Author: swing

In village, Palestinians see model for their cause

Ethan Bronner | The New York Times

27 August 2009

Every Friday for the past four and a half years, several hundred demonstrators — Palestinian villagers, foreign volunteers and Israeli activists — have walked in unison to the Israeli barrier separating this tiny village from the burgeoning settlement of Modiin Illit, part of which is built on the village’s land. One hundred feet away, Israeli soldiers watch and wait.

The protesters chant and shout and, inevitably, a few throw stones. Then just as inevitably, the soldiers open fire with tear gas and water jets, lately including a putrid oil-based liquid that makes the entire area stink.

It is one of the longest-running and best organized protest operations in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it has turned this once anonymous farming village into a symbol of Palestinian civil disobedience, a model that many supporters of the Palestinian cause would like to see spread and prosper.

For that reason, a group of famous left-leaning elder statesmen, including former President Jimmy Carter — who caused controversy by suggesting that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank amounted to apartheid — came to Bilin on Thursday and told the local organizers how much they admired their work and why it was vital to keep it going.

The retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, also on the visit, said, “Just as a simple man named Gandhi led the successful nonviolent struggle in India and simple people such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King led the struggle for civil rights in the United States, simple people here in Bilin are leading a nonviolent struggle that will bring them their freedom.”

Mr. Tutu, a South African Nobel Peace Prize winner, spoke on rocky soil, surrounded by the remains of tear gas canisters and in front of coils of barbed wire, part of the barrier that Israel began building in 2002 across the West Bank as a violent Palestinian uprising was under way. Israel said its main purpose was to stop suicide bombers from crossing into Israel, but the route of the barrier — a mix of fencing, guard towers and concrete wall — dug deep into the West Bank in places, and Palestinian anger over the barrier is as much about lost land as about lost freedom.

Bilin lost half its land to the settlement of Modiin Illit and the barrier and took its complaint to Israel’s highest court. Two years ago, the court handed it an unusual victory. It ordered the settlement to stop building its new neighborhood and ordered the Israeli military to move the route of the barrier back toward Israel, thereby returning about half the lost land to the village.

“The villagers danced in the street,” recalled Emily Schaeffer, an Israeli lawyer who worked on the case for the village. “Unfortunately, it has been two years since the decision, and the wall has not moved.”

The village is back in court trying, so far in vain, to get the orders put into effect.

Ms. Schaeffer was explaining the case to the visitors, who go by the name The Elders. The group was founded two years ago by former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa and is paid for by donors, including Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Group, and Jeff Skoll, founding president of eBay. Its goal is to “support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity.”

Both Mr. Branson and Mr. Skoll were on the visit to Bilin, as were Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland; Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway; Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil; and Ela Bhatt, an Indian advocate for the poor and women’s rights. Their visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories has also included meetings with young Israelis and young Palestinians.

Mr. Cardoso said that he had long heard about the conflict but that seeing it on the ground had made a lasting impression on him. The barrier, he said, serves to imprison the Palestinians.

Like every element of the conflict here, there is no agreement over the nature of what goes on here every Friday. Palestinians hail the protest as nonviolent, and it was cited recently by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, as a key step forward in the struggle for a Palestinian state. Recently, one of the leaders here, Mohammed Khatib, set up a committee of a dozen villages to share his strategies.

But the Israelis complain that, along with protests at the nearby village of Nilin, things are more violent here than the Palestinians and their supporters acknowledge.

“Rioters hurl rocks, Molotov cocktails and burning tires at defense forces and the security fence,” the military said in a statement when asked why it had taken to arresting village leaders in the middle of the night. “Since the beginning of 2008, about 170 members of the defense forces have been injured in these villages,” it added, including three soldiers who were so badly hurt they could no longer serve in the army. It also said that at Bilin itself, some $60,000 worth of damage had been done to the barrier in the past year and a half.

Abdullah Abu Rahma, a village teacher and one of the organizers of the weekly protests, said he was amazed at the military’s assertions as well as at its continuing arrests and imprisonment of village leaders.

“They want to destroy our movement because it is nonviolent,” he said. He added that some villagers might have tried, out of frustration, to cut through the fence since the court had ordered it moved and nothing had happened. But that is not the essence of the popular movement that he has helped lead.

“We need our land,” he told his visitors. “It is how we make our living. Our message to the world is that this wall is destroying our lives, and the occupation wants to kill our struggle.”

