Category: In the Media

IDF uses ‘two-two bullets’ in Ni’ilin clash

The Jerusalem Post

15 November 2009

IDF troops used ammunition equivalent to live bullets against protesters at Ni’ilin on Friday, where a weekly protest by Palestinians and left-wing activists from Israel and abroad is held against the West Bank security barrier.

The military ordinarily only uses protest-dispersal means such as tear gas and a recently introduced “skunk bomb” that is harmless but exudes a pungent stench.

One Border Police officer was lightly wounded in Friday’s clash when he was hit by a rock. He was given preliminary treatment at the scene and later taken to a hospital.

A rioter at Friday’s protest said the military fired ‘two-two bullets,’ small metal pellets similar to those fired by BB guns but of a larger caliber (5.6 mm. vs the BB gun pellets’ 4.5 mm.). The man said ‘two-two bullets’ have not been used against protesters since May.

According to a statement issued by left-wing NGO B’Tselem on July 9, IDF Judge Advocate General Brig.-Gen. Avihai Mandelblit said in response to a query from the organization that “tutu bullets” are not considered a protest-dispersal means.

Mandelblit told B’Tselem in July that the rules for using “tutu bullets” are “restrictive, and parallel to the rules of engagement when using live ammunition.”

The protesters on Friday held signs inscribed “From Berlin to Bil’in,” in reference to the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Bil’in is another Palestinian village that is a hotspot of protests against the barrier.

The IDF confirmed that 5.66 mm. pellets (two-two bullets) were used on Friday. “The use of such ammunition is done against protesters where the use of violence has been ascertained, according to the restrictive protocol followed in incidents such as this,” the IDF Spokesman’s Office said. in a statement.

Meanwhile, near Deir Ghassana (22 km. northwest of Ramallah), the security barrier was reportedly breached when Palestinian, Israeli and foreign demonstrators broke open one of its gates.

The Popular Struggle Coordination Committee said the demonstrators managed to break the lock on the gate by rocking it back and forth, despite the presence of soldiers, who shot rubber-coated bullets and tear gas at the protesters. It said one demonstrator was lightly wounded in the leg by a rubber-coated bullet.

10-year-old Palestinian boy jailed for 11 hours

Ali Waked | YNet News

15 November 2009

Hussam Faisal Muhana, 10, heeded the calls made on Saturday over the loudspeakers throughout his village of Deir al-Ghusun near Tulkarem encouraging residents to participate in a demonstration against the separation fence.

Together with other children and youth from the village, he went to the demonstration. The children threw stones at the security forces that clashed with the demonstrators. Despite his young age, Muhana was arrested. “There were two soldiers there who beat me in the legs with a club. After that, they took me to Ariel,” the boy told Ynet the day after his arrest.

Still in shock, he didn’t know whether he was taken to a police station or to a military base. “In Ariel, they started to ask me, ‘Why do you throw stones?’ I told them, ‘Just because.'”

After his family and human rights groups learned that he had been arrested, they phoned the military and the police. “They took him to the Jabara Checkpoint. From there they told a taxi driver to take him home,” recounted the father, Abu Tarek. According to him, the driver was not from the village “and Hussam directed him how to get to our home.”

The father said that his son was in complete shock even the day after. “He arrived home after 10 pm, nearly 11 hours after he had been arrested. This is his first experience with the police and military. We didn’t even know that he went to the procession,” he said.

“He returned in shock and went immediately to sleep. This morning he also woke up very late, not like he usually does. Fortunately, there is a day off from school today because of the anniversary of the declaration of independence, so he can recover at home.”

Hussam himself said in a timid voice that he soldiers gave him water to drink and a pita with labaneh during the long hours of his arrest. According to him, the soldiers did not threaten him or curse him, “except for the blows they dealt me when they arrested me.”

Dozens of Palestinians, Israelis, and activists from around the world took part in the demonstration at which Hussam was arrested. According to the demonstrators, 18 people were arrested. The IDF, on the other hand, claims that only six people were arrested for lightly damaging the external gate of the separation fence.

The IDF reported that it is investigating the issue of Hussam Muhana’s arrest.

