'There is no humanity here,' says S, my new-found friend.
'I guess that means we've had it then,' I reply, and I try to laugh so that she realises this is an attempt to lighten the mood, but the laugh comes out dry and hoarse and I can hear the wobble in my voice as I say the words.
I'm annoyed at myself, and I want to tell her - a feisty, young, beautiful-looking Palestinian - that I'm not really the pathetic, anxious individual I'm currently coming across as.
But I've been in this holding pen alone for three-and-a-half hours, without food or water, and have, already, in that period of time, been hauled out five times for interrogating (the first couple of times, I'd describe it as questioning; after that, it became worse) by four different people.
On top of that, I came in on a night flight, landing at 6am on Sunday, so I haven't slept since Friday night, and I'd find that upsetting at the best of times. In this situation, the lack of sleep has led me to make some appalling slip ups during the questionings.
S and I are being held at Tel Aviv airport, Israel. She's just come in on a flight from New York, with the aim of making it to Ramallah to edit a newsletter being started by Palestinian friends. Orginally from Gaza, she knows she has no chance of being allowed in to that brutally-punished strip of land, even though her family lives there, so instead she comes to the West Bank to do her bit against the occupation. This time, she tells me, she has no intention of leaving.
Thinking only of my stomach, I ask her if we're likely to get any food or something to drink. 'No,' she replies. 'There is no humanity here.'
My first questioning had seemed pretty straightforward: 'Are you Muslim?' asked the uniformed woman with the blue eye shadow. 'What is your father's name?'; 'Where was he born?'; 'What was his father's name?'; 'Where was he born?'; 'Why have you come to Israel?'; 'Are you going to the West Bank or Gaza?'.
The woman had even apologised for having to ask the questions. It all put me in the wrong frame of mind...I thought this was going to be ok, and I relaxed.
S opens her hand luggage, which is stuffed full of granola bars and oatcakes, and offers me one. Bloody hell, has this woman been sent to me from heaven??
'They do this because they don't want Arabs using their aiport,' she says. 'They want to make it so difficult for us that we stop coming through here. You've got to hang on. They'll let you through in the end.'
I quickly realise that I can't eat the granola bar because of the anxiety knots tying and untying themselves in my stomach. The combination of that plus food gives me the runs, and I depart hastily to the toilet.
When I return, M, the leader of the Surrey-based group I'd flown into Tel Aviv with (which intends to stay in the West Bank for a week - secretly meeting human-rights organisations - and who've all got through customs) is in the holding pen. He's been allowed in to give me my bag, and also brings me a baguette and a bottle of water. I tell him briefly what's happened so far. 'Welcome to the occupation,' he says wryly, and then he has to leave.
Possibly the worst questioning was with the man in plain-clothes. He was young and wore a black t-shirt. Fit and strong, he made sure his attitude was one of intimidation. When we walked into a tiny metal room, the door clanged shut behind us, and then it was just me and him, and a desk between us. I considered the possibilities of assault. Focus on the questions, focus...
'We know you've been in Israel before'; (I've never been: 'No I haven't,' I say); 'You've been here before, just tell us the truth'; ('I've never been to Israel'); 'Don't lie to us, or we'll stop being nice to you'; 'Why is your passport so new?'; 'Who have you been communicating with in the West Bank?'; ('No-one'); 'We know you've been communicating with people in the West Bank. Tell us who they are'; ('I don't know anyone in the West Bank'); 'I know you're lying. You've got one more chance to tell me the truth. I might look nice, but I'm not'.
And so it went on. My tongue kept sticking to the top of my dry, dry mouth, and I tried not to cluck every time I unstuck it. My lips were dryer than I ever thought it possible for them to be, and I worked hard to control my shaking. Was I shaking because I was tired and hungry? Maybe. I hoped it wasn't fear. That would just make me cross.
S has just come back from her second interrogation with the woman we call The Bitch. She is another one of the plain-clothes squad, in a khaki t-shirt and jeans and I've also done two rounds with her. By now, nearly four hours after she arrived in the holding pen, S and I are laughing and chatting, and I know I can cope for however long this takes, regardless of the constant, anxious churning in my stomach.
But S comes back from this interrogation furious. 'How dare she? How dare she?' she fumes. She goes over the details of her questioning with me, angry, raging.
'I'm Palestinian. Why aren't I allowed into my own country?' she demands. 'We have no control over our own airspace, our own borders. Why do I have to beg the Israelis for a visa to enter my own country? When are we going to stop being herded in and out of the West Bank like cattle?'
Then she kind of collapses in on herself, totally defeated. 'You have to be strong,' I tell her, remembering her words to me several hours previously. 'You'll get in eventually.'
The second time I was in with The Bitch, I completely c*cked up. Thinking it would help me get in, I told her I had a friend who was travelling in Israel, which I do, and that we were going to meet up and travel together. She asked me for his email address, but I didn't want to give it to her, so I said I couldn't remember it. The Bitch softened and implied that if I could prove the existence of an Israeli friend, they'd let me go. 'Do you have his email address in your email contacts list?' she asked. God, I was tired. What harm could giving someone an email address do? 'Yes,' I said.
She turned her computer screen towards me on the desk, and pushed the keyboard in front of me. 'Give it to me,' she ordered. Suddenly my stupid brain clicked back on. 'What are you doing??' it screamed at me. 'Get out of this.'
I entered a really old email address that I'd used when I was freelancing three years ago, opened the account, looked through the contacts list, and told her my friend's address wasn't in there. She took the keyboard from me and typed 'Israel' into the search bar. Bizarrely, three reports I'd emailed to myself in 2006 came up - one on young offenders, a second on funding for women's refuges, and the third was a Housing Corporation report on overcrowding amongst Muslim children in Tower Hamlets.
She seized on the third one. 'What's this? What's this?' she demanded to know. I told her and sensed her anger at having been denied the prize - the proof she was looking for. Despite the situation, I felt a rising giggle at the absurdity of it all and quickly suppressed it. Then total fear struck as I realised what she'd discover if she managed to get into my current email account, including the link to this blog.
During our first questioning, The Bitch asked me if I'd ever done voluntary work. I said I'd done some stuff with homeless people years ago in England, but she was unimpressed. 'We know why you're here,' she told me, 'But we want you to tell us before we send you back.'
Why was I there? To work with children in a Bethlehem school, to live with a Palestinian family (a couple and their four teenage daughters) and share their lives for three months, to witness the reality of the occupation. It's hardly the stuff of revolution, but every human rights sympathiser, every international observer that is allowed in weakens Israel's iron stranglehold on the West Bank, even if only symbolically, interupts its systematic crushing of the Palestinians and refuses to let the name of Palestine die on the world stage.
Just a few miles from where I sat for 14 hours in that holding pen, convoys of lorries carrying emergency medical aid, food, rebuilding materials, even children's toys and musical instruments, are regularly denied entry into the sealed-off Gaza Strip, where 80% of the Palestinian population lives in poverty amongst houses that have been destroyed, power plants and sewage-treatment centres that have been shelled, hospitals and schools that have been bombed, and farmland that has been uprooted by Israel's bulldozers. Treated like animals, the Palestinians are not allowed out and humanitarian aid is not allowed in.
My pen was nothing like the open pen they are trapped in, and I was eventually given my freedom. During the hours and hours I spent in there, Palestinians other than S came and went. Some were kept for several hours, others only for an hour or two. At one point, every chair in there was occupied by men, women, teenage children, whose faces displayed nothing but patience. This was the narrative of their existence, and they bore it with dignity. For me, used to the freedom to roam at will, it was a tiny, shocking insight into the tactics of humiliation and control, tactics the Palestinians of the West Bank face daily at any one of around 600 checkpoints that control their movement. Checkpoints where they start queuing at 2, 3 or 4 in the morning in order to make it to work, where 69 women on their way to hospital have been forced to give birth since September 2000.
