30th October 2013 | International Solidarity Movement, Charlie Andreasson | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
(Photo by Charlie Andreasson)
As part of the resumption of negotiation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, 26 Palestinian prisoners were released overnight Wednesday from Ofer prison in Israel. Five were transferred to the Gaza Strip via the Erez checkpoint in Beit Hanoun. This was the second of four planned releases of a total of 104 Palestinian prisoners, nearly all imprisoned before the beginning of the Oslo system in 1994. The 26 released in this round have been detained from 19 to 28 years, and are between 38 and 58 years old. But they could have regained their freedom long ago. As part of the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum in 1999, all Palestinians captured and sentenced before Oslo should have been freed.
(Photo by Charlie Andreasson)
The five men returning to the Gaza Strip were hailed as heroes for their resistance against the occupation by the 400-500 Palestinians gathered at Erez to greet them. The scene in Israel, however, was entirely different. On Monday, thousands gathered outside Ofer prison to protest against plans to release the 26 prisoners, all but two sentenced to life.
Even within Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, there have been strong disagreements about the release. The Jewish Home party, an ultra-right coalition member, unsuccessfully proposed legislation to bar future releases. Its leader, Naftali Bennett, criticized Israeli justice minister Tzipi Livni, one of the negotiators, in strong terms, saying that stopping the release of Palestinian prisoners was far more important than than Livni’s continued presence in the cabinet. Less extremist elements within the coalition said that Netanyahu could have prevented the release by accepting a freeze on the construction of new settlements in the occupied West Bank, or negotiations based on its boundaries as the borders of a future Palestinian state. This is a view shared by opposition leader Shelly Yachimovich, who claimed that Netanyahu’s Likud prefers to release prisoners than freeze settlement construction.
(Photo by Charlie Andreasson)
A freeze on the construction of new settlements and the expansion of existing ones, all illegal under international law, has always been a demand of Palestinians to continue negotiations. It was Israel’s refusal to meet this requirement that crashed the talks 2010, and only after the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s mediation were the parties were able to return to the negotiating table. But Netanyahu has already stated that permission will be given for more settlements. It is speculated that this will include between 1,200 and 1,700 units of settler housing. How this will affect the negotiations remains to be seen.
(Photo by Charlie Andreasson)
A spokesman for the Hamas-led government in Gaza, Fawzi Barhoum, accused the Israeli government of using the release of prisoners as a smokescreen for house demolitions, the construction of the wall, changing the status of Jerusalem, obstructing the right of return, and seizing even more Palestinian land. Hamas is not part of the negotiations. Barhoum’s claim expresses what many believe, that Israel hopes to change the focus of the negotiations. A resolution giving Israel the opportunity to expand settlements on occupied territory is an agreement between a pacified Palestinian authority and an occupying power. With the announcement escalated settlement expansion, the Netanyahu government has proven what it wants out of the talks.
29th October 2013 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza Team | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
(Photo by Rosa Schiano)
Families and supporters of Palestinian detainees held by Israel celebrated tonight’s promised release of 26 prisoners during a weekly sit-in Monday morning.
The regular event, which began in 1995, brings comrades, friends and relatives of Palestinian prisoners together in the courtyard of the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Gaza City office.
“I and my family can’t believe Hazem is going to be released,” Taiseer Qassem Shubeir said after the event.
Shubeir is the brother of of Hazem Qassem Taher Shubeir, one five prisoners from the Gaza Strip scheduled for release.
“We had lost hope,” Shubeir said. “Now all the Israelis’ excuses have been broken. We are unbelievably happy, and the whole family is waiting nervously.”
The expected release of 26 detainees follows an earlier release that also included 26 prisoners, with 14 from the Gaza Strip, on 14 August.
(Photo by Rosa Schiano)
Rallies have been planned to the five Gaza Strip detainees, both on their arrival at the Erez checkpoint in Beit Hanoun, expected around midnight, and later in their cities and neighborhoods.
“Families and supporters of the detainees will go to Erez,” said Osama al-Wuhaidi, a spokesman for the Hussam Association, a Gaza-based society of current and former Palestinian detainees. “After seven o’clock, people will start gathering by the checkpoint.”
“Everybody in Khan Younis is already celebrating,” said Shubeir. “I feel like Hazem is the son not only of our family, but of the whole Palestinian people.”
The Israeli government has said that the releases, part of its current negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), will free 104 detainees over nine months of talks.
These will include all Palestinians detained before the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994 and charged by Israeli with offenses before the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords, according to Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.
Israel first agreed to release these prisoners in its 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum with the PLO.
29th October 2013 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus Team | Tawayel, Occupied Palestine
A family after their home was demolished
Today, Tuesday 29th October, Israeli soldiers invaded the village of Tawayel in the early hours of the morning to demolish several buildings and a water reserve. The demolition continued into the afternoon, where two international activists were detained before being released shortly after.
Early this morning at around 5am, the Israeli army arrived in Tawayel with several military jeeps and three bulldozers. They began by demolishing a sheep enclosure before continuing to destroy the house of one farmer. The former home of this family was completely destroyed, but Israeli forces then demolished a water reserve. This means the soldiers removed the water supplies for several families and their animals in the area.
