The settlers who have recently occupied the house of the Gawi family, forcefully evicted from their home in Sheikh Jarrah on 2 August 2009, launched an attack today on the Palestinians camping outside. According to local sources, seven Palestinians were injured and four arrested.
The attack started between 8 and 8.30pm, when a driver of a lorry delivering furniture to the occupied house, accompanied by four settlers, attacked a five year old boy from the Gawi family who was playing nearby. The settlers then attacked a small tent where the Gawi family have been living since the eviction. The tent was full of mainly women and children at that time. A Palestinian woman who was hit hard by the driver had to be taken to hospital. A fight broke out immediately, involving at least 15 settlers. Several members of the family sustained light injuries and a 15-year old girl from the neighbourhood was hit by a falling TV as the settlers managed to tear down the tent.
When police arrived, they made no attempts to stop the settlers attacking the family and later arrested four Palestinians. Two were released and another two, Khalet Gawi and Saleh Diab have been taken to hospital and told to come back to the police station tomorrow for further questioning. Four settlers were taken for questioning and released immediately.
The Gawi and Hannoun families, consisting of 53 members including 20 children, have been left homeless after they were forcibly evicted from their houses on 2 August 2009. The Israeli forces surrounded the homes of the two families at 5.30am and, breaking in through the windows, forcefully dragged all residents into the street. The police also demolished the neighbourhood’s protest tent, set up by Um Kamel, following the forced eviction of her family in November 2008.
At present, all three houses are occupied by settlers and the whole area is patrolled by armed private settler security 24 hours a day. Both Hannoun and Gawi families, who have been left without suitable alternative accommodation since August, continue to protest against the unlawful eviction from the sidewalk across the street from their homes, facing regular attacks from the settlers and harassment from the police.
The Karm Al-Ja’ouni neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah is home to 28 Palestinian families, all refugees from 1948, who received their houses from the UNRWA and Jordanian government in 1956. All face losing their homes in the manner of the Hannoun, Gawi and al-Kurd families.
The aim of the settlers is to turn the whole area into a new Jewish settlement and to create a Jewish continuum that will effectively cut off the Old City form the northern Palestinian neighborhoods. Implanting new Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is illegal under many international laws, including Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The following is Palestinian nonviolent resistance activist Ahmed A. Khatib’s story as told to The Electronic Intifada contributor Jody McIntyre:
Palestinians take part in one of the nonviolent demonstrations against Israel's wall in Bilin, September 2006. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)
My name is Ahmed A. Khatib, I am 32 years old, and married with four children. I live in the village of Bilin, where I work on our family’s farm.
When Israel started building the wall here in 2005, I was working with the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades military, the armed wing of the Fatah party. But at first, the villagers went to our land not to “resist,” but simply to see what the Israeli soldiers were doing. There was no planning, no such things as “demonstrations,” and no organization. We were just curious as to why these strangers were stealing our olive groves. So, in effect, our popular struggle was initiated through ordinary people walking to their land.
However, as the Israelis’ intentions became evident, the people of the village agreed that the formation of a local popular committee would be the best way forward.
After a couple of initial meetings, it was decided that we would embark on a campaign of nonviolent resistance, drawing inspiration from the struggle in Budrus village, where they had actually succeeded in moving the route of the wall. At first, I thought the suggestion was a joke — I had friends who had been killed, friends locked up in prison. I worked with guns to fight against the occupation, so it was difficult for me to believe that we could ever return to our land through nonviolent means.
But we are farmers from a small village, simple people, fighting against the fourth largest military in the world. If you think about it, Bilin is home to around 1,500 inhabitants; half of those are women, plus a few hundred children, and maybe 50 elderly men. You aren’t left with many people to take up an armed struggle against the Israeli army.
At the first demonstration, the army really didn’t have a clue how to deal with us! Because we came to them as unarmed citizens, they were left with no pretext to shoot at us. Instead, they started beating us with their weapons. Before, I didn’t believe that Israeli and international activists would be able to help, but then I saw them becoming human shields, taking the soldiers’ blows for us Palestinians. When we returned to the village, everyone had an injury to show. It was a great feeling to see that kind of solidarity, although I still remained skeptical about the concept of nonviolent resistance.
However, we started to see the name of our village and our photos all over the media, and people from around the world were saying that these simple farmers really could challenge this brutal army.
Demonstration after demonstration, I started to believe in the nonviolent struggle. However, this put a strain on my relationships with my al-Aqsa friends, whom I tried to convince of the benefits of these new methods. Some were willing to listen; this was at a time when Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president) had won the presidential election and made a temporary truce with Israel, so people were looking for a new way forward.
When our struggle first started in Bilin, the al-Aqsa military declared that they would come to the village and kill the army. But I went to them and told them not to interfere — this was our decision, our struggle, and we went to our demonstrations with women and children — and they listened to me.
