Author: ISM Media Group

Nablus: What Could Happen Next?

The Israeli siege on Zawata, a village near Nablus, continued around noon on Thursday, July 19, 2007 as Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) demolished the exterior wall of a second home. The home itself was saved due to the extreme pressure placed on the IOF by international human rights activists present on the ground. The house belonged to Asad Natour’s three brothers. Faris Natour, 21, was interrogated inside his family’s half demolished home for almost six hours before he was arrested and taken away by the IOF.

“I had been sleeping. We turned on the television and we heard that they had entered the house of my brother and law. We were worried,” said Om Faris in a video interview with an international activist present at the demolition. “We went out on the street when there was an announcement that the army had pulled back. We wanted to walk up to check on our family members up in the village. And that’s when we realized that the army was standing just outside of our door. This was at 10:00 am.”

The IOF surrounded the house and they called the families out on the street. “They made them take off their clothes, all of their clothes one by one,” said Om Faris. The families were then strip-searched and forced to sit in the sun for two hours.

“They tried to call out Faris and when he did not response they called out for his mother—me,” said Om Faris. “They told him to surrender with ‘his bomb’ or they would blow up the house.”

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions’ website cites a 2004 B’tselem Summary as reporting that more than 628 Palestinian homes were demolished during the second Intifada. These demolitions were used as specific tactic of collective punishment which affected the families of people known or suspected to be “terrorists.”

Om Faris continued lamenting the events that transpired at her home that day. “I told them 18 people live in this house. We are still paying off the debts of this house. I started crying hysterically. Faris calmed me down and said I should leave. He told me: a house can be demolished and a house can be rebuilt,” she said. “Then they took the women up on the street. I refused to go. I told them if they are going to demolish my house they are going to do it with me in it.

The house behind Om Faris’ home also fell prey to the IOF who had encircled the vicinity. Though the house was empty every window was shot in and shattered glass hemmed its interior.

Osama Zawati, 50, was returning home from work in Nablus at 2:00 pm when he realized his neighbor’s home was under siege. He held two grocery bags of fruits and vegetables and was told by an IOF soldier to walk swiftly with them by his side straight to his home or he would be shot. Later, he tried to look at the damage to the windows of his neighbor’s home, however, the IOF did not permit him to do so.

Around the same time, the IOF shot rubber bullets at an ambulance parked a quarter kilometer from the home still being occupied. The ambulance was parked outside a home where medics and internationals waited, after being denied access to the home, for Faris to be released and the army to leave the village.

At 5:00 pm, less than three hours later, the Israeli army occupied the house of Nowaf Abu Amsha, 35, in which the internationals and medics had been waiting, and the family was dragged out into the street. The army then demolished the family’s nearby garage with their car inside. “They didn’t ask me even to open it,” said Abu Amsha.

At 6:00pm the IOF left the village, two young men from Zawata still in their custody. Their mothers left to wonder when, if ever, they would see their sons again.

“On average 12 innocent people lose their home for every person ‘punished’ for a security offense – and in half of the cases the occupants had nothing whatsoever to do with the acts in question,” reads the ICHAD website. “To add to the Kafkaesque nature of this policy, the Israeli government insists it is pursued to ‘deter’ potential terrorists, although 79% of the suspected offenders were either dead or in detention at the time of the demolition.” (B’tselem Summary 2004:1,3).

Nablus: “So you’re doing this without a military order?”…“I am.”

Thursday, July 19, 2007 at 6:50 am approximately 50 Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) soldiers and border police, accompanied by a bulldozer, came to the village of Zawata, located by the West Bank city of Nablus. At 9:30 am they demolished one home despite attempts by international human rights activists at the scene to stop the demolition. Later the IOF caused severe damage to several other houses in the area. (For more information on the second part of the Israeli siege, please look at the second report.) Asad Natour, 47, his wife, Saeda, 39, and seven children are homeless now due to the egregious acts of the IOF.

“When the kids saw them do all of this—they wet their pants,” Asad told an international activist during a video interview. “First they shot at the house. After that they called on us using the megaphones. We exited. We had our hands up and went out on the street. They said take off your clothes.” The family was made to stand in the sun on the street adjacent to their home during which time they stripped completely for a full-body search even his youngest daughter Laura, who is six, was subjected to this brutal Israeli tactic of deprivation and humiliation.

“If they want to search our house, don’t take us out of our house as if we are terrorists. None of us have ever been in prison or done anything wrong to another human being, but they are not human,” Asad said. “They are used to killing. We are from Jaffa, we came to Camp No. 1 [Ein Beit Al Ma] and later we bought these 250 square meters here to build a house. But they don’t want this.”

Asad’s eldest son, Jihad, 20, was taken to a building across from his home, detained and interrogated. When the IOF was finished with their “interrogation,” they arrested him and took him away. No reason was given to his family for the arrest. “No, no one told me nothing!” said Asad. “I have never been in prison and neither has he. So there is no reason…They don’t want our young men to grow up.”

