankfully, roused the European intellectuals.
Those who refrain from criticizing are not necessarily friends, and even if they are not enemies, they could find themselves standing where outright enemies stand. The 3,000 European Jewish intellectuals therefore are acting out of love.
Samuel Maoz: my life at war and my hopes for peace: The Observer
The former Israeli tank gunner turned award-winning director talks about his controversial film, Lebanon, and why he’s still in the line of fire
Samuel Maoz was 20 years old when he killed a man for the first time. It was 1982 and Israel had recently begun fighting a war against the PLO and Syria in Lebanon, a campaign which, although supposed to last for just three weeks, would continue, in various guises, for 18 bloody and horrifying years. Maoz, an Israeli soldier by dint of the fact that he was still doing his national service when the war began, was a member of the tank corps. Specifically, he was a gunner. At 6.15am on 6 June, in the stony hills of southern Lebanon, he looked down the sight of the gun of his rackety, ageing tank. In the crosshairs was a small truck. It was speeding down a dirt track towards him, its middle-aged Arab driver shouting and gesticulating wildly. Maoz did not know if this man was the enemy. How could he? “This war was different to others that Israel had fought,” he says. “In the Six Day War, there were two armies, in two different uniforms, fighting over one strip of land. I’m not saying that was less horrible, but it was at least clear. In Lebanon, the war was fought in neighbourhoods, there were 10 kinds of enemies, and many of them were wearing jeans. It was… chaotic.” He looked at the man. Was he driving at him, or was he driving away from someone, or something? No matter. In his ear, Maoz heard his orders, loud and clear. He fired. His life changed forever.
Maoz was in Lebanon for 45 days. Thirty of them (“thirty days of hell,” he says) he spent in his tank, with only three other men – the commander, the driver and the loader – for company. The remaining 15 he spent in Beirut, in a hotel suite, in the care of Israel’s Christian Phalangist allies. “You couldn’t leave the tank,” he says. “But this is the thing: you didn’t want to. You hate the tank, but you love it, too. To be inside it is hell. But it will save you. A tank can survive even a rocket attack.” He smiles. “I remember we used to talk about injuries. Our dream was to have a light injury: a bullet in the leg, something like that. We’d seen soldiers with those kinds of injuries. They were smiling – victory smiles! – and smoking and waiting to be taken home. But we knew that wouldn’t happen to us. Either we would live, and keep fighting, or there would be nothing left of us to bury.”
When he got home, Maoz was considered lucky. He had his arms and his legs, his face was not scarred, his skin had not been burned. His mother flung her arms around him, wept, and gave thanks to God for his safe return. What she failed to realise, however, was that a part of Maoz had died in Lebanon. “She was embracing an empty shell,” he says. “I could not escape the fact that I had pulled the trigger, that I was a kind of executioner, that I was the last person in the death link.” After the second Lebanon war, in 2006, whole sections of Israeli hospitals were given over to helping soldiers deal with the psychological fallout. But in 1982, things were different. “Those who couldn’t fight for, say, medical reasons used to sneak home by the back door; they didn’t want anyone to see that they didn’t have a gun, that they were only a clerk. As for the rest of us, well, to complain afterwards that you felt bad inside was unforgivable. The older generation told us, ‘Say thank you that you are alive; we were in the [Nazi concentration] camps.’ We hated them because they used the camps against us and this made us feel we had no right to complain.” He winces. “Even now, as I’m talking about it, I feel like a bad boy.
“For the next 25 years, Maoz said nothing. The son of a bus driver and a nurse, he had always wanted to be a film-maker (at 13, for his barmitzvah, he received an 8mm camera and four minutes’ worth of film) and, in 1988, shortly after finishing a cinematography course at the Beit Zvi Academy of the Arts, he did try, briefly, to write a film script about his experiences. “But the first memory that came was the smell of burning flesh.” He backed away, fearing his trauma would only increase.