After a few demonstrations had passed, the Israeli occupation forces arrested someone from the al-Aqsa military, and they told the Shabak (Israel’s internal security service, also known as the Shin Bet) that I had helped with transporting weapons. The army raided the village on 29 October 2006, four days after Hamas had taken an Israeli soldier hostage in Gaza.
That day, an Israeli taxi driver had been kidnapped and gone missing, so when I saw soldiers outside my home, I presumed it was an arbitrary search for him. I didn’t for one second think they had come to arrest me, because I had stopped working with al-Aqsa some time before. Once they were sitting in my front room, I even offered them some tea, but they said they didn’t drink on the job.
They let me smoke a cigarette, and said that they were searching many houses, so I relaxed. But after ten minutes, the soldiers told me to be ready, because the Shabak were coming to arrest me.
I stayed in jail for 13 months, but the experience didn’t change anything in me. I had changed my ideas well before I was arrested.
I spent the first month in Ramle prison, where I was joined by 20 Hamas politicians, whom I later found out had been arrested on the same night as me. So every day, although we stayed in different rooms, I came face-to-face with them. When they heard I was from Bilin, they asked me about our struggle — I knew that Hamas had refused to join our struggle at first, so I started to explain how we practiced nonviolent resistance, and how the Israelis and internationals were helping and could use their experience in Bilin to pressure their own governments into taking action against the occupation. By the time I had finished, they promised that once they were released, they would join us in Bilin.
For me, it was a great personal victory to see that I could convince these important leaders, so I started to talk to all my friends in jail about the nonviolent struggle. Every Saturday they brought the newspapers to the prison, and it was always understood that Ahmed Khatib could read the first copy, so that I could see the report from the Friday demonstration in my village. I also saw Bilin live on Al-Jazeera; I couldn’t believe I was seeing my friends on the prison’s television! All this strengthened my beliefs; sometimes I asked myself, there are 2,000 Palestinian prisoners here — maybe the nonviolent struggle could release us one day?
They had sentenced me to 28 months in prison, but it was my fate to be released after 13, along with 250 other Palestinians, when Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made their prisoner release deal.
A short time after I was released, the Israeli high court gave an order to change the route of the wall in Bilin. When I heard the news, I was filled with a happiness that I had only felt twice before — when my first child was born, and when I heard my name being read out on the list of those to be released on a secret radio while still in jail. I was so overjoyed that I ran to the local mosque and announced the victory on the loudspeaker! We got music and started dancing on the streets, calling all our friends to let them know what had happened.
Without a moment of planning, we took an impromptu demonstration to the wall, and started throwing sweets at the Israeli army. The soldiers were looking pretty nervous.
I felt like I was on top of the world — we had won, and this was a victory not only for us, but for every person who had visited Bilin. I truly believed that our experience would inspire other villages, and that we would become a symbol — a spark for a world struggle for freedom.
But slowly, I began to wake up from the dream. Two years later, our situation hasn’t changed. For me, I will never return to armed resistance, now that I have a family to look after. But I see the entire village as my family, and I really want to see something good for them — for the wall to be destroyed, and for the people of Bilin to return to our lands. I am still waiting for that moment.
Unfortunately, the tactics of Israel seem to promote armed resistance. They refuse to release just one of the 11,000 Palestinian prisoners currently rotting away in Israeli jails, but when an Israeli soldier is taken hostage, they are willing to negotiate. How can I convince the mothers of those martyred and those imprisoned that nonviolent resistance is the way forward?
But in my heart, I know that nonviolent resistance is the path to freedom for our nation. From my small village of Bilin, I hope our actions can set an example for others to follow.
The Ministry of Education has taken the unusual step of collecting all copies of the history textbook, “Nationalism: Building a State in the Middle East” which was published about two months ago by the Zalman Shazar Center. They will be returned to the shelves only after corrections are made to the text, particularly with reference to the War of Independence.
The book had already been approved by the ministry.
“Collecting the books from the shops is an unnecessary [form of] censorship,” said Dr. Tsafrir Goldberg, who wrote the controversial chapter on the war. “The process of approving the text was completed in serious fashion from both the pedagogic and the historic points of view. The fact that the education minister changed does not mean that it is possible to bypass this procedure.”
On September 22, Haaretz reported that the textbook, which is meant for 11th and 12th-grades, for the first time presented the Palestinian claim that there had been ethnic cleansing in 1948.
“The Palestinians and the Arab countries contended that most of the refugees were civilians who were attacked and expelled from their homes by armed Jewish forces, which instituted a policy of ethnic cleansing, contrary to the proclamations of peace in the Declaration of Independence,” states the text, which presented the Palestinian and the Israeli-Jewish versions side by side.
Criticism about the book was voiced by history teachers.
“Presenting Israel’s claims as being equal to those of Arab propagandists is exactly like presenting the claims of the Nazis alongside those of the Jews,” one of them said.
On the other hand, another teacher noted that the most important component in studying history is to introduce as many points of view as possible.
