Clashes have broken out in East Jerusalem amid high tensions after Palestinian groups called for a day of protest over access to al-Aqsa mosque.
Eleven police officers were injured and at least two Palestinians arrested as youths threw stones.
But Friday prayers at the flashpoint holy site passed off largely peacefully amid a heavy Israeli police presence.
Meanwhile, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said talks with US envoy George Mitchell were “constructive”.
Mr Mitchell was due to meet with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Friday, and to hold further talks with Mr Netanyahu’s aides on Saturday.
US attempts to restart peace negotiations appear to have stalled over Israel’s refusal to meet US and Palestinian demands that it freeze all settlement activity in the West Bank.
Israel has made clear that it intends to keep building in East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians want the capital of their future state.
The Palestinian Authority has accused Israel of seeking to “Judaise” East Jerusalem, and of allowing extremists access to the al-Aqsa mosque compound while denying it to Muslims.
Thousands of extra Israeli police were deployed on Friday after sporadic clashes over the past two weeks, apparently sparked by Palestinian fears that Jewish extremists were seeking to enter the third holiest site in Islam. The complex, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif and Jews as Temple Mount, houses both al-Aqsa mosque and the Jewish holy site, the Western Wall. The Islamist group Hamas had called for a “day of rage” on Friday, local media said, while its rival Fatah had urged a strike and peaceful protests in support of the mosque.
The Islamic Movement – a political organisation based in Israel – had urged Muslim citizens of Israel to flock to Jerusalem to “defend al-Aqsa”.
To those who thought that the starving and blockade of Gaza is the main and only aspect of the oppressive occupation, this is a timely reminder that ALL Palestinians are the victims of this occupation, on a daily basis.
By Gideon Levy
His mouth is sewn shut and wires are clamped on his jaw. He can’t open his mouth, can’t speak and can’t eat anything but liquids, which are injected into his mouth via syringe or straw. He will remain in this unfortunate situation for at least six weeks. Israel Defense Forces soldiers shut Salman Zararana’s mouth – literally.
A Bedouin shepherd and the son of refugees, from the remote village of Al-Ramadin, at the southernmost extremity of the West Bank, Zararana is a 43-year-old father of six. This week he sat on the floor of his hut wearing a heavy jacket despite the heat, a red keffiyeh covering his face and his shame, his eyes flashing with anguish and pain. One powerful blow with a rifle butt, delivered by a soldier who vented his anger on him for no apparent reason, broke Zararana’s jaw in three places. First there was surgery, and now prolonged wiring.
He is pale, thin and weak, barely able to stand on his feet. But Zararana is not suffering alone: On at least two other occasions, on consecutive days, the same soldiers apparently used the same place – near an opening in the separation fence – to batter two more groups of wretched Palestinians, who only wanted to do a few days of work in Israel. The soldiers are also suspected of stealing the Palestinians’ money and cigarettes, forcing them to crawl on the ground and walk barefoot through a field of thorns, and of trying to organizing a “race” among them, in which the winner would be given water to drink in the heat of the day.
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This week, Jessica Montell, executive director of B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, sent an urgent letter to the military advocate general, Brigadier General Avichai Mandelblit, calling on him to intervene immediately to stop what she described as the persistent abuse of Palestinians by soldiers next to the village of Al-Ramadin, near the settlement of Eshkolot, not far from Be’er Sheva.
Al-Ramadin looks like the end of the world. It is a village of about 4,000 Bedouin from refugee families who were expelled or fled from the Negev in 1948. There is no way to talk to Zararana, of course, but we received his testimony by means of hand gestures, and with the help of his brother as well as of B’Tselem fieldworker Musa Abu Hashhash, who accompanied us.
Zararana has been unemployed for the past two years, during which he has not had a valid Israeli work permit. He sometimes takes sheep out for grazing. On Wednesday, September 23, during the “10 days of penitence” between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, he left his house at midday, heading for the home of friends near the separation fence, to buy feed for the sheep. For some reason, the fence, which was built in this area about four years ago, has an opening through which hundreds of workers from the territories sneak into Israel every day. They are met on the other side by Israeli Bedouin, who drive them to jobs in the Negev. This “taxi service” costs each worker NIS 150.
When he got to his friends’ home, Zararana noticed an IDF jeep chasing a Dodge Magnum pickup carrying workers who tried to sneak into Israel. On the hills above were another four or five pickups full of workers, waiting for the jeep to leave.