Then, in 2006, Israel again invaded Lebanon. Suddenly, after years of inertia and darkness, everything changed. “I was sitting in front of the television – I’m sure you can understand that it was the best reality show going for them – and I realised that this was no longer about me and my needs, my problems, my memories, my pain. Our boys were dealing with the same thing all over again. I suppose you could say it was a mission. I wanted to make a film that might save a life. I took a life; now I could save a life. It’s no coincidence that there have been three Israeli films about the Lebanon war in as many years [the others are the Oscar-nominated Beaufort and the Golden Globe-winning Waltz With Bashir]. When the pain is only affecting you, you can ignore it. When it’s affecting your children, this is a red light.” Maoz does not believe in good wars and bad wars. “War is not the last solution. War is no solution at all. War is a beast which, once released, cannot be controlled. The second Lebanon war was a totally bad idea.”
So he began writing: a spare script “because when you are scared, you do not speak”. This was the work of mere weeks. “It was like I had had an electric shock; I had been woken from a long hibernation.” Euphoric, he then set about shooting his film. The result, Lebanon, made on a budget so small there were times when its actors had to do duty with the clapperboard, won the Golden Lion, the top prize, at last year’s Venice film festival, where it received a 20-minute standing ovation (Maoz was so overcome, he wept). It was also featured at festivals in Toronto, New York, Pusan and London, where Maoz was awarded the 14th Satyajit Ray award. In Israel, it won four Ophir awards.
As a consequence, Maoz now seems to be almost permanently on the move, though he isn’t complaining. “I feel very lucky and, more important, I feel hungry again, full of passion.” Did he have any idea his film would be so acclaimed? “Well, I worked hard. I really worked hard for three years. But, with all due respect, when I was making the film, I thought only about my small country. I would rather change the mind of one mother than impress 100 intellectual journalists.”
Lebanon has been likened to Das Boot, Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 film about life on a Second World War U-boat. It’s easy to see why. It’s not only that, in Lebanon, all the action takes place in a similarly enclosed space (the only time the audience catches sight of the world outside the tank is through the sight of its gun). Like Petersen, who said that he wanted to take the audience “on a journey to the edge of the mind”, Maoz isn’t interested in plot or character so much as the effect such an extreme situation has on a human being – any human being. “There is a huge difference between serving in an army and in a war,” says Maoz. “They can’t prepare you. They can make sure you’re in good shape. They can make sure that you know how to use a gun. But they can’t prepare you emotionally and, in the end, they don’t need to. This is the trick of war. It needs death in order to exist.
“Normal people can’t kill. You need to be a psycho. So the trick of war is to take a human being and put him in this… situation. After that, it’s a process. It takes 24 hours, maybe 48. It’s a metamorphosis. Our most basic instinct, our survival instinct, starts to take control and it’s like a drug: you can’t resist it. The first step is that you almost lose your sense of taste, because you need to be able to eat everything without saying, ‘I like it, I don’t like it.’ Then you start to hear and see very sharply. Then you find that you need only half an hour of sleep. You don’t think about moral calls and this is the trick of war. You’re not fighting for your country or for your family. You’re fighting for your life.
“And this is why, when people around me start talking about war and morals, it’s ridiculous to me. I’ll give you an example. In Lebanon, every time we found ourselves entering a small town, they told us that on 50% of its balconies there were snipers with missiles and on the other 50% there were families. Now, if you’re going to check balcony after balcony, you won’t survive beyond three or four. So what are your options? I mean your options to be moral? Am I a pacifist? Am I not? It doesn’t work like that. It’s like blinking and, yes, these acts afterwards fuck your life.”
In Lebanon, we see only what the tank’s four occupants see, hear only what they hear, know only what they know. It is claustrophic and visceral and audiences regularly tell Maoz that, watching it, they felt as if they, too, were in the tank. “I wanted the audience to smell the smells, taste the tastes,” says Maoz. “I wanted you to see the victims of war staring straight into your eyes [via the sight of the tank’s gun]. In a way, the tank is the fifth character. It’s like an animal. The men are in the stomach of a wild animal.”