The IOF never entered the home; they never presented a military order or a permit for the destruction of the home. While demolishing first home, the IOF also demolished a neighbor’s car. In addition, when the bulldozer backed up from bulldozing Asad’s home, the back of the bulldozer hit his neighbor’s home where a month old infant was sleeping in its bed. Pieces of concrete from the wall fell on the baby and slashed its head. The baby was taken to hospital. X-rays were performed; luckily no fractures or permanent damage was sustained to the infant’s head.

“We are a people who love peace, but they don’t,” Asad said. “If they [Israel] are so democratic they would knock on the door. And we would open.” Israel’s policy of house demolitions is illegal under international law. Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention reads: “Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons…is prohibited.”

Thus as an occupying force within Palestine, the IOF acts illegally and completely of their own volition. Soldiers assaulted activists attempting to view the home demolition. When asked to present documents authorizing the home destruction, soldiers admitted they had none. A soldier on the scene declared, “I understand where you’re coming from, but you’re not going to see an order.” Yet another soldier when asked, “So you’re doing this without a military order?” answered, “I am.” Furthermore, activists at the scene applied due diligence toward contacting the District Command Office (DCO). However, despite promises by the DCO representative to return calls, repeated requests went unanswered. A representative from B’tselem told an international activist over the phone that the Israeli civil authorities knew nothing about the situation on the ground.

“Whatever they want—they can do. If they want to kill—they can. The only thing they want is to destroy, they destroy the house and then that’s it—they leave,” said Asad. “And we hope that all of the people in the world can stand with the Palestinian people because we’re repressed on our own land. Most don’t have work, and have nothing to eat. And all of the Palestinian people live off of aid. That’s it.”

Assad is employed by the United Nations as a Modern Standard Arabic teacher at Camp No.1 Basic Boy’s School. To date he has not paid off the loans he took out to build his home.

According to the website of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), 18,000 Palestinian homes were demolished in the Occupied Territories, including Occupied East Jerusalem, since 1967.

Between September 2000 the first year of the second Intifada and October 2004, approximately 50,000 Palestinians were left homeless (Human Rights Watch, Razing Rafah, October 2004).

Undoubtedly this number is much higher now.

Is This Ben Gurion Or Hell?

Is This Ben Gurion Or Hell?

Original Article Link.

By Remi Kanazi

18 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org

Anyone who has traveled through Ben Gurion airport in Israel knows that it is a unique experience. For most Israeli Jews, the experience is comforting, a quick and accommodating entry into a nation created and developed for the Jewish people. For Palestinian-Americans and many activists working in occupied Palestine it is quite a different experience. Most of these travelers are held for hours and questioned repeatedly; some of who are stripped naked and in some cases (especially in the last two years) denied entry.

As I write from Ramallah, I recall my and my brother’s experience in Ben Gurion just one week ago. After a sleepless 15 hour trip from New York, we arrived at the airport and went directly to the check-in booth. After waiting in a short line, a friendly woman asked for our passports, yet immediately turned sour once she viewed them. We were asked to step aside and after about 15 minutes a woman from airport security told us to follow her into one of the detainment rooms. Given the countless stories of harassment I had heard and read about before my trip, I wasn’t so foolish to think that my journey through Ben Gurion would be a walk in the park. I had initially anticipated a four hour wait, interrogation, and a thorough pat down by Israel’s finest.

When we arrived at the first detainment room, several young female security agents asked us where we were going, about our ethnic background and family history, whether we had family in Israel or the occupied territories (and if we would be staying with them), and if “there was anything they should know.” We were then taken to another detainment room, where a few other detainees were being held. Over the next three hours, several female security officers came into the detainment room we were being held in to question us, while at other times we were called into other detainment rooms for questioning. One African detainee, an elderly black woman, was not allowed into the country with her husband despite a seemingly innocent decision to visit her family.
After about four hours, pure exhaustion set in. At this time, we were taken to a large room with metal detectors, an x-ray machine and a coffee machine that looked like it wasn’t in use. Still, in a token attempt at friendliness, the security agent offered us a cup of coffee. But the offer was rescinded once he noted the machine was out of service.

About every ten minutes another member of airport security entered the room. After about 30 minutes we were taken into a back room, patted down, and scanned with a hand held metal detector. After being held for an hour, Sami, who claimed to be a higher up in the IDF and airport security, entered the room. He had apparently been called in by regular airport security because of certain “red flags” we had raised.

Sami didn’t look particularly happy to see us. He started to go through our bags, which had been checked by every member of airport security that previously entered the room. He had a determined look on his face as he sifted through my brother’s book on corporate law and became more agitated when he didn’t find the holy grail of information.

After about 15 minutes Sami looked up at us and told us that “something was missing;” we were “leaving out part of the story,” and he was going to find out just exactly what that “part” was. He was looking for what he called the “truth.” So I repeated what we had told the previous soldiers: we were staying our first two nights in East Jerusalem, we would be traveling to the holy sites (to see where baby Jesus was born), Haifa and Yaffa (the cities our grandparents were dispossessed from in 1948), Nazareth and Bethlehem. We told the truth, but kindly omitted Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Jenin, Dheisheh, and any other intended stops in the occupied territories that didn’t involve conventional tourism. In all honesty, we had only planned out our first two days in East Jerusalem, which made Sami increasingly annoyed.

