Breaking news: Palestinians arrested after peaceful protest on Nakba Day, 2011
At 11 AM on al-Nakba remembrance day, 500 residents from the West Bank village of al-Wallajeh and international supporters marched towards
the Israeli Apartheid Wall. The Wall was built to separate the villagers from their original land from which they were expelled in 1948. The demonstration was violently attacked by the Israeli military with rubber coated steal bullets, tear gas and protesters were beaten with batons and rifles. One youth was hospitalized after being injured by a rubber coated steal bullet .
Eight Palestinians including twins aged 11 and 6 internationals (American, Dutch, German and Canadian nationals) were arrested. The army proceeded to raid the village and invade each house, searching for people who had participated in the demonstrations. The raids as well as confrontations between the army and the village youth are ongoing.
The Arrested Palestinians are:
Mazen Qumsiyeh
Basel Al Araj
Ahmed Al Araj
Mohammad Al Araj
Allah And Mohammed Abu Tin 11 year old twins
Tarek Abu Tin
Adel Abu Tin
Al-Walaja is an agrarian village of about 2,000 people, located south of Jerusalem and West of Bethlehem. Following the 1967 Occupation of
the West Bank and the redrawing of the Jerusalem municipal boundaries, roughly half the village was annexed by Israel and included in the
Jerusalem municipal area. The village’s residents, however did not receive Israeli residency or citizenship, and are considered illegal in their own homes.
Once completed, the path of the Wall is designed to encircle the village’s built-up area entirely, separating the residents from Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and almost all their lands – roughly 5,000 dunams. Previously, Israeli authorities have already confiscated approximately half of the village’s lands for the building of the Har Gilo and Gilo settlements, and closed off areas to the south and west of it. The town’s inhabitants have also experienced the cutting down of fruit orchards and house demolition due to the absence of building permits in Area C.
According to a military confiscation order handed to the villagers, the path of the Wall will stretch over 4890 meters between Beit Jala and alWallaja, affecting 35 families, whose homes may be slated for demolition.
For more information call
Mahmud Zawahre 0599586004
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led non-violent resistance movement committed to ending Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land. We call for full compliance with all relevant UN resolutions and international law.
For specific media inquires such as interview requests, photo usage, etc. please email the ISM Media Office at media@palsolidarity.org
Equality or nothing — Edward Said
Stay Human — Vittorio Arigoni
Israel opens its gates to the world, shuts them to Palestinians: Haaretz Editorial
The covert deportation of West Bank residents in order to increase the number of Jews in the West Bank, like the declaration of land as “state land” to build settlements on it, is an example of the occupation’s rotten fruit.
From the occupation beginning in 1967 to the day after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, Israel used a covert procedure to banish Palestinians by stripping them of their residency rights. This was revealed in an official document drawn up by the Israel Defense Forces’ West Bank headquarters, published by Haaretz on Wednesday.
A letter sent to the Center for the Defense of the Individual says the procedure, enforced on Palestinian West Bank residents who traveled abroad, led to the stripping of 140,000 of them of their residency rights. Israel registered these people as NLRs − no longer residents − a special status that does not allow them to return to their homes. The document makes no mention of the number of Gaza Strip residents who traveled abroad for studies or work and were permanently banished from the region by the same procedure.
The sweeping denial of residency status from tens of thousands of Palestinians and deporting them from their homeland in this way cannot be anything but an illegitimate demographic policy and a grave violation of international law. It’s a policy whose sole purpose is to thin out the Palestinian population in the territories.
It would be reasonable to assume that many family members of the Palestinians uprooted between 1967 and 1994 joined their relatives in exile and became homeless refugees themselves. The gates of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were also locked to the NLR’s children and descendants who were born outside the territories. After the Oslo Accords, Israel allowed a relatively small number of NLRs to return to the territories. Since the second intifada broke out, the people exiled between 1967 and 1994 have been prohibited from visiting their homes, even as tourists.
The covert deportation of West Bank residents in order to increase the number of Jews in the West Bank, like the declaration of land as “state land” to build settlements on it, is an example of the occupation’s rotten fruit. Israel opens its gates to people from all over the world, who have the right of return. It lets them settle in Hebron and at the entrance to Nablus. It must immediately rectify the ongoing injustice caused to tens of thousands of Palestinians who were born in Hebron and raised children in Nablus.
