‘Since the Six-day War, Israel has become a power apparatus, a Jewish power apparatus for ruling over another people’: Gush Shalom
February 4th, 2012
Uri Avnery has been awarded the Leibowitz prize for his life’s work for peace. He recalls the life’s work of distinguished scientist and religious believeer Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-94) who prophesied that Israel would become a nation of work-gang supervisors and secret agents if it maintained the Occupation.
BBC rules no-one may suggest Palestine is not free: The Electronic Intifada
February 3rd, 2012
Not only may no-one say Palestine is not free on the BBC, in practice no-one may say anything at all about Palestine. Too hot to handle, or too difficult to understand for the BBC’s experienced journalists who have managed to conduct interviews with many Israeli politicians? Ameena Saleem reports on her long period of monitoring BBC output.
EDITOR: More violence by Israeli jackboots is legally ignored
Despite the clear video evidence, Israeli legal system ignores the violence of its Border Police, a unit known for its untrammeled barbarity. This has to be seen to be believed.
Internal Affairs Department Closes Investigation into Shooting of an Israeli Protester Despite Video: Popularstruggle
The Israeli Internal Affairs Devision announced today that it decided to close the investigation into the shooting of Israeli activist, Ben Ronen, due to lack of evidence. The decision was reached despite a video that clearly depicts the unlawful shooting.
Israeli activist, Ben Ronen, was informed today that the investigation into his shooting by last May was closed due to lack of evidence by the Israeli Internal Affairs Devision (IAD), which is responsible for investigating crimes committed by officers of the law. Ronen suffered multiple fractures to his hand, after a Border Police officer shot a tear-gas projectile directly at him from close range during a demonstration in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh.
In a letter received today, the IAD informed Ronen of their decision to close the case on grounds of insufficient evidence, saying, “An analysis of the evidence and different versions that arise from the case file brought us to the conclusion that a conviction in the case is improbable”.
The decision to not file indictments in the case was reached despite extensive video footage depicting the events preceding the shooting, the shooting itself and what followed it, as well as the officers’ attempts to prevent the documentation.
The footage clearly shows Border Police officers very violently attacking a group of peaceful protesters who were chanting slogans (at 00:55 into the video), especially targeting the women in the group.
Later in the video, at 03:15, the footage shows a Border Police officer who was indiscriminately shooting tear-gas projectiles directly at protesters and Ronen shouting at him to relax. The officer then steps a few meters back to his commander, who orders him to shoot Ronen, which he does. When reviewed frame-by-frame, the projectile can be seen flying towards Ronen.
Both the footage and medical documents attesting to Ronen’s injuries were handed to the IAD by Ronen’s lawyers, as well as testimonies by himself and other eye-witnesses.
Ronen’s lawyer, Adv. Gaby Lasky, said, “In light of such decisions, despite overwhelming evidence, it is impossible to view the Internal Affairs Devision as anything but a whitewash mechanism to enable the continued use of excessive force against Palestinians and their supporters”.
Israeli security forces regularly use tear-gas canister as projectiles, shooting them directly at protesters – as was done in Ronen’s case – when suppressing Palestinian demonstrations in the West Bank. On December 9th, 2011, Mustafa Tamimi from Nabi Saleh suffered fatal injuries after an Israeli soldier shoot him in the face with a tear-gas projectile from close range while standing in safety inside an armored military jeep. Last Friday, a French citizen was similarly shoot with a tear-gas projectile in the back of her neck by a Border Police officer during a demonstration in the same village.
Israeli right wing blacklists the best and brightest: Tikkun
Please note: this article has been removed from the Tikkun website!
February 3rd, 2012
Three of Israel’s most right-wing organisations, Im Tirtzu, Academic Monitor and Isracampus, have named over 1000 of Israel’s most distinguished thinkers, writers and campaigners as being enemies of Israel and exploiting their positions to defame the country. This carries little weight in Israel – it is primarily for the diaspora in which some depend on believing only their support saves the country from extinction.
What Are the Boundaries of Antisemitism: Australian Jewish Democratic Society
February 3rd, 2012
Last year, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry lodged a complaint of antisemitism with the SBS Ombudsman about the TV series The Promise shown in Australia last December. The Ombudsman for SBS – Special Broadcasting Service, a public broadcasting network– rejected the complaint. Harold Zwier argues that we need a definition of antisemitism which the mainstream can use. SBS adjudication at end.
DOCUMENT – ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES: PALESTINIAN HUNGER STRIKER’S LIFE AT RISK: KHADER ADNAN: Amnesty International
February 2nd, 2012
Amnesty (1) and Addameer (2), the prisoners’ rights and support association, are both now campaigning urgently for Khader Adnan, arrested on 17 December 2011 and on hunger strike since then. He is held under military administrative detention, which means without trial or prisoners’ rights. He is associated with Islamic Jihad, the assumed reason for his several arrests, but has not been charged with any crime.