From Gaza to Obama: An open letter

Haidar Eid | Ma’an News

16 November 2009

Barack and Michelle Obama dine with Edward and Mariam Said at a 1998 Arab community event in Chicago
Barack and Michelle Obama dine with Edward and Mariam Said at a 1998 Arab community event in Chicago

Dear Mr President,

You will probably not read this letter due to your busy schedule and the huge number of messages you receive from presidents, kings, princes, sheiks, and prime ministers. Who is a Palestinian academic from Gaza, after all, to have the guts and write an open letter to the president of the United States of America?

What has triggered this letter is a picture of your excellency sitting with the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. That, of course, happened before 2004, i.e. before you underwent a process of metamorphosis which I personally think is unprecedented in history. Seeing you with Edward Said, I must say, surprised me. Said, a true public intellectual must have said something to you about the suffering of the Palestinian people. In the picture, you and your wife seem to be listening attentively, and admiringly, to him. But the point remains; did you really understand his eloquent, passionate defense of the rights of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine? Judging from your recent policy shifts, I very much doubt it. It is precisely the incongruity between the photograph and these policy shifts that has prompted this letter.

Mr President,

The whole world celebrated your election as the first African-American president of the US. I did not. Neither did the inhabitants of the concentration camp where I live. Your sympathetic visit to Sderot—an Israeli town which was the Palestinian village of Najd until 1948 when its people were ethnically cleansed—three years after your first visit to a Kibbutz in northern Israel in support of its residents, and after your pledge to be committed to the security of the State of Israel and its “right” to retain unified Jerusalem as the capital city of the Jewish people—to give but few examples—were all clear indications of where your heart lies.

Another reason for the writing of this letter is shock at the indifference and arrogance with which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dismissed Palestinian concerns about Israel’s illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank. Only a few weeks ago you made the admirable statement that all Jewish settlement must halt, and you made it clear that this included expansion of existing settlements as well as the construction of new settlements. However, when Netanyahu let it be known that he had no intention of stopping settlements, you missed an historic opportunity to draw a line: no more billions and no more weapons for Israel unless and until this condition is met. Now Clinton has the Herculean task of pretending that your position on Jewish settlements has not changed, although it is clear you have chosen not to use the very real power at your disposal to bring Israeli policy into line.

About six months after your election, you gave a speech in Cairo, addressed to the Arab and Islamic worlds; which some people found impressive. I found it impressive in form, but not in substance because your actions have not matched your rhetoric. Why did I not buy the new language of the new American administration? Because while you were giving your speech, we were burying my neighbor, a terminally ill patient, who needed treatment in a hospital abroad, since, thanks to the siege imposed by your own administration and Israel on the Gaza Strip, the facilities that would have saved his life are not available in Gaza. Like more than 400 terminally ill people in Gaza, my neighbor lost his life. In spite of the fine Arabic words of peace, “salaam aleikum,” you made it crystal clear that the point of reference in any negotiations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Israel’s security. By doing that, Mr President, you are effectively marginalizing the whole issue of Palestine, and unfortunately setting the stage for renewed Israeli assaults against a starving Gaza, an entity that has, thanks to your “unbreakable” ties with Israel, been transformed into the largest concentration camp on earth.

Your failure to support the Goldstone report, your indifference, not to say your contribution, to Palestinian suffering and the process of “politicide” against the Palestinian people of Gaza is, to say the least, unfathomable, coming from a man who listened so earnestly to Edward Said. Your advisors must have told you about the cutting off of medicine, food and fuel to the concentration camp where I live. Patients in need of dialysis and other urgent medical treatment are dying every single day. A majority of our children, many the same age as your two beautiful daughters, are badly undernourished.

You must have skimmed through the executive summary of the Goldstone report detailing the horror inflicted on 1.5 million civilians for 22 days, horror caused by F16s, Apache helicopters, and phosphorus bombs made in American factories. Hundreds of children were burnt to death by phosphorus bombs; pregnant women were brutally targeted in what Israeli soldiers boasted of on their T-Shirts: “One bullet, Two kills.” And yet, not a single word of sympathy, Mr President! Edward Said had this to say upon his first visit to Gaza: “It’s the most terrifying place I’ve ever been in… it’s a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa.” This was back in 1993, Mr President, before conditions dramatically deteriorated. Gaza has now become, as the leading Israeli human rights organization B’tselem describes it, “the largest prison on Earth.”

