Category: In the Media

The Break on Palestine

David Bromwich | The Huffington Post

16 March 2010

To wipe the spit off his face, Biden had to say it was only rain.” The Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar was tapping a vein of bitter Jewish wit when he wrote those words about the humiliation of the vice president on his recent state-visit to Israel. Trust a weakling, the saying goes: if you spit in his face he’ll just pretend it was rain. Last week, an American leader finally chose not to pretend.

Before Biden issued his rebuke to a prime minister who forgot the second rule of diplomacy — when you undermine a friend, have the decency to wait till he waves goodbye — he had offered the traditional performance of an American dignitary in Israel. Thus in response to the unctuous platitudes of Shimon Peres, Biden had actually said:
“It’s good to be home.” A crazy thing for an American to say outside America. But in the context of our relations to Israel over the past thirty years, such a remark is almost par-for-the course. It shows how reckless American mainstream opinion had grown in its indulgence of all things relating to Israel. It had reached the point where a reflex avowal of false nostalgia was taken as the simplicity of good manners. An American politician in Israel is routinely expected to show more piety for Tel Aviv than for Plymouth Rock.

The sentiment of “home” dished up by the vice president and the graceless insult with which it was met by the Israeli prime minister also reflect a political background. The United States had recently assisted Israel in its attempt to suppress the facts and discredit the findings of the Goldstone Report. The effort had several steps, all of them brutal. First there was the character assassination of Judge Goldstone. A South African Jew, a renowned authority on international law, who had presided over the trial of Slobodan Milosevic and whose probity had never been called into question in Israel, Goldstone was reviled in terms of abuse that would normally be leveled against a gutter anti-Semite. A hater of Israel, they called him; though his daughter is an Israeli and he has enjoyed good relations with Israel in the past. All of this was disturbing enough in itself. It is more disturbing in the light of that Jewish ethical tradition in which no station of life is higher and no character more venerable than that of the honest judge. Not one major finding, not one witness, not one report of an incident in the Goldstone report, has yet been successfully challenged to vindicate the crash of ad lib slanders.

A second strategy adopted by the Netanyahu government and by the Obama administration was to claim that Goldstone’s partiality was proved by his failure to condemn Hamas. This charge is all over the anti-Goldstone literature. Yet the report in fact condemns Hamas as well as Israel. What next? The Israeli government and army said that all those acts of wanton destruction enumerated in the report were not actually done on purpose. The bombing or shelling of the chicken farms, the flour mill, the hospitals, the mosques, the UN compound, the water treatment plants–how could they know what they were doing? Or else, they had good intelligence there were terrorists hiding there, but sometimes even good intelligence is faulty. And the use of white phosphorus? Israel is still investigating. A last resort of evasion was to give up defending the actions of the onslaught, and, instead, change the terminology. Claim, now, that the horror of Gaza was one of the ironies of “asymmetrical warfare.”

Asymmetrical it certainly was. 1385 Palestinians dead, 762 of them civilians. 13 Israelis, ten of them soldiers, four by “friendly fire.” The Israeli authorities would like America and the world to think these numbers a natural by-product of asymmetrical warfare. In Boston, on March 5, 1770, a crowd of Americans threw rocks at British soldiers and were answered by disorderly gunfire. Five Americans were killed, and we call it the Boston Massacre. What was Gaza? Look again at the numbers.

Barack Obama abetted the Israeli drive to bury the Goldstone report by allowing his government to say it was “one-sided and deeply flawed” and also the subject of “grave concerns.” Obama had already shown his loyalty by his silence regarding the actions of Israel in Gaza in January 2009. It all stopped, by apparent arrangement, just before inauguration day. Given that history, what reason had Netanyahu to suppose that Obama would discover the end of his patience last week? There seemed no jerk of the leash to which this American president, like so many others, would not respond obediently. Besides, as Obama knows and as Netanyahu knows he knows, American Jewish liberals who are loyal to Israel are the stamina of the Democratic Party.

After an initial perfunctory apology and an incredible profession of innocence, Benjamin Netanyahu has reverted to the customary usage of Israeli-American public relations. He has deplored the unhappy timing of the announcement of the 1600 new Israeli settlement units, but meanwhile has affirmed the substance of the order. And he has indicated his intention to resist any further American attempt to restrain Israel. Netanyahu has two considerations in play. One is to insert himself into American politics (not for the first time) to weaken a president he never liked who shows serious signs of waning popularity. Another is to buy time for the resumption of his policies by protracting a mimic war of “wounded feelings” between the U.S. and Israel. This can serve to draw attention away from the Israeli subjugation of the Palestinians. There has been a danger, after all, over several months, that Palestinian protesters, aided by Israelis who sympathize with their cause, would crystallize into a movement essentially non-violent in orientation and catch the conscience of America and the world. The fear of Netanyahu and the Israeli right is that the Palestinian cause will indeed become a non-violent mass movement.