The BDS movement grows in Italy: Mondoweiss
February 2nd, 2012
A statement from BDS Italy about their annual conference reports discussions of strategic thinking on when and how to run an effective campaign and advice from Hind Awwad to ‘work within a broad base of partners and alliances’ . Meanwhile at the grubby end, the American ADL Stand WIth Us and Prof. Gur are pulling out all the stops to smear this week’s BDS conference at The University of Pennsylvania.
Abbas to RT: We want to co-exist with Israel – independently: Russia Today
February 1st, 2012
On the last stage of his European tour, in which he is seeking to increase diplomatic presure on Israel to stop settlement building, the PA President tells Russia’s RT that Israel might withdraw from a few settlements and try to persuade the world that this has changed the status quo of occupier and occupied. Which it won’t. But he remains willing to negotiate on the two things that matter – borders and security.
Uproar at PENN over BDS Conference: Jadaliyya
A Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) conference is set to take place next week at the University of Pennsylvania (PENN). As one would expect, the fact that the conference is taking place has created a furor. The President of the University, Amy Gutmann, released an anodyne statement disavowing any connection with the conference. She released no such statement, however, last year when the faculty and students were incensed about a talk to be delivered on campus by Eric Cantor on the theme of income inequality (Congressman Cantor eventually cancelled his appearance). The goose and gander do not get the same treatment from President Gutmann.
People on campus and in the community who do not want to allow any discussion about Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians and the US subvention for the Occupation decided to fight back. They will hold a series of events called Israel Across Penn, including dinners hosted by Penn Hillel, the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. Penn Hillel’s Rabbi Mike Uram wants “to mobilize an Israel-friendly community and network on campus.” To counter the BDS conference, the group has also invited Alan Dershowitz to give a lecture on 2 February 2012 entitled “We Are One with Israel: An Evening of Unity and Community Solidarity.” The Political Science Department will be the co-sponsor his lecture, which will be held at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. Dershowitz is billed as “Israel’s single-most visible defender.” There will be no balance in his presentation.
It is not easy in the United States to have a real, factual discussion about Israel. The obvious retort is that a critic of Israel is an anti-Semite. This is a lazy argument, at the “D”- level of thought. Beyond this tar-brush, there is little else. When Norman Finklestein came to give a lecture at my college a few years ago, a small minority of faculty and students were enraged. The agitated faculty boycotted the lecture but the students came regardless. After Finkelstein spoke, students put their hands up, and one after another read from a script seemingly authored by a Hasbara agency. Then, as Finkelstein frowned and held his own, one young man stood up and said, “I have a genuine question….” That was sufficient. The firewall had been breached. He was sincerely disturbed by Finkelstein’s narrative of events against Gaza and could not square his ideology with the circles drawn by Finkelstein’s data.
The student’s hesitation provides one more example for the Jewish American philanthropists who turned to the Republican pollster Frank Luntz to find out why Jewish American college students were not more vigorous in their rebuttal of criticism of Israel on campus. One of the moments that worried the philanthropists was the refusal by the Brandeis Student Senate to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Israel in 2008. Luntz found that the young Jews wanted an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its policies, that “young Jews desperately want peace,” and “some empathize with the plight of Palestinians.” Luntz recommended that the philanthropists use the word “Arab” (“wealth, oil, and Islam”) rather than “Palestinian” (“refugee camps, victims, and oppression”) to spin youth towards a pro-Israel agenda.
Yet the failure of this public relations spin opens the door to discussion of US and Israeli policy in West Asia. The bromides spilled by the public relations pollsters cannot hold back the doubts about the validity of the idea of Brand Israel, the “start-up nation.” The Arab Spring has clearly disrupted the view of the “Arab as terrorist.” Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assertion that Israel remains the “only democracy in the Middle East” and that this accomplishment should be attributed to culture in the midst of the seismic shifts during the Arab Spring constituted an embarrassment of self-delusion.
Netanyahu came to the US Congress in May 2011 to go mano-a-mano against Obama, pushing the United States to throttle the Palestinian case in the United Nations. Netanyahu’s braggadocio and the servile applause from the members of Congress in the face of the uprising in North Africa and West Asia hollowed out what remained of the idea of the United States as an “honest broker” in the region. The unseemly pressure from Netanyahu and the Israel Lobby had the opposite effect on those who pay attention to West Asian politics, and in particular among young American Jews.
Part of this hysteria is the over-reaction to the BDS campaignk, which began at the margins of political life and has now gradually shuffled to the center. The BDS campaign’s ability to ruffle so many feathers so quickly is a victory for the movement. The defenders of Israel, right or wrong, believe that no opportunity to censure those who criticize Israel must be left unseized. Every article must be challenged; every speaker must be condemned; any criticism of Israel must be suffocated. BDS campaigners have pierced this firewall and broken this formidable taboo. BDS is now taken very seriously because of its impact on our intellectual and political lives.