Mr Obama,

Unlike your predecessor, you seem to be a smart man. You must have realized that a two-state solution has been rendered impossible by Israeli colonization of the West Bank, by the war on Gaza, by the construction of the apartheid wall, by the expansion of so-called Greater Jerusalem, and by the increase in the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. You must have realized also that there are six million refugees, most of whom live in miserable conditions waiting for courageous, visionary leaders committed to true democracy, human rights and international law to implement UN resolution 194. And yet, you and your secretary of state, like every US president since 1967, have decided to support Israel in creating conditions that made the two-state solution impossible, impractical and unjust.

Were you a supporter of the bantustan system in South Africa under the apartheid system? Are you opposed to equal rights and the transformation of Israel/Palestine into a state for all its citizens? The two-state solution means the bantustanization of Palestine, a solution you, to our knowledge, never supported for South Africa. Are you, Mr President, opposed to civic democracy, which is the demand of most Palestinian civil society and grassroots organizations? This is what your role models, Martin Luther King Jr and Steve Biko, died for. Was Nelson Mandela wrong to spend 27 years of his life in pursuit of justice by demanding equality for the indigenous people of South Africa? Do you realize that what you are supporting in the Middle East is a racist solution par excellence? A solution based on ethnic nationalism. Your secretary of state and envoy to the Middle East, unashamedly, stood with beaming smiles next to Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who not only defends openly the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but also calls for a new genocide in Gaza. Do you realize, Mr President, that this Hitlerite fascist might become Israel’s next prime minister, thanks to your administration’s complacency and support?

Our only immediate demand is that your administration ensures that Israel fulfills its obligations in terms of international law. Is that too much to ask?

Mr President Barack Hussein Obama,

We, the Palestinian people, are fed up!

Sincerely,

Professor Haidar Eid
Gaza, Palestine

The author is an independent political commentator and professor in the Department of English Literature at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza.

Baseball team urged to cut ties with Israeli group

Eli Clifton | IPS News

14 November 2009

A coalition of 11 U.S., Israeli and Palestinian groups are calling on the New York Mets baseball team to cancel a fundraiser by the “violent and racist” Israeli Hebron Fund which is scheduled to be held at the Mets’ stadium, Citi Field, on Nov. 21.

The Hebron Fund participates in “the raising of capital for the improvement of daily life for the residents of Hebron, Israel”, a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to its website, but the Fund has been accused of encouraging violence towards Palestinians and participating in illegal settlement expansion.

The coalition urges the Mets to reconsider their decision to rent space at the Casesar’s Club, an event space in Citi Field, on the basis that, “The New York Mets will be facilitating activities that directly violate international law and the [Barack] Obama administration’s call for a freeze in settlement construction, and that actively promote racial discrimination, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes in Hebron.”

“By allowing the Hebron Fund to fundraise on its premises, the New York Mets will be directly aiding Hebron’s Jewish settlers, who are regularly described, both worldwide and among Israelis, as violent racists,” said a letter from Adalah-NY, on behalf of the coalition.

It was addressed to Fred Wilpon, chair of the board of the New York Mets and copied to Bud Selig, commissioner of Major League Baseball; U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Special Envoy for the Middle East George Mitchell; and Rachel Robinson, chair of the Jackie Robinson Foundation.

Adalah-NY has also been involved in the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanction” campaign to bring indirect pressure on Israel to work towards a viable Palestinian state.

“[The Mets] can do the right thing very easily. I’m not blaming them for where they are now,” Sydney Levy, director of campaigns and chapters at Jewish Voice For Peace, one of the members of the coalition, told IPS. “[The Mets’] situation is totally reversible but this is not an issue which is going to die quietly.”

“Citi Field hosts a wide range of events that reflect the diversity of our hometown and the differing views and opinions of New Yorkers. The beliefs of organizations holding events at Citi Field do not necessarily reflect those of the New York Mets,” the Mets said in a prepared statement.

The occupation of Hebron has been an ongoing source of concern for human rights groups as the Israeli military has taken increasingly aggressive actions to secure the 700 Jewish settlers living among 150,000 Palestinians.