Unable to catch the Dodge, the soldiers stopped and called Zararana over. He told them he had come to visit friends living near the fence. The soldiers took his ID card and his mobile phone, ordered him to wait – and left. He sat down on a boulder and waited. About 40 minutes later, they returned. Three of them walked over to Zararana, who was certain they were going to beat him to vent their frustration at not catching the pickup. One of the soldiers handed him his ID card and phone very slowly, but when Zararana reached out to take them, one of the soldiers struck him viciously with his rifle butt on the right cheek.
Zararana heard something crack in his mouth; from the force of the blow he lost his balance and felt dizzy, but did not fall. All he wanted to do was get away so the soldiers would not hit him again. When he was about 300 yards from the soldiers, he waved at one of the pickups waiting above, signaling the driver to come rescue him. The pain was unbearable.
The pickup took him to the entrance of the village, where his brother was already waiting in the neighbors’ car. They drove quickly to Al-Ahli Hospital in Hebron, from where he was transferred to the city’s Alia Hospital, but there were no specialists in either institution capable of dealing with Zararana’s injury. After four days without proper treatment, the family had him transferred to the government hospital in Ramallah, where he was operated on and his jaw was wired shut. The physicians found fractures in three places.
Six days later, on September 29, the day after Yom Kippur and all its soul-searchings, soldiers detained a group of 13 workers who had tried to sneak into Israel. According to the testimonies taken by Abu Hashhash, they forced the Palestinians to lie on the ground, and stepped on and kicked them. They kicked the stomach of one worker – Nadir Horibat, who is about 20 – so hard that he had to be evacuated by ambulance. He spent two days in a Hebron hospital.
But there was more. The soldiers came back again the next day, last Wednesday, September 30, in the afternoon. This time they caught a group of nine workers from nearby towns, and for six hours, meted out the most serious abuse of all: They ordered the men to crawl on the ground, pushing them to move faster. Then they made them take off their shoes and walk barefoot through a field of thorns, according to the testimonies taken by B’Tselem.
Despite his age, a worker nammed Mohammed Sadak Kneibi, 56, also underwent the hazing and abuse. His son-in-law, Iyad Abu Marhiya, a resident of Hebron, aged about 30, tried to get up to urinate during the crawling session, but was told by a soldier: “You didn’t get permission to piss,” and ordered him to keep crawling. Abu Marhiya told B’Tselem that in the end he had to relieve himself in his trousers. All the men were on their way to work in Ashkelon.
That stage of the abuse went on for about two hours. Then the soldiers ordered the workers to sit on the ground with their backs to them. The workers later related that while they were sitting, the soldiers stole cigarettes and money they had brought for the days they would spend in Israel. The soldiers apparently did not touch the Palestinian cigarettes, but according to the testimonies, they made off with about 30 packs of L&Ms and NIS 700 in cash.
When the workers asked for water, after hours in the heat, the soldiers told them to run a race in which the winner would get water. The soldiers offered the same deal when the workers asked if they could smoke: The winner would get a cigarette. The workers said they refused to suffer such humiliation. One of the soldiers also ordered the eldest of the workers to take off his jacket, so that the soldier could use it to dress up as a Palestinian and catch more workers.
At one point, Kneibi says he told the soldiers: “Either kill us or let us go.” He was the only one who had the guts to protest – and he was also the first to be released. The others, he says, were freed after yet another race. By 9 P.M. they all had been allowed to go; when the soldiers left they snuck into Ashkelon after eating supper in the Israeli Bedouin town of Lakiya. The next day, however, the group was caught by the Ashkelon police and, after being interrogated, were expelled via the Tarkumiya checkpoint.
The IDF Spokesman stated in response: “Following a complaint by the B’Tselem organization regarding the event of September 23, including the details of the complainant, a Military Police investigation of the issue will be commenced, and the complainant will be requested to give detailed testimony. The other two events are not known to the IDF and no specific complaints have been received regarding them … The behaviors described in the complaints, if they indeed occurred, are against IDF regulations, directives and values as given to IDF soldiers in Judea and Samaria, and we denounce them.”
Another excellent piece by Gideon Levy:
By Gideon Levy
Is the discourse we are conducting – if indeed we are conducting any discourse among ourselves and with our interlocutor – legitimate at all? Ever since the territories were occupied a public debate has been going on here about their future and what is being done there. The questions have come and gone, all of them in the same cursed vein: To give? To concede? Under what conditions? In exchange for what? The settlements – yes or no; the roadblocks – yes or no; the assassinations, the arrests, the starving, the closure, the encirclement, the curfew, the exposure, the torture, the freedom of movement, the choice or the ritual – yes or no.
