Author: ISM Media Group - Page 344 - International Solidarity Movement

Tel Rumeida: Teachers Detained at Checkpoint, Settlers attacks human rights workers, steal camera

by ISM Hebron, Sunday, 1 April

Checkpoint 56, Tel Rumeida: Palestinian school teachers were again delayed for a long time this morning on their way to school.

The school teachers have an agreement with the DCO (District Coordinating Office) that they can pass through the gate at the side of the checkpoint instead of having to go through the metal detectors. The soldiers in the checkpoint are supposed to have a list of their names and identification numbers to allow for the teachers to pass quickly each day. However, the soldiers often refuse to allow the school teachers to pass through the gate and insist that they pass through the metal detectors instead.

The female teachers refuse to do this because they say passing through the metal detectors so often is harmful to their health, and also because they are teachers, bringing education to Palestinians, and not terrorists.

When challenged by two human rights workers (HRWs) and two members of the Ecumenical Accompagniment Programme for Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) as to why they were not letting the teachers pass through the gate, one soldier first of all claimed that he was not “a doorman for the Arabs”. Later, he claimed that it was too dangerous for him because snipers would shoot him once he left the security of the checkpoint to open the gate. One HRW offered to open the gate herself or to stand in front of the soldier while he opened the gate, but he refused. This same soldier had been seen the previous day standing in the sun, outside the checkpoint, and had not appeared to be worried by snipers then.

Both the HRWs and EAPPI made several calls to the DCO to try to resolve the situation. The response was always that they would “take care of it”. During the final call to the DCO from one of the HRWs the DCO was laughing so hard that he had to pass the phone to a colleague who hung up the phone when the HRW asked for her name.

Finally, after one hour, the gate was opened for the teachers.

After school, the same teachers were again detained for 45 minutes when they tried to return through the checkpoint gate.

Later in the afternoon, at approximately 13.30, soldiers at the checkpoint were only letting Palestinians pass through the checkpoint into Tel Rumeida one at a time, leading to a large queue building up. When challenged by the HRWs, the soldiers at the checkpoint said they were just doing their job “thoroughly”.

Israeli settles steal video camera from international volunteer:

Around 17:30, six Israeli settler children surrounded two international human rights workers. The settlers began to physically assault the two women, kicking them and one of their video cameras. One female settler adult was also present, and did nothing to prevent the children from harassing the HRWs.

One of the settlers then stole the video camera from one of the HRWs and the settlers ran into the direction of the Tel Rumeida settlement. The HRWs confronted a group of soldiers with what had just happened and they set off in the direction of the settlers.

Four additional HRWs arrived at the scene. The soldiers began told them that the area was a closed military zone and that the HRWs had to leave. The HRWs remained, however, when the army soldiers could not produce the legal documents.

After 20 minutes, the Israeli police from Kiryat Arba showed up. They surveyed the scene but did not go further to search for the settlers who had stolen the camera. The two HRWs who were attacked by the settlers then went to Kiryat Arba police station to file a police report. The officer promised that afterward, with additional police backup, they would seek out the settler thieves.

Saturday, 31 March

At approximately 17.15 two HRWs were sat in the olive groves above Qurtuba school when two adult settlers, both with rifles over their shoulders, and a male child settler walked past in the direction of Abraham’s Well. A couple of minutes later three Palestinian children, two girls and a boy, from a Palestinian family in this area walked past on their way home. The two HRWs saw the settlers stop them and turn them back. The HRWs went up to the Palestinian children who said that the settlers had told them they weren’t allowed to go that way to their home. The HRWs then accompagnied the children to their house.

While the HRWs were standing outside the house a group of soliders and four male settler children, aged approximately 10 – 12, came down the olive grove slope towards the HRWs and shouted at one of the HRWs that a soldier had seen him going into a “Jewish house” and that he wasn’t allowed to be there. The house in question in fact belongs to a Palestinian man and is rented at the moment to a local Palestinian. The HRW had earlier walked in front of it, over its porch, and told the soldiers this. One of the soldiers then said that he would check the military cameras in this area and if he saw that the HRW had entered the house, the HRW would be put in jail.

The soldiers and settler children were aggressive towards the HRWs and tried to stop one of them filming by deliberately standing with their backs right in front of her camera. However, after about 10 minutes the soldiers and settler children moved off towards Abraham’s Well without detaining the HRWs any further.

M.E. Times: Palestinian refugee marks Land Day away from her land

Palestinian refugee marks Land Day away from her land
by Marwan Naamani, 31 March 2007

BEIRUT — Palestinian Umm Aziz was an 18-year-old newly-wed when she fled to Lebanon from her native village of Sheikh Daoud, in what is now Israel, when the Jewish state was created in 1948.