Israel has taken strong measures against that possibility, especially in the last few months, by rounding up and imprisoning non-violent protesters. Most recently, according to a report by Amira Hass on March 15 in Haaretz, Iyad Burnat was arrested for sending an e-mail that said “the third intifada is knocking at the door.” The consequence? The towns of Bil’in and Na’alin, centers for non-violent protest, are closed until August 17.

In general the Netanyahu government regards the prospect of a third intifada with fatalistic acceptance. “Arabs are like that.” However, concerning the form the intifada will take Netanyahu is not indifferent. The next uprising will be easier to manage in public and easier to crush if it is violent. At the annual AIPAC convention next week–a rite of passage for American statesmen at which the burden of both flattery and mendacity is understood to rest on American shoulders–Netanyahu will serve the usual fare and trust nobody in the crowd of domestic speakers to show King Olaf’s powers of resistance.

But at this juncture all Americans, even the domestic performers at AIPAC, have an advantage if they dare to take it. It lies in the power of truths long-unspoken that, because of Israel’s recent actions, are starting to be spoken. Racism as much as fear drives the Israeli policy toward Palestinians. This has always been known. But who now will deny that there is also, in the Israeli distrust and visceral ridicule of Barack Obama, an undercurrent of racism? This has only lately been uttered in the American mass media.

On Hardball on March 9, Chris Matthews in Jerusalem interviewed Ethan Bronner, the New York Times bureau chief. They began by talking about Israeli resistance to the content of Obama’s Cairo speech, and eased into a polite exchange about the prejudice against Obama’s middle name, when all at once a veil dropped away:

BRONNER: I think there’s also some sense here that–some degree of racism, to be perfectly honest.

MATTHEWS: Yes. They–because they see it as a black man.

The operation of Israeli racism against a black American president is powerfully enforced by the settler movement and by its American allies, the Christian Zionists. Indeed, just before the Biden visit, the Israeli primer minister was host (and a far more caring host) to the apocalyptic Judeo-Christian supremacist John Hagee.

Settler racism and Christian Zionist racism (associated with the “birther movement” in the U.S.) converge in a belief in the political and the social superiority of Israeli Jews over Palestinians — a superiority that for the Christian Zionists corresponds (in ways that need no comment) to the natural superiority of American whites to blacks. It was salutary to see Matthews and Bronner calling racism by its name. The effects of cracks in the official silence have still to be tallied, but truth may catch as well as falsehood.

Will Americans now stop calling the annexation wall — which cuts off West-Bank Israeli colonists from their Palestinian inferiors — “the security fence”? It is a wall. Its function is only partly to secure. It is there also to separate, to mark off, and to overawe. It registers a difference of kind and a difference of caste. But there is no familiar name for the separation of Israelis from Palestinians. The separation produces, and it aims to support, a condition of constant inequality. It seems too weak to call the result “segregation.” Ehud Barak, a solid authority one would have thought, has recently called it apartheid, and language that is accurate in the eyes of the defense minister of Israel should be good enough for Americans. Many witnesses who know both countries will tell you conditions are worse today in the West Bank and Gaza than apartheid was in South Africa. But that analogy surely will not be discussed, not even to be violently rebutted, at the AIPAC convention next week.

A distraction besides the pouring of unguents on a “family feud” will preempt much talk about Palestine. Instead, a great deal will be said about Iran. The Holocaust will be evoked in this context. But here again an answer is timely for Americans who dare to inform themselves. Ehud Barak on March 8 told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset that Iran poses no existential threat to Israel. The truth is that whatever the wild men say, no country of that region threatens any other with extinction; but one country is widely believed to be well equipped for nuclear war, and that country is Israel.

The existential threat in the vicinity of Israel is not extermination but expulsion. And Israel is the agent rather than victim of that threat. The project is being carried forward by legalized acts of dispossession, by harassment, by deprivation of useful work, and by the deliberate infliction of misery. The most notable Israeli spokesman for Palestinian expulsion happens not to be a security billionaire or a radio demagogue but the foreign minister of Israel, Avigdor Lieberman. When Avigdor Lieberman was welcomed last February to the world of nations by Senator Joe Lieberman, the world took note.

There have been some voices in the past decade to remind us that the United States is endangered by the aggressive expansionist policies of Israel. Amy Goodman, Philip Weiss, M.J. Rosenberg, Glenn Greenwald, Tony Karon, Daniel Luban — but it is an ungrateful subject and not many have had the nerve or the pockets to look at it steadily. And yet, if one takes stock of more recent stories and columns, one has to add to the list Bill Moyers, Joe Klein, Chris Matthews. It seems possible that a nationwide self-censorship which has lasted more than forty years, on a subject of enormous importance — a “friendly silence” that is contrary to the spirit of democracy itself — is at last beginning to lift.