An excellent example was provided this week by Jerusalem police chief Aharon Franco, who said that the city’s Muslims were “ungrateful.” For what? We gave them – here we have that word “gave” again – permission to pray at the Temple Mount and they replied with violence.
Indeed, we do not have any moral right to conduct this discussion. First of all, it’s a lie that we have given the Muslims permission to worship – only men over 50. But more importantly, who are we to “give” them rights to which they are entitled in a way that is taken for granted in every democracy? Is it imaginable that we would prevent young Jews from going to the Western Wall? Can Palestinians, too, dream of holding a “Jerusalem March” of their own?
Defense Minister Ehud Barak and his spokesmen are boasting of having taken down a number of roadblocks, and the deputy director general in charge of frequencies at the Communications Ministry is considering whether to “give” the Palestinians a second mobile telephone network after the government has piled up conditions – Goldstone in exchange for Wataniya, the cellular phone operator.
Where does this right come from? Just as a rapist does not have the right to discuss carrying out his nefarious scheme, and the robber cannot haggle over the conditions under which he will return his loot, the occupier, the taskmaster, the jack-booted soldier and the exploiter cannot discuss the conditions under which they will carry out their deeds. This is a blatantly immoral discussion. The discussion by free people of the fate of other people under their rule is just as legitimate as the discussion by slave-runners or human traffickers. The only legitimate discussion is one that intends to end the situation, immediately and unconditionally.
This starts from the top. The Supreme Court deliberates on various matters. Is torture legal? Are assassinations permitted? Is it permissible to take land away from a farmer? Is it permissible to impose a siege on hundreds of thousands of people? Is it legal to imprison people for years without trial? Is it possible to prevent people from getting medical treatment? Is it legitimate to prevent children from getting to school? The mere fact of raising these questions in court, as if there weren’t already a conclusive answer to them, is the most depressing proof of the moral nadir to which we have declined.
Of course, this illegitimate discussion seeped long ago into every walk of society. On television, learned commentators discuss whether the siege of Gaza is “effective.” Over a can of Red Bull, soldiers argue about whether Operation Cast Lead wasn’t stopped too soon and when “we’ll stick it to them” again. In their cafes, over a cup of iced java, young people sit and discuss whether “we should give the Palestinians a state,” as if this were a question at all and we “give” states. But these discussions, too, monstrous as they may be, have in recent years given way to repression (in the psychological sense), silence, complacence and indifference.
About an hour’s drive from us, the unbelievably cruel reality continues. Everything is done there in the name of us all, supposedly, and in the name of security, supposedly. And here among us there is either distorted discourse or non-discourse. Nothing will change as long as this state of affairs continues. A recent report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs draws a shocking picture of what is happening in Gaza. For example, 75 percent of its inhabitants, more than 1 million people, are suffering from nutritional deficiencies, 90 percent must live through power blackouts for four to eight hours every day, 40 percent of those who apply to leave for medical treatment are refused by Israel and 140,000 inhabitants are unemployed. All these figures reflect a situation that has degenerated badly over the past year, and all of them stem from the siege in its third year. How many of us know this? How many of us does this touch at all, between the bar and the gym? And above all, where did we get the gall to decide the fate of another people?
A reminder of the cynical use made by Abbas in the suffering of Palestinians. This about-face is the result of the anger of Palestinians, now at the boiling point, after his despicable collapse ion the face of Israeli and US pressure to waylay the Goldstone report debate at the UN:
Palestinian diplomats in Geneva said Friday they are pushing to bring forward a United Nations Human Rights Council debate on alleged war crimes committed by Israeli forces and Palestinian militants in Gaza earlier this year. Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, said the request for an urgent meeting was prompted by violence this week in Jerusalem that he blamed on Israel and which he also wants discussed. Last week, the Palestinian Authority agreed to delay debating a UN report on the conflict until March over concerns that going ahead now could harm the fragile Middle East peace process. The decision led to street protests by Palestinians and condemnation around the Arab world. “We deferred, so we were expecting that the Israelis should respect in some way human rights, but this act of aggression against people, against the human rights and humanitarian law, is unbelievable,” Khraishi said. There have been repeated outbursts of unrest in Jerusalem since last week, sparked by rumors spread among Palestinians of an attempt by Jewish extremists to harm the Islamic holy sites in the compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.