This is exactly right. In the gloom, unidentifiable liquids seep from mysterious pipes and gather on the tank’s floor in foul, viscous pools. Meanwhile, as the turret swings laboriously from this direction to that, it makes a sound so raw and agonised, it could drive a man insane. This, too, is deliberate. “When we created that noise, we tried to mix the sound of a hydraulic mechanism with the sound of a wounded animal.” (Point of information: the inside of the tank is not, in fact, a tank; it is the chassis of an old tractor, which two stage hands would violently shake up and down as and when Maoz required. But he needed a tank for the film’s opening and closing sequences, a prize item he and his designer eventually found abandoned by the side of a road in northern Israel, presumably the result of some bureaucratic cock-up. “Someone, somewhere, forgot to sign for it.”)
The absence of dialogue in his script meant that rehearsing Lebanon seemed pointless. But, in any case, Maoz had a better plan. “I took each of the actors and, separately, locked them in a very small, dark and hot container. After about two hours, when I knew their bodies would have shut down, as if hypnotised, I knocked on the iron walls with a bar, something that sounded very like an attack on a tank. For the next two hours, they were waiting for the next time. So this was a new state: nervousness. They spent five or six hours like this and when they came out and I looked in their eyes, I could see that I didn’t have to explain anything else.” Torturer! “Yes. But this is how we worked.”
Most of what happens in the film happened to him, he says, though sometimes the real life version was, if anything, worse. Take the film’s turning point, when the tank in which Maoz’s alter ego Shmulik (Yoav Donat) is gunner gets lost deep in Beirut. “In life, it was more extreme. After a while [during the war] people in Israel started asking questions. They wanted to know what on earth was going on. So someone [in the army, or the government, or both] had the bright idea: let’s take three tanks and sneak them in the night into Beirut. We will spread a rumour, all the journalists will come, they will see that the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] is in Beirut and that will buy us time until we really are there. I was in one of those tanks. The Phalangists led us. Mine was totally drunk, I could smell the whisky. I asked him, ‘Do you know where you are going?’ He said, ‘No, but Jesus is with me.’ Anyway, he led us straight to a place where there were 11 Syrian tanks. I don’t know if he sold us out, or if it was a mistake, but we found ourselves surrounded. We started to shoot, but all our systems crashed.
“When the Syrians realised this, they climbed on the tank. They wanted to kill us with their knives. Then we heard the voice of an F-15 pilot on the emergency channel. He told us he was on his way. We told him, ‘You can’t bomb here, you will kill us.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I have eight seconds to think of something.’ In the end, he dived so low the Syrians ran off. We pushed the gas and drove.”
This is a startling story, but perhaps the most startling thing about it is that the man in Air Force Intelligence who scrambled the plane was Lebanon’s director of photography, Giora Bejach. “We were scouting for locations and we were talking, comparing our experiences in Lebanon. He described a lost tank, the shit it was in and how he had dispatched a fighter to the site. That was me, I said, and I quoted back to him the exact words I’d said over the radio during that long minute.”
For Maoz, making his film turned out to be, cliched though this sounds, healing. As he wrote the script, he realised he was at last able to put some distance between himself and his past. This time, he didn’t smell burning flesh. Physically, too, something changed. “Two days into the shoot, I developed an infection in my leg. It was so painful I could hardly walk. The doctor gave me antibiotics and I went to bed for a day. When I woke up, the pain was gone.” He looked down at his foot and, there beside it on the mattress, were five small pieces of shrapnel, rejected by his body after nearly three decades, evidence, he believes, of “the connection between body and soul”.
And now? Does he feel better now? “It’s not a question of feeling better. It’s not that I now feel clean, clear and fresh. It is still the first thought in the morning and the last at night. But I never expected it not to be. This is the price and we will pay it. But I do feel more complete. I accept myself. I can learn to live with it.”