And those, from the vice president down, who have now begun to speak openly, have a new ally in General David Petraeus. For what Biden said behind closed doors to Netanyahu—that your actions are “dangerous for us”–did not come from Biden alone or from himself and the president but also from General Petraeus. A recent story in Stars and Stripes reported that Petraeus has been impressed by clear evidence that American troops are at risk from America’s supply of weapons and approval to a policy that grinds down the Palestinians. Israel’s continuous fertilizing of the soil in which anti-American terror is grown had driven Petraeus to ask at a January meeting of the joint chiefs of staff that Palestine be placed under the regional control of CENTCOM. The request was turned down, but the analysis that supports the request is in the public domain. It has been an open secret for a long time, and what Petraeus said to the service heads a few weeks ago, he has repeated in Congressional testimony today.

So the door to an honest discussion of Israel and Palestine has been opened wide. Too wide for AIPAC, and all its journalistic outlets, to close with their usual dispatch. We are in possession now of the realistic knowledge that Israel’s policies endanger American troops and American interests; that by creating new terrorists, those policies also threaten the security of the United States. These truths are not less evident today than they were in 2001. But a disturbing fact, no matter how unsettling, does not make a decisive argument in itself. All one can hope is that, in thoughtful people, it will create a pause for thought. It is one thing to sacrifice yourself for a friend in the cause of justice; another to sacrifice yourself for a friend in the cause of injustice. With “the third intifada knocking at the door,” the old American pattern — an ever-renewable forgetfulness about the conduct of Israel and de facto postponement of the question of Palestine — is less tenable than ever. At the same time the overcoming of segregation in the United States bears close comparison with the hardening of segregation in Israel. The oppressions of Hebron in 2010 exceed those of Montgomery in 1965. And the settlers of Hebron, unlike the white citizens’ councils of Montgomery, know they have a national government they can rely on to support the next assertion of their supremacy.

Seven years ago today, an American civil rights worker, Rachel Corrie, was killed in Gaza, run over by a Caterpillar tractor driven by a soldier of the Israel Defense Forces. A civil suit against the Israeli defense ministry, by the parents of Rachel Corrie, was starting in a courtroom in Haifa during the recent visit of Vice President Biden. The event was barely noticed in the American press — it got more attention in Israel — but an AP video caught the statements made by Craig and Cindy Corrie on entering the court, statements remarkable for their dignity and candor.

Rachel Corrie wrote in an early letter from Gaza, addressed to “friends and family, and others” on February 7, 2003:

I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. . . . I don’t know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I’m not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere.

She wrote in her last letter, to her father, on March 12:

I really don’t want to move back to Olympia, but do need to go back there to clean my stuff out of the garage and talk about my experiences here. On the other hand, now that I’ve crossed the ocean I’m feeling a strong desire to try to stay across the ocean for some time. . . .I would like to leave Rafah with a viable plan to return, too. One of the core members of our group has to leave tomorrow–and watching her say goodbye to people is making me realize how difficult it will be. People here can’t leave, so that complicates things. They also are pretty matter-of-fact about the fact that they don’t know if they will be alive when we come back here.

She would have returned if she could. And the cause that prompted her courage is a matter that the rest of us have barely begun to arrive at.

West Bank rises up in a new ‘white’ intifada

Donald Macintyre | The Independent

12 March 2010

Under a cloud of tear gas residents of the Palestinian village Nabi Saleh, Israeli and international activists run away during the weekly demonstration against Israeli settlement expansion, in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, near the Jewish settlement of Halamish

Ehab Barghouti would not have been at the demonstration at all if his father Asdal had had his way.

Asdal found his son, 14, on the road from their village of Beit Rima and ordered him into the car. “I told him: ‘You shouldn’t go, you’re too young.’ He told me: ‘I want to resist.’ I said: ‘Do you want me to see you on TV?'” But when Asdal stopped at a local garage and went in to talk to the mechanic, Ehab made his escape.

A few hours later he was unconscious in intensive care in Ramallah’s main hospital, a rubber-coated steel bullet having penetrated his skull. He had been standing among a crowd of youths, well inside the nearby village of Nabi Saleh, on a hillside carpeted with the first daisies and wild flowers of spring. Many of the youths were throwing stones at an unfinished house 25 metres away which had been occupied by armed Israeli Border Police some 15 minutes earlier. Shortly after 2.30pm a shot rang out, probably from the window, and Ehab dropped face down on the ground before being carried vomiting and bleeding from the wound above his right eye by four older men to relative safety back up the hill.

Even if freshly promised “proximity talks” between Israelis and Palestinians get under way, they are unlikely to halt the weekly protests that will take place after noon prayers today in some villages and tomorrow in others. The Palestinian Authority did not start the weekly protests that have now spread to more than half a dozen West Bank villages. And it is not leading them. But a supportive Palestinian cabinet statement appeared to adopt their model last month, applauding that: “Peaceful and popular efforts have regained international recognition of the just Palestinian cause and revealed the void Israeli excuses for the construction of settlements and the wall.”