Khraishi’s comments appear to indicate a mounting effort by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to deflect criticism for earlier holding off pursuing Israel over alleged war crimes in the Gaza fighting.
According to a senior source in Jerusalem, the Palestinian move has caused a great deal of embarrassment for the United States, which has been trying to formulate a response with Israel since Friday morning. Officials in Jerusalem believe that Washington will find it difficult to prevent the debate, especially since the Palestinian agreement to the deferral last week was achieved with U.S. pressure. Nonetheless, officials believe that the visiting U.S. envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, will attempt to convince the Palestinian leadership not to advance the initiative in his meetings in the West Bank on Friday and Saturday. The Palestinian leadership has already backed a Libyan push to debate the report in the U.N. Security Council on Oct. 14. The head of the Organization of The Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, said earlier Friday that his group would support Palestinian efforts to raise the report in the Geneva-based UN rights council that originally
commissioned it.
“You know that OIC countries and public opinion were saddened by the withdrawal [of the report],” Ihsanoglu told reporters in Geneva. The Organization of The Islamic Conference is a powerful force in the 47-nation council and can usually muster the 17 votes necessary to force an emergency meeting. The 575-page report, drawn up by a team of experts led by former South African judge Richard Goldstone, concluded that Israel used disproportionate force and failed to protect civilians during its Dec. 27-Jan. 18 offensive against Hamas in Gaza. Israel has rejected the war crimes allegations, saying they resulted from bias against it. The report also accused Palestinian armed groups of possible war crimes, including firing rockets into civilian areas and using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Hamas, the Palestinian Authority’s main rival, controls Gaza. Israel’s stated goal in the 3-week campaign was the cessation of the cross-border rocket attacks by Gaza militants, which had plagued the country’s south for eight years. Israel says 1,166 Palestinians were killed in the offensive, the majority of whom were militants. Human rights groups say, however, that approximately 1,400 Palestinians were killed, mostly civilians. Thirteen Israelis were killed during the fighting: ten soldiers and three civilians. Khraishi said the Palestinians would try to have the report approved in every possible forum, to give weight to its recommendation that the alleged war crimes be investigated by independent and impartial bodies, including the International Criminal Court in The Hague, if necessary.
Palestinians sometimes joke about the fact that, when written in Arabic, “Palestinian National Authority” looks the same as “Palestinian National Salad”.
And to many here, the PA’s handling of Richard Goldstone’s UN report on the conflict in Gaza has been mixed up and limp. What began as the publication of a damning report on Israel’s military conduct – although it also condemned Hamas – has turned into an embarrassing debacle for Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president and Fatah leader. Palestinians were outraged after the authority last week, under Israeli and US pressure, abruptly halted its drive to speed the report, which accuses both sides of war crimes, to the higher echelons of the mechanisms of international justice. The PA initially urged UN human rights council members to refer the issue to the powerful Security Council which could in theory ask the International Criminal Court to open a war crimes prosecution.
But when the day of the vote came, the authority backed deferring discussion until March. In response, rights groups in the PA’s nerve centre of Ramallah took to the streets to denounce the decision. Gazans threw shoes – a sign of disrespect in Arabic culture – at Mr Abbas’s portrait on posters that branded him a traitor. Syria cancelled a planned visit by Mr Abbas to Damascus. An Israeli-Arab political party urged him to step down. The authority’s damage limitation exercises have done little to help. Some PA figures initially denied a change in policy, while others tried to cast the move as a step to allow more time to build consensus.
On Sunday Mr Abbas ordered an “investigation” into how his own government made the decision. On Wednesday one senior figure, Yasser Abed Rabbo, conceded the move was a “mistake”. Meanwhile negotiator Saeb Erekat has been threatening to name other countries – hinting that these include Arab governments which would face domestic anger – that he says pressured the Palestinians to back down.
Damaged credibility
Mr Abbas’s credibility, which is heavily tied to attempts to negotiate a Palestinian state into existence, had already taken a knock two weeks ago as US attempts to restart peace talks appeared to stall.
The PA leader faced domestic criticism for participating in a tri-lateral meeting with US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite Israel’s refusal to halt settlement building in the West Bank. Unofficial reports of the mini-summit, and US talk of Israel “restraining” rather than “freezing” settlement building, left Palestinians deeply disappointed. It seemed that Mr Obama had eased US pressure on Israel.