The BDS campaign emerged in 2002 during one of the more virulent assaults by the Israeli armed forces on the Palestinian people. The next year a group of beleaguered Palestinian academics published a Call for Boycott, and in 2005 the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel issued its well-known appeal. What is to be underscored about these documents is their measured character. For intellectuals whose access to books and ability to travel is severely limited and who are in constant threat of bombardment, their writing in these documents is not vindictive. Consider that I have just returned from a conference in Beirut, which could not be attended by a professor from al-Quds University to whom Israel has not granted a visa in time to attend the conference. His ticket, like those of other Palestinian academics, had to be bought and forfeited. When I tell another professor that I would like to send him Mary Gabriel’s remarkable book, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, he says not to bother since he will not see it for months. The academic freedom of Palestinian educational institutions has been deeply compromised by the Israeli Occupation. It is in this light that the authors of the 2005 call for BDS proclaimed, with Mahmoud Darwish, “besiege your siege;…there is no other way.”
The point of BDS is not to abjure any contact with Israeli artists or scholars. It is rather to refuse to collaborate with Israeli institutions that benefit from and participate in the Occupation of Palestine. The point is very well developed in the collected essays of Omar Barghouti, Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. It is easy to bowdlerize the BDS position on Israeli institutions, to suggest, for instance, that the BDS adherents are against academic freedom or are anti-Semitic. However, a serious discussion about the condition in Palestine for intellectual, cultural, and academic workers is essential as part of the context for any serious discussion on academic freedoms (or lack thereof) in the region, as is the collusion of Israeli academic institutions with the strong-arm of the military, with its American bursary in hand.
The first BDS-type conference was held at the University of California at Berkeley in 2001, initiated by the Palestine Solidarity Movement. Annual events followed at Ohio State, Duke, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with Students for Justice in Palestine chapters springing up across the country. A three-year gap was broken in 2009, when students at Hampshire College revived the BDS conference once more. It was billed as the first BDS conference, mainly because the link between the Palestine Solidarity Movement and the Hampshire students was not intact, and so the history of the BDS movement was not readily available.
The next BDS conference will be held in the first weekend of February 2012 at PENN. The list of speakers at the conference is impressive: Ali Abunimah, of the Electronic Intifada website, is the keynote speaker. Abuminah will anchor the conference that includes Susan Abulhawa (Playgrounds for Palestine), Max Blumenthal (author, Republican Gomorrah), Noura Erakat (adjunct professor, Georgetown University), Bill Fletcher Jr. (author, Solidarity Divided), Kehaulani Kauanui (professor, Wesleyan University), Nancy Kricorian (Code Pink), Heather Love (professor, University of Pennsylvania), Sarah Schulman (professor, CUNY), Nikhil Singh (professor, New York University), Rebecca Vilkomerson (Jewish Voices for Peace), and Phil Weiss (curator, mondoweiss.net). Participants will also include scholars from Israel such as Dalit Baum (Haifa University). These are all serious people and academics who speak with studious care about the region. The conference website has the full list of panels.
In speaking to several of the panelists and having attended similar BDS events, I can say with some measure of confidence that each and all panels will adhere to protocols of open discussion. This has been the way of the BDS movement: to open a question that has too long remained closed, namely what is the role of the United States in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its garrisoning of Gaza? The US taxpayer not only underwrites the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, but US power also provides the Israeli government with carte blanche to behave in the region without care for blowback.
If the Occupation creates resentment towards the United States in the Middle East, Israel is confident that the United States will vote in the requisite international chambers to, nevertheless, support it. In turn, the United States will lean heavily on the European governments to fall in line. Financial and diplomatic pressure from the United States are both essential to the Israeli occupation. It is this dual US gift that the BDS movement seeks to challenge, particularly in a context where most people have no idea that the United States pays the down payment and is the insurance policy for Israeli aggression.
The virulent reaction to the BDS conference is to be expected. Such reactions have become commonplace but they are also clichéd. That the Israel First groups turn to Professor Alan Dershowitz to anchor their defense of Israel tells you something about the staleness of their position. In 2003, Dershowitz wrote a tired book, The Case for Israel, whose arguments were upended by Norman Finkelstein in his 2005 Beyond Chutzpah, which additionally showed that Dershowitz is a routine plagiarizer. Dershowitz has attacked the BDS movement as putting forward one of the most “immoral, illegal, and despicable concepts around academic today.” He recycles two of the canards about BDS, that it is anti-Semitic and that it violates academic freedom:
BDS is anti-Semitic. “To single out the Jewish nation for collective punishment has a name,” says Dershowitz, “and it’s called bigotry.” Dershowitz’s complaint that BDS is bigoted or more specifically anti-Semitic, mimics the statement signed by American college presidents against the British BDS campaign of 2007 (this statement, joined by my college’s president, appeared in the New York Times on 8 August 2007). A good response to the anti-Semitism charge is to be found in the philosopher Judith Butler’s essay: No, it’s not anti-Semitic. “It seems that ‘anti-Semitism’ functions as a charge,” writes Butler, “one that does not correspond to a given kind of action or utterance, but one that is unilaterally conferred by those who fear the consequences of overt criticism of Israel.”