Lebanon is part of a blossoming Israeli cinema, the result, Maoz believes, of the Israel Film Foundation’s new proactivity when it comes to finding European partners and European money. Tiny Israel now turns out some 15 movies every year, most of which seek to challenge the status quo. Some, like Lebanon and Beaufort, look at Israel’s conflicts with its neighbours. Others, like Close to Home (2005), which investigates the tedium as well as the tension of the daily routines of two women conscripts in Jerusalem, and Lemon Tree (2008), which charts the legal efforts of a Palestinian widow to stop an Israeli defence minister, her next-door neighbour, from destroying her family lemon grove, have more domestic canvases. A few, such as Eyes Wide Open, which also opens in the UK this month, seek to challenge religious taboos (it’s a gay love story set in the Orthodox community). None of this, however, means that their release is any the less controversial, or not in some quarters.
In some ways, reaction to Lebanon has been wholly predictable. “In Israel, the younger the audience, the more positive the response,” says Maoz. “The older generation has been more negative. I suppose I understand it. As I said, many of them came from the camps. I remember my teacher, her camp number on her arm, shouting in the class that we must fight for our country, even die for it, because everyone wants to terminate us. But when we were growing up, the only things in our heads were the Tel Aviv beach and girls. When our parents had their wars, they felt it was the only choice and they won. When we had our wars… well, it’s no longer the only choice and, even with the best army, we lost.”
In Europe, the response has been more baffling. Prizes aside, anti-Israel feeling among audiences is high and it seems to have blinded some both to Lebanon’s obvious artistic virtues and to its righteous intentions. “The fact that I put the focus on the soldiers, not the victims, upset them. In Norway, people started to shout at me. ‘Don’t talk to us until your soldiers leave Gaza!’ they said, as if I were a representative of the government. That was too much for me! No one likes the situation in Gaza, but still… missiles are fired at Israeli cities from Gaza. Sometimes, I don’t know if these people really want peace. They have all these opinions, but they don’t really know anything… they just want to feel intelligent and left wing and artistic.”
He looks wan, momentarily exhausted. What about him? Does he feel peace will come? “I feel it will, but for capitalist reasons rather than humanist ones. People are definitely tired, their motivation for war is low, but money also plays a part, like when it was revealed that every Israeli citizen paid the equivalent of 170% on their electricity bill to fund Gaza.” He grins. “We don’t have to be good friends. We just have to be at peace. Like the British and the French. You hate each other, but you are at peace.”
LEBANON: MAOZ AND THE CONFLICT
1962 Samuel Maoz is born in Tel Aviv.
1975 Maoz celebrates his bar mitzvah: he receives an 8mm camera and four minutes of film which he uses to try to recreate western gunfights.
1980 Aged 18, Maoz joins the Israeli armoured corps and trains as a gunner in a tank crew.
1982 6 June: Following an assassination attempt on Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Israel launches a full-scale invasion of Lebanon to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Maoz, still doing national service, finds himself at war.
1982 July: Maoz leaves Lebanon after 45 days.
1982 14-18 September: Lebanese president-elect Bachir Gemayel is assassinated. The next day the Israeli forces occupy west Beirut, and allied Phalangist militia massacre Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
1982 24 September: Peacekeeping forces requested by Lebanon arrive in Beirut.
1983 17 May: Israel and Lebanon sign an agreement on Israeli withdrawal, ending hostilities that have left thousands of Lebanese and hundreds of Israelis dead.
1985 6 June: Israel pulls back to a self-declared security zone.
1987 Maoz completes his cinematography course at the Beit Tzvi Academy of the Arts. He goes on to work as a production designer in film and television, then directs documentaries, television series and theatre productions.
2006 July: Israel launches a 34-day war against Lebanon after the militant Hezbollah group in southern Lebanon seizes two Israeli soldiers. Thousands of Lebanese and Israelis are killed and displaced. This comes as an “electric shock” to Maoz: he begins writing Lebanon.
Palestinian Roads: Cementing Statehood, or Israeli Annexation?: The Nation
by NADIA HIJAB & JESSE ROSENFELD
April 30, 2010
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has staked his political credibility on securing a Palestinian state by 2011 in the entire West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, a program enthusiastically embraced by the international community. Ambitious PA plans include roads and other infrastructure across the West Bank, with funds provided by the United States, Europe and other donors.