Also, Mr Abbas’s Fatah faction’s long-running feud with Hamas, and his own conduct during the Israeli operation in Gaza, have come back to haunt him.
He angered even some Fatah supporters by being slow to condemn the Israeli offensive which started in December. He criticised Hamas rocket attacks on southern Israel, even as Palestinian civilians were dying in Israeli air strikes. According to local media, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has said the PA actually “pressured Israel to go all the way” in the operation.
There have been reports – albeit from a news agency based in Hamas-controlled Gaza – that Israel threatened to release a video tape showing Palestinian leaders urging Israel to be tougher on Hamas during the Gaza offensive, unless the PA backed down over the Goldstone report.
While the tape may not exist at all, the rumours feed into perceptions among some Palestinians that Mr Abbas has at times swung almost traitorously close to Israel in his attempts to defeat his Hamas opponents.
Reconciliation
Paradoxically, the crisis for Mr Abbas has come amid signs that Fatah and Hamas may be close to a reconciliation deal that has eluded them for so long, that would pave the way for presidential and legislative elections.
Mr Abbas’s four-year term ended in January, and his authority now rests on disputed legal arguments, rather than a clear expression of voters’ views. But Hamas, which won legislative elections in January 2006, will find itself in a similar position from January onwards. Hamas declared the PA’s Goldstone decision “a betrayal of the blood of the martyrs”, and called for a delay in the planned reconciliation process. But it has not pulled out of talks completely, and one school of thought suggests Hamas leaders may actually be keen to negotiate while Mr Abbas’s hand is weakened.
Having failed to make progress on lifting Israel’s blockade of Gaza, they are currently enjoying a rare moment of triumph boosted by the release last week of 20 female Palestinian prisoners in exchange of footage for the captured soldier Gilad Shalit.
The PA move in Geneva has probably not made a major difference to the likelihood of Israel ending up in the dock of the International Criminal Court. This was always low.
Even if the Palestinians had persuaded enough countries to vote last Friday to forward the Goldstone report to the UN Security Council, the US and possibly others would most likely have vetoed sending it any further.
But backing from UN member states would ratchet up pressure on Israel to comply with Mr Goldstone’s recommendation that both it and Hamas mount credible, independent investigations into the report’s allegations.
However, the PA decision’s repercussions for Mr Abbas may be wider, especially if Mr Obama’s drive to relaunch peace negotiations fails to bear fruit.
The weaker Mr Abbas becomes, the less credible any attempted peace process looks – and the less credible any peace process looks, the weaker he becomes.
An interesting report on new research, exposing the deep-seated racism of one of the fathers of Zionism, Arthur Ruppin:
By Tom Segev
Arthur Ruppin, a German-born lawyer and sociologist, is considered the father of the Zionist national settlement in the Land of Israel, beginning in 1908. Among other things, he was involved in the establishment of Kibbutz Degania and in the early development of Tel Aviv, he was among the founders of Bank Hapoalim and until his death in 1943, he was one of the leaders of the Zionist enterprise. He was also one of the fathers of Hebrew education and Hebrew culture in general; indeed, his outlook influenced the worldview of Moshe Dayan and other notables.
All of this is widely known. What is less known is Ruppin’s belief that the realization of Zionism demanded “racial purity” among the Jews. In part, his views were inspired by the works of anti-Semitic thinkers, including some of the original Nazi ideologists.
After the Holocaust, Israeli historiography tended to play down this embarrassing information as much as possible – or even ignore it totally. However, a few weeks ago, Tel Aviv University accepted a doctoral thesis by a researcher named Etan Bloom, who found, inter alia, that not only was Ruppin influenced by the theories that engendered Nazi racism, he also had an impact on their formulation.
Bloom discovered that Ruppin had a “definitive influence” on the German view of the Jews as a race. For example, Ruppin’s own research, some of it carried out at the Hebrew University, offered an explanation for Jews’ supposed avarice: He posited that the Jews who originally lived in the Land of Israel before the destruction of the First Temple, and engaged in agriculture, actually belonged to non-Semitic tribes. At a certain stage they began mixing with Semitic tribes, something that compromised their racial purity and weakened them. As the Semitic element began to become dominant, it prompted the Jews to leave agriculture and to develop commercial instincts, a heightened lust for money and uncontrollable greed.