When Israeli forces continued in their demolition by moving their focus to another house, used as a storage room, four international activists sat in front of the bulldozer to try to prevent the demolition. Several Israeli soldiers and border police told them to leave and when they refused, took one French activist and pushed her into an army jeep. Shortly after this, border police grabbed a German activist, handcuffed him and placed him in the military jeep. The farmers and the internationals then had to watch, while the Israeli army destroyed the storage room. After they were finished, they released the activists, without taking their passports or even their names.
Tawayel is a village close to Aqraba. The landscape is mainly desert, which makes it difficult for the farmers in the area to build a structured water supply. The village is Area B, but many farmers are living outside of the village, where there is more space for their sheep and animals. These farmers and their families have been living in this land for generations, though the army declared it Area C. Most of the houses the farmers are living in are quite old and in the last few years they constructed infrastructure to simplify water supply, they also built new shelters for their sheep in order to protect them from the summer sun, the cold in the winter and wild dogs. For these new buildings the farmers sent several aplications for planning permission, they did not receive a response from the Israeli government and this is why the administration declared those constructions as illegal.
This kind of structured demolition has happened before in Tawayel and the harassment from the Israeli army is ongoing, although they have never bothered to answer the permit requests from the farmers.
29th October 2013 | International Solidarity Movement, Rosa Schiano | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
(Photo by Rosa Schiano)
On the morning of Monday, 28 October, the Israeli air forces bombed agricultural land in the north of Gaza City.
The airstrike took place at 9:25 am. An F-16 fighter jet bombed an area planted with olive trees on Mukhabarat Street, near Soudanya.
The bombing created a huge crater. The land belongs to the Shohaber family, which produces oil from the olive trees. The family also owns a trucking company that transports materials from the Karem Shalom checkpoint into the Gaza Strip.
Hazem Shohaber, owner of the land, told me his house was damaged in the bombing. His family has only lived in the new home for three months.
“I was sitting behind the wall around the yard when the bombing took place,” Hazem said. “I was shocked. I was not able to do anything. Thank God my children were not on the land. They were in school. They usually play here.”
(Photo by Rosa Schiano)
Hazem has three sons and three young daughters who were in school at the time of the bombing. The explosion cracked the walls of his house. All its windows, as well as those of adjacent buildings, shattered.
A few meters away from the bomb site is a primary school for girls.
“The girls were in class,” Hazem said. “They fled. The situation was terrible. Teachers could not calm them. The ambulances came. Everyone feared that children had died in the explosion.”
A few meters away from the bomb site is a primary school for girls.
“The girls were in class,” Hazem said. “They fled. The situation was terrible. Teachers could not calm them. The ambulances came. Everyone feared that children had died in the explosion .”
Hazem’s wife offers a cup of coffee. His daughter, Farah, age six, hides under the table, looking shocked. Who knows how many other children will do the same today?
The ceasefire of 21 November 2012 established that the Israeli military forces should “refrain from hitting residents in areas along the border” and “cease hostilities in the Gaza Strip by land, by sea and by air, including raids and targeted killings.”
But Israeli military attacks by land and sea have followed from the day after the ceasefire,, and Israeli warplanes constantly fly over the Gaza Strip. In areas by the Israel-imposed “buffer zone,”Israeli forces have killed seven civilians since the end of the “Pillar of Defense” military offensive. At least 124 others have been wounded.
These attacks against the civilian population of Gaza continue, but are met only with silence by the international community.
Recording the testimony of Nakba survivors is essential for educating future generations of Palestinians, say oral historians. (APA images)
Tucked into a quiet basement suite in the main building of the immaculate Islamic University of Gaza campus, the Oral History Center could at first be mistaken for a bursar or registrar’s office.
But its stacks of metal filing cabinets may contain more memories per square meter than any other place in the occupied Gaza Strip.
Researcher Nermin Habib said that the center conducted interviews with those who had witnessed the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the ethnic cleansing ahead of Israel’s foundation in 1948, as well as the Naksa (setback), Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai in 1967.
“We have already conducted 1,500 oral interviews and archived audio files from them,” Habib added. “A meeting can last anywhere from half an hour, to two or three hours. We can also have follow-up meetings.
“We have also published 120 [interviews] in written form. In the future, we plan video interviews. We hope to use them to produce a documentary film about the history of Palestine.”
Launched as part of the university’s faculty of arts in 1998, the Oral History Center has a staff of experienced field researchers and recent graduates from the university’s departments of history, press and media, and social studies.
“It is by experience, by relationships,” said Habib. “We built the archive from scratch. There is no systematic reference center for such information in Gaza.”
The Oral History Center researches a number of fields. Beyond displacement and refugee life, it has programs on Palestinian regions, folklore, politics and culture, as well as Israeli violations of Palestinian rights.
“We are trying our best to maintain our Palestinian identity and Palestinian heritage, customs and traditions, like food and dress, after the Nakba,” said Habib. “Oral history has links with all fields of knowledge, like folk medicine. It’s part of our work as historical researchers to convey this information.