Somehow, in the Israeli mentality, allowing me in to work with children would have been an unthinkable concession to humanity.
After 11 hours, I was taken for questioning by the Ministry of the Interior. More relentless interrogation, more psychological mind games and then I was told that my story didn't add up and I would be deported.
I was photographed, finger-printed, and a copy of my passport taken. There was a bag search, body search and yet more questions.
For the final two hours before my bmi flight back to London, I was escorted by two armed guards if I wanted to go to the toilet and a close watch was kept on me in the holding pen. Then finally it was time to go. Two different armed security staff put me into a van and drove me across the tarmac to the plane. I was taken up the metal steps by one of the guards and we waited at the door of the plane for a few minutes until some security clearance came through on her radio. And then, for the first time since it was taken from me at 6 that morning, my passport was returned to me. I boarded the plane and went and sat in the seat allocated to me at the very back. For the first time also since that morning, I was free from surveillance and control. It felt weird.
I opened my passport. The stamp inside it said: 'Ben-Gurion Airport: Entry Denied'.
And, with that stamp, the human rights of Palestine were denied once more.
Links: The Palestine Solidarity Campaign campaigns for justice for the Palestinians. It also advocates for Palestinians' civil, political and human rights, in accordance with international law.
Annual membership is £24.
Medical Aid for Palestinians is a British charity that delivers health and medical care to Palestinians. It also contributes to psycho-social support efforts for women and children affected by the occupation.
Tuesday 26 May 2009
Friday 22 May 2009
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine 1948
In 1947, the population of Palestine was 1,750,000, of which 70% were Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian.
The UN partitioned Palestine and gave 55% of the land to the Jewish population to create the state of Israel.
The Palestinian inhabitants of the land weren't consulted on the partition plan, rendering it illegal.
In March 1948, Jewish forces put into effect a carefully prepared plan (Plan D) to seize more Palestinian land for the state of Israel.
Extract from Plan D, for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine of its Arab population: 'These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble)...or by encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them.'
A total of 31 massacres were carried out by the Jewish forces, including in the village of Deir Yassin, where approximately 250 women, children and men were killed in what began as a dawn raid and lasted two days. (April 1948)
A 12-year-old Palestinian child at Deir Yassin said later: 'They took us out one after the other, shot an old man and, when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too.
'Then they called my brother Muhammed and shot him in front of us. And when my mother yelled, bending over him - carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her - they shot her too.'
Like other Palestinian villages, Deir Yassin was then burnt to the ground.
In the village of Tantura, in May 1948, Jewish forces separated 200 men and boys between the ages of 13 and 30 from the rest of the village and shot them dead in cold blood.
Palestinians in the cities weren't spared from the atrocities. Terrorism was used against the 75,000 strong Palestinian population of Haifa. They were subjected to heavy shelling, bombing, sniper fire and the igniting of deliberately spilled oil. Civilians trying to flee the port town by sea were shelled.
The orders to the Jewish troops were: 'Kill any Arab you see; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.'
They succeeded in their objectives and the Arab population in Haifa was reduced from 45% to just 4%.
A witness to the flight from Haifa said: 'Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers.'
By the time Jewish troops had finished their ethnic cleansing and land grab, 13,000 Palestinians lay dead, nearly 500 Palestinian villages had been burnt to the ground, and 750,000 Palestinians driven from the country of their birth and forced to live abroad, or in the camps of Gaza and the West Bank, as refugees, where they remain today - the largest refugee population in the world. (There are currently 7.2m Palestinian refugees worldwide)
But the operation was a success. When it ended, in 1949, the state of Israel had grown to occupy 78% of what, just two years earlier, had been Palestine.
Menachem Begin, the leader of one of the Jewish military organisations (Irgun) which carried out the massacres, and who later became a Prime Minister of Israel, said: 'As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere...Oh Lord, Oh Lord, you have chosen us for conquest.'
The remaining 22% of the land is now known as the Gaza Strip (bordering the Mediterranean) and the West Bank (bordering Jordan).
Both areas were occupied by Israeli troops in 1967 and the Palestinian population is subject to ongoing terror.
UN Resolution 242 calls on Israel to withdraw from the territories it has illegally occupied. Israel refuses and, instead, has removed the borders of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from all its maps, including in Israeli schoolbooks and tourist maps.
Sources: Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Friends of Al Aqsa (Peace in Palestine)
The UN partitioned Palestine and gave 55% of the land to the Jewish population to create the state of Israel.
The Palestinian inhabitants of the land weren't consulted on the partition plan, rendering it illegal.
In March 1948, Jewish forces put into effect a carefully prepared plan (Plan D) to seize more Palestinian land for the state of Israel.
Extract from Plan D, for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine of its Arab population: 'These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble)...or by encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them.'
A total of 31 massacres were carried out by the Jewish forces, including in the village of Deir Yassin, where approximately 250 women, children and men were killed in what began as a dawn raid and lasted two days. (April 1948)
A 12-year-old Palestinian child at Deir Yassin said later: 'They took us out one after the other, shot an old man and, when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too.
'Then they called my brother Muhammed and shot him in front of us. And when my mother yelled, bending over him - carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her - they shot her too.'
Like other Palestinian villages, Deir Yassin was then burnt to the ground.
In the village of Tantura, in May 1948, Jewish forces separated 200 men and boys between the ages of 13 and 30 from the rest of the village and shot them dead in cold blood.
Palestinians in the cities weren't spared from the atrocities. Terrorism was used against the 75,000 strong Palestinian population of Haifa. They were subjected to heavy shelling, bombing, sniper fire and the igniting of deliberately spilled oil. Civilians trying to flee the port town by sea were shelled.
The orders to the Jewish troops were: 'Kill any Arab you see; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.'
They succeeded in their objectives and the Arab population in Haifa was reduced from 45% to just 4%.
A witness to the flight from Haifa said: 'Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers.'
By the time Jewish troops had finished their ethnic cleansing and land grab, 13,000 Palestinians lay dead, nearly 500 Palestinian villages had been burnt to the ground, and 750,000 Palestinians driven from the country of their birth and forced to live abroad, or in the camps of Gaza and the West Bank, as refugees, where they remain today - the largest refugee population in the world. (There are currently 7.2m Palestinian refugees worldwide)
But the operation was a success. When it ended, in 1949, the state of Israel had grown to occupy 78% of what, just two years earlier, had been Palestine.
Menachem Begin, the leader of one of the Jewish military organisations (Irgun) which carried out the massacres, and who later became a Prime Minister of Israel, said: 'As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere...Oh Lord, Oh Lord, you have chosen us for conquest.'
The remaining 22% of the land is now known as the Gaza Strip (bordering the Mediterranean) and the West Bank (bordering Jordan).
Both areas were occupied by Israeli troops in 1967 and the Palestinian population is subject to ongoing terror.
UN Resolution 242 calls on Israel to withdraw from the territories it has illegally occupied. Israel refuses and, instead, has removed the borders of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from all its maps, including in Israeli schoolbooks and tourist maps.
Sources: Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Friends of Al Aqsa (Peace in Palestine)
In Quotes: The Road to Gaza, January 2009
'In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country...Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.' Lord Arthur James Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, 1919.
'I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.' Sir Winston Churchill, discussing the fate of the Palestinians, 1937.
'Palestinians do not exist.' Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister, 1969.
'(They are) two-legged beasts.' Menachem Begin, Israeli Prime Minister, on the Palestinians.
'They are grasshoppers who can be crushed.' Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli Prime Minister.