On Friday, Umm Aziz marked what is known as Land Day, observed each year since six Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli forces, following a government decision to expropriate land in Galilee in 1976.

Umm Aziz still holds to her dream of one day returning back home.

“In 1948 I fled my village on foot, and I know I would go on foot if I had the chance to go back,” said the 76-year-old woman, who lives in a modest house in the refugee camp of Burj Al Barajneh, south of Beirut.

Resting on a cane, the veiled woman insisted on marching in the small ceremony to mark Land Day at the camp.

Umm Aziz is among 400,000 refugees who are registered in Lebanon since Palestinians fled or were driven from their villages in a mass exodus in 1948.

Many Palestinian refugees marched in the Land Day ceremony, carrying the keys of their houses and documents of property ownership.

Palestinian refugees cling in hope to a peace proposal that Arab leaders revived at a summit in Riyadh this week, which offered Israel normal ties if it withdraws from all land occupied in the 1967 war, allows the creation of a Palestinian state, and the return of Palestinian refugees.

But Umm Aziz, who left Sheikh Daoud with only the clothes on her back, regrets now that she fled.

Her life has been a series of tragedies.

Umm Aziz’s four sons went missing September 17, 1982, a few days after a massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

And her husband was killed in a shelling in 1986, at the height of the Lebanese civil war.

But her ordeal started much earlier. She said her mother and father were killed in an Israeli shelling of their native village.

“If I had the power to see the future and know that four of my sons would be taken from me, and that my husband would be killed in a mortar attack, I would have preferred to stay behind and be killed with my parents,” said the tearful woman.

“There [Israel] when someone is arrested or put in jail, at least we can know his whereabouts, but here [in Lebanon] I have been searching for my sons for 24 years without anyone being able to confirm whether they are dead or alive,” she bitterly added.

The woman recalls the painful day when her four sons were taken.

“We were having lunch at home on that day, when armed men broke in and took my four sons. They put them, along with scores of young Palestinian and Lebanese men, in a truck that had the sign of the Lebanese army,” she said.

“The truck just left, and I don’t know anything about them ever since. The eldest was then 30 and the youngest 13,” she added.

Black and white pictures of Umm Aziz’s four sons adorn the walls of her two-room apartment in the camp, which had witnessed the fiercest of battles in the so-called “camps war” between Palestinian fighters and militants of the pro-Syrian Lebanese Shiite Amal militia in 1986.

Umm Aziz describes her harsh daily life like “wild plants that live without water.”

“We survive like plants which grow in the wilderness, without watering. But these plants die slowly, with no hope of a better future,” she said, sitting amid a few grandchildren, some of them smoking a water pipe in the small yard outside her apartment.

“Many of these kids grew up without knowing their fathers, and they will die without knowing Palestine,” she added.

Znet: How Palestine became “Israel’s Land”

How Palestine became “Israel’s Land”
by Sonja Karkar of Women for Palestine, 31 March 2007

For Palestinians, theirs is not the land of conquest, but the land of their roots going back to time immemorial. Such a lineage does not rely on a biblical promise like the Jewish claim that God promised the land to Abraham and his descendants, and is therefore, the historical site of the Jewish kingdom of Israel. It belongs to the people of Palestine by the simple fact of their continuous residence repeated through birth and possession going back to the earliest Canaanites and even those people living there before recorded history. They were there when the Israelites invaded the land, occupied it, and held it intermittently as wave after wave of other conquerors came and went, and they were still there when the Romans put an end to Jewish Palestine by destroying Jerusalem in 135AD. If a religious basis is sought, then the Palestinians can lay claim to being the descendants of Abraham’s son Ishmael who is regarded the forefather of the Arabs. But actually, Palestinian rights are enshrined in the universally accepted principle that land belongs to its indigenous inhabitants. Thus, the modern day struggle for this land by European Jewish immigrants who have no connection with Palestine other than through their religion is a colonial enterprise that seeks sovereignty for an “external Jewish population” to the exclusion of the indigenous Palestinians who, regardless of faith – Jewish, Christian or Muslim – have lived together for centuries.