Following the newspaper report, Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar instructed the ministry’s director general, Shimshon Shoshani, to examine the book and look into the process of approving texts in general.
Officials in the ministry said Sunday that an examination carried out by Michael Yaron, who is in charge of history studies, found “a great many mistakes, some of them serious. As a result of this examination it was decided that the original version of the textbook must be withdrawn and returned to the stores only after being corrected.”
Among other things, the Shazar Center was asked to exchange the original Palestinian text that appears in the book, written by Walid Khalidi, for another that is closer to reality, said Goldberg, who finished making the changes recently.
Another demand was that the term “ethnic cleansing” be redacted. Goldberg says that he changed the phrase and spoke instead of an organized policy of expulsion.
When the corrections have been completed, the book will be reviewed again at the publishers and in the ministry, before it is given final approval.
“The state has the right to determine the contents of textbooks but this is not supposed to be done by the education minister,” Goldberg said.
He noted, though, that some of the remarks were merely cosmetic and did not pose any problem. “The publishing house decided to make the corrections as a form of self censorship,” Goldberg said.
Zvi Yekutiel, the executive director of the Shazar Center, said that “the book has to be aimed at the widest possible consensus and not at the fringes on the left or the right. We made a mistake and we are correcting it.”
Last month, Yekutiel said that there had been no remarks about the chapter on the War of Independence during the process of approving the book.
He added that “the explicit instruction from the ministry was to include controversial points of view so that the students can confront them and make up their own minds.”
Yekutiel said the ministry would pay for the collection of the books from the stores.
The ministry approved the textbook for use in the schools on July 26, after it had been sent to two external assessors – an academic and a teacher.
It was granted approval after an examination of its suitability for the curriculum and its scientific reliability.
The ministry spokesman said last week that, “from the start the book was intended to go into use as a textbook only from this coming January, so the students were not yet exposed to the relevant material. It was decided as well that the director general’s circular should be corrected to make it clear that the responsibility and authority for approving textbooks is on the inspectors and coordinators who are responsible for the various subjects taught and who have to examine the books before they are approved and pass on their remarks and instructions.”
On Sunday, 18 October, about 30 internationals from several different solidarity groups accompanied inhabitants of the village Iraq Burin south of Nablus to plant olive trees. 45 plants were donated by the Palestinans Authority and the action was considered successful by the local residents.
Farmers from Iraq Buring plant olive trees on reclaimed land
The olive trees were planted close to the illegal settlement Bracha, on 30 dunums (30 000m2) of land that has recently been returned to its rightful Palestinian owners as a result of an agreement with the District Coordination Office. This is the first success of its kind, and is a result of weekly demonstrations, where local protesters and international activists came together to protest illegal land annexation and settlement expansion in the West Bank.
After the olive trees were planted the protesters stayed in the field chanting pro-Palestinian slogans, celebrating the reclaimed land. A security jeep along with an army jeep arrived to the area at this point, however, as the action was already over and successfully fulfilled, the protesters decided to return to the village.
The farmers from Salim, a village located north east of Nablus and close to the illegal Israeli settlement Elon Moreh, faced numerous problems throughout this year’s olive harvest. The army prevented them on several occasions from accessing a substantial amount of farmland lying behind the gates of the settler-only road, issued Closed Military Zone orders and threatened the farmers with imposing fines of up to 6,000 shekels if they invite international volunteers to accompany them to the olive groves.
Ten years ago, an Israeli-only road (557) was built between the settlements of Elon Moreh and Itamar, drawn through the Salim fields, cutting off land belonging to 150 families from the village. During the first and second intifada, Salim farmers were shot at while trying to access their fields. Until now, Palestinians are not allowed to be near or cross the road, except during the olive harvest season. Even then, the Israeli Occupation Soldiers position themselves at the road gate crossing to road 557 every year, slowing, tracking and in some cases preventing families from accessing their land on the other side.
In one of these incidents, on Saturday 17 October, the army jeeps and several soldiers blocked the gate, resulting in 150 villagers waiting to access their land and tractors and other vehicles lining up on the track. The soldiers refused to allow the Palestinian access unless the international volunteers, who were accompanying them, retreat to the village. After the volunteers withdrew, the army allowed access by foot for about ten minutes and later opened the gate for tractors only. Drivers of other vehicles were allowed to pass only after submitting their IDs, while the army took notes of their car registration numbers.
International volunteers have been accompanying farmers from Salim to their olive groves since the harvest commenced in the village earlier this month. On one occasion, the Israeli soldiers told the farmers that they will be fined 6,000 shekels if they visit their lands accompanied by international activists. The army also issued Closed Military Zone orders in order to prevent international activists from accessing the groves along with the farmers.
Aside from the agricultural and economic problems Salim suffers from its proximity to Elon Moreh, the village has received orders to halt work on the construction of seven houses, under threat of demolition if they proceed. The homes lie on the edge of the village in Area C (under Israeli control) and the orders appear to be a part of a greater scheme to prevent the expansion of Palestinian communities.