The government would do well to remove the NLR stigma from these people, restore their residency status as quickly as possible and permit them to return home and unite with their families.
Lia Tarachansky: Israelis defy Nakba Law on Independence Day: The Real news Network
By Lia Tarachansky
At the end of March, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) passed the Nakba Law. The version that passed the third reading states that any body that receives government funding, such as schools, can be fined for commemorating the Nakba on the Israeli Day of Independence. The Nakba means “Catastrophe” in Arabic and refers to the 1948 war, the result of which was the depopulation of two thirds of the Palestinian population, which today numbers millions of refugees. To this day many still hold the keys to their original homes, but are not allowed to return. In defiance of the law, the Israeli organization Zochrot (Hebrew, feminine “we remember”), posted a sign with the law in German throughout the core of Tel Aviv where thousands celebrated. Within minutes, police surrounded the Zochorot office.
Transcript
LIA TARACHANSKY, TRNN: On May 9, Israelis poured onto the streets throughout the country to celebrate the 63rd Day of Independence. At the end of March, the Israeli Parliament passed the controversial Nakba Law, part of numerous laws termed antidemocratic by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. This law states that government-funded bodies such as schools are to be fined for commemorating the Nakba on the Day of Independence. In protest, an Israeli organization named Zochrot decided to do just that, by posting a sign stating the new law in German in the heart of Tel Aviv during the celebrations.
EITAN BRONSTEIN, FOUNDER, ZOCHROT (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): The idea is to have a discussion in public about the danger of the Nakba Law. What’s written here [in German] means it is not allowed to mourn on the day of independence.
TARACHANSKY: The Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic and refers to the war of 1948, when two-thirds of the Palestinian population became refugees. Many still hold the keys to their original homes, but to this day they’re not allowed to return. Today, millions live in refugee camps throughout the Arab world. The Real News spoke to the founder of Zochrot, Eitan Bronstein.
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TARACHANSKY: It’s often said that the Nakba is the last and biggest taboo in Israeli discourse about the conflict.
BRONSTEIN (ENGLISH): Mainly because it undermines the basic justification for the establishment and the existence of a Jewish state as a place only for Jews. And if you–and for that, to keep those arguments, you must hide–keep in hiding the Nakba, because once you reveal it, it really undermines these justifications.
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BRONSTEIN (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): The idea for this action came from a remembrance project in Berlin. Maybe some of you have seen it. It’s pretty well known. It’s not meant to commemorate the Holocaust; it commemorates the racist, antidemocratic laws of the early Nazi regime.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): [German] It is not allowed to mourn on the Day of Independence. Israel 2011
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UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): This is really the time, on Independence Day, to come here with the Nakba?
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): But it’s very connected.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): On Independence Day?
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): But it’s very connected.
—
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): Happy holidays! Happy holidays to everyone!
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): Holocaust survivors came from the diaspora to build a home here. You’re against that? And your parents? You have the gall to stand here?
—
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): … a country that’s going in a racist, antidemocratic direction endangers us.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): Me, me, I lost three brothers in the Holocaust. I’m a racist, and I don’t want Arabs here, and I don’t want you. It’s sad people like you are even alive. It’s embarrassing to the country. People gave their lives to this country. You stand here without shame? Judgment? Morals?
—
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): Why did you tear the sign?
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): Before the country was built, there was the old Jewish settlement.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): Palestinians lived here.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): So they can keep living, but not on Independence Day.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): But most of them were expelled.
—
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): The key remains.
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UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): How far [can they go]?
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): That’s the price of democracy.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): The right to vote and freedom of speech, that’s democracy.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): And this is not freedom of speech?
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): That’s not freedom of speech. When a person goes and protests unrealistic things, even if it displaces someone else.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): And what about the 4.5 million Palestinian refugees?
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): What’s the connection?
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UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): I busted my ass off in Gaza for you pieces of shit!
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): Screw your mothers! Sons of bitches! Go fuck Arabs!
TARACHANSKY: After leaving the action, dozens of police officers surrounded the Zochrot office.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): This is the camerawoman who filmed them. They’re in here. She’s filming the Day of Independence, and she filmed their protest. They’re in this building. So if you want to question her–.