Sami put it bluntly, as of the moment we were called in we were considered “terrorists” or people intending to “engage in terrorists activities” because we “lied” to airport security about the intention of our travels. Sami defined terrorism and terrorist activities as meeting up with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), working in “terrorist” branches of the Alternative Information Center (AIC), and non-violently protesting against the Apartheid Wall in the village of Bil’in. He was trying to a strike fear in us that went well passed being denied entry. It had become a matter of whether he was going to tell the US government if we were terrorists or not. He claimed that if he told the US government we were terrorists, it would not only affect us the rest of our lives (i.e. anytime we tried to get a job, bought a plane ticket, or applied for a credit card), but it would affect our family, immediate and extended, in a similar fashion. The explanation was clear: nobody would believe two Palestinians males over a respected man in the IDF with 40 years of experience. At this point I started to offer up information that may or may have not been considered “terrorist activity,” essentially the plans for our trip, which my brother and I were still faintly excited about, plans that didn’t seem to bring much joy to Sami.
Sami started to go through our phones, writing down numbers and asking questions about anyone with an Arab, Persian or Jewish name. He was particularly angered when he saw the name of a well known Jewish activist who had done extensive work in the occupied territories in my brother’s phone. Ironically, the number in my brother’s phone was the number of a paralegal in New York City, not the well-known activist, but Sami wouldn’t get off the subject for a solid half hour.
After about 90 minutes of intense bullying, Sami concluded we weren’t terrorists. At this point, good old Sami started to warm up, but not without first telling us what we explicitly weren’t supposed to do: no ISM, stay away from AIC activity, and do not engage in anything that we would categorize as non-violent activism.

By the end of stay at Ben Gurion, Sami informed us that we were lucky to catch him on a good day. He became extremely open and candid in the last 30 minutes. He said that he may not agree with everything that he does and he may not agree with the political situation, but he’s a soldier of the state, and serving its interest is his job. While I appreciated his honesty, this type of rationalization has been used throughout history, justifying war crimes and human rights violations ad infinitum.

As our seven hour journey came to an end, Sami began telling us personal stories. I’m not sure if it was an attempt clear his conscience, but he told us about his diverse group of friends, which included Arabs, and how his life had been saved five times, all by Arabs. It was amazing to see how human and forthcoming some of the “toughest” people in Israel have become, while at the same time keeping up their walls of discrimination and oppression, walls that have ultimately been encompassed by a greater wall of rationalization. For us, it was seven hours of hell in Ben Gurion. For a Palestinian here, occupation is a reality every day of the year.

Remi Kanazi is a Palestinian-American poet and writer based in New York City. He is the co-founder of remroum@gmail.com.

Bil’in: No IOF Love for Bil’in Non-Violent Protesters

July 20th, 2007.

Friday’s non-violent protest saw over 300 Israeli (~25), Palestinian, and international (over 100) supporters walk, unarmed as usual, from central Bil’in village towards the Israeli Apartheid Wall, which steals nearly 60% of Bil’in villagers’ vital agricultural land. Despite numerous attempts by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) at squashing the marchers demonstration, protesters re-grouped repeatedly to continue to march on Palestinian land towards the Apartheid Wall, also on and dividing Palestinian land. Marching forward, they faced repeated firing of tear gas, sound bombs, rubber and live bullets. At least 7 were injured, including regular Palestinian activist from Bil’in, Ibrahim Bournat, who was hit in the head near his eye with a rubber-coated steel bullet, resulting in a significant loss of blood, and long-time Israeli activist Jonathon Pollack, who was wounded in the arm. Wheelchair-bound, another regular Bil’in activist was hit by a tear gas canister which rebounded, landing in his lap clouding him with dangerous amounts of debilitating tear gas at close range. Paralyzed in one hand, he was able to flick away the hazardous canister but suffered further as a second rolled towards him.

The excessive firing of tear gas at the peaceful protesters inevitably results in numerous fires among the olive trees, as was the case today with at least 3 potentially serious fires and other smaller flames breaking out. Marchers rushed to extinguish the flames, using branches and their feet to beat and smother flames before they spread. Due to winds, lack of water, and the chaos of the situation, it is common for these fires to quickly escalate and burn the many olive trees spread across the arid land belonging to Bil’in villagers.

In spite of having been assaulted repeatedly with seriously debilitating tear gas, sound bombs and bullets, protesters persevered, again and again making efforts to walk on the land being held hostage by the IOF, using such non-violent tactics as singing, sit-ins, walking with arms raised to indicate they held no weapons and attempting dialog with the attacking IOF soldiers.

Although the International Court of Justice 3 years ago ruled Israel’s Apartheid Wall illegal and called for the cessation of its construction, along with reparations and compensation to Palestinians affected by it, Israel continues to build the wall, annexing more and more Palestinian land, demolishing homes, and further oppressing Palestinians in its expansionist, land-grabbing quest for “security.”

In stark contrast to recent CNN reporting on Bil’in weekly protests, it is worth highlighting the number of Palestinian and Israeli participants, as well as dedicated regular international supporters, old and young, who convene out of moral obligation and objection to this Wall and the Occupation.