Category: In the Media

Palestine’s peaceful struggle

Mohammed Khatib | The Nation

11 September 2009

A few weeks ago, in the dead of night, dozens of Israeli soldiers with painted faces burst violently into my home. If only they had knocked, I would have opened the door. They arrested me. My wife, Lamia, was left alone with our four children. My youngest, 3-year-old Khaled, woke up to the image of Israeli soldiers with painted faces who were taking his father away. He has not stopped crying since. A few nights ago he woke up in terror, sobbing: “Daddy, why did you let the soldiers take me?” That’s the way our children sleep–in a constant state of fear.

Many Americans know that the Obama administration has been pushing the Israeli government to accept a freeze on settlement construction. What is not commonly known is that even as Israel negotiates with the United States, it has been taking steps, including my arrest, to crush the growing Palestinian nonviolent movement opposing Israel’s construction of settlements and the wall on Palestinian land in the West Bank.

For over five years the residents of Bil’in and other villages have been protesting against Israel’s separation wall, which cuts off our village’s land for the sake of Israeli settlement expansion. We have even taken the struggle to the courts. The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in July 2004 that the wall, where it has been built inside the West Bank, is illegal under international law, as are all Israeli settlements. In September 2007, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the wall in Bil’in, which separates us from 50 percent of our land, is illegal according to Israeli law. The wall has yet to have moved.

The Israeli army is using more-lethal weapons and greater violence against protesters, and arresting many people, including many protest organizers. In Bil’in alone, twenty-nine residents have been arrested in the past three months. Twelve of them are children. Almost all were arrested during military raids in the middle of the night. Their detention has been extended repeatedly.

But the charges against them are baseless. As one example, I have been charged with stone throwing. I was released on bail with draconian terms only after my lawyers showed the court passport stamps proving that I was abroad at the time of the alleged offense. My friend, Adeeb Abu-Rahme, 37 years old and the father of nine, has been imprisoned for more than six weeks, though the charges against him are just as absurd.

Every Friday in Bil’in, we march to the wall in peaceful protest, along with our Israeli and international partners. Once a year we hold an international conference about the popular nonviolent struggle. Together we learn and gain inspiration. We struggle together to bring down the many walls between people that the occupation is creating. We’ve repeatedly addressed the Israeli soldiers here, telling them we are not against them as people, but that we oppose their actions as an occupying military force.

Still, nineteen demonstrators have been killed by the Israeli army in these nonviolent demonstrations against the wall. Many have been injured, including Israeli and international activists protesting with us. Here in Bil’in we recently lost our friend Bassem Abu Rahme, who was fatally shot by soldiers in April while he was imploring them to stop shooting at demonstrators.

Several months ago we were warned by Israel’s occupation forces that they intended to crush the popular struggle.

Why has the Israeli government decided now to increase the suppression of demonstrations and to break the spirit of protest leaders? Maybe because they realize that the nonviolent struggle is spreading, that more and more villages have created popular committees that are organizing demonstrations. Perhaps the crackdown is a result of their concern and the growing international movement for the boycott of companies and businessmen such as Lev Leviev who are involved in Israel’s land grab. Or maybe they fear that the new American government could learn through our demonstrations that Israel’s wall is a means to annex land for the growing settlements, and that nonviolent Palestinian protests are being brutally suppressed.

Israel’s actions suggest that it is intimidated by people struggling for their rights in a nonviolent manner. The Israeli government seems to believe that Palestinians who struggle while partnering with Israeli activists endanger Israel’s occupation and that tearing down human walls is a dangerous act. Perhaps what the state of Israel fears most of all is the hope that people can live together based on justice and equality for all.

The Tel Aviv party stops here

Naomi Klein | The Nation

9 September 2009

When I heard the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was holding a celebratory “spotlight” on Tel Aviv, I felt ashamed of Toronto, the city where I live. I thought immediately of Mona Al Shawa, a Palestinian women’s rights activist I met on a recent trip to Gaza. “We had more hope during the attacks,” she told me. “At least then we believed things would change.”

Al Shawa explained that while Israeli bombs rained down last December and January, Gazans were glued to their TVs. What they saw, in addition to the carnage, was a world rising up in outrage: global protests, as many as 100,000 on the streets of London, a group of Jewish women in Toronto occupying the Israeli Consulate. “People called it war crimes,” Al Shawa recalled. “We felt we were not alone in the world.” If Gazans could just survive, it seemed that their suffering could be the catalyst for change.

