Yesterday, July 10th, was launched the third edition of the Jordan Valley football tournament in Al Awja.
Yousef Lafi, from the Palestinian Football Federation, along with Al Awja club manager, Fathy Khderat and Ibrahim Sawafta, from the JVS campaign, opened the football tournament.
Every speaker emphasized the importance of this tournament as a way of putting light on the Jordan Valley and its specific situation.
They also complimented this initiative as a way of gathering people from the Jordan Valley that should be repeated.
Fathy Khderat, the coordinator of the Jordan Valley Solidarity campaign, restated that JVS will focus its work in Fasayel Wasta and Foqa in the coming months.
The result of the game Fasayel VS Al Awja was 3-1.
Next game will be Zbedat VS Anata, today at 7pm at Al Awja playground.
10 July 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
On 9th July, a group of twenty Palestinians accompanied by twenty internationals, managed to cut through some fence near the checkpoint at Qalandia.
The direct action was organised by Welcome to Palestine as part of the Week of Action in the West Bank. The action was in defiance against the Apartheid Wall, which divides the West Bank and is central to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Activists were able to cut through the barbed wire fence and plant Palestinian flags on the other side.
10 July 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
On Saturday 9th July, seventy people – including thirty internationals from Sweden, France, Britain, Australia, Mexico, the United States and Denmark – demonstrated at a military checkpoint outside Nabi Saleh, after the army denied them entry into the village where Palestinians lead peaceful demonstrations weekly.
The demonstration was planned six months in advance by Welcome to Palestine, in order to kick off a week of action. The buses carrying demonstrators were attempting to enter the village of Nabi Saleh, but when people dismounted the buses and began walking towards the military checkpoint, Israeli soldiers responded with volleys of tear gas and sound bombs.
Thirty people managed to reach the checkpoint, with others being pushed back by clouds of tear gas and smoke from fires started by canisters. Soldiers pointed their weapons at the demonstrators and fired tear gas directly at individuals, as the unarmed protestors formed lines to chant ‘We are peaceful, what are you?’
Three Israeli activists were arrested, while one Palestinian boy was shot in the leg with a canister. Other demonstrators severely beaten by the soldiers.
The army only allowed the buses carrying demonstrators to leave with a military escort, which took them to Ramallah.
There are demonstrations every Friday in Nabi Saleh, where the Israeli military has a history of responding extremely violently and often invading the village.
11 July 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
On Monday, July 11th, the Israeli military demolished 5 buildings of local Palestinian businesses in the closed neighborhood of al -Khalayla near al-Jib village outside of Jerusalem. At 6:30am the owner of a window shop received a call from the Israeli military that part of his business’s building structure would be demolished. Not long after the phone call, he arrived to the shop to find that they had already finished demolishing part of the structure.
At around 8am, the Israeli military destroyed a lumber factory owned by the al-Asmar family for 8 years. In the process they also took 4 lumber machines, in addition to demolishing part of the al-Asmar’s home that was attached to the factory. One of the sons
explained that the military had come one month prior to issue the demolition. He then mentioned that twenty people were occupying the residences before they were demolished. The police also accompanied the military in 3 Hummers.
Later that morning at 10am, the Israeli military demolished Ismail Abu Rabah’s supermarket. Four months prior they had come to the village to issue the demolition. Ismail explained that he had hired a lawyer to work on the case in Israeli court, but was not successful in suspending the demolition for a longer period of time. Ismail had only short notice before his supermarket was demolished. While he was able to move refrigerators, shelves and products from the store into his home before the Israeli military arrived, the destruction of his business has cost him his livelihood.
In the late morning and early afternoon, the Israeli military demolished buildings of a mechanic garage and a truck and storage company. The owner of the garage explained that the military had arrived only one week before to issue the demolition. At approximately 1pm, structures of the Nasr storage and truck facilities were demolished. One of the sons, Tilal, explained that their equipment and storage structures were damaged, including a tractor owned by the family.
Al-Khalayla is located in Area C on the Jerusalem side of the Apartheid Wall. It is inhabited by about 700 Palestinians, 250 of whom hold West Bank Palestinian ID cards. Approximately half of Palestinians holding West Bank IDs are registered as refugees with the UNRWA.
Tourists being watched by security forces at Ben Gurion airport, June 8 2011 (photo: Oren Ziv / activestills)
Israel responded to the “flytilla” with a wildly disproportionate deployment of police and extraordinary security checks. But Palestinian citizens of Israel are discriminated at the Ben Gurion Airport on an hourly basis – and are now able to racially profile themselves, using a specially provided form to warn the airport authorities of their arrival.