For something is happening in these villages nestling among the rocky hills and olive groves between Ramallah and Nablus. The Israeli military does not accept the classification of the protests as non-violent; most usually end in confrontations between stone-throwing Palestinian youths and armed police and troops. But for the six years of such protests none of the Palestinians, in contrast to the security forces, have carried weapons. If these are the first tentative stirrings of a new uprising, and it is doubtful they can be described as that yet, then they are closer to the beginnings in 1987 of the first intifada, the so-called “war of stones”, than the second, with its bloody record of suicide bombings between 2000 and around 2005. Some commentators have dubbed the protests – and the apparent endorsement of them by the internationally respected Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad – as the “white” intifada.

Either way the protests, and the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to condemn them, have provoked a strong reaction from Israel’s security establishment. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this week that Israel had warned the PA that if it did not “contain” the protests it would lose co-operation with Israel and there would be more arrests within the West Bank. An unnamed Israeli security official was earlier quoted in the same paper as having told diplomats that the protests constituted an “existential” threat to Israel.

Except for the 10 real injuries (eight to demonstrators and two to photographers), Nabi Saleh last Friday had a flavour of Kabuki about it with Palestinians, supporting international and Israeli activists, and security forces all playing their part. The march of perhaps 100 men, children and a few women started in bright sunshine from the middle of the village. They began their descent along the main street chanting slogans like “National Unity: Fatah, Hamas, PFLP”. They followed the road round to the left, past the petrol station and were still a good 800 metres from the main road (Route 465) separating Nabi Saleh from the Israeli settlement of Halamish when the first tear gas canisters – along, say the protesters, with rubber bullets – were fired by the Israeli forces who had long taken up a position on a hilltop to the right. Some marchers scrambled down the hillside to the right, others retreated back towards the village, while others continued to move forward.

There was perhaps an hour of cat-and-mouse between the youths from Tamimi and the Israeli forces controlling the exits from Nabi Saleh, the former throwing stones that fell short of any target and the latter firing rubber bullets and tear gas canisters (aluminium and rubber) that hit and injured a few protesters before the forces began to advance into the village itself. Three Jeeps advanced slowly up the road behind a white truck carrying a water cannon spraying “skunk”, a foul-smelling substance that leaves its odour for a week in the clothes of anyone who comes into direct contact with it. Taking refuge with perhaps a dozen protesters in the back room of the petrol station you could hear the loud explosion of a stun grenade – and the firing of tear gas and rubber bullets to cover the front Jeep as it was pelted with stones – before it began to move slowly back down the road again.

It seemed all over. But then the forces took over two houses, one the green building from which Ehab Barghouti, still in a coma yesterday, was shot. Pictures taken by The Independent from earlier in the protest show him hanging back from the front lines. But once the forces were inside the house, he was within range and in real danger. According to the Israeli human rights agency B’tselem, the regulation minimum range for firing rubber bullets is 40 metres and such bullets must be fired only at legs and not fired at children. Secondly, it is far from clear why the security forces occupied the house at all. According to Ramzi Tamimi, 33, one of the men who took the inert Ehab back up the hill: “As long as the soldiers stay away from the village and stay at the entrances, nothing happens. They deliberately come to make friction with us.” And beyond this is the fact that the entire protest took place on Palestinian land, land that if the putative peace talks ever had an outcome, would be part of a Palestinian state. For the stated, and of course never reached, destination of the march was a spring a few metres on the other side of Route 465, on what had long been Tamimi land. But the Halamish residents now control the land – and the spring – to the extent that when the villagers tried to cultivate their olive trees last November, they say they were driven away by armed, stone-throwing settlers.

The military says that “rock-throwing is considered a serious offence, placing others at significant risk and endangering both public and regional security.” But in Nabi Saleh the protesters were still marching peacefully, well within the village, and certainly not throwing stones when the military started firing tear gas.

At times the Israeli military has been deploying more lethal ammunition. The more famous and longer-running protests against the separation barrier have been at Nilin and Bil’in (where the IDF has finally decided to modify the route of the barrier so it will swallow up less of the villagers’ land, two-and-a-half years after a court order to do so). At both it has fired .22 live ammunition and high-velocity tear gas projectiles which are intended by their US manufacturers to be used to penetrate walls rather than against open-air crowds. It was one of these that severely wounded the US activist Tristan Anderson in the forehead in Nilin in March 2009 and has left him, after months in an Israeli hospital, with permanent brain damage. Another killed a prominent Bil’in protester Bassem abu Rahmah a month later.

According to the Popular Struggle Co-ordination committee, a loose body linking the local protest organisers, the .22 live bullets – which were proscribed for crowd-control by the military Advocate General in 2001 but reintroduced Operation Cast Lead in Gaza – have killed one demonstrator and injured 28 in Nilin alone since January last year.