BDS violates academic freedom. Those who trot out this specious argument, including the two 286 American university presidents who signed the full-page advertisement in the New York Ttimes, says nothing about the constrained academic freedom of Palestinian academies. PENN English professor Amy Kaplan wrote an honest and moving account about this in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece:
“I spent twelve days driving back and forth between my hotel in East Jerusalem and universities in the West Bank. On each trip I waited at a military checkpoint along Israel’s security wall to have my passport inspected. One thing became immediately clear: Freedom of movement is fundamental to intellectual life. How can ideas and speech circulate freely if teachers and students cannot? In my encounters with Palestinian academics, I was struck both by the obstacles that living in the occupied territories imposes on their mobility, and the creativity that allows Palestinian intellectual life to be so vibrant today.”
BDS has raised several questions about the boycott of Palestinian intellectual and cultural life and more generally about the ongoing occupation of Palestine. Dershowitz asks why we are not as incensed about Syria or Cuba. The answer is that most of us are involved with other countries’ issues and events. However, and more importantly, the question of Israel is manifestly more central because of the annual three to four billion US dollars (conservative figure) subsidy given to the Israeli government by the US taxpayer. That—along with distortions produced by the Israel First attitude in the US State Department with regard to West Asian policy—is what makes Israel first amongst our primary concerns. That the PENN BDS conference has raised so much ire is a simple indicator that the BDS dynamic has made an enormous difference in our conversation about West Asia. As Omar Barghouti puts it, “Our South Africa moment has finally arrived!”
Does helping Palestinians beautify the occupation?: Haaretz
The women of MachsomWatch have helped some 5,000 people through the process of appealing their travel ban to Israel.
By Amira Hass
There is a thorn in the side of the Israeli prohibitions industry, in the guise of several stubborn and persistent women of retirement age. In a word: nudniks. They are the MachsomWatch volunteers, who during the past seven years have been offering their persistence in order to appeal the travel ban that the Shin Bet security service imposes on Palestinians who seek work in Israel.”
The MachsomWatch organization of female volunteers, which began over a decade ago with the monitoring of physical and administrative checkpoints on the West Bank, has developed various areas of expertise: travel bans for security reasons, the military courts, police fines, permits for reasons of health, restrictions in the Jordan Valley and more.
During their shifts at the checkpoints the women have come to know the Palestinian workers and tradesman who depend on Israel for their livelihood, and who one murky day discover that their exit permit has been revoked and a “security prevention” imposed on them. After becoming acquainted and having conversations with hundreds of people, and later with thousands, the women reject the automatic interpretation that the average Israeli attributes to the pair of words “security prevention”: “The Shin Bet knows what it’s doing. If the permit was revoked, that means that the man is dangerous.”
They began waiting for hours with the workers and tradesman who went to appeal the “security prevention” in the offices of the Coordination and Liaison Administration, and afterwards they helped to fill out forms and submit requests to overturn the prevention. They called everyone possible in the Civil Administration to find out why someone waits for hours and never gets to the window of a clerk, why he is not given a receipt for submitting the request, why a reply to a previous request doesn’t arrive, and why there are no forms in Arabic. They wrote letters to the officer of the employment department in the Civil Administration, to the Military Advocate General in Judea and Samaria, to the head of the Shin Bet and to the head of the Civil Administration.
The pestering brings results: To date they have helped some 5,000 people through the appeals process. The “security prevention” evaporated for 35 percent of them already in the initial stage of handling the case. Some go on to judicial institutions, despite the financial outlay. Attorney Tamir Blank is a partner to the women of MachsomWatch, whose volunteer work lowers the cost to the Palestinian worker. The security denial of about 70 percent of the 283 people who turned to the courts via MachsomWatch evaporated, usually before the deliberations stage.
On November 9, 2009 an officer in the Population Registry department of the Military Advocate General in Judea and Samaria wrote to them: “Recently our office has been receiving on a weekly basis a large number of copies of requests to revoke the “security prevention” of residents whose request to enter Israel for employment purposes was denied … Our office is not the authorized administrative institution for handling such requests … [and] complaints about the conduct of the Civil Administration. I ask that the sending of these copies be stopped. [They create] a burden on the fax machine and also waste precious ecological resources.”
The MachsomWatch activists had the fax number of the advocate general because until June 2007 he was, in fact, the address for appealing security prevention. Later the rule was changed and he stopped being the address, and again the rules were changed, then again something changed and there was a wave of cancellation of permits of veteran workers. Then for some reason, from July 2009 until March 2010 there was nobody to turn to in order to appeal.
The women faxed a reply to the officer: “Employers [who under the new procedures were asked to personally request that the security prevention of a Palestinian laborer be revoked] don’t receive replies. Attorneys don’t receive replies … The Coordination and Liaison Office offers no reply regarding the reason for the confiscation of a permit … [The workers] try to meet with a Shin Bet [representative], who makes them wait for hours and sends them away saying: ‘You aren’t needed.’ When a Shin Bet representative consents to meet with the Palestinian resident, the crushing statement is: ‘Help us and we’ll help you, and if not, you’ll never receive a permit.’ And when they appeal the prevention together with their employers there is no reply. There’s a sealed wall ….