“We seek to document the history of the Palestinian people and the main events that have shaped the Palestinian cause.”
The Gaza Strip has the highest proportion of refugees of any territory in the world. Few aspects of life, from the economy and politics, to the broad range of local foods and dialects from elsewhere in Palestine, are unaffected by the Nakba, during which approximately 750,000 Palestinians were displaced by Zionist forces and hundreds of villages and cities depopulated.
The Israeli army expelled 400,000 to 450,000 more Palestinians during the Naksa in 1967, according to the Palestinian refugee advocacy group BADIL.
By the end of 2011, at least 7.4 million Palestinians had been displaced, 66 percent of a global Palestinian population of 11.2 million, making them the world’s largest and longest-standing group of refugees, according to a recent survey by BADIL.
But with the 1948 ethnic cleansing more than 65 years in the past, the ranks of those who witnessed it firsthand, in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere, are quickly declining.
“We started thinking about how the generation that survived the Nakba are leaving us,” said Haidar Eid of the Oral History Project, another effort to collect accounts of 1948.
The project team has recorded 64 hours of interviews, Eid said. Time to complete the rest is running out.
“Most of these people are dying. For the project, they are supposed to have been at least ten when the Nakba happened. So we are talking about people in their seventies and eighties.”
“One of the major demands of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is the implementation of United Nations Resolution 194, which clearly calls for the return of all Palestinian refugees to the lands, villages and towns from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and their compensation,” Eid said. “With the Oral History Project, we are supporting this demand and making it real. We move from ethnic cleansing as an abstract term into the practicality, the life itself.
“An interesting question we sometimes ask is whether they would accept any solution that would compromise their right of return. There is a consensus among all the refugees we’ve interviewed that no compromise on the right of return would be accepted. For them, that is not a solution.”
Gaza’s Oral History Project works in cooperation with Palestine Remembered, an online archive of information on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the Israeli organization Zochrot, which advocates the return of Palestinian refugees. Eid called this “a form of co-resistance” as opposed to projects which normalize Israel’s ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine.
“The onslaught of normalization projects has taken place at the expense of two-thirds of the Palestinian people who are refugees,” he added, drawing a distinction with other kinds of cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis. “1948 is the original sin, rather than 1967, on which these projects are all based.”
Young volunteers conduct most of the Oral History Project’s interviews. Many belong to the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel, PACBI’s youth affiliate.
“Revisiting the trauma”
“It’s tiring, I must tell you,” Eid said. “I have been avoiding recording with people myself, because it’s extremely difficult. Revisiting the trauma is not easy. But they would be very happy to talk about everything before 1948.”
Oral History Project interviews consist of three sections: Palestine before 1948, its ethnic cleansing and refugee life.
“We ask about mundane things, the daily life of people in the village or city, weddings, funerals and coffee shops,” Eid said. “We ask if the people still have a thobe [a traditional garment] or anything from the village. They usually love it.
“When they come closer to the moment of truth, when the person was forced from their village, it’s heartbreaking. Many start crying. They can give you minute details about the strangest things.”
Accounts can be not only emotional, but brutal as well. “Those Palestinians who refused to leave Palestine were basically massacred,” Eid said.
“This is the embodiment of the Zionist dream of creating a state with a Jewish majority. To guarantee that, you need to have a process of either ethnic cleansing or genocide.”
A refugee himself, Eid cited his own background to illustrate the importance of oral history to the Palestinian narrative.
“I’m from a village called Zarnuga, which is on the outskirts of Ramle [in present-day Israel],” he said. “I found only three pictures of Zarnuga. Only three.”
“The history of the Tantura massacre relies heavily on oral history. Now people know that a massacre took place in the Tantura village, about 30 meters south of Haifa, based on recorded oral history,” Eid added.
Oral history also has an important role in the continuity of Palestinian culture. “This work has a lot of benefit for new Palestinian generations,” said Nermid Habib. “It allows them to know that what their grandparents were doing,”
Israel “trying to whitewash”
On 12 August, a number of Palestine solidarity groups issued an open letter protesting an international conference on oral history planned by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for June 2014, calling for oral historians to boycott it.
PACBI endorsed the letter, and Eid and more than 350 others working in the field of oral history have signed it.
“Israel is trying to whitewash and beautify its image,” Eid said. “One of the questions that we want to raise here in Palestine, as academics and also as refugees, is whether the Nakba will be part of the conference, whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 will be addressed. I think this is a rhetorical question, the answer to which we know.”
Participation in the conference by oral historians from the Gaza Strip is out of the question. Most Palestinians are banned from entering present-day Israel. The 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law even criminalizes the presence of Palestinian refugees in Israel.
But through these longstanding exclusions, Israel may inadvertently highlight the relevance of the work on refugees, as well as the darker elements of its history and society.
“The Zionist narrative has been the recognized narrative in the West,” Eid said. “Before 1948, there was nothing. There was a gap between 1948 and 2,000 years before that.
“We are helping to provide an alternative to it. It’s part of what we call the counter-narrative.”
“The stories of the old are more confident than the history books,” Habib said. “They witnessed the events themselves. There are written histories as well. It’s essential to add a new kind of reference.”