The U.S. State Department called for a freeze in settlement expansion but has recently made clear that it should not be a precondition for a resumption of peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Statements made by Hebron Fund Executive Director Yossi Baumol suggest the group supports the expansion of settlements even in areas where the Israeli government has evacuated settlers in accordance with international law.

In a December radio interview, Baumol said, “In the end we will come back to this building,” in reaction to the Israeli army’s evacuation of settlers from the Hebron settlement of Beit Hashalom.

Shortly after the evacuation, settlers went on a violent rampage in Hebron, leading to the shooting of three Palestinians and damaging and burning Palestinian property.

“As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term ‘pogrom’ [a riot organised against a specific group] to describe what I have seen,” said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert after the violence erupted.

And in 2006 the Hebron Fund and the Jewish Community of Hebron called for the reestablishment of a settlement in the centrally located Palestinian market in Hebron from which the Israeli army had previously removed settlers.

“Help us move families back into the Shuk [market] and into other new areas!” said the Hebron Fund in a report.”

“Please redouble your support of the Hebron Fund at this crucial time so you can be a partner in…The purchase and renovation of ancient Jewish homes, Construction of new housing,” the report went on to say.

“The Hebron Fund should not be eligible for tax-exempt status in the U.S. because it is not organized and operated exclusively for charitable purposes, but rather promotes the anti-charitable values of violence, racism, and opposition to human rights. The settlement activity that the Hebron Fund supports is racially exclusive, discriminatory, contrary to United States policy and contrary to international law,” read the letter from the coalition calling for the Mets to cancel the event at Citi Field.

The letter goes on to document numerous other cases of settlement expansion, settler violence and Israeli military violence and closures in the center of Hebron which have lead to the closure of 76.6-percent of businesses and 41.9-percent of homes to go vacant.

“There are certain red lines that have to do with racism and sponsoring violence that you do not cross,” said Levy.

“The Hebron fund is there to support Jewish only settlements in Hebron. When you sponsor organisations that are involved in these sorts of activities you have to question what’s going on. At the end of the day this is a matter of people being aware of what’s happening there and what’s our responsibility is here,” Levy concluded.

The campaign also emphasises that, “Allowing the Hebron Fund to fundraise at Citi Field contradicts New York Mets and Major League Baseball’s commitment to equal opportunity and non-discrimination, and is an insult to the legacy of Jackie Robinson.”

Jackie Robinson was the first African American Major League Baseball player and is honored at the Mets’ Citi Field stadium in the Jackie Robinson Rotunda.

The coalition of groups calling for the Mets to cancel the Hebron Fund event includes: Adalah-NY, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Brooklyn For Peace, Coalition of Women for Peace (Israel), CODEPINK Women for Peace, Gush Shalom (Israel), Jews Against the Occupation-NYC, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Jews Say No!, Jewish Voice for Peace, Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (Palestine), U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, and the WESPAC Foundation.

Naalin: Protestors say IDF using live fire

Ali Waked | YNet News

13 November 2009

Two Palestinians were injured Friday at the weekly anti-fence protest in the West Bank village of Naalin.

The protestors claim Israeli security forces have reinstated the use of Ruger rifles, which have been deemed live fire by the military prosecution. The IDF confirmed the use of the rifles, which can be used to fire live ammunition with relatively low force.

Earlier this year B’tselem appealed to the military prosecution with a demand to ban the rifles. Judge Advocate General Avi Mandelblit said in his response to the appeal that “the guidelines for use of this ammunition are severe, and parallel to those for the use of live ammunition”.

In June a Palestinian was killed during an anti-fence protest in Naalin, assumedly from ammunition fired from a Ruger rifle. Four additional Palestinians were injured in the incident.

Meanwhile Friday afternoon 150 left-wing activists and Palestinians protested in the West Bank village of Bil’in, among them three MKs from the Hadash Party.

The protestors were demonstrating their solidarity with the party’s chairman, MK Mohammad Barakeh, against whom the attorney general has recently decided to file an indictment on charges of assaulting police officers in Bil’in in 2005.

The party’s secretary, Ayman Ouda, explained, “We felt that the indictment against Barakeh is actually an indictment against the legitimacy of our struggle, Jews and Arabs as one, against the occupation. We feel we are all defendants so we have decided to strengthen our battle until the charges are dropped.”