“Israel’s control of the area is that of belligerent occupation, and therefore it has obligations toward [its residents], and among other things the obligation to take care of their welfare and their needs. Therefore along with the complaint about the ecological damage that we are causing, we would expect at least a minimal reference to the human damage …”
Kafkaesque sagas
A second report by this group of experts was posted on the MachsomWatch website, which sums up its activity since June 2007 and is called “Invisible Prisoners – Don’t Know Why and There’s Nowhere to Turn.” It was written by Sylvia Piterman, a retired senior economist.
She has reason for beginning the report with a scene from Kafka’s “The Castle.” There is no shortage of Kafkaesque sagas of individual Palestinians in the mazes of the occupation in our newspapers. But the report tells a saga of thousands. That is why throughout the report one can hear the refrain: There’s a method here, there’s a purpose behind the wholesale denial of permits and of restrictions of movement.
“This is a system that is designed to continue and maintain the occupation. And for that purpose the population has to be kept afraid, in a situation of uncertainty and without social solidarity. The method is also designed to maintain a large reservoir of Palestinians … in order to enlist them [as informants to the Shin Bet], while cynically exploiting their most urgent needs,” writes Piterman.
It would have been worthwhile to add: The method is designed to reduce to a minimum the number of Palestinian workers in Israel, on the way to completing the policy of demographic separation that governments have been practicing since the early 1990s.
Another thing that the report outlines – and here, too, more details would have been welcomed – is the gradual inclusion of the Palestinian workers in Israel in the category of “foreign workers.” Israel is establishing many facts on the ground in order to create the false presentation that Areas A and B are a “state” rather than occupied territory. For example, the checkpoints are called “terminals” or “crossings.” Placing Palestinian laborers under the jurisdiction of the Interior Ministry (rather than the Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry, as used to be the case ) and treating them as though they were from Thailand and Colombia, are another such fact.
Doesn’t the assistance to individuals (even when there are thousands ) beautify the system? That is a question that comes up in the report, as in the constant conversations of the activists. This is a dilemma that faces every anti-occupation group in Israel. In the overall battle against a regime of privileges for Jews, Jewish Israelis exploit their superior rights in order to try and help people (usually of those classes which are not wrapped with money and connections ) in their daily dealings with the empire of prohibitions: to go to Israel for medical treatment, to overturn a home demolition order, to prepare a building plan, to dig a water cistern, to file a complaint with the police against settler harassment, to go to study, to visit a sick mother.
The theoretical understanding that this is a repugnant system, and its overall rejection does not weaken their caring and commitment to individuals.
How the Occupation Became Legal: NYbooks.com
Eyal Press
In 1979, a group of Palestinian farmers filed a petition with Israel’s High Court of Justice, claiming their land was being illegally expropriated by Jewish settlers. The farmers were not Israeli citizens, and the settlers appeared to have acted with the state’s support; indeed, army helicopters had escorted them to the land—a hilltop near Nablus—bringing along generators and water tanks. The High Court of Justice nevertheless ordered the outpost dismantled. “The decision of the court… proved that ‘there was justice’ in Jerusalem and that Israel was indeed ruled by Law,” exulted one Israeli columnist.
But the frustration of the settlers did not last very long. As revealed in The Law in These Parts, an engrossing new Israeli documentary making its American debut at the Sundance Film Festival, just hours after the ruling was handed down, Ariel Sharon, a keen supporter of the settlement project who was then Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, organized a meeting to discuss how to circumvent it. Alexander Ramati, then a legal advisor to the West Bank military command, raised his hand to tell Sharon about an Ottoman concept known as “Mawat land.” The Ottomans, who had controlled Palestine until World War I, had used the term to designate land far enough from any neighboring village that a crowing rooster perched on its edge could not be heard. Under Ottoman law, if such land was not cultivated for three years it was “mawat”—dead —and reverted to the empire. “With or without your rooster, be at my office at 8:00 in the morning,” Sharon told Ramati, who was soon crisscrossing the West Bank in the cockpit of a helicopter, identifying tens of thousands of uninhabited acres that could be labeled “state land” and made available to settlers, notwithstanding the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on moving civilians into occupied territory. In the years that followed, a string of new settlements was built on this territory, eventually prompting another challenge before the Israeli High Court. This time, the Court denied the challenge, ruling that settlement construction was permissible while Israel served as the temporary custodian of the territory. This provided a legal basis for land expropriation that has since enabled hundreds of thousands of Israelis to relocate to the West Bank.