But today, Al Shawa said, that hope is a bitter memory. The international outrage has evaporated. Gaza has vanished from the news. And it seems that all those deaths–as many as 1,400–were not enough to bring justice. Indeed, Israel is refusing to cooperate even with a UN fact-finding mission headed by respected South African judge Richard Goldstone.

Last spring, while Goldstone’s mission was in Gaza gathering devastating testimony, the Toronto International Film Festival was making the final selections for its Tel Aviv spotlight, timed for the Israeli city’s hundredth birthday. There are many who would have us believe that there is no connection between Israel’s desire to avoid scrutiny for its actions in the occupied territories and the glittering Toronto premieres. I am sure that Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s co-director, believes that himself. He is wrong.

For more than a year, Israeli diplomats have been talking openly about their new strategy to counter growing global anger at Israel’s defiance of international law. It’s no longer enough, they argue, just to invoke Sderot every time someone raises Gaza. The task is also to change the subject to more pleasant topics: film, arts, gay rights–things that underline commonalities between Israel and places like Paris, New York and Toronto. After the Gaza attack, as the protests rose, this strategy went into high gear. “We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theater companies, exhibits,” Arye Mekel, deputy director-general for cultural affairs for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, told the New York Times. “This way, you show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.” And hip, cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, which has been celebrating its centennial with Israeli-sponsored “beach parties” in New York, Vienna and Copenhagen all summer long, is the best ambassador of all.

Toronto got an early taste of this new cultural mission. A year ago, Amir Gissin, Israeli consul-general in Toronto, explained that the “Brand Israel” campaign would include, according to a report in the Canadian Jewish News, “a major Israeli presence at next year’s Toronto International Film Festival, with numerous Israeli, Hollywood and Canadian entertainment luminaries on hand.” Gissin pledged, “I’m confident everything we plan to do will happen.” Indeed it has.

Let’s be clear: no one is claiming the Israeli government is secretly running TIFF’s Tel Aviv spotlight, whispering in Bailey’s ear about which films to program. The point is that the festival’s decision to give Israel pride of place, holding up Tel Aviv as a “young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity,” matches Israel’s stated propaganda goals to a T. Gal Uchovsky, one of the directors in the spotlight, is quoted in the festival catalog saying that Tel Aviv is “a haven [Israelis] can run away to when they want to forget about wars and the burdens of daily life.”

Partly in response, Udi Aloni, the wonderful Israeli filmmaker whose film Local Angel premiered at TIFF, sent a video message to the festival, challenging its programmers to resist political escapism and instead “go to the places where it’s hard to go.” It’s ironic that TIFF’s Tel Aviv programming is being called a spotlight, because celebrating that city in isolation–without looking at Gaza, without looking at what is on the other side of the towering concrete walls, barbed wire and checkpoints–actually obscures far more than it illuminates. There are some wonderful Israeli films included in the program. They deserve to be shown as a regular part of the festival, liberated from this highly politicized frame.

It was in this context that a small group of filmmakers, writers and activists, of which I was a part, drafted The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration Under Occupation (torontodeclaration.blogspot.com). It has been signed by the likes of Danny Glover, Viggo Mortensen, Howard Zinn, Alice Walker, Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, Ken Loach and more than a thousand others. Among them is revered Palestinian director Elia Suleiman, as well as many Israeli filmmakers.

The counterattacks–spearheaded by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the extremist Jewish Defense League–have been at once predictable and inventive. The most frequently repeated claim is that the letter’s signatories are censors, calling for a boycott of the festival. In fact, many of the signatories have much-anticipated films at this year’s festival, and we are not boycotting it: we are objecting to the Tel Aviv spotlight portion of it. More inventive has been the assertion that by declining to celebrate Tel Aviv as just another cool metropolis, we are questioning the city’s “right to exist.” (The Republican actor Jon Voight even accused Jane Fonda of “aiding and abetting those who seek the destruction of Israel.”) The letter does no such thing. It is, instead, a simple message of solidarity, one that says: We don’t feel like partying with Israel this year. It is also a small way of saying to Mona Al Shawa and millions of other Palestinians living under occupation and siege that we have not forgotten them.

An open letter to Mr. Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa

Haider Eid | The Palestine Chronicle

10 September 2009

Dear Mr. President,

I am writing to express my dismay and disappointment with both your attendance at the national conference of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies – a racist organization by any standards – as well as the content of your speech at that forum.