Then there are the scores of arrests, frequently at night, including five in Nabi Saleh two days before last Friday’s demo. The arrests – including 112 in Bil’in alone since May 2008 – have worried European diplomats enough for them to form a rota to monitor the military court in Ofer where most of the detainees appear. One day last week – in the additional presence of an official from the US Consulate General – one of the Bil’in protest leaders, Abdullah Abu Rahmah, 39, who has been in military detention since December, was remanded again on a series of charges including a bizarre one of illegal arms possession; the indictment relates to Mr Abu Rahmah’s collection of spent tear gas canisters for an exhibition. As his Israeli lawyer Gaby Lasky told the court, her client was in no different a position from the police in the Negev border town of Sderot who have a collection of exploded Qassam rockets fired from Gaza to show visitors. “Because they are spent, they cannot be addressed as illegal arms,” she patiently explained to the military judge. The case continues.

The military has also sought to move against another notable aspect of the protests, the supportive presence of the left-wing Israeli activists who now regularly join them. The registration numbers of cars entering the West Bank through various checkpoints are checked against those of known Israeli participants. Among the 15 Israelis taking part in Nabi Saleh last week was Jonathan Pollak, a 28-year-old from Anarchists Against the Wall who is media co-ordinator on the joint committee.

For Ayed Morrar, a true Palestinian veteran of unarmed protest in the West Bank, the presence of Israelis is highly positive. “It’s good for our people, and good for them,” he says. Mr Morrar (who was injured by rubber bullets when he took part in the first demonstration in Nabi Saleh in January) is a popular leader in Budrus, where the villagers managed to change the route of the barrier at a time when suicide bombing was at its height and popular unarmed protest much criticised by Palestinian militants. Mr Morrar has spent six years in an Israeli prison as a Fatah activist (even though he never participated in armed violence) but now charges both Fatah and Hamas with being more interested in the sometimes bloody rivalry with each other than the national cause. His credo is to “apply all the sources of pressure on the occupation except killing. It is forbidden to decide to kill, to try to kill or to kill.” Arguing the Palestinians needs the international community on its side, he adds: “We want to show we are not against Jews, not against Israelis. We are against the occupation.”

State to reinvestigate wounding of U.S. activist

Cnaan Liphshiz | Ha’aretz

12 March 2010

The state this week agreed to reinvestigate the 2009 near-fatal wounding of American pro-Palestinian protester Tristan Anderson in the West Bank, after his lawyer complained that the discontinued probe of the case was “negligent.”

“We will reexamine the decision to close the case of Tristan Anderson,” Justice Ministry spokesman Ron Roman told Anglo File. He said this after receiving an appeal from the lawyer of the 38-year-old American, who remains in critical condition at the Sheba Medical Center after police seriously injured him in the head exactly one year ago during a demonstration.

The ministry decided in December to close its investigation into Anderson’s injury after its probe produced “a lack of criminal culpability.” Anderson, a Californian, was hit in the forehead on March 13, 2009 by a tear gas canister fired by a border policeman in the village of Na’alin during a demonstration against Israel’s contested separation fence.

“The investigation conducted was characterized by severe omissions,” attorney Michael Sfard wrote on Tuesday to the central district attorney’s office, in an appeal against the decision to close the case. The appeal by Sfard, an international human rights lawyer representing the family, was based on his own shadow investigation of the incident.

In deciding to close the case, the Justice Ministry’s investigation team “failed altogether to visit the scene of the incident or even view it from a nearby location in order to familiarize itself with it,” Sfard said. “Border Police officers responsible for Tristan’s injury were not questioned at all,” he added.

The ministry would not comment on this assertion, citing the ongoing investigation. The Border Police also declined to comment.

According to both the ministry’s probe and Sfard’s own investigation, Anderson was hit at around 4 P.M. near a mosque, at the same time as Border Police officers were dispersing stone throwers in the village with tear gas. But Sfard’s probe showed that although there were several Border Police squads in the area, the ministry’s team only questioned one squad, which was busy dispersing the demonstrators from its position near a cellular antenna. Sfard says that the soldiers of this squad could not have fired the canister that hit Anderson because the officers did not have a line-of-sight to Anderson.

“This constitutes severe negligence in the work of the investigation team, which went astray following the mistaken assumption that Tristan was injured by shots fired by the squad positioned on ‘Antenna Hill’, not even bothering to question the other squads, despite clear indications that [one of the other squads] fired the shot,” Sfard’s appeal reads.

The shadow investigation by Sfard traces the “mistaken assumption” to the fact that the squad questioned admitted to injuring a protester who was evacuated from the scene. However, this was not Anderson, according to Sfard. The investigators could have “discovered that there was another injured person at that same incident – and that this person was injured from the fire of a different squad than that which hit Tristan,” Sfard went on to write in the appeal.

A Swedish member of the International Solidarity Movement told Anglo File that the shooting was unprovoked. “The policeman approached from behind a building when everything was quiet,” said the activist while still in Israel a few months ago, who identified himself only as John because he works for the Swedish government. John, 30, added he was 30 meters away from Anderson at the time. The policeman who fired the canister was 60 meters away, he said.