Although eager to accept the UN Partition Plan of 1947 which recommended that 56% of the land be set aside for a Jewish State, 42% for an Arab state and 2% for an internationalised Jerusalem and its surrounds, the world has not said a word about the land that was seized by Zionist terrorists before the State of Israel was proclaimed on 14 May 1948. Through a series of shocking massacres, the territory assigned to the Jews suddenly became 77% resulting in more than 750,000 Palestinians being forcibly expelled and dispossessed of their homes, personal property and their homeland. The Jewish State then came into being without waiting for the United Nations Commission – prescribed in the Partition resolution – to hand authority progressively over to the Jewish and Arab leaders for their respective states. And after the 1948 war, Israel declared Jerusalem its capital in contravention of its internationally-recognised status of corpus separatum – a status that is still recognised. Effectively, the new state of Israel was not only created in violation of, it continued to violate, the very resolution which Israelis now look to as giving them sovereignty. The Arab state imposed by the UN Partition Plan without consultation and in contradiction to the UN charter – which should have upheld the majority indigenous Palestinians’ right to self-determination – has since been deliberately and methodically whittled away by Israel, leaving nothing but isolated non-contiguous parcels of land to some 4 million Palestinians.

Around 170,000 Palestinians remained in what became Israel, the largest number of whom resided in the Galilee area, originally a designated part of the Arab state under the Partition Plan. These Palestinians also became the victims of Israel’s land grab policy. Over 438,000 acres, which was more than the total Jewish land holdings at the time, were confiscated and a further 400,000 acres were marked for confiscation. After Israel won the 1967 war, the total territory of Palestine came under Israel’s rule. It annexed East Jerusalem, despite the Holy City’s internationally recognised status and began implementing its Jewish settlement program with a vengeance. The Palestinians in Israel were increasingly aware of their precarious position politically and declared a national strike, known as “Land Day” on 30 March 1976 against Israel’s continuing ruthless land expropriation. An affinity was quickly felt between Palestinians everywhere and “Land Day” was adopted as a sort of national Palestinian day which is commemorated by Palestinians and their supporters around the world each year. This awakening of national consciousness had an unequivocal political message: end the occupation and allow self-determination of the Palestinians in a sovereign state living in peace side by side with Israel.

Thirty-one years later, the message is till resonating, but the Palestinians are further away from seeing a solution than ever before. Daily, Israel is taking a bit of land here and a bit of land there, to make all of Palestine “Israel’s Land”. The problem then will be, what to do with 5 million Palestinians with no land? There are only a few possible, but criminal solutions – transfer, collective imprisonment, apartheid, and/or ethnic cleansing. Alternatively, Israel can disengage from the West Bank to the 1967 borders or agree on a single, democratic state for all. Without a just solution, the struggle for Palestine’s land will continue.

Pesach March to Nablus Checkpoint- “Let my people go”

On Monday, April 2, Palestinians will be joined by international solidarity activists in the West Bank city of Nablus for a non-violent demonstration at the Israeli checkpoint, Beit Furik. Activists will be demonstrating against Israeli Apartheid and Israel’s restriction of freedom of movement in Nablus.

Since 2002 it has only been possible to enter Nablus through six checkpoints on foot. It is even more difficult to exit. Men between 16 and 45 (it varies from day to day) can only exit their city with a special permit that can be obtained only outside Nablus. The city is often sealed off during Jewish holidays. Almost nightly the residents of Nablus are the victims of violent military raids and their lives have not been peaceful or normal for years Demonstrators are planning to meet in Nablus at 10am. From there, the crowd will board buses and head toward the Beit Furik checkpoint.

There will be a demonstration and representatives will give speeches regarding the effects of the Israeli Occupation on Nablus and Palestine as a whole.

For more info, contact:
Sameh, 059-910-6533
Myasser, 059-932-4672
Mohammad Ayesh, 052-222-3374
ISM Media Office: 02-297-1824, 059-994-3157

IMEMC: Um Salamuna village protest the construction of the wall

Um Salamuna village protest the construction of the wall
by George Rishmawi

Around two hundred protesters marched in the village of Um Salamuna, south of Bethlehem to protest the construction of the wall on their land and to commemorate the 31 anniversary of Land Day.

Protesters, including Palestinians, Internationals and Israelis, carried signs and banners and chanted slogans calling for the removal of the Wall, describing it as land theft that is killing the Palestinian life.

The protest started with a prayer at the land slated for confiscation by the Israeli authorities for the construction of the wall.

No clashes erupted with the soldiers as the protesters remained nonviolent. Provocative moves by some of the protesters were stopped by the organizers of the action.

The crowd arrived at the Mosque of the village where some speeches related to the Land Day were made. The speakers stressed the importance of the nonviolent resistance to protect the land from being confiscated by the Israeli army.

A wide area of the village of Um Salamuna and the near by villages are confiscated for the construction of the wall and the expansion of the Israeli settlement of Ephrata.