'The Palestinians must be made to understand, in the deepest recesses of their consciousness, that they are a defeated people.' Moshe Yaalon, Israeli army chief, 2002
Source: 'The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire' by Arundhati Roy (pub. Harper Perennial)
'I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.' Sir Winston Churchill, discussing the fate of the Palestinians, 1937.
'Palestinians do not exist.' Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister, 1969.
'(They are) two-legged beasts.' Menachem Begin, Israeli Prime Minister, on the Palestinians.
'They are grasshoppers who can be crushed.' Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli Prime Minister.
'The Palestinians must be made to understand, in the deepest recesses of their consciousness, that they are a defeated people.' Moshe Yaalon, Israeli army chief, 2002
Source: 'The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire' by Arundhati Roy (pub. Harper Perennial)
Gaza
The Gaza Strip - quite literally a strip of land, about 25 miles long and four miles wide, crammed to bursting with 1.4 million Palestinians whose olive groves, their primary source of income, have been systematically destroyed by Israeli troops, and whose fishermen are shot at by Israeli soldiers when they set out in their boats to catch an alternative source of food.
The Gaza Strip was invaded in 1967 by Israeli troops and subjected to a 38 year brutal military occupation, which included the 'settling' of Israelis in Gaza as a key strategy of the occupation, and in contravention of international law.
In 2005, Israel withdrew the settlers from Gaza, which allowed it to then hermetically seal off the tiny strip of land, trapping the population inside, and placing severe restrictions on those seeking to deliver aid, including food, water and medical supplies to its impoverished people.
Over the next two years, Israel fired around 16,000 artillery shells into Gaza, killing 120 of the increasingly malnourished civilian population.
In 2004, Professor Arnon Soffer, one of the architects of the 2005 'settler' withdrawal, explained the Israeli government's reasoning for the forthcoming siege and entrapment of Gaza.
'In a few years' time, when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today.
'It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.'
He added: 'The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.' (Interview in The Jerusalem Post, 21 May 2004)
Between October 2001 and November 2008, nearly 3,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza by those Israeli boys and men (a further 2,000 killed in the West Bank), and another 1,300 were massacred in 22 days between December 2008 and January 2009, trapped with no hope of escape. The shelling and killing has continued daily since then, unreported in the Western media.
Israeli spokespeople have admitted that the January assaults on Gaza were planned eight months before Israel broke a six-month ceasefire, negotiated with Hamas - the supposed catalyst for the massacre.
In the same 2001 to 2008 period, Israel has suffered 13 fatalities from home-made Qassam rockets. The Palestinians have no army, no other weapons.
At Israel's disposal are US F-16s, Apache helicopter gunships, Merkava tanks and naval gunships. Israel's right-wing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has also urged the Israeli government to use its nuclear arsenal against the people of Gaza.
The UN permits an occupied people to resist their occupation; small comfort to a civilian population in the iron grip of the world's fourth-largest military power.
Sources: Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Electronic Intifada
Link: International Solidarity Movement
The Gaza Strip was invaded in 1967 by Israeli troops and subjected to a 38 year brutal military occupation, which included the 'settling' of Israelis in Gaza as a key strategy of the occupation, and in contravention of international law.
In 2005, Israel withdrew the settlers from Gaza, which allowed it to then hermetically seal off the tiny strip of land, trapping the population inside, and placing severe restrictions on those seeking to deliver aid, including food, water and medical supplies to its impoverished people.
Over the next two years, Israel fired around 16,000 artillery shells into Gaza, killing 120 of the increasingly malnourished civilian population.
In 2004, Professor Arnon Soffer, one of the architects of the 2005 'settler' withdrawal, explained the Israeli government's reasoning for the forthcoming siege and entrapment of Gaza.
'In a few years' time, when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today.
'It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.'
He added: 'The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.' (Interview in The Jerusalem Post, 21 May 2004)
Between October 2001 and November 2008, nearly 3,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza by those Israeli boys and men (a further 2,000 killed in the West Bank), and another 1,300 were massacred in 22 days between December 2008 and January 2009, trapped with no hope of escape. The shelling and killing has continued daily since then, unreported in the Western media.
Israeli spokespeople have admitted that the January assaults on Gaza were planned eight months before Israel broke a six-month ceasefire, negotiated with Hamas - the supposed catalyst for the massacre.
In the same 2001 to 2008 period, Israel has suffered 13 fatalities from home-made Qassam rockets. The Palestinians have no army, no other weapons.
At Israel's disposal are US F-16s, Apache helicopter gunships, Merkava tanks and naval gunships. Israel's right-wing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has also urged the Israeli government to use its nuclear arsenal against the people of Gaza.
The UN permits an occupied people to resist their occupation; small comfort to a civilian population in the iron grip of the world's fourth-largest military power.
Sources: Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Electronic Intifada
Link: International Solidarity Movement
Remember Jenin
It isn't my intention to catalogue on this blog the massacres that have taken place in Palestinian refugee camps since 1949 - eight, including the horrors at Sabra and Chatila in 1982, which led me to go on my first ever protest march, aged 12 - all of which have born the same trademarks of sealing off all entrances to the camp, the systematic and barbarically deliberate execution of babies, children and adults, the banning of the media, the refusal to allow the UN to conduct an inquiry afterwards amid claims of 'bias against Israel', and the complicit observation of those who have the power to intervene, but don't, while Israel's army 'finishes off the job'.
However, I was sent the following blog posting by a friend and said I would pass it on. The original can be found on http://www.palestinechronicle.com/
Remembering Jenin
The Martyrs' Cemetery is but a few meters from Jenin Refugee Camp. On a warm, sunny day I stood in front of the memorial to the victims of the massacre of 2002 and remembered them, I had long promised to do. I remembered the forgotten.
It is not an imposing monument; had the victims been Israeli, a more grandiose memorial would have been built, perhaps with a museum, perhaps with a carefully-maintained eternal flame. I was disappointed at first. Is this what I had travelled from Occupied Jerusalem to see? Through Ramallah, Nablus and those checkpoints manned by bored, surly adolescent soldiers?
But then I understood; the victims were ordinary people- men, women and children- trying to live ordinary lives, until they came face to face with an extraordinary interruption; the appearance of the highly-mechanised, US- resourced Israel Defence Force at their very their doorsteps. Most of them died in or just outside their homes. Such ordinary homes. Such ordinary people. No huge, imposing monument for them.
The story of the invasion, the heroic resistance and the demolition of Jenin Camp is related in Ramzy Baroud’s "Searching Jenin". The author had written a message to me, “Remember Jenin”, inside the cover of my copy and I was here; to remember.
It had begun on 3 April 2002 with an artillery barrage. The next day, access was blocked; there was no escape for the residents. Apaches, Cobras and tanks did their work. And bulldozers. One of the drivers, known as Kurdi Bear, enjoyed his fifteen minutes of celebrity as he recounted the relish with which he had destroyed the homes of the residents.
“If I’d been given three weeks, I would have had more fun,” he said. As it happens he had only ten days to complete his grisly work while the world’s population watched, some uncaring, some impotently angry, some with smug satisfaction, from outside.
Ramzy Baroud records the names of over sixty shahid, though it is likely that there were many more. The IDF had been able to work in total secrecy during the period the camp was sealed. The camera crews waited beyond the road blocks until it was done.
In retrospect, the attack on Jenin appears to be a ghastly dress-rehearsal for Gaza, the closure, the refusal to allow media access, the executions, the demolitions; and the excuses and the denials. Jenin was “a nest of vipers”, Gaza a “hotbed of fundamentalism”. The IDF is the most moral army in the world.
And just as the UN was coerced by Israel and the US into abandoning an enquiry into Jenin, it would be unwise to expect a different response to Gaza. The victims of the Gaza are no less ordinary than those of Jenin.