Avi Biton, the spokesperson for the border police’s Judea and Samaria district, declined to comment on this, citing the investigation in progress. “This occurrence could have easily been avoided had demonstrators showed more respect for Israeli law regarding protests, Israel’s troops’ safety and Israeli taxpayers’ property,” Biton said.

The impact of the projectile that hit Anderson caused condensed fractures to his forehead and right eye socket. Part of his right frontal lobe had to be removed, and a brain fluid leakage was sealed using a tendon from his thigh.

The case, according to Ron Roman from the Justice Ministry, has been transferred to a ministry appeal committee in Jerusalem, which “will look into the facts in an earnest manner and may reverse the decision to close the case if it finds the evidence compelling.”

Border Control / Biden and the bulldozer

Akiva Eldar | Ha’aretz

9 March 2010

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who arrived in Israel yesterday, didn’t look for camels among the cars on the road from Ben-Gurion International Airport to Jerusalem. In a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing held two years ago for the United States Ambassador to Israel, James Cunningham, Biden heard that the Israelis even know how to ride bulldozers.

Then a senator from Delaware, who chaired the committee, Biden asked for a detailed report on the affair of American peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was run over and killed by the treads of an Israeli bulldozer.

If Biden schedules a meeting with Corrie’s parents here, the Israeli Information and Diaspora Ministry will have to work overtime. The parents, who arrived in advance of the scheduled deliberations on their suit against the state of Israel, will tell him that his hosts are continuing to deny any responsibility for their daughter’s death.

Rachel was a 23-year-old student run over by a 64-ton bulldozer in March, 2003, when she and others from the International Solidarity Movement tried to use their bodies to stop the demolition of a house in Rafah.

At the Senate hearing, Cunningham spoke about the Israel authorities’ refusal to open a thorough investigation into the affair and not rest content with an internal report.

Cunningham detailed numerous written and oral requests to top people in the Israeli government by senior people in the American administration and his predecessor at the embassy. In reply to Biden’s question, Cunningham undertook to stand by the Corrie family in the demand for a credible investigation of the tragic event. Tomorrow the witness stage in the Corrie family’s suit will open at the Haifa District Court. Facing the family and friends will be representatives of the state who are demanding the suit be withdrawn. They claim Corrie was killed in “an act of war,” during the course of an armed conflict in a closed military zone. Therefore, even if it is proved there was use of excessive force as well as gross negligence – the state is totally exempt from liability. The defense is giving legal cover to the bulldozer operator and the soldiers who secured him, on the grounds it was a sovereign “act of state.” In other words: Corrie was responsible for her own death.

Apparently Israel takes responsibility for the deaths of foreign civilians only when threatened. For more than five years legal wrangling dragged on between the state and the family of British television filmmaker James Miller, who was shot and killed in Rafah. With respect to that incident too, which took place two months after Corrie was killed, the state hid behind the excuse of “an act of war.” In this case too questions arose as to the credibility of the Investigative Military Police report and the top political level in London urged the government of Israel to compensate the widow and the orphans. The case was closed (with the payment of more than 1 million pounds Sterling in compensation) after the British threatened to issue an official extradition request for the Israeli soldiers who shot the cameraman.

The American media have long ceased to follow American VIPs who come to give artificial respiration to “the peace process.” Perhaps the White House reporters who are accompanying Biden will evince interest in the Corrie case.

Israel: end crackdown on Anti-Wall activists

Human Rights Watch

5 March 2010

Israel should immediately end its arbitrary detention of Palestinians protesting the separation barrier, Human Rights Watch said today. Israel is building most of the barrier inside the West Bank rather than along the Green Line, in violation of international humanitarian law. In recent months, Israeli military authorities have arbitrarily arrested and denied due process rights to several dozen Palestinian anti-wall protesters.

Israel has detained Palestinians who advocate non-violent protests against the separation barrier and charged them based on questionable evidence, including allegedly coerced confessions. Israeli authorities have also denied detainees from villages that have staged protests against the barrier, including children, access to lawyers and family members. Many of the protests have been in villages that lost substantial amounts of land when the barrier was built.

“Israel is arresting people for peacefully protesting a barrier built illegally on their lands that harms their livelihoods,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The Israeli authorities are effectively banning peaceful expression of political speech by bringing spurious charges against demonstrators, plus detaining children and adults without basic due process protections.”

Demonstrations against the separation barrier often turn violent, with Palestinian youths throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. Israeli troops have regularly responded by using stun and tear gas grenades to disperse protesters, and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has documented the Israeli military’s use of live and rubber-coated bullets on several occasions. Violence at demonstrations may result in the arrest of those who participate in or incite violence, but it does not justify the arrest of activists who have simply called for or supported peaceful protests against the wall, Human Rights Watch said.