Fayyad has argued that development will make the reality of a Palestinian state impossible to ignore. However, many of the new roads facilitate Israeli settlement expansion and pave the way for the seizure of main West Bank highways for exclusive Israeli use.
For decades Israel has carried out its own infrastructure projects in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. These include a segregated road network that, together with the separation wall Israel began building in 2002, divides Palestinian areas from each other while bringing the settlements–all of which are illegal under international law–closer to Israel.
Now, armed with information from United Nations sources and their own research, Palestinian nongovernmental organizations are raising the alarm. Their evidence spotlights the extent to which PA road-building is facilitating the Israeli goal of annexing vast areas of the West Bank–making a viable Palestinian state impossible.
Roads currently under construction in the Bethlehem governorate are a prime example, as they will complete the separation of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, which includes some of the earliest Israeli settlements, from the Palestinian West Bank, swallowing up more pieces of Bethlehem on the way. The PA is building these roads with funding from the US Agency for International Development and thus ultimately the US taxpayer.
Bethlehem Palestinians had not grasped the implications of the PA-USAID road construction until a meeting organized last month by Badil, the refugee rights group. Representatives of local councils, refugee camps, governorate offices and NGOs were shocked by the information presented, and are calling for a halt to road construction until risks are assessed.
It is unlikely that either the PA or USAID would wittingly advance Israeli annexation plans. Still, several factors conspire to help Israel take advantage of donor support to Palestinian development and sweep land away from under Palestinian feet. For example, it is impossible to build in most areas without Israel’s say-so, and permission is usually given only when it suits Israel’s plans.
As public works minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh defended the PA’s road rehabilitation and construction: “All these efforts have improved Palestinian infrastructure and fit into the plans of the government,” he said. But, he added, “this work needs a political frame to end the occupation.” (Shtayyeh has since resigned his post.) As for USAID, it insists that the PA is responsible for project selection, while its role is limited to economic and technical assessment and funding.
But research by the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ), the respected Palestinian natural resources institute, reveals some damning facts: 32 percent of the PA roads funded and implemented by USAID neatly fall into a proposal the Israeli Civil Administration (aka the military occupation authority) presented to donors in 2004. Israel wanted donors to fund some 500 kilometers of alternative roads to serve the Palestinians it was blocking from the main road network (see animated slide here). The donors rejected the proposal at that time, but it now turns out that PA-USAID efforts have effectively implemented 22 percent of Israel’s plan.
When it is pointed out that many of the alternative roads could facilitate settlement expansion, apartheid-style segregation and annexation by taking Palestinians off the main grid–thus working against a Palestinian state–Shtayyeh said, “We don’t look at it this way. The Israelis are stopping people from using these roads, and our job is to find ways for people to survive. This doesn’t mean these roads are permanent structures.”
The Palestine Liberation Organization’s Negotiation Support Unit carefully studied the perils of developing infrastructure under occupation after the International Court of Justice in 2004 reaffirmed the illegality of Israel’s wall in the occupied West Bank. The NSU prepared a manual with guidance on how to build without becoming complicit in Israeli colonization. Asked whether the PA was aware of the role these roads would play in settler annexation, an NSU staffer, speaking anonymously as he was not authorized to speak to the media, told The Nation, “We have presented our position paper to the prime minister’s office and Mohammad Shtayyeh, and they are well aware of the issue.”
In a meeting with Badil and other local Palestinian NGOs, a senior official at the Palestinian public works ministry reportedly criticized some Palestinian municipalities for exacerbating the problem by dealing directly with donors, without concern for the national interest. He also targeted international aid agencies, reportedly saying that Western donors insist on accommodating the Israeli settlements. For example, he said, German donors enabled the Israeli settlement of Psagot to link into the Palestinian town of El-Bireh’s sewage system despite PA objections. He added that USAID goes along with PA priorities “so long as Israel doesn’t object.”