But one aspect is different; there is hardly any photographic evidence of what happened during the Jenin assault; we have only moving testimonies and photographs of the aftermath.
In Gaza, on the other hand and much to the unconcealed fury of the Israeli government and its apologists, footage was broadcast, some of it live. The media ban had failed. 21st century technology had played a unique role in an old conflict. And any activist here in the UK will tell you what a devastating effect this has had on public opinion.
Exploring with my Palestinian friend the refugee camp, I confirmed that the houses had been re-built by the UN. He said they were better, much better, than what had been there before.
But Jenin Refugee Camp is still a refugee camp. The streets are narrow, the houses small, the facilities for the children, well over half of the population, depressingly limited.
And they are still refugees. Their homes are across the border. Their fathers’ bones call for them. I remembered another, surprising, victim; my fellow-Briton Ian Hook, a UN engineer employed in the rebuilding. He was shot dead by the Israelis during the reconstruction; his mobile phone, apparently, looked like a gun.
As in all Palestinian refugee camps, the shahid are revered; their posters adorn the shabby streets. I was observing one of them, of two young men in the familiar military pose, when an old man called and invited us into his home.
The two boys were his sons, assassinated by the IDF years after the invasion. Jenin’s agony, Palestine’s agony, did not end with the demolition of the camp, nor did resistance. As he told the story, I couldn’t find the words to console him and so I put my arms around him. He was moved and kissed me.
As I left, I turned to look at him at his door and put my hand on my heart.” I shall remember,” I said in a language he did not understand. He returned the gesture.
Back at the Martyrs’ Graveyard, I stood again in front of that little memorial, so mean and yet now so splendid.
I remembered the shahid of Jenin; thirteen year old Mohammed Omar Hawashin, killed by a sniper; sixty-five year old Muhammed Masoud Abu al- Sibah, crushed to death when an Israeli bulldozer destroyed his home while he was still in it; Miriam Abdullah Wishahe, a fifty-two year old woman who also killed by a sniper. And many, many more.
I remembered the shebab who held the mightiest army in the region at bay for all those terrible, long bloody days, matching their AK47s against Apaches.
And I said a Christian prayer for the souls of the shahid.
- Stephen Williams is based in the UK. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
Notes:
However, I was sent the following blog posting by a friend and said I would pass it on. The original can be found on http://www.palestinechronicle.com/
Remembering Jenin
'Jenin: Such ordinary homes. Such ordinary people..'
By Stephen Williams
It is not an imposing monument; had the victims been Israeli, a more grandiose memorial would have been built, perhaps with a museum, perhaps with a carefully-maintained eternal flame. I was disappointed at first. Is this what I had travelled from Occupied Jerusalem to see? Through Ramallah, Nablus and those checkpoints manned by bored, surly adolescent soldiers?
But then I understood; the victims were ordinary people- men, women and children- trying to live ordinary lives, until they came face to face with an extraordinary interruption; the appearance of the highly-mechanised, US- resourced Israel Defence Force at their very their doorsteps. Most of them died in or just outside their homes. Such ordinary homes. Such ordinary people. No huge, imposing monument for them.
The story of the invasion, the heroic resistance and the demolition of Jenin Camp is related in Ramzy Baroud’s "Searching Jenin". The author had written a message to me, “Remember Jenin”, inside the cover of my copy and I was here; to remember.
It had begun on 3 April 2002 with an artillery barrage. The next day, access was blocked; there was no escape for the residents. Apaches, Cobras and tanks did their work. And bulldozers. One of the drivers, known as Kurdi Bear, enjoyed his fifteen minutes of celebrity as he recounted the relish with which he had destroyed the homes of the residents.
“If I’d been given three weeks, I would have had more fun,” he said. As it happens he had only ten days to complete his grisly work while the world’s population watched, some uncaring, some impotently angry, some with smug satisfaction, from outside.
Ramzy Baroud records the names of over sixty shahid, though it is likely that there were many more. The IDF had been able to work in total secrecy during the period the camp was sealed. The camera crews waited beyond the road blocks until it was done.
In retrospect, the attack on Jenin appears to be a ghastly dress-rehearsal for Gaza, the closure, the refusal to allow media access, the executions, the demolitions; and the excuses and the denials. Jenin was “a nest of vipers”, Gaza a “hotbed of fundamentalism”. The IDF is the most moral army in the world.
And just as the UN was coerced by Israel and the US into abandoning an enquiry into Jenin, it would be unwise to expect a different response to Gaza. The victims of the Gaza are no less ordinary than those of Jenin.
But one aspect is different; there is hardly any photographic evidence of what happened during the Jenin assault; we have only moving testimonies and photographs of the aftermath.
In Gaza, on the other hand and much to the unconcealed fury of the Israeli government and its apologists, footage was broadcast, some of it live. The media ban had failed. 21st century technology had played a unique role in an old conflict. And any activist here in the UK will tell you what a devastating effect this has had on public opinion.
Exploring with my Palestinian friend the refugee camp, I confirmed that the houses had been re-built by the UN. He said they were better, much better, than what had been there before.
But Jenin Refugee Camp is still a refugee camp. The streets are narrow, the houses small, the facilities for the children, well over half of the population, depressingly limited.
And they are still refugees. Their homes are across the border. Their fathers’ bones call for them. I remembered another, surprising, victim; my fellow-Briton Ian Hook, a UN engineer employed in the rebuilding. He was shot dead by the Israelis during the reconstruction; his mobile phone, apparently, looked like a gun.
As in all Palestinian refugee camps, the shahid are revered; their posters adorn the shabby streets. I was observing one of them, of two young men in the familiar military pose, when an old man called and invited us into his home.
The two boys were his sons, assassinated by the IDF years after the invasion. Jenin’s agony, Palestine’s agony, did not end with the demolition of the camp, nor did resistance. As he told the story, I couldn’t find the words to console him and so I put my arms around him. He was moved and kissed me.
As I left, I turned to look at him at his door and put my hand on my heart.” I shall remember,” I said in a language he did not understand. He returned the gesture.
Back at the Martyrs’ Graveyard, I stood again in front of that little memorial, so mean and yet now so splendid.
I remembered the shahid of Jenin; thirteen year old Mohammed Omar Hawashin, killed by a sniper; sixty-five year old Muhammed Masoud Abu al- Sibah, crushed to death when an Israeli bulldozer destroyed his home while he was still in it; Miriam Abdullah Wishahe, a fifty-two year old woman who also killed by a sniper. And many, many more.
I remembered the shebab who held the mightiest army in the region at bay for all those terrible, long bloody days, matching their AK47s against Apaches.
And I said a Christian prayer for the souls of the shahid.
- Stephen Williams is based in the UK. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
Notes:
- Jenin Refugee Camp is in the West Bank of Occupied Palestine. The majority of its residents come from Palestinian villages in the Haifa district of what is now Israel. The villages were destroyed by Jewish troops during the ethnic cleansing of 1948/9, and their populations expelled.
- For 15 days in April 2002, the Israeli army assaulted the camp with helicopters, tanks, bulldozers and troops.
- In November 2002, co-director of the Jenin Refugee Camp, UNRWA employee, and British national Ian Hook was shot twice in the abdomen. Attempts to evacuate him were delayed for two hours, causing him to bleed to death. He was shot dead while trying to negotiate with Israeli soldiers to evacuate the hundreds of women and children in the UN headquarters receivingvaccinations that day. Witnesses testify to the soldiers’ announcement in English over a loudspeaker not long before shooting Mr. Hook: “We don’t care who you are. Fuck the UN.”
- See also The Jenin Inquiry Report, compiled by international human rights volunteers, for a detailed account of the atrocities.
The West Bank - Illegal Settlements
'We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. Yes, we’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.'