Ruppin believed these were correctable flaws, and the first task he demanded of the Zionist enterprise was, therefore, to identify remnants of the “original” or “authentic” group of Jews – those with a direct, biological connection with the ancient, racially pure Israelites. He believed they would be found among the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe.
At that time, Western Jews were already in the midst of a process of assimilation while, in Ruppin’s opinion, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews (from Middle Eastern and North African countries) were experiencing biological atrophy, which cast the fact of their identity as part of the Jewish race in doubt. Therefore, it was only after long hesitation that he authorized bringing Jewish laborers over from Yemen; furthermore, he declared that there were no black Jews.
This, according to Bloom, is how discrimination against Mizrahim took root in the Land of Israel back then. Contrary to accepted beliefs, he posits, this phenomenon was not born of “cultural misunderstanding,” but rather of cultural planning based on racial theories. In Bloom’s opinion, this was a case of intra-Jewish racism, of an anti-Semitic dimension of modern Hebrew culture. Some of Ruppin’s ideas fit into the intellectual discourse that prevailed in his day, which praised racial purity and dealt extensively with eugenics, the movement toward improving human genetic quality. Belief in the theory that Ashkenazim were the definitive Jewish type in the modern era enabled Ruppin to accept German racial theory, and effectively remove the majority of Jews from the Semitic category. Indeed, in his view, the original, “healthy” Jews who were responsible for the virtuous aspects of the culture belonged, in racial terms, to the Indo-Germans.
A few months after the Nazis came to power, in 1933, Ruppin met for a friendly conversation with Hans Guenther, one of the main disseminators of Nazi racial theory. The meeting was intended, among other things, to advance negotiations between the Zionist movement and Nazi German authorities toward an agreement that would enable the Jews of Germany to immigrate to Palestine and transfer some of their assets there.
Ruppin comes across in Bloom’s findings as an intellectually and mentally complex individual, who in later years, apparently behaved quite oddly. He photographed “Jewish types,” measured skulls, compared fingerprints and believed it was possible to categorize Ashkenazi Jews in various racial subclasses, according to nasal structure. Shortly before his death, he finished a comparative study on the latter subject, comparing a number of outstanding figures in the Zionist movement – beginning with Theodor Herzl himself, whose nose Ruppin defined as “Assyrian-Bukharan.” He defined the nose of a Jew named Jacob Feitlowitz, who was born in Poland and studied the history of the Jews in Ethiopia, as “Ashkenazi-Negroid.” According to Bloom, Ruppin apparently believed that Feitlowitz’s affinity for Ethiopians testified to his attraction to his “own kind.”
The doctorate in question is fascinating and eloquent. It was written in English, under the supervision of Tel Aviv University’s Itamar Even-Zohar and American historian Sander Gilman. Bloom says he is not particularly happy that he is also a part of this story. He is concerned about the reactions his research is liable to elicit, but will defend what he has written. Indeed, he said this week, “It is the truth.”
Hasan Abu Nimah, 9 October 2009
While American officials continue to claim that the mission of US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell is by no means over, and that he will still pursue his efforts to convince the Israeli government to agree to some sort of settlement freeze, Israeli plans for further colonization of Palestinian land continue undisturbed. The latest Israeli plans call for the destruction of the West Bank village of al-Walajah for the second time in six decades.
According to Israeli press reports, Israel is planning a massive new settlement in the vicinity of Jerusalem, on land owned by Palestinians of al-Walajah. The project, expected to be approved by the Israeli ministry of the Interior, could become the single most populous settlement built in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967 according to the Israeli daily Maariv. The project plans prepared by the ministry of the Interior and the Jerusalem municipality call for 14,000 housing units for 40,000 settlers on 3,000 dunums of land which would require the demolition of al-Walajah residents’ homes, according to the paper.
The original village of al-Walajah was located on the opposite side of its current location, on a mountain slope facing east, just about six kilometers south of Jerusalem. It was very close to Battir, the village in which I was born and brought up. The two villages were separated by a valley, with Battir on the opposite slope from al-Walajah, though a little further south and were very closely linked.
The railway from Jerusalem to the Palestinian coastal city of Jaffa ran right through that valley, which also marks the 1949 armistice line following the end of the 1948 war (also known as the “Green Line.”)
During October 1948, Zionist forces attacked and occupied al-Walajah. Its roughly 1,800 inhabitants were scattered in every direction, sharing the fate of Palestinians from hundreds of other towns and villages ethnically cleansed in the same period.
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