Investment giant BlackRock divests from Leviev’s Africa-Israel due to Israeli settlements

Adalah-NY

25 August 2009

In another stunning blow to Israeli settlement-builder Lev Leviev, the Israeli business magazine Globes Online has reported that BlackRock Inc., one of the world’s largest investment management firms, has divested from Leviev’s Africa-Israel Investments. The Globes article follows a similar report by the Norwegian news service Norwatch. The move comes after a nearly two-year long global boycott campaign of Leviev’s businesses that developed in response to the billionaire’s construction activities in at least four Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank, all of which violate international law, and his abusive labor practices in the diamond industry in Angola and Namibia.

In an August 23 article, Globes noted that BlackRock has been under pressure from three Norwegian financial institutions to remove Africa-Israel from its portfolio of funds offered to investors. Globes reports that BlackRock, once the second-largest investor in Africa-Israel, had formerly offered Africa-Israel as an investment in its BlackRock Emerging Europe fund, which the Norwegian banks in turn offered to their clients. The information manager for Skandiabanken, one of the three banks that requested that BlackRock divest from Africa-Israel, is quoted in the Globes article as saying “We have received confirmation that BlackRock that Africa-Israel Investments no longer is part of their portfolio. The confirmation of the divestment was sent to Skandiabanken the day before yesterday on August 18.

BlackRock expects to complete the acquisition of Barclays bank by the end of 2009. Barclays has also been cited as a major owner of Africa-Israel stocks.

The campaign against Leviev, launched in November, 2007 by Adalah-NY, is part of a growing global movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) aimed at stopping Israeli rights violations against Palestinians. Ethan Heitner from Adalah-NY explained, “We are elated at BlackRock’s decision, but expect BlackRock to ensure, as it purchases Barclays, another a major owner of Africa-Israel, that Barclays also divests from Africa-Israel. We call on other businesses with investments in Israel to follow BlackRock in ending their complicity in Israel’s crimes.”

BlackRock’s move comes after the March decision by the government of the United Kingdom to drop plans to move its Tel Aviv embassy into a building owned by Africa-Israel. Leviev has also been renounced by UNICEF and Oxfam, and major Hollywood stars have quietly distanced themselves from the settlement-builder.

In a related development in May, eleven organizations, including organizations from Norway, Palestine, Israel and other countries, along with Adalah-NY, called upon the Norwegian Government Pension Fund to divest from Africa-Israel. The fund is reportedly the fifth-largest shareholder of Africa-Israel. In a May 15th response to Adalah-NY, Aslak Skancke of The Norwegian government Pension Fund’s Council on Ethics noted that the fund is assessing “whether companies in the Fund have activities which can be considered supportive of violations of international humanitarian law. One area of such interest is the construction of various forms of infrastructure in occupied territories.” A decision on the Norwegian government pension fund investment in Africa-Israel is expected in the fall.

Israeli settlements violate international law and cut the West Bank into disconnected Bantustans. Leviev’s company Africa-Israel has built housing units on occupied Palestinian land in such settlements as Mattityahu East on the land of the village of Bil’in, and in the settlements of Har Homa and Maale Adumim. Leviev’s company Leader owns and builds settlement homes in the settlement of Zufim on the land of the village of Jayyous.

How settlements in the West Bank are creating a new reality, brick by brick

Rory McCarthy | The Guardian

24 August 2009

There is a hilltop east of Jerusalem with striking views down into Jericho, across the dry slopes of the West Bank and on to the Dead Sea. From the red ochre of the rock came the name Ma’ale Adumim, Hebrew for the Red Ascent.

Today it is a city of more than 30,000 people, with red-roofed apartment blocks, shopping malls, a public swimming pool and ancient olive trees sitting on neat roundabouts. A major highway runs down the hill, across the valley up into the centre of Jerusalem and beyond, connecting conveniently to Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean coast.

The rise of Ma’ale Adumim captures the success of Israel’s vast settlement project and the extent of the challenge posed to any future Palestinian state by the settlements and the often overlooked infrastructure of Israel’s occupation.

In March 1975 there was no Ma’ale Adumim. After Israel captured and occupied the West Bank in the 1967 war the site was earmarked as a an industrial park. A group of activist settlers from the Gush Emunim — the Bloc of the Faithful — arrived one morning and built a water tower and simple concrete hut. They were removed that day by soldiers, but in December that year the first settler families moved in for good. The city then grew exponentially.