The infamous words of Ariel Sharon, a former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking in 1973. Five years after Israel had invaded and occupied the Palestinian territory known as the West Bank, he outlined the key role that 'settlements' would play in the military strategy of occupation, control and, ultimately, the expansion of Israel.
Another 36 years down the line, with Israel free to ignore UN resolution 242 to withdraw from its illegal occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, there are now close to half a million Israeli occupiers, better known as 'settlers', living in the Palestinian West Bank.
This in itself breaches UN resolution 446, which states: ' The policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories [Syria's Golan Heights] occupied since 1967 have no legal validity, and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.'
The occupiers are housed in 200 settlements, which are strategically built on hilltops and surrounded by high walls, on land taken from the Palestinians.
Palestinian villages have been demolished and their inhabitants left homeless, olive groves uprooted by bulldozers and farmland expropriated to construct the settlements, which are then illegally annexed to Israel by the building of major 'by-pass' roads.
These roads take more land from the native Palestinian population and provide high speed links, connecting the settlements to each other and back to Israel.
In a system that reminded Archbishop Desmond Tutu, when he visited the West Bank, of apartheid South Africa, Palestinians are not allowed to use these roads or to cross them, despite the fact that many of the roads separate Palestinian villagers from their farms, schools, or water supply.
This policy has devasted the economic life of the West Bank, with an estimated 46% of Palestinians in the West Bank now living below the poverty line. (In sealed-off Gaza, the figure is 80%)
For every 100km of by-pass road, Israel confiscates around 2,500 acres of Palestinian land, destroying whatever homes or farms happen to be in the way.
Huge earth mounds are built around the roads to prevent Palestinians, reduced to second-class citizens and crammed into ever-shrinking enclaves, from gaining access to them.
Changing the 'physical character and demographic composition' of territories occupied by Israel since 1967 flouts UN resolution 465.
Additionally, 'Israel's policy and practices of settling parts of its population...in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention'. (Resolution 465)
And while the occupiers, as citizens of Israel, enjoy full civil rights, these same rights are denied to the Palestinians living under military occupation in their own land.
Ironically, settlement building doubled between 1993 and 1995, the period of the Oslo Accords - the US-brokered peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians - even as Israel was signing treaties to freeze settlement building and conduct a staged withdrawal from the Occupied Territories.
'Settlers' are encouraged to populate the West Bank through tax breaks given by the Israeli government, while glossy advertising campaigns in America promise 'fresh mountain air', 'stunning views' and 'wide open spaces' to those who decide to buy a settlement property and emigrate.
Each settler is allocated 1,450 cubic metres of water a year - vital when you have a swimming pool to fill. Palestinians are allocated 83 cubic metres a year, and are forced to pay double for it. The water tanks which sit on the roof of Palestinian houses are a regular target for pot shots by Israeli soldiers.
Settlers are armed and are not prosecuted for shooting Palestinians, making Palestinians a legitimate target as they go to school, to their farms and about their daily business. Road blocks are set up, cars burned , windows smashed and crops destroyed as the settlers violently try to ethnically cleanse the West Bank.
In the meantime, education has virtually ground to a halt, basic healthcare services are dangerously inadequate and the building of the illegal Separation Wall, in addition to just over 1,000 permanent and 'flying' checkpoints has made it almost impossible for Palestinians to move freely within the West Bank.
Since September 2000, 69 Palestinian women have been forced to give birth at Israeli checkpoints resulting in the deaths of 35 newborn babies.
The Wall and the settlements have reduced Palestinian territory within the West Bank to nothing more than a series of bantustans (named after the territory that was set aside for the black inhabitants of South Africa during apartheid).
These enclaves are delibarately separated from each other - leaving no contiguous area that could feasibly form a Palestinian state - by the Wall and the settlements, which are arguably too entrenched now, with fixed populations, to remove.
Ariel Sharon's 1973 vision for the West Bank is, 36 years on, a reality.
Sources: Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Innovative Minds
Palestine Monitor: Exposing Life under Occupation
Interpal
Recommended reading: Palestinian Walks - Notes on a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh (pub. Profile Books)
The infamous words of Ariel Sharon, a former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking in 1973. Five years after Israel had invaded and occupied the Palestinian territory known as the West Bank, he outlined the key role that 'settlements' would play in the military strategy of occupation, control and, ultimately, the expansion of Israel.
Another 36 years down the line, with Israel free to ignore UN resolution 242 to withdraw from its illegal occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, there are now close to half a million Israeli occupiers, better known as 'settlers', living in the Palestinian West Bank.
This in itself breaches UN resolution 446, which states: ' The policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories [Syria's Golan Heights] occupied since 1967 have no legal validity, and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.'
The occupiers are housed in 200 settlements, which are strategically built on hilltops and surrounded by high walls, on land taken from the Palestinians.
Palestinian villages have been demolished and their inhabitants left homeless, olive groves uprooted by bulldozers and farmland expropriated to construct the settlements, which are then illegally annexed to Israel by the building of major 'by-pass' roads.
These roads take more land from the native Palestinian population and provide high speed links, connecting the settlements to each other and back to Israel.
In a system that reminded Archbishop Desmond Tutu, when he visited the West Bank, of apartheid South Africa, Palestinians are not allowed to use these roads or to cross them, despite the fact that many of the roads separate Palestinian villagers from their farms, schools, or water supply.
This policy has devasted the economic life of the West Bank, with an estimated 46% of Palestinians in the West Bank now living below the poverty line. (In sealed-off Gaza, the figure is 80%)
For every 100km of by-pass road, Israel confiscates around 2,500 acres of Palestinian land, destroying whatever homes or farms happen to be in the way.
Huge earth mounds are built around the roads to prevent Palestinians, reduced to second-class citizens and crammed into ever-shrinking enclaves, from gaining access to them.
Changing the 'physical character and demographic composition' of territories occupied by Israel since 1967 flouts UN resolution 465.
Additionally, 'Israel's policy and practices of settling parts of its population...in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention'. (Resolution 465)
And while the occupiers, as citizens of Israel, enjoy full civil rights, these same rights are denied to the Palestinians living under military occupation in their own land.
Ironically, settlement building doubled between 1993 and 1995, the period of the Oslo Accords - the US-brokered peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians - even as Israel was signing treaties to freeze settlement building and conduct a staged withdrawal from the Occupied Territories.
'Settlers' are encouraged to populate the West Bank through tax breaks given by the Israeli government, while glossy advertising campaigns in America promise 'fresh mountain air', 'stunning views' and 'wide open spaces' to those who decide to buy a settlement property and emigrate.
Each settler is allocated 1,450 cubic metres of water a year - vital when you have a swimming pool to fill. Palestinians are allocated 83 cubic metres a year, and are forced to pay double for it. The water tanks which sit on the roof of Palestinian houses are a regular target for pot shots by Israeli soldiers.
Settlers are armed and are not prosecuted for shooting Palestinians, making Palestinians a legitimate target as they go to school, to their farms and about their daily business. Road blocks are set up, cars burned , windows smashed and crops destroyed as the settlers violently try to ethnically cleanse the West Bank.
In the meantime, education has virtually ground to a halt, basic healthcare services are dangerously inadequate and the building of the illegal Separation Wall, in addition to just over 1,000 permanent and 'flying' checkpoints has made it almost impossible for Palestinians to move freely within the West Bank.
Since September 2000, 69 Palestinian women have been forced to give birth at Israeli checkpoints resulting in the deaths of 35 newborn babies.
The Wall and the settlements have reduced Palestinian territory within the West Bank to nothing more than a series of bantustans (named after the territory that was set aside for the black inhabitants of South Africa during apartheid).