In the see-saw of travel-craving and homesickness preceding any trip abroad, there’s one moment when you can feel the balance finally shifting and you becoming glad to be leaving Israel: When you arrive in your car or taxi to the airport gates and a burly, submachine gun-wielding security guard asks you to roll down the window to wish you a good evening. This isn’t about courtesy, of course; he wants to get a good look at your face, and, most importantly, to hear your accent. If your accent sounds even remotely Arab, you will be asked to disembark, answer a flurry of intrusive questions, and asked to open your trunk (just in case it holds a big wooden crate labeled “Acme TNT”). If your accent is “normal”, you’re swiftly waved through.
The undisguised racism of Israeli airport security profiling is a fact of life here as much as summer weather and the impossibility to park in Tel Aviv; only recently did civil rights organisations begin to challenge the practice. Arab passengers get different stickers on their passports at the end of the “did you pack a bomb by mistake” questioning in the queue to the check-in; their baggage is often searched manually (raising interesting questions about the effectiveness of the carwash-sized suitcase screening machines that everybody else go through); and in general, Palestinian Israelis can expect their check-in process to take about twice as longer, both in Israel, and, if they have the misfortune of flying with an Israeli airline, on their way home from abroad.
Recently, however, we’ve moved up a notch and are now asking the Palestinian Israelis to discriminate themselves. The Hebrew version of the Israel Airports Authority has this curious page, reachable through Ben Gurion Airport > Passenger Information > Security Information > [Official] in charge of minority treatment. The general information page of the section explains, in stumbling Brechtian:
“The security treatment of the passengers forms a centrally important link in the chain of service provided to passengers in the process of their departure from the country and return to the country via the Ben Gurion International Airport.
The Israel Airports Administration has set itself a goal of improving the efficiency of the level of service provided for the population of members of minorities in these processes, and decided to set up for this purpose a unit entrusted with liaising with the population of members of minorities in Israel.
The unit includes four delegates: Mr Abu Matir Mohammed, Mr Abu Ghanem Salame, Mr Yossi Makleda and Mr Salah Dubaa, employed on shifts at the airport. Their role is to coordinate, mediate and assist in the processes of security clearance, without infringing upon the necessary security processes.”
Members of minorities is, of course, a euphemism for “Arabs” about as embarrassingly transparent as “persons of colour,” and is used most often by the media to report an Arab is held on suspicion of rape or other offenses (they never specify the nationality when the suspect is a Jew). Incidentally, it’s forever “members of minorities”, not “minorities,” because, as observed in recent years by academic like Yehouda Shenhav, Yoav Peled and Yossi Yona, the Jewish and democratic state can (grudgingly) abide only with recognising individual rights of individual Arabs on a case by case basis, never with describing them as a minority with a claim to collective rights.
But the real treat is the following form, which groups of Arabs (say, extended families or groups of friends) are advised to complete and send to the airport ten days ahead of their arrival (presumably so that the airport authorities doesn’t deploy tanks across the tarmac if they espy more than two Arabs moving together, talking in Arabic and being all Arab). The PDF is a touch more honestly titled “EthnicMinoritiesForm.” It reads:
To: The official in charge of the members of minorities population
Ben Gurion International Airpot
By fax no. 03-9752358
Regarding: Information on flight abroad
1. On date ______ a group/family is planned [sic] to travel to ______ on flight _____ at ______.
2. The group/family includes _____ passengers, as follows:
1. Mr / Ms ________________ Passport no. ____________
2. Mr / Ms ________________ Passport no. ____________
3. Mr / Ms ________________ Passport no. ____________
4. Mr / Ms ________________ Passport no. ____________
5. Mr / Ms ________________ Passport no. ____________
6. Mr / Ms ________________ Passport no. ____________
3. The group is traveling on the behest of the ______ office[/ministry], physicians/academics/public figures/sports delegation/organised tour/other _______ [Arabs don’t take holidays or go on business trips -DR]
4. I would be thankful for any assistance you can extend at the airport.
5. Mr/Ms _______ will serve as contact person for the group, phone no. _______
Most respectfully,
Mr/Ms ___________
Phone no. _______________
Fax no.___________
It’s cute that they bothered including pt.4, ensuring that the Arabs are not only discriminated at their own request, but are duly thankful. More than anything else, this is a clear and stark example of normalisation of apartheid: When both parties accept an ethnically discriminative practice as a given and just seek to make it a little more palatable; and when the discriminated party is expected to pro-actively cooperate, “in their own best interest.”
The sad thing is that I can imagine official delegations and tour organisers probably do make use of the form, and both them and the airport authorities actually do prefer this Very Inferior Person treatment to the crude yanking of Arab passengers out of the waiting line. Have you made holiday plans for Israel this summer?