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UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): And why did you not notify the police about this? You didn’t think it necessary?
TARACHANSKY (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): Why? I’m a journalist. I film protests, etc.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): You have a responsibility to report actions that have a certain purpose. To disrupt the peace and order.
TARACHANSKY: I don’t.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): You don’t?
TARACHANSKY: Maybe you do.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): As a citizen, you’re responsible.
TARACHANSKY: Maybe if they were doing something illegal.
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): You don’t think it’s illegal, disrupting the peace and order?
TARACHANSKY: The laws in this country do not say it’s illegal to organize.
—
BRONSTEIN (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): When I saw they were talking to you, I ran over. He asked, so I explained we did this action. And he asked if I gave out flyers. I said, if you want to see the flyers, come into our office. So he came, stood and read the flyer a few minutes, and took one with him. He told me it was an illegal action because it’s a provocation and it adds work for the police. I said, okay, but we finished a while ago. What provocation? But “what”, and “this and that”. Anyway, he left.
TARACHANSKY: Do you think there’s a chance your flyer will influence his opinions?
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSLATION): I think so. He read it with great interest. He took a few of our pamphlets to read. He said he’ll keep in touch, get on the Zochrot newsletter. Yeah, I swear, yeah.
End of Transcript
Israeli Jews should mark Nakba Day, too: Haaretz
It is possible and necessary to teach that this glory that is the establishment of Israel also has a dark side – so we can know our history, and understand the wishes of the Palestinians.
By Gideon Levy
Were Israel a little more confident of the righteousness of its case, and were its government a little more open, then all schools in Israel, Jewish and Arab alike, would today mark Nakba Day. A few days after the celebrations of our own Independence Day, in which we lauded the bravery and the achievements that we are rightly proud of, we could offer a lesson in citizenship. It would be a different heritage lesson, the kind that includes the story of the other side, the one that is denied and repressed. Not a single hair from our head would be lost were we to do this today. Sixty three years later,with the country established and flourishing, we can now begin telling the entire truth, not only the heroic, convenient part of the story.
On that day it would be possible to tell our pupils that next to us lives a nation for whom our day of joy is their day of disaster, for which we and they are to blame. We could tell the pupils of Israel that in the 1948 war, like in every war, there are also some acts of evil and war crimes. We could tell them about the expulsions and the massacres. Yes, there were massacres: All you have to do is ask the veterans of the war to tell you about the towns that were “cleared” and the villages that were razed, and the thousands of residents who were promised that they would be allowed to return in a few days, a promise that was never kept, and about the poor “infiltrators” who tried to return to their homes and their properties in order to collect remnants of their lives, and were killed or expelled by the IDF.
Not only is it possible to permit the Israeli Palestinians to commemorate the day of their heritage and express their national and personal pain, something that should be self-evident, but also to teach us, the Jews, the other narrative.
It is possible to justify everything Israel did during its War of Independence, and it is also possible to ask difficult questions, but it is, first of all, essential to know – everything.
It is necessary to know that there were 418 villages here that were wiped off the face of the earth, and it should be remembered that there were more than 600,000 natives of this land who fled or were expelled not to return to their homes, and that to this day most of them, they and their offspring, live in terrible conditions, carrying keys to their lost homes. It is possible and necessary to teach our pupils that this glory which is the establishment of Israel also has a dark side. This must be taught so that we can know our history, and so that we can understand the wishes of the Palestinians, even if there is no intention of realizing them. We can call this, “know your enemy,” but to know we must.
We must know that under nearly every patch of Jewish National Fund forest rest the ruins that Israel was keen to erase, to ensure that they not serve as evidence of a different heritage. We can know that under our flourishing Canada Park hide the ruins of three villages which Israel razed after the Six Day War, putting its residents on a bus and expelling them. We can now turn our sights to the ruins of the homes that remained on the sides of the roads, from which we turn away, and remember that once there was life there. We can even put up memorial sites, in the land full of memorials, to commemorate the villages that are no longer there. We can ask how is it that along the coast, between Jaffa and Gaza, there is not a single village.