These enclaves are delibarately separated from each other - leaving no contiguous area that could feasibly form a Palestinian state - by the Wall and the settlements, which are arguably too entrenched now, with fixed populations, to remove.
Ariel Sharon's 1973 vision for the West Bank is, 36 years on, a reality.
Sources: Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Innovative Minds
Palestine Monitor: Exposing Life under Occupation
Interpal
Recommended reading: Palestinian Walks - Notes on a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh (pub. Profile Books)
Life Under Occupation
The Separation Wall
'The construction of the wall being built by Israel [is] contrary to international law. Israel is under obligation ...to dismantle forthwith the structure...[and] make reparation for all damage caused.' International Court of Justice, July 2004
Construction of the wall began on 16 June, 2002. The wall consists of a series of 25-foot-high concrete slabs, trenches, barbed wire 'buffer zones', electrified fencing, numerous watch towers, thermal imaging video cameras, sniper towers and roads for patrol vehicles.
It is not built along the border between Israel and the West Bank, nor does it consume any Israeli land.
Instead, it slices through the West Bank, capturing Palestinian land and resources, particularly precious water sources, and annexes them to the illegal settlements.
When completed, the 723km-long wall will encircle eight Palestinian communities on all four sides, with a tunnel or road connection to the rest of the West Bank, and 28 Palestinian communities on three sides.
Checkpoints
'The right to freedom of movement provides that people are entitled to move freely within the borders of the state, to leave any country and to return to their country'. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 13)
74% of the main routes in the West Bank are controlled by Israeli checkpoints or blocked entirely.Palestinian movement is controlled and restricted through the use of trenches, checkpoints, earth walls, road blocks, road barriers, road gates, earth mounds and the Separation Wall.
Palestinians are prevented from travelling between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, cutting them off from friends and families.
Prisoners
'It would be better to drown these prisoners, in the Dead Sea if possible, since that's the lowest point in the world.' Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli foreign minister
There are between 9,500 and 10,500 Palestinians currently being illegally detained by Israel, the occupying power, including children as young as 12. Statistically, Palestinians are one of the most imprisoned people on earth.
Between September 2000 and August 2008, an estimated 6,700 Palestinian children were arrested and detained in Israeli prison facilities and tried in adult courts.
Arrests can happen anywhere, including checkpoints, but the majority happen at home, usually after midnight, with soliders frequently opening fire on the building before entering. Family members can be beaten. The person being arrested is usually beaten, sometimes stripped naked and then handcuffed with plastic ties before being taken away in a military jeep.
Detention can last for years without charge or trial, and many prisoners disappear into a black hole.
Torture, according to Israel's own security forces, is routine, and confessions are written out in Hebrew for the arrested Palestinians - most of whom know only Arabic - to sign.
The detention of prisoners inside Israel makes it difficult, if not impossible, for family members to visit. There is a blanket ban on entry into Israel for all Palestinian males aged between 16 and 40. Since 2007, all visits to prisoners taken from Gaza have been banned.
The transfer of Palestinian prisoners to Israeli territory is a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, as is the ban on family visits.
Since 2007, 45 MPs from the democratically elected Hamas party have been abducted and imprisoned, as part of Israel's sustained attempt to undermine Palestinian democracy. The spouses of political leaders have also been arrested and tortured.
Torture
'Israel is the sole country in the world to have legalised the use of torture.' B'Tselem (The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights)
Since 1967, more than 105 documented torture techniques have been used by Israel, including on women. At least 66 Palestinians have been tortured to death. The majority (between 85 and 95%) of the 650,000+ Palestinians who have been arrested by Israel since 1967 have been subjected to torture.
Israel justifies torture by designating the Palestinian Territories as being under 'exceptional circumstances'.
This is in direct violation of the 1984 Convention Against Torture. Article 2 of the convention states: 'No exceptional circumstances whatsover...may be invoked as a justification of torture'.
Israel ratified the Treaty in 1991. Its torture techniques used against Palestinians include bending the prisoner's back into an arch and tying their hands to their feet and leaving them for hours or days in that position.
The Catastrophe
The creation of the State of Israel is known amongst Palestinians as Al Nakba (the Catastrophe).It is marked by Palestinians around the world on May 14 every year.
On May 14, 2009 a new law was proposed in Israel banning the commemoration of Al Nakba in that country.
Any member of Israel's Arab population - those who didn't flee their homes and villages in 1948, and their descendants - would be subject to three years' imprisonment if they broke the proposed new law.
The law would equally apply to Israeli Jews marking Al Nakba, and is therefore aimed at silencing their protest too.
The legislation has been proposed by the party of the right-wing foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose other policy ideas include withdrawing citizenship from Israeli Arabs who don't swear an oath of loyalty to the Israeli state.
Israel's Arab citizens are restricted politically, limited in the jobs they can take and even in who they can marry. The number plates on their cars are a different colour to those of Israeli Jews, to mark them out from the Jewish population.
Writing in Jewish Peace News, Sarah Ann Minkin says of the Al Nakba proposal: 'This proposed law should set off anti-fascism alarms.
'...By forbidding the remembering of the Nakba, the law aims to erase the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians...even as this same political party's platform threatens another form of dispossession, that is, removing citizenship from Palestinian citizens .'
And so, in our converse, paradox world, it is Nakba Denial that will actually be within the law in Israel, while remembering those killed and dispossessed in the Zionist onslaught of 1948 will become punishable by three years in prison.
Sources: Palestine Monitor (Exposing Life Under Occupation)
Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Jewish Peace News
Link: The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
'The construction of the wall being built by Israel [is] contrary to international law. Israel is under obligation ...to dismantle forthwith the structure...[and] make reparation for all damage caused.' International Court of Justice, July 2004
Construction of the wall began on 16 June, 2002. The wall consists of a series of 25-foot-high concrete slabs, trenches, barbed wire 'buffer zones', electrified fencing, numerous watch towers, thermal imaging video cameras, sniper towers and roads for patrol vehicles.
It is not built along the border between Israel and the West Bank, nor does it consume any Israeli land.
Instead, it slices through the West Bank, capturing Palestinian land and resources, particularly precious water sources, and annexes them to the illegal settlements.
When completed, the 723km-long wall will encircle eight Palestinian communities on all four sides, with a tunnel or road connection to the rest of the West Bank, and 28 Palestinian communities on three sides.
Checkpoints
'The right to freedom of movement provides that people are entitled to move freely within the borders of the state, to leave any country and to return to their country'. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 13)
74% of the main routes in the West Bank are controlled by Israeli checkpoints or blocked entirely.Palestinian movement is controlled and restricted through the use of trenches, checkpoints, earth walls, road blocks, road barriers, road gates, earth mounds and the Separation Wall.
Palestinians are prevented from travelling between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, cutting them off from friends and families.
Prisoners
'It would be better to drown these prisoners, in the Dead Sea if possible, since that's the lowest point in the world.' Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli foreign minister
There are between 9,500 and 10,500 Palestinians currently being illegally detained by Israel, the occupying power, including children as young as 12. Statistically, Palestinians are one of the most imprisoned people on earth.
Between September 2000 and August 2008, an estimated 6,700 Palestinian children were arrested and detained in Israeli prison facilities and tried in adult courts.
Arrests can happen anywhere, including checkpoints, but the majority happen at home, usually after midnight, with soliders frequently opening fire on the building before entering. Family members can be beaten. The person being arrested is usually beaten, sometimes stripped naked and then handcuffed with plastic ties before being taken away in a military jeep.
Detention can last for years without charge or trial, and many prisoners disappear into a black hole.
Torture, according to Israel's own security forces, is routine, and confessions are written out in Hebrew for the arrested Palestinians - most of whom know only Arabic - to sign.