The site is a compelling example of how infrastructure is used to extend Israel’s reach around and well beyond the settlement. Ma’ale Adumim’s buildings seem to cover one main hilltop, but the municipal area of the settlement is nearly 20 square miles, the size of Tel Aviv. Then there are the Israeli-built roads connecting Ma’ale Adumim with nearby smaller, satellite settlements, as well as a major highway running further east past Jericho and cutting across the West Bank until it reaches the Jordanian border. Israel is now building its steel and concrete West Bank barrier around Ma’ale Adumim and the other smaller settlements, effectively incorporating them on the “Israeli” side and by doing so taking another 24 square miles of the West Bank.

To the north and south of Ma’ale Adumim stretches a swath of land that is a closed military area, where access for Palestinians is prohibited. Just across the valley is an area known as E1, where hillsides have been terraced, a police station built and roads laid in preparation for a further 3,500 settler housing units, as well as offices, sports centres, 10 hotels and a cemetery. Other land nearby is designated Area C, a creation of the Oslo accords of the early 1990s, meaning Israel has full administrative and security control. In effect that means no Palestinians can build.

So while the apartment blocks of Ma’ale Adumim seem to have a limited though strategic footprint, Israel’s actual control extends much further and deeper into the West Bank. It is a pattern repeated again and again across the West Bank.

None of this should be a surprise. It becomes quickly obvious to those who have ever travelled through the West Bank. There are also countless reports from the UN, the World Bank and Israeli and Palestinian groups documenting the reality on the ground.

Then there are the often striking admissions from within the establishment. Two years ago Haggai Alon, an adviser to the then Israeli defence minister Amir Peretz, told Ha’aretz that Israel was using the West Bank barrier to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state and that the Israel Defence Force was carrying out an “apartheid policy” in emptying the city of Hebron of Palestinians, setting up roadblocks across the West Bank and co-operating with settlers. “The actual policy of the IDF, especially in recent years, is creating profound changes that threaten to make it impossible to leave the West Bank,” Alon said. “We cannot allow the executive ranks to get us stuck in an irreversible binational situation.”

Or look at what Ariel Sharon, former prime minister and self-described pragmatic Zionist, wrote of his post-1967 plans for the Palestinian territories and the importance of control: “What I thought was that, regardless of whatever political solution the future might hold, we would have to keep the high controlling terrain — to protect and give depth to the tiny heartland along the coast, to be able to defend ourselves on the line of the river Jordan, and to secure Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish people forever. That was an indispensable, necessary minimum.”

In the 42 years since Israel captured the land, its control has grown apace. There are 149 settlements, together with at least another 100 “outposts” — smaller settlements unauthorised even by the Israeli government. Nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers now live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In order to protect the settlements and, as Israel argues, to impose law and order, came a series of what the UN calls “multi-layered restrictions”: checkpoints, trenches, earth mounds, road gates, roadblocks and a large restricted road network which Palestinians cannot use. Put together they seriously inhibit ordinary life for millions of Palestinians.

Then there is the West Bank barrier, begun at the height of the violence of the second intifada and today nearly 60% complete. When finished it will be 450 miles long, running inside the West Bank for 86% of its length.

It effectively attaches many of the major settlements to Israel and in doing so places nearly 10% of the West Bank and East Jerusalem on the “Israeli” side. When finished it will leave 35,000 Palestinians living in “closed areas” cut off from the rest of the West Bank and caught between the 1949 armistice line and the barrier.

Added to that are the large nature reserves and military closed areas, which Palestinians cannot enter and which are mainly in the Jordan Valley or near the Dead Sea. There are also 48 Israeli military bases. Beyond that, Israel has full control over Area C, which makes up nearly two-thirds of the West Bank. Planning restrictions are tight: 94% of building permit applications have been refused between 2000 and 2007, according to the UN. Today there are around 3,000 pending demolition orders across the West Bank.

Instead, the Palestinians are confined to their fragmented urban areas, often behind checkpoints and where talk of a future contiguous, viable Palestinian state seems ever more remote. The effect of this political geography is so striking that even George Bush, who was perhaps the US president most supportive of Israel, was moved early last year to say of a future Palestine: “Swiss cheese isn’t going to work when it comes to the outline of a state.”

Others are more direct. In their study Lords of the Land, Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, an Israeli academic and a journalist, write: “The Jewish settlement, at God’s command and at the government’s will, has thus caused continuing and extensive damage to the basic human rights of the Palestinians who live in the territories, among them the rights to personal liberty, freedom of movement, and property; it has also thwarted any possibility for the realisation of the collective rights of those who lived in the territory before the intrusion of the Israeli forces, such as the right to national self-determination, including statehood.”