We must also ask why the mosque in the heart of Moshav Zechariya is surrounded by a fence with the sign, “Danger, unsafe structure.” It is not this holy structure of theirs that is dangerous. We can also ask where do the residents of Zechariya live today, on whose ruins the moshav was built (the answer: the poor Deheisheh refugee camp ). This does not constitute a breach of faith. It is not treachery against the Zionist ideal: it is historical and intellectual honesty, perhaps courageous, but certainly something which the circumstances require.
On the day of this Nakba, it is possible to begin telling the entire truth. If we are so proud of it, why hide it? And if we are embarrassed by it, the time has come to expose it and deal with it. Only on the day that the pupils in Israel also learn about the Nakba, will we know that the earth is no longer burning under our feet and that the Zionist enterprise has been completed.
Israel better prepare, for a Palestinian state is on the way: Haaretz
Israel has always tried to convince that it is reaching out for peace into the void. But this policy is about to sustain a shock.
By Zvi Bar’el
Yuval Diskin is right. September always was a lousy month. Take September 1993, the cursed month when the the Oslo Accords were signed. Or 15 years earlier, the signing of the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt. The Nazi invasion of Poland took place in September, as did the Al-Qaida bombings in New York and the Second Intifada. James Dean was killed on September 30, and in September 1995 Israel agreed to hand over control of considerable parts of the West Bank to the Palestinians.
Lousiness, it transpires, is a matter of perspective. Whatever happens in September 2011, if anything does happen, will also be a matter of perspective.
Diskin’s text, which adorned the Friends of Tel Aviv University conference, shouldn’t particularly move or astonish anybody. Leaders of the Shin Bet security service and the Mossad, and former generals are not tested by their rhetoric. They are in charge of fear, and fear doesn’t need that many words or poetic phrasing. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, terrorism, rockets and, of course, an independent Palestinian state – that’s all the vocabulary you need to phrase Israel’s strategy of fear.
The head of the Shin Bet doesn’t have, and apparently did not have, a peace conception. That’s not his job. He doesn’t create policy, he merely takes care of its ramifications. But the “policy” as he understands it is crystal-clear.
“Mahmoud Abbas, Salam Fayyad and the entire Palestinian Authority,” he ruled, “represent only themselves, and certainly not Hamas in the Gaza Strip.”
In other words, there was no point in talking to them from the outset, most certainly not now after they have reconciled with Hamas. The reconciliation may have shaken Diskin, he may not have expected it – or maybe he did and didn’t say so – but it doesn’t change the general picture. “Hamas did not change its ideas, ideology or policy,” while the reconciliation will be “tested over time.”
As if “time” was an independent factor unaffected by processes, policies, statements. As if neither Palestinians nor Israelis influence the content of this time and the manner in which changes will occur. And how much time are we speaking of, by the way? Are we now doomed to tear pages from a calendar until some deadline? Does the time run out in lousy September? Or maybe a year after the reconciliation agreement, when elections for the Palestinian parliament and presidency are supposed to take place? And when does that time even begin?
Diskin, of course, is but a metaphor. Maybe something will happen to him “over time” as well, and we will yet see him sign petitions or join to one of the peace initiatives. Many senior “security sources” experience such sudden enlightenment. But for now, he is unhesitatingly presenting to the public the fundamental assumptions that have shaped the Israeli government’s policy.
There is no Palestinian partner and now there won’t be, until the end of “time.” The government doesn’t even need to prove it. Reconciliation is an illusion, the Palestinian state will be a mirage, and neither of them obliges the government to change its vision. The government is already hacking away at the reconciliation, assuming that if it fails it will take Abbas with it, and if it survives it doesn’t have room for an Israeli partner anyway.
But it is the debate over the identity of the partner that is illusory. It successfully substitutes the need to determine a policy, to decide the country’s borders, to determine just how far it can reach into the occupied territories. It’s empty babble, leaning on the theory of “confidence-building steps” since exposed as confidence-destroying steps, but still managed to make the question of the Palestinian partner – not the Israeli partner, God forbid – into the main issue in every political discussion.
Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to Congress will spare no words from that absent partner; for this is the heart of a tactic masquerading as a policy. Israel has always tried to convince that it is reaching out for peace into the void. But this policy is about to sustain a shock in September. You can cancel out Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh. But a Palestinian state? One to which presidents and kings will suddenly start to arrive?