The detention of prisoners inside Israel makes it difficult, if not impossible, for family members to visit. There is a blanket ban on entry into Israel for all Palestinian males aged between 16 and 40. Since 2007, all visits to prisoners taken from Gaza have been banned.
The transfer of Palestinian prisoners to Israeli territory is a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, as is the ban on family visits.
Since 2007, 45 MPs from the democratically elected Hamas party have been abducted and imprisoned, as part of Israel's sustained attempt to undermine Palestinian democracy. The spouses of political leaders have also been arrested and tortured.
Torture
'Israel is the sole country in the world to have legalised the use of torture.' B'Tselem (The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights)
Since 1967, more than 105 documented torture techniques have been used by Israel, including on women. At least 66 Palestinians have been tortured to death. The majority (between 85 and 95%) of the 650,000+ Palestinians who have been arrested by Israel since 1967 have been subjected to torture.
Israel justifies torture by designating the Palestinian Territories as being under 'exceptional circumstances'.
This is in direct violation of the 1984 Convention Against Torture. Article 2 of the convention states: 'No exceptional circumstances whatsover...may be invoked as a justification of torture'.
Israel ratified the Treaty in 1991. Its torture techniques used against Palestinians include bending the prisoner's back into an arch and tying their hands to their feet and leaving them for hours or days in that position.
The Catastrophe
The creation of the State of Israel is known amongst Palestinians as Al Nakba (the Catastrophe).It is marked by Palestinians around the world on May 14 every year.
On May 14, 2009 a new law was proposed in Israel banning the commemoration of Al Nakba in that country.
Any member of Israel's Arab population - those who didn't flee their homes and villages in 1948, and their descendants - would be subject to three years' imprisonment if they broke the proposed new law.
The law would equally apply to Israeli Jews marking Al Nakba, and is therefore aimed at silencing their protest too.
The legislation has been proposed by the party of the right-wing foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose other policy ideas include withdrawing citizenship from Israeli Arabs who don't swear an oath of loyalty to the Israeli state.
Israel's Arab citizens are restricted politically, limited in the jobs they can take and even in who they can marry. The number plates on their cars are a different colour to those of Israeli Jews, to mark them out from the Jewish population.
Writing in Jewish Peace News, Sarah Ann Minkin says of the Al Nakba proposal: 'This proposed law should set off anti-fascism alarms.
'...By forbidding the remembering of the Nakba, the law aims to erase the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians...even as this same political party's platform threatens another form of dispossession, that is, removing citizenship from Palestinian citizens .'
And so, in our converse, paradox world, it is Nakba Denial that will actually be within the law in Israel, while remembering those killed and dispossessed in the Zionist onslaught of 1948 will become punishable by three years in prison.
Sources: Palestine Monitor (Exposing Life Under Occupation)
Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Jewish Peace News
Link: The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
Opinion Piece: Israeli Army Commander
From The Guardian, January 7 2009
How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions
A wounded Palestinian policeman gestures while lying on the ground outside Hamas police headquarters following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City.
The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context.
Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders".
I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line.
The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development.
To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation.
In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day.
The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces.
To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank.
It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison.
From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it.
Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon.
In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.
As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes.
Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy.
But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.
Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.
It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.
The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power.
The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.
The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006.
Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim.
This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".
To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror.
Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June.
The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.
Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza.
Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities.
Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.
The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.
A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.
No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets.This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community.
The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.
This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it.
Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.
Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace.
How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions
A wounded Palestinian policeman gestures while lying on the ground outside Hamas police headquarters following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City.
The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context.
Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders".
I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line.
The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development.
To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation.
In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day.
The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces.
To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank.
It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison.
From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it.
Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon.
In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.
As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes.
Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy.
But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.
Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.
It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.
The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power.
The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.
The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006.
Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim.
This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".
To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror.
Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June.
The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.
Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza.
Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities.
Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.
The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.
A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.
No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets.This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community.
The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.
This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it.
Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.
Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace.
Opinion Piece: Robert Fisk
From The Independent, January 7 2009
Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask
Robert Fisk
A child injured in the Israeli bombardment of a UN school yesterday is taken to Shifa hospital in Gaza City.
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms".
But why should we be surprised?Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?
What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties.
"Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on their hands.
Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was.
After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction.But Israel claims it is fighting our war against "international terror".
The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.
I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.
The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing.When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a blood libel.
After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah.
Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship.The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.
Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue.
I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.
And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie.
And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.
Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale.
This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.
Link: Noam Chomsky
Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask
Robert Fisk
A child injured in the Israeli bombardment of a UN school yesterday is taken to Shifa hospital in Gaza City.
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms".
But why should we be surprised?Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?
What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties.
"Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on their hands.
Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was.
After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction.But Israel claims it is fighting our war against "international terror".
The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.
I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.
The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing.When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a blood libel.
After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah.
Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship.The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.
Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue.
I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.
And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie.
And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.
Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale.
This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.
Link: Noam Chomsky
Opinion Piece: Boycott
From The Guardian, 10 January 2009
Enough. It's time for a boycott
The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa
Naomi Klein
It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.
In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era".
The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born. Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews.
In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle.
"The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."
Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity.
Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.
The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade.
Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning.
Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies.For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc.
In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.
It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%.
When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.Israel is not South Africa.Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail.
And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads.
Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.
Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.
Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott.
On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew.
We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City.
My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.
Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them.
Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."
Ramsey says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."
It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.
A version of this column was published in the Nation (thenation.com)
Link: Boycott Divestment Sanctions (The Non-Violent Response to Israeli Apartheid and Occupation)
Enough. It's time for a boycott
The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa
Naomi Klein
It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.
In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era".
The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born. Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews.
In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle.
"The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."
Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity.
Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.
The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade.
Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning.
Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies.For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc.
In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.
It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%.
When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.Israel is not South Africa.Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail.
And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads.
Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.
Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.
Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott.
On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew.
We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City.
My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.
Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them.
Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."
Ramsey says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."
It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.
A version of this column was published in the Nation (thenation.com)
Link: Boycott Divestment Sanctions (The Non-Violent Response to Israeli Apartheid and Occupation)
Opinion Piece: Hamas
From The Times, December 31 2008
We must adjust our distorted image of Hamas
Gaza is a secular society where people listen to pop music, watch TV and many women walk the streets unveiled
William Sieghart
Last week I was in Gaza. While I was there I met a group of 20 or so police officers who were undergoing a course in conflict management. They were eager to know whether foreigners felt safer since Hamas had taken over the Government? Indeed we did, we told them. Without doubt the past 18 months had seen a comparative calm on the streets of Gaza; no gunmen on the streets, no more kidnappings.They smiled with great pride and waved us goodbye.
Less than a week later all of these men were dead, killed by an Israeli rocket at a graduation ceremony. Were they “dangerous Hamas militant gunmen”? No, they were unarmed police officers, public servants killed not in a “militant training camp” but in the same police station in the middle of Gaza City that had been used by the British, the Israelis and Fatah during their periods of rule there.
This distinction is crucial because while the horrific scenes in Gaza and Israel play themselves out on our television screens, a war of words is being fought that is clouding our understanding of the realities on the ground.Who or what is Hamas, the movement that Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, would like to wipe out as though it were a virus? Why did it win the Palestinian elections and why does it allow rockets to be fired into Israel?
The story of Hamas over the past three years reveals how the Israeli, US and UK governments' misunderstanding of this Islamist movement has led us to the brutal and desperate situation that we are in now.
The story begins nearly three years ago when Change and Reform - Hamas's political party - unexpectedly won the first free and fair elections in the Arab world, on a platform of ending endemic corruption and improving the almost non-existent public services in Gaza and the West Bank.