One arrested during demonstration against settlement expansion

Palestine Solidarity Project

21 August 2009

Construction of a road has begun on Palestinian land right outside the settlement Karmei Tsur, between Beit Omar and Halhoul, about two weeks ago. The construction has happened between the edge of the settlement and a “security fence” that the military built three years ago. This agricultural land still belongs to the Palestinian families of Abu Maria, Soleiby, Awwad, Abu Ayyesh, and Sabarna. However, entry to their land since the building of the fence has required a permit from Israel, which most Palestinian families refuse to apply for, maintaining that the land is rightfully theirs.

Friday, August 21, a group of Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals held a demonstration outside the fence. Palestine Solidarity Project organized the demonstration, in which about 35 people participated. Participants stepped over barbed wire which was lining the fence, and inserted papers with the slogans “we will never leave our land,” “stop illegal building on Palestinian land,” and “expansion of settlements makes peace impossible” into the fence. Some of the owners of the land stolen from them joined the group, displaying their papers of ownership from the Ottoman Empire and shouting, “where is the peace?”

arrest karmei tsurThe group walked along the fence surveying the land that was restricted to the Palestinians and now being built on by the settlement. Elderly farmers spoke about the land that was taken and the documents handed down from their grandparents from the Ottoman Empire, proving ownership, until several Israeli military jeeps arrived and soldiers shouted at the group to leave. The group, standing on Palestinian land, insisted on their right to be there and in fact to enter the fence if they wished to their privately-owned land. There was discussion between the soldiers and the activists, until Settlement security arrived and, after shouting at the activists to “go back to Germany“ and “f**k your mother“ to an activist who identified himself as a Jew, opened the gate in the fence, insisting that the army disperse the activists. The military did just that, chasing the group into the Palestinian fruit groves. On their way back to the village, one international activist from the United States was arrested and accused of destroying security property for taking a piece of wire off of the fence. He was released later the same day.

The aim of the demonstration was to show resistance to illegal building on stolen Palestinian land in addition to bringing attention to the quiet expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank in the midst of strong international pressure to stop exactly that.

Plans for largest East Jerusalem settlement filed for approval

Nir Hasson | Ha’aretz

22 August 2009

A plan for the building of a new settlement, Ma’aleh David, in the middle of an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem was filed for approval by the relevant municipal committee at the Jerusalem Municipality. The plan calls for the construction of 104 housing units on the land where the former headquarters of the Judea and Samaria police was housed in the neighborhood of Ras al-Amud.

The new settlement is planned to be connected to an existing Jewish neighborhood, Ma’aleh Zeitim, and together will be occupied by some 200 families, forming the largest Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem.

The plan is being promoted by the right-wing group Elad.

The land on which the new housing is planned was, until 18 months ago, the compound of the Judea and Samaria police headquarters, which has since moved to a new building in Area E-1. Once the police evacuated the area it returned to the control of the Committee of the Bokharan Community, which has held ownership over the property and the structures there since before 1948.

Last week the Committee filed the plans with the local municipal committee for approval.

According to the plan, the former police structure will be razed and replaced by seven structures ranging between four and five stories in height, and incorporating 104 housing units.

The plan involves high-end housing and the complex will include a swimming pool, mini “country club,” community library and parking spaces. A synagogue, kindergartens and a mikveh (Jewish ritual purification bath) are also planned for construction there.

A foot bridge will connect the new settlement with existing ones on the other side of the road. The settlement of Ma’aleh Zeitim across the street currently houses 51 families and in its second phase of development, which is currently being completed, another 66 housing units are being built.

When the two neighborhoods are completed and linked, a Jewish settlement of more than 1,000 people will be situated in the heart of Ras al-Amud, a neighborhood comprised of 14,000 Palestinians.

Officially, the building plans and the request for approval were filed by the Committee of the Bokharan Community, but sources at the Jerusalem Municipality believe settler organizations are behind the project.

The same sources said the plans, as they currently stand, will likely be changed and less units will be built. However, in the long run it will be difficult to prevent the project with the existing statutory measures, since there is no dispute over the ownership of the land, or whether the area is designated for residential construction projects.

Yudith Oppenheimer, the executive director of Ir Amim, a non-governmental group that monitors Jewish settlement activity in East Jerusalem, told Haaretz: “A two-state solution requires provisions for Palestinian building in East Jerusalem. The goal of this plan is to establish facts on the ground on a scale that would thwart such a solution. Advancement of this plan will stoke the flames in Jerusalem and is liable to lead to a Hebronization of the city.”