Surprisingly little is known about the legal apparatus that has enabled and structured the occupation. Filmed in nine days but based on years of archival research, The Law in These Parts aims to expose it. Even before the 1967 Six-Day War, the film reveals, officers in the army’s legal corps drew up guidelines for a separate system of laws that could be applied to territory under IDF control, rules they were convinced could strike a balance between order and justice. But by the time the first Palestinian Intifada erupted in 1987, detention without trial and convictions based on secret evidence had become standard operating procedure in the military courts entrusted with this task. One reason Israel did not simply extend its own laws to the West Bank and Gaza Strip was that doing so would “imply certain things you may not want,” an official in the film explains – in particular, that Palestinians living in the occupied territories were citizens with the same rights as Israelis. (In contrast, Jewish settlers in places like Hebron were spared the military justice system and granted access to civilian courts in Israel.) Director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, an Israeli known for his meticulously researched documentaries, initially planned to make these Palestinians the film’s protagonists. Instead, the documentary focuses on the handful of Israeli legal officials who, working largely in the shadows, set the ground rules for an occupation now in its forty-fifth year.
The architects of this parallel justice system believed that what they were designing was enlightened and progressive, a sentiment some viewers of the film may initially be inclined to share. At the insistence of Meir Shamgar, an elderly man with an august bearing who served as Israel’s Military Advocate General from 1963 to 1968, it was agreed soon after the Six-Day War that Palestinians could appeal cases to Israel’s High Court of Justice. Shamgar, who later served as the High Court’s president, notes that international law did not require Israel to grant Palestinians such access and expresses considerable pride in this. “I hope other countries will emulate the practice,” he says.
Like all the people interviewed in the film, Shamgar is seated in a black leather chair set behind a desk that is mounted on a stage, an arrangement that makes it easy to imagine him in court, with the gavel – and the power to mete out judgment – in his hands. In the film, of course, this power actually rests with Alexandrowicz, a deft interviewer who patiently draws out his subjects but is not shy about airing his opinions – as, for example, after an exchange with Shamgar about a High Court case in which a Palestinian living near Hebron challenged the expropriation of so-called “state land.” It was Shamgar who presided over the case and who ruled that while international law barred Israel from assuming ownership of the territory, building temporary outposts was permissible. Half-a-million Israelis now live in these “temporary” settlements, notes Alexandrowicz. “Look, I don’t think this is connected to Supreme Court rulings,” says Shamgar, attributing what happened to politics. But Alexandrowicz points out that international law “clearly forbids transferring population from the occupying state to the occupied area.” He asks Shamgar, “Why didn’t the court see this as something it needed to stand up against?” Shamgar glances to the side, a trace of exasperation ruffling his face. “That is a question after the fact,” he says.
“Justice Shamgar doesn’t see the connection between Supreme Court rulings and our settlements in the occupied territories,” Alexandrowicz then says in a voiceover. “But I, the person documenting, see a connection, and I present the rulings and events as I understand them. Because in the world of the film, I rule on what reality is.” As the statement suggests, The Law in These Parts makes no claim to being objective: as the narrative unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that the film is putting its subjects on trial before the audience. In another scene, Alexandrowicz interviews a former military judge about a case involving a Palestinian arrested without being told what he’d done wrong. To protect Israel’s sources in the territories, Palestinians often could be shown only a “paraphrase” of the charges against them, the judge explains. And what if the security forces made unreliable accusations? “As a rule, I didn’t doubt what they said,” says the judge. This revealing admission was extracted from an interview that lasted more than three hours. “The viewer is only hearing a ‘paraphrase’ of my interview,” says Alexandrowicz. Here as elsewhere, he slyly anticipates (and thus potentially defuses) the charge that his view is biased, while implicitly raising the same question about the supposedly neutral officials who held sway in courtrooms where the disparity in power, and the absence of objectivity, was far more glaring.
Alexandrowicz’s unsparing inquiry is targeted at Israelis and foreign observers, who trumpet the achievements of Israel’s democracy and the High Court’s willingness to restrain abuses even at the occasional expense of security. The Law in These Parts does not deny that the High Court has successfully put a stop to some abuses in the territories—most notably in a 1999 ruling that barred various methods of physical interrogation (shaking, hooding, and shackling detainees) practiced for years with impunity. Like the 1979 decision on settlements, it infuriated some Israelis on the right, particularly since it came a few years after a wave of suicide bombings. On other occasions, the High Court has issued rulings—requiring, for example, that Israel re-route its security barrier to expropriate less Palestinian land—that the army has refused to enforce. But the film disquietingly suggests that these occasional displays of independence may only serve to foster the illusion of justice even as separate laws for settlers, house demolitions, restrictions on free movement and a host of other unjust policies obtained “a legal seal of approval,” as Ilan Katz, who served as Deputy Military Advocate General from 2000 to 2003, puts it in the film. The Knesset could easily have passed a law barring Palestinians from petitioning the High Court, notes Katz. Why didn’t it? “Because many times the Supreme Court is convenient for the security forces,” he says.