Roads to Dispossession
The Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO facilitated the implementation of Israel’s segregated road system. The PA, supposedly established for an “interim” five-year period in 1994, has control over Area A, some 17 percent of the West Bank. Israel and the PA share control over Area B, while Israel retains absolute control of Area C–around 60 percent of the West Bank. Not coincidentally, Areas A and B include some 96 percent of the Palestinian population, while Area C comprises the settlements and most of the agricultural land, including the fertile Jordan Valley. In addition, Israel has sole control over development in occupied East Jerusalem, which it annexed de facto in 1967.
Israel continues to cement these interim arrangements into permanence, with control of road construction being one of its major tools. USAID explains that “only” the roads located in Areas B and C (more than 80 percent of the West Bank) require coordination with Israeli officials. Roads located in Area B are forwarded to Israel’s District Civil Liaison for security coordination, while roads located in Area C are submitted for “security coordination and construction permitting” so that the liaison can verify “compliance with existing master plans and confirmation of rights-of-way.”
Badil director Ingrid Jaradat Gassner says that the PA receives fast-tracked permission from the Israeli Civil Administration for construction in area C that can be incorporated into Israel’s road plans. She adds that not all roads are a problem, but the ones that don’t link to main roads or act as substitutes for established routes are of serious concern.
After donors rejected its 2004 proposal for the alternative road network, Israel began building the roads anyway, later terming them “fabric of life” roads. “Apart from being racist, these roads are wasteful,” said Sarit Michaeli, spokesperson for B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization. “The fabric-of-life roads are meant to solve a problem that in most cases was illegally imposed by Israel.”
In mid-2009 the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that Israeli authorities had paved about forty-nine kilometers of alternative roads, including forty-three tunnels and underpasses, raising not just political but also environmental concerns about the impact of an additional road network on a small area like the West Bank. OCHA describes the fabric-of-life roads as one of the mechanisms to control Palestinian movement and facilitate that of Israeli settlers. B’Tselem estimates that Israel has spent some $44.5 million on the fabric-of-life road system–a small price to pay to seize vast tracts of land.
The Human Impact
Nidal Hatim, a local playwright, online columnist and activist with the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS), cannot take the main road from Bethlehem to his home village of Battir, just outside the city. Route 60 is the main highway running north-south through the center of the West Bank. “To go on the highway, we have to go through the checkpoint and turn around,” he said. “I have a West Bank Palestinian ID, so I can’t go through the checkpoint.” Instead, he takes a bumpy side road that is currently being built by the PA with USAID support. The road turns from choppy cement to residential street to dirt and gravel path, weaving around and under the four-lane Route 60, which is now used mostly by Israeli settlers. Passing through a partly completed tunnel, the car stalls for a second on a steep unpaved incline on the edge of an olive grove.
According to a Battir council member Hassan Awaineh, the tunnel will become the only access point connecting the 22,000 residents of Battir and neighboring villages to Bethlehem.
B’Tselem’s Michaeli affirms that the dual road system in the West Bank will “in the long run cement Israeli control. The tunnel that connects with Battir can be controlled by one army jeep.”
The tunnel will enable Israel to fully integrate the Gush Etzion settlement bloc into Israel and separate it from the Palestinian population, a Western NGO worker explained. “Once the tunnel is completed, it’s all over,” she said, speaking anonymously because she is not authorized to speak to the media. Sitting on his porch in Battir overlooking the valley where the train connecting Jerusalem to Tel Aviv runs, Awaineh points to the now defunct Battir station, where trains used to stop during Ottoman and British rule. Since then, Battir has had nearly half its land confiscated by Israel, and Palestinian activity there is forbidden. Awaineh leans forward, the sun reflecting off his white hair, and sighs. “In the end they will make life difficult for students going to school, laborers going to work and farmers going to their fields,” he says. “People will be forced to move to Bethlehem.”