In December 2009, military prosecutors charged Abdallah Abu Rahme, a high-school teacher in the West Bank village of Bil’in who is a leading advocate of non-violent resistance, with illegal possession of weapons in connection with an art exhibit, in the shape of a peace sign, that he built out of used Israeli army bullets and tear gas canisters. The weapons charge states that Abu Rahme, a member of Bil’in’s Popular Committee against the Wall and Settlements, used “M16 bullets and gas and stun grenades” for “an exhibition [that] showed people what means the security forces employ.”

A military court also charged him with throwing stones at soldiers and incitement for organizing demonstrations that included stone throwing. An Israeli protester, Jonathan Pollack, acknowledged Palestinian youths often have thrown stones but told Human Rights Watch that he had attended “dozens” of protests with Abu Rahme and had never seen him throw stones. Abu Rahme remains in detention.

The Israeli military in August detained Mohammed Khatib, a leader of the Bil’in Popular Committee and the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, which organize protests against the separation barrier, and charged him with “stone throwing” at a Bil’in demonstration in November 2008. Khatib’s passport shows that he was on New Caledonia, a Pacific island, when the alleged incident occurred. He was released on August 9, 2009, on condition that he present himself at a police station at the time of weekly anti-wall protests, effectively barring him from participating, his lawyers said.

The military detained him again and charged Khatib with incitement on January 28, 2010, a day after the Israeli news website Ynet quoted him as saying: “We are on the eve of an intifada.” His lawyer said that security services justified the detention on the grounds of “incitement materials” confiscated from his home, which proved to be records of his trial. He was released on February 3. Khatib has published articles calling for non-violent protests, including in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Nation magazine. Khatib has also been active in lobbying for divestment from companies whose operations support violations of international law by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Military authorities also detained Zeydoun Srour, a member of the Popular Committee against the Wall in Ni’lin, on January 12, charging him with throwing stones during a demonstration, despite a letter from his employer and stamped and dated forms signed by Srour showing that he was working his normal shift at the time of the alleged incident.

“Israel’s security concerns do not justify detaining or prosecuting peaceful Palestinian activists,” Whitson said. “The Israeli government should immediately order an end to ongoing harassment of Palestinians who peacefully protest the separation barrier.”

Mohammad Srour, also a member of the Popular Committee in Ni’lin, was arrested on July 20 by the Israeli army while returning from Geneva, where he appeared before the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (the Goldstone Commission). Srour’s testimony to the UN mission described the fatal shooting by Israeli forces of two Ni’lin residents on December 28, 2008, at a demonstration against Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip. Srour was taken to Ofer prison for interrogation and was released on bail three days later without having been charged. In its report to the Human Rights Council, the Goldstone Commission expressed its concern that Srour’s detention “may have been a consequence of his appearance before the Mission.”

Cases brought against Palestinians for throwing stones and cases under the military’s overbroad incitement law frequently raise serious due process concerns, Human Rights Watch said. Prosecutions of anti-wall activists have been based on testimony from witnesses who say their statements were obtained under coercive threats. A16-year-old witness against Mohammed Khatib testified on January 4 that he signed a false statement claiming that Khatib was throwing stones at a demonstration only after his interrogator “cursed me and told me that I should either sign or he would beat me,” according to a military-court transcript.

Another 16-year-old from Bil’in said he signed a false statement alleging that Bil’in’s Popular Committee members incited others to throw stones because his interrogator threatened to accuse him of “many things that I did and they were not true, that I had gas grenades, Molotovs, that I threw stones, and I was afraid of that.”

Other Palestinians detained in anti-wall demonstrations have also alleged coercion by Israeli interrogators. A man whom lawyers say is mentally challenged testified on January 21 that he had falsely confessed to throwing a Molotov bomb at an Israeli army jeep after soldiers placed him inside a cockroach-infested cell, threatened to throw boiling water on him, and burned him with lit cigarettes, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The Israeli military had no record of a jeep being attacked, Haaretz reported.

The detained activists are from Ni’lin, Bil’in, and several other Palestinian villages inside the West Bank that have been directly affected by Israel’s separation barrier. The barrier – in some places a fence, in others an eight-meter-high concrete wall with guard towers – was ostensibly built to protect against suicide bombers. However, unlike a similar barrier between Israel and Gaza, it does not follow the 1967 border between Israel and the West Bank. Instead, 85 percent of the barrier’s route lies inside the West Bank, separating Palestinian residents from their lands, restricting their movement, and in some places effectively confiscating occupied territory, all unlawful under international humanitarian law.

Lawyers for detained activists also told Human Rights Watch of cases in which Israeli security services raided several West Bank villages that have been the site of anti-wall demonstrations and detained and interrogated residents, including children, and denied them access to lawyers and family members. Israeli military orders require allowing detainees to contact lawyers before interrogation and allowing detained children to have family members present.