The Law in These Parts appeared in Israel during a period in which many of the organs of an independent civil society – including the civil court system – have been under attack. The repressive climate may explain why the film has generated enormous interest in Israel, screening in more than 100 locations and receiving the prize for best documentary at the 2011 Jerusalem Film Festival. Of course, the warm reception also underscores a paradox: while many Israelis seem open and even sympathetic to critical examinations of the occupation, no political constituency has emerged to challenge the creeping colonization of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which has continued to advance under the Netanyahu government. The film’s subjects have been more sparing with their praise – with one notable exception, a former military judge named Jonathan Livny who has attended some screenings and spoken admiringly about it. At one point in the film, Livny is openly critical of the military courts: “As a military judge, you don’t just represent justice,” he says. “You represent the authorities of the occupation, vis-à-vis a population that sees you as the enemy… It’s an unnatural situation. As long as it’s only temporary, fine. But when it goes on for 40 years? How can the system function? How can it be just?”
It is the closest any of the film’s subjects come to admitting to a troubled conscience, and it made me wonder whether the experience of being cross-examined in the studio had forced Livny to grapple with the compromises he’d made. “Yes,” he told me when I reached him recently by phone, “it’s become an educational moment in my life. It enabled me to sit for three hours and really look inwardly and go through a process of understanding and come to grips, through the questioning, with my emotions, my feelings, with trying to understand the role I played.” I asked him if he ever looked back and thought he should have followed the lead of the hundreds of Israeli soldiers who refused to serve in the occupied territories. “Never,” he said. “Because I realized that if I wouldn’t do it and somebody else would be in my place, that person would not even have the qualms that I showed.” Many of his colleagues viewed the settlements favorably, he told me. Some even lived in them. Few understood Arabic, which he spoke fluently. Still, he said, he regarded the system in which he’d served as a place where cultivating respect for the rule of law was impossible. “It is a kangaroo court.”
We spoke in early January, a week after Israel’s High Court ruled on a petition challenging the right of Israeli companies to mine in eight quarries situated across the Green Line. The materials are sold overwhelmingly to Israelis —“looting the West Bank,” in the words of Dror Etkes, a researcher formerly with the organization Yesh Din, which submitted the complaint—in seemingly clear violation of a provision of the Hague Convention requiring an occupying power to serve only as the “administrator” of such resources. The High Court rejected the challenge, ruling that the occupation has gone on for so long that the situation has acquired certain “unique characteristics.” About this, at least, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz might agree.
Demanding justice for Yousef, a quiet boy killed by Israeli settlers:The Electronic Intifada
Bekah Wolf , 27 January 2012
On 28 January 2011 at 6:30am, Yousef Ikhlayl, 17, went with his father Fakhri to their farmland on the outskirts of the West Bank village Beit Ommar, where they prepared the land around their grapevines. At approximately 7am, two groups of Israelis from the illegal settlements Bat Ayn and Kiryat Arba were taking a “hike” in the privately-owned Palestinian agricultural land belonging to the residents of Beit Ommar (“Palestinian killed in clashes with settlers near Hebron,” The Jerusalem Post, 29 January 2011).
There was no indication that the settlers were planning on shooting. Yousef’s father reported that the first shot fired by the settlers hit his son in the head. The settlers then began shooting in the air and the surrounding areas to prevent others from approaching, as his father screamed desperately for help.
Yousef was carried to a car that drove him out of the agricultural valley and to the main road, where an ambulance “rushed” him to the hospital in Hebron, passing two Israeli military checkpoints on the way. At the hospital, Yousef was put on a respirator, though he had no brain activity. He passed away soon after.
At his funeral the following day, as is common practice with the Israeli military involving martyr funerals, soldiers numbering in the hundreds invaded Beit Ommar and attacked the funeral with tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and even live ammunition, as the Palestine Solidarity Project reported (“Funeral of Yousef Ikhlayl attacked by Israeli military, dozens injured,” 29 January 2011).
The murder of Yousef Ikhlayl, the impunity with which the settlers acted and the military’s behavior at the funeral are common occurrences in the occupied West Bank. The death of a Palestinian, even a child, is rarely noted and quickly forgotten in much of the world. The killing of Yousef was, however, a profound event for myself, the Palestine Solidarity Project (PSP, the organization I co-founded) and popular resistance in the Hebron district as a whole.
Never safe
PSP began farmer-accompaniment programs in the areas surrounding Beit Ommar — particularly the areas near Bat Ayn settlement — in 2006. We did so because of the extreme violence and the regularity with which settlers from this colony would attack farmers, particularly in the Saffa valley near where Yousef was killed.
Yousef was a regular participant in all of our activities, including demonstrations, farming actions, summer camps, English classes and even a photography workshop we held in 2010. He was a fixture at PSP events, volunteering to set up for conferences and often babysitting my young daughter as we held meetings and tours for international activists. I have vivid memories of Yousef carrying my baby, Rafeef, around the yard of my house, pointing out tree leaves and flowers while my husband, PSP co-founder Mousa Abu Maria, and I met with international delegations and the local popular committee.
Yousef was quite familiar with the Israeli settlers from the area and their potential for violence. Perhaps it was because of this familiarity with them that he did not run when they arrived in the area. He had been with PSP dozens of times as we accompanied other farmers to their land, as settlers watched from the hillside or hurled rocks at us from hundreds of meters away. Perhaps he assumed this time would be no different; but maybe it would have been different if we had been there with his family. I wonder about what he thought when the settlers approached. I have often thought in the last year if things would have been different if international activists had been there; if I had been there.