“This is part of Israel’s policy to ‘thin out’ Palestinian areas,” the NGO worker said. “It’s not full-blown ethnic cleansing but rather incremental displacement, just as was done to the Palestinians who remained in Israel in 1948.” What is happening to Battir and its neighbors in Area C has already happened in the Jerusalem-Ramallah area and elsewhere in the West Bank.
How It Works
A slide in a PowerPoint presentation produced by OCHA on new development in the Gush Etzion area graphically shows how PA-USAID-constructed roads connect with existing or planned Israeli bypass roads that push Palestinians off the main road network. The slide disappeared from the OCHA website after a presentation to donor organizations last month, but a copy has been obtained by The Nation. ARIJ has produced its own maps showing the impact of Gush Etzion development. The completion of the separation wall will sever Palestinian access to the section of Route 60 between Bethlehem and Hebron. Israel is increasingly pushing Palestinians off Route 60 and onto other roads like Road 356, part of which Israel has rehabilitated. Conveniently for Israel, the PA rehabilitated another segment of 356 with support from foreign donors, and a third segment is under rehabilitation by the PA with support from USAID.
“When you look at all things put together, it doesn’t look like we’ll be using Route 60 for very long,” said Badil director Gassner in her Bethlehem office.
It gets worse. The rehabilitation of Road 356 has given several of the Jewish settlements in the Bethlehem governorate a new lease on life. ARIJ points out that the settlements of Teqoa and Noqdim had their travel time to Jerusalem slashed from forty-five minutes to fifteen, encouraging Israeli settlers to buy property in the bloc, where house prices have soared by 70 percent. By contrast, Palestinians who will be pushed off Route 60 onto Road 356 will see their travel time from Hebron to Bethlehem quadruple, to 100 minutes. And of course Israel has made Jerusalem increasingly off limits to West Bank Palestinians.
Community Outcry
There is no question that Palestinians need, and have a right to, a secure and functioning infrastructure and that the communities are crying out for it. It is also clear that Israel wields overwhelming power over the occupied Palestinian territories, putting many obstacles in the way of independent action. Moreover, communities are reliant on the PA’s good graces for development support, which in turn is reliant on the funding of donors like USAID.
Nonetheless, those on the front lines are not accepting development at any price, and activists are demanding that road construction be halted until political risk assessments can be done. “No one wants to see the wrong roads built overnight,” Gassner says.
“The people here need to resist,” says Hatim, the playwright and activist. Walking around a Palestinian taxi stand in the setting sun and looking at the tunnel that now connects his village to Bethlehem as settler cars speed by overhead, he adds, “We also need to target the PA and USAID. People need to boycott USAID and its contractors. As long as the problem is Israel, the PA and USAID, we need to struggle on all three fronts.”
Battir’s Awaineh, who is close to the PA, is more guarded in his criticism and focuses on the Israeli role. Yet when pressed, he is clear on the need to resist the isolation and displacement of his community. “We must encourage people to stay here and survive. The PA and USAID need to build roads for the Palestinian people, not for settlers in the name of Palestinians.”
Hamas condemns Arab support for indirect peace talks: Haaretz
The Damascus-based leadership of the Palestinian movement Hamas on Sunday condemned the Arab League’s backing for the indirect peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis.
The Arab League signaled its continued support for such talks following a meeting in Cairo late Saturday, saying it had received “positive signs” from the United States, which is acting as mediator and proposed the talks.
“The endorsement and support for the Arab Committee to resume negotiations again, even after the occupation continues with its policies and settlements, is considered as accepting the situation as it is, and a new umbrella for it to commit more crimes and violations against the Palestinian people,” Hamas said in a statement.
Palestinian-Israeli talks have been on hold since late 2008. The
Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli blockade since Hamas took control of the coastal enclave in 2007.
In March, Arab states said they would give the U.S. four months for so-called proximity talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.
In the same month, Hamas called on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to resign, accusing him of selling the Palestinians “illusions” by moving to resume peace talks with Israel.
However, the decision was rescinded shortly afterwards over an Israeli plan to build housing in East Jerusalem.