Nery Ramati, a lawyer representing several detainees, told Human Rights Watch of three cases in which Israeli authorities refused to allow him to speak to boys in detention, all ages 14 and 15, from the villages of Bil’in and Budrus, or to allow the boys’ relatives to be present, before their interrogation at the Shaar Benyamin police station. Military courts authorized the detention of one boy for a month for allegedly throwing stones at the separation barrier. The court ruled that there was no alternative to detention, but ignored the fact that Israeli movement restrictions had prevented the boy’s father and uncle from presenting evidence of an alternative to detention to the court. The boy was held in jail for an entire month, until his uncle was able to come from Ramallah.

In several cases, Israeli military authorities took children to a building operated by the Israeli Shin Bet security agency in the Ofer military camp to which lawyers and family members are denied access. Under international treaties to which Israel is a party, children may be detained only as a last resort and for the shortest possible period of time.

Under laws applicable in Israel and to Israeli settlers in the West Bank, a child is anyone under 18 years old, a standard consistent with international law. Military laws applicable to Palestinians in the West Bank, however, define anyone over 16 as an adult. Israeli law requires the prosecution to justify that the detention of an Israeli child is “necessary” to prevent the child from committing illegal acts until the trial is over, requires the court to consider documentation from a social worker about how detention will affect the child, and limits the period of pre-sentence detention to nine months. Israeli military laws provide none of these safeguards for Palestinian children and allow pre-sentence detention of up to two years.

Israeli military authorities in recent months placed two anti-wall activists in administrative detention, failing to charge them with any crime and detaining them on the basis of secret evidence they were not allowed to see or challenge in court. The military detained Mohammad Othman, 34, an activist with the “Stop the Wall” organization, on September 22, 2009 when he returned to the West Bank from a trip to Norway, where he spoke about the separation barrier and urged boycotting companies that support Israeli human rights violations. An Israeli military court barred Othman from seeing his lawyer and family for two weeks during his 113-day administrative detention, before his release on January 12.

The Israeli authorities also detained Jamal Juma’a, 47, the coordinator of the “Stop the Wall” campaign, on December 16, 2009 and denied him access to his lawyer for nine days, except for a brief visit at a court hearing during which Juma’a was blindfolded. Israel barred international observers from attending a court hearing before Juma’a’s release on January 12. Both men publicly advocated non-violent protest, including an article Juma’a published on the Huffington Post website on October 28, 2009.

Israeli military authorities have also repeatedly raided the West Bank offices of organizations involved in non-violent advocacy against the separation barrier. In February, the military raided the offices of Stop the Wall and the International Solidarity Movement, both located in Ramallah. (Israel ostensibly ceded Ramallah and other areas of the West Bank to the control of the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Agreements of 1995.)

Background

Israeli military authorities have detained scores of Palestinians, including children, involved in protests against the wall. According to the Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer, 35 residents of Bil’in have been arrested since June 2009, most during nighttime raids; 113 have been arrested from the neighboring village of Ni’ilin in the last 18 months.

Israel applies military orders, issued by the commander of the occupied territory, as law in the West Bank. Article 7(a) of Military Order 101 of 1967 criminalizes as “incitement” any act of “attempting, whether verbally or otherwise, to influence public opinion in the Area in a way that may disturb the public peace or public order.” Military Order 378 of 1970 imposes sentences of up to 20 years for throwing stones.

Both Israeli and international courts have found the route of the separation barrier in the West Bank to be illegal. The International Court of Justice ruled in a 2004 advisory opinion that the wall’s route was illegal because its construction inside the West Bank was not justified by security concerns and contributed to violations of international humanitarian law applicable to occupied territory by impeding Palestinians’ freedom of movement, destroying property, and contributing to unlawful Israeli settlement practices. Israel’s High Court of Justice has ruled that the wall must be rerouted in several places, including near Bil’in and Jayyous, because the harm caused to Palestinians was disproportionate, although the rulings would allow the barrier to remain inside the West Bank in these and other areas.

The activists whom Israel has arrested in recent months organized protests in areas directly affected by Israel’s separation barrier. In Jayyous, home to Mohammad Othman. the wall cut the village off from 75 percent of its farmland, with the aim of facilitating the expansion of a settlement, Zufim, on that land, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem says. “Stop the Wall” supported marches by civilian protesters against the separation barrier in Jayyous. In response to a petition from the village, Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the Israel Defense Forces to re-route the wall around Jayyous on the grounds that the prior route was due to Zufim’s expansion plans. The Israeli military rerouted the wall in one area around Zufim after a court proceeding, but has not rerouted the barrier elsewhere.

Abdallah Abu Rahme is from Bil’in, a village where the wall cut off 50 percent of the land. The Israeli settlement of Mattityahu East is being built on the land to which the village no longer has access. In September 2007, after years of protests organized by Bil’in’s Popular Committee, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the separation barrier in Bil’in must be rerouted to allow access to more of Bil’in’s land, and the military recently began survey work preliminary to rerouting the barrier.