Our farmer-accompaniment program in the area throughout the years, though it had led to literally dozens of arrests of Israeli and international solidarity activists, was completely successful in deterring settler violence during the accompaniment.
In the end, the settlers roamed the area freely, shooting at residents and youth who began throwing stones for two hours. Two hours before Israeli soldiers, who are responsible for the security of Area C — 60 percent of the West Bank under Israeli military control — could persuade the residents to return to their homes.
The aforementioned Jerusalem Post article adds that twenty settlers were detained at the scene by the military — a highly unusual occurrence, possibly due to the presence of international and Israeli activists who had arrived in the area after the shooting — but were all released the same day.
Israeli impunity
During the two hours that the settlers stayed in the area, PSP activists arrived and began taking pictures of them to provide to the Israeli police responsible for investigating attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank. Shortly after the murder, Yousef’s father and the activists who took the pictures went to the Israeli police station (located in the settlement Kfar Etzion, next door to Bat Ayn) and filed a formal complaint.
Yousef’s father provided the photographs to the police and even identified a few individuals he saw closest to him and his son when he was shot. In a democracy, one would think this level of evidence, combined with the heinousness of the crime, would lead to a thorough investigation and speedy indictment. But, as we all well know, that is not what happens when settlers attack Palestinians.
In December 2011, Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization that monitors the criminal accountability of Israeli civilians and Israeli military forces in the West Bank, released an updated report on the rate of which Israeli civilians are prosecuted for crimes committed against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Yesh Din discovered, after researching the progress of 700 individual complaints filed with the Israeli police in the West Bank by Palestinians, that 91 percent of all complaints end with the investigation being closed without an indictment, including 85 percent of cases involving violence. The most common reason for closing a case (which can be done either by the police or by the police prosecutor) is “perpetrator unknown,” though a full 2 percent of all cases were closed because of a “lack of public interest,” which begs the question, “which public?” (“Updated data monitoring hundreds of investigations: 91% of cases closed without indictments,” 15 December 2011).
The report reveals that only 7.4 percent of cases involving settler crimes committed against Palestinians from 2005 to 2011 actually ended in an indictment. The statistic regarding crimes committed by Israeli military personnel against Palestinians, which are investigated by a separate entity, is a negligible 3.5 percent ending in indictments.
Yesh Din’s full report shows a series of failures, from the process of filing an initial complaint, to the police investigation, to the process inside the prosecutors’ office for initiating an indictment. In Yousef Ikhlayl’s case, Yesh Din discovered that while an investigation was conducted by the police (which may have only constituted the interview with Yousef’s father) and the file was turned over to the prosecution, the case has inexplicably been stalled for months because the prosecution’s office has refused to assign the case to an individual attorney, a step necessary before a final decision can be made on whether an indictment will be handed down.
It is obvious that individual justice for Palestinian victims of settler crimes — even when the victim is an unarmed child — remains elusive. Perhaps, as was suggested in an op-ed that appeared in Israeli daily Haaretz about the murder of Mustafa Tamimi, knowing the individual perpetrator, and pursuing a case against the individual, only serves to alleviate the responsibility of the system as a whole (“A courageous Palestinian has died, shrouded in stones,” 13 December 2011).
However, violent, ideological settlers, and their counterparts in the Israeli military, will only continue to act with total disregard for the basic human rights of Palestinians if they are assured that they will not face consequences. The death of a civilian, particularly a child, should result both in a black mark on the society that condones it, as well as the prosecution of the individuals responsible.
A call to action
Yousef Ikhlayl’s murder was overshadowed by world events taking place in January 2011. Activists and sympathetic journalists alike were focused on the massive uprising in Egypt that had just erupted, as well as other developments during the Arab uprisings. Beit Ommar, Yousef’s hometown, had fallen into the background as settler violence had decreased in previous months and the demonstrations in Nabi Saleh were gaining attention.
The community of Beit Ommar and the Palestine Solidarity Project have called for an international day of action on Saturday, 28 January, to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Yousef’s death and ensure that he will not be forgotten.
People all over the world will hold demonstrations in front of Israeli consulates, and will plaster their cities with posters of with his face (which can be found on the website).
We are calling for an end to Israeli impunity, and the world to remember that behind statistics and policy reports, the victims of Israel’s murderous policies are real, live people. It is imperative that the international community not only hold Israel accountable for its criminal acts, through movements including boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), and solidarity work in Palestine, but also to humanize the victims of these crimes. Yousef Ikhlayl was a goofy, quiet and dedicated boy. He had a sheepish smile and made my daughter laugh. We will not forget him.
Bekah Wolf is a co-founder of the Palestine Solidarity Project, and has worked in the West Bank since 2003. Further details on the day of action to demand justice for Yousef Ikhlayl can be found on the PSP website, www.palestinesolidarityproject.org. PSP can be followed on Twitter at @PalestinePSP.