Against a divided opposition this ostensibly religious party impressed the predominantly secular community to win with 42 per cent of the vote.Palestinians did not vote for Hamas because it was dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel or because it had been responsible for waves of suicide bombings that had killed Israeli citizens. They voted for Hamas because they thought that Fatah, the party of the rejected Government, had failed them.Despite renouncing violence and recognising the state of Israel Fatah had not achieved a Palestinian state.
It is crucial to know this to understand the supposed rejectionist position of Hamas. It won't recognise Israel or renounce the right to resist until it is sure of the world's commitment to a just solution to the Palestinian issue.
In the five years that I have been visiting Gaza and the West Bank, I have met hundreds of Hamas politicians and supporters. None of them has professed the goal of Islamising Palestinian society, Taleban-style. Hamas relies on secular voters too much to do that.
People still listen to pop music, watch television and women still choose whether to wear the veil or not.The political leadership of Hamas is probably the most highly qualified in the world. Boasting more than 500 PhDs in its ranks, the majority are middle-class professionals - doctors, dentists, scientists and engineers. Most of its leadership have been educated in our universities and harbour no ideological hatred towards the West.
It is a grievance-based movement, dedicated to addressing the injustice done to its people. It has consistently offered a ten-year ceasefire to give breathing space to resolve a conflict that has continued for more than 60 years.
The Bush-Blair response to the Hamas victory in 2006 is the key to today's horror. Instead of accepting the democratically elected Government, they funded an attempt to remove it by force; training and arming groups of Fatah fighters to unseat Hamas militarily and impose a new, unelected government on the Palestinians. Further, 45 Hamas MPs are still being held in Israeli jails.
Six months ago the Israeli Government agreed to an Egyptian- brokered ceasefire with Hamas. In return for a ceasefire, Israel agreed to open the crossing points and allow a free flow of essential supplies in and out of Gaza. The rocket barrages ended but the crossings never fully opened, and the people of Gaza began to starve. This crippling embargo was no reward for peace.
When Westerners ask what is in the mind of Hamas leaders when they order or allow rockets to be fired at Israel they fail to understand the Palestinian position. Two months ago the Israeli Defence Forces broke the ceasefire by entering Gaza and beginning the cycle of killing again. In the Palestinian narrative each round of rocket attacks is a response to Israeli attacks. In the Israeli narrative it is the other way round.
But what does it mean when Mr Barak talks of destroying Hamas? Does it mean killing the 42 per cent of Palestinians who voted for it? Does it mean reoccupying the Gaza strip that Israel withdrew from so painfully three years ago? Or does it mean permanently separating the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, politically and geographically? And for those whose mantra is Israeli security, what sort of threat do the three quarters of a million young people growing up in Gaza with an implacable hatred of those who starve and bomb them pose?
It is said that this conflict is impossible to solve. In fact, it is very simple. The top 1,000 people who run Israel - the politicians, generals and security staff - and the top Palestinian Islamists have never met.
Genuine peace will require that these two groups sit down together without preconditions. But the events of the past few days seem to have made this more unlikely than ever. That is the challenge for the new administration in Washington and for its European allies.
William Sieghart is chairman of Forward Thinking, an independent conflict resolution agency
We must adjust our distorted image of Hamas
Gaza is a secular society where people listen to pop music, watch TV and many women walk the streets unveiled
William Sieghart
Last week I was in Gaza. While I was there I met a group of 20 or so police officers who were undergoing a course in conflict management. They were eager to know whether foreigners felt safer since Hamas had taken over the Government? Indeed we did, we told them. Without doubt the past 18 months had seen a comparative calm on the streets of Gaza; no gunmen on the streets, no more kidnappings.They smiled with great pride and waved us goodbye.
Less than a week later all of these men were dead, killed by an Israeli rocket at a graduation ceremony. Were they “dangerous Hamas militant gunmen”? No, they were unarmed police officers, public servants killed not in a “militant training camp” but in the same police station in the middle of Gaza City that had been used by the British, the Israelis and Fatah during their periods of rule there.
This distinction is crucial because while the horrific scenes in Gaza and Israel play themselves out on our television screens, a war of words is being fought that is clouding our understanding of the realities on the ground.Who or what is Hamas, the movement that Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, would like to wipe out as though it were a virus? Why did it win the Palestinian elections and why does it allow rockets to be fired into Israel?
The story of Hamas over the past three years reveals how the Israeli, US and UK governments' misunderstanding of this Islamist movement has led us to the brutal and desperate situation that we are in now.
The story begins nearly three years ago when Change and Reform - Hamas's political party - unexpectedly won the first free and fair elections in the Arab world, on a platform of ending endemic corruption and improving the almost non-existent public services in Gaza and the West Bank.
Against a divided opposition this ostensibly religious party impressed the predominantly secular community to win with 42 per cent of the vote.Palestinians did not vote for Hamas because it was dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel or because it had been responsible for waves of suicide bombings that had killed Israeli citizens. They voted for Hamas because they thought that Fatah, the party of the rejected Government, had failed them.Despite renouncing violence and recognising the state of Israel Fatah had not achieved a Palestinian state.
It is crucial to know this to understand the supposed rejectionist position of Hamas. It won't recognise Israel or renounce the right to resist until it is sure of the world's commitment to a just solution to the Palestinian issue.
In the five years that I have been visiting Gaza and the West Bank, I have met hundreds of Hamas politicians and supporters. None of them has professed the goal of Islamising Palestinian society, Taleban-style. Hamas relies on secular voters too much to do that.
People still listen to pop music, watch television and women still choose whether to wear the veil or not.The political leadership of Hamas is probably the most highly qualified in the world. Boasting more than 500 PhDs in its ranks, the majority are middle-class professionals - doctors, dentists, scientists and engineers. Most of its leadership have been educated in our universities and harbour no ideological hatred towards the West.
It is a grievance-based movement, dedicated to addressing the injustice done to its people. It has consistently offered a ten-year ceasefire to give breathing space to resolve a conflict that has continued for more than 60 years.
The Bush-Blair response to the Hamas victory in 2006 is the key to today's horror. Instead of accepting the democratically elected Government, they funded an attempt to remove it by force; training and arming groups of Fatah fighters to unseat Hamas militarily and impose a new, unelected government on the Palestinians. Further, 45 Hamas MPs are still being held in Israeli jails.
Six months ago the Israeli Government agreed to an Egyptian- brokered ceasefire with Hamas. In return for a ceasefire, Israel agreed to open the crossing points and allow a free flow of essential supplies in and out of Gaza. The rocket barrages ended but the crossings never fully opened, and the people of Gaza began to starve. This crippling embargo was no reward for peace.
When Westerners ask what is in the mind of Hamas leaders when they order or allow rockets to be fired at Israel they fail to understand the Palestinian position. Two months ago the Israeli Defence Forces broke the ceasefire by entering Gaza and beginning the cycle of killing again. In the Palestinian narrative each round of rocket attacks is a response to Israeli attacks. In the Israeli narrative it is the other way round.
But what does it mean when Mr Barak talks of destroying Hamas? Does it mean killing the 42 per cent of Palestinians who voted for it? Does it mean reoccupying the Gaza strip that Israel withdrew from so painfully three years ago? Or does it mean permanently separating the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, politically and geographically? And for those whose mantra is Israeli security, what sort of threat do the three quarters of a million young people growing up in Gaza with an implacable hatred of those who starve and bomb them pose?
It is said that this conflict is impossible to solve. In fact, it is very simple. The top 1,000 people who run Israel - the politicians, generals and security staff - and the top Palestinian Islamists have never met.
Genuine peace will require that these two groups sit down together without preconditions. But the events of the past few days seem to have made this more unlikely than ever. That is the challenge for the new administration in Washington and for its European allies.
William Sieghart is chairman of Forward Thinking, an independent conflict resolution agency
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