I am a naturalised South African of Palestinian origin. I spent more than five years in Johannesburg, during which I earned a PhD from the University of Johannesburg and lectured at the-then Vista University in Soweto and Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg.

I would like to take issue with the manner in which you express your support for the two-state solution: “It is a solution that fulfils the aspirations of both parties for independent homelands through two states for two peoples, Israel and an independent, adjoining, and viable state of Palestine” (emphasis mine). Allow me, Mr. President, as a resident of Gaza, to express my shock with the fact that – only 8 months after the Gaza massacre, in which 1500 civilians, including 434 children, were brutally murdered – you still believe that there are two symmetrical sides. You even call it the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict!” Was that your belief in the 1970’s and 80’s; that there were “two-sides” to the South African “conflict”? Were there two equal parties, namely White and Black, with equal claim to the land and equal historical responsibility for the-then status quo? No doubt, this sounds like a bizarre interpretation of South African history and one which we Palestinians find equally astounding when applied to our history and our reality today.

Mr. President, these words of yours are even more disturbing, given your own involvement in the commendable struggle against the brutal, anti-human apartheid system and the notion of “independent homelands” which were based on the separation of human beings. Your struggle as Black South Africans, was morally superior to apartheid because it was inclusive where apartheid focused on separation; it was embracing where apartheid focused on division; it was life-affirming where apartheid was violent and murderous.

The South African anti-apartheid goal, adopted by anti-apartheid activists all around the world was unequivocal: the end of the racist system and ideology of apartheid. There could be no toenadering (rapprochement)with apartheid ideologues; no creation of homelands and puppet leaders: the system had to be dismantled in its entirety. Many South Africans supported by a sustained global anti-apartheid campaign, sacrificed their lives to bring down the Bantustansan euphemistically, called independent homelands by the apartheid regime. Mr. President, Steve Biko, Oliver Tambo, Chris Hani, the Mxenges, the Slovosac to mention but a few anti-apartheid heroes must have listened to the speech to the JBD and wondered what happened to the universal values and human rights espoused by the ANC.

Comrade Jacob (if I may),

I would like to brief you on the nature of the powerful party, i.e. Israel – with whom your post-apartheid government still, amazingly, maintains exceptional diplomatic and economic ties.

Unlike the new post-apartheid South Africa, which you helped to create, in the State of Israel all human beings are NOT equal. There are fundamental artificially created and selectively rewarded a level of of citizens in the state. Israel defines itself as a Jewish State. It, therefore, creates a bizarre distinction between “nationality” and “citizenship.” Almost 22% of the citizens of Israel are Palestinians who are excluded from such a definition. Israel thus, by definition is NOT the state of its citizens, but rather that of “The Jewish People”, most of whom, like the members of JBD whom you were addressing, have no birthright connection to it. The question which begs an answer is what the status of those Palestinian citizens in a Jewish state is? The answer is, as every single – to use a word you must abhor “non-white” South African knows: Racism.

The delegates at the national conference of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, Jewish, but at the same time, South African citizens “enjoy full rights” in Israel, rights that apartheid Israel denies to us, the indigenous people of this land. They also call us “Israeli Arabs”, “Jerusalem residents”, “Arabs of the territories”, not to mention the refugees living in the Diaspora, whose mere mention always spoils any party, and whose right to return and compensation is sanctioned by International Law (UNGA resolution 194).

Israeli nationality, therefore, is non-existent. Instead, there is “Jewish Nationality”. To make such a bizarre term comprehensible, think of “White Nationality” as opposed to South African. In your speech before the JBD, you state very eloquently that “(m)uch as we are conscious of who we are culturally and otherwise, it must not take away the national identity, as we should be South Africans first”.

The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crimes of Apartheid, Article 2, Part 3, clearly defines apartheid as:

“[a]ny legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work… the right to education, the right to leave and return to their country the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence.”

This definition, in its entirety, clearly applies not only to the Palestinian people residing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but also those living in Israel itself. This is precisely the reason that the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Territories, a fellow South African, John Dugard, concluded that “the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid appears to be violated by many practices”.

If you were born to Palestinian parents living in Israel – a fate you have been spared, Mr. President – you too would be denied the rights of “Jewish Nationality” and been forced to submit to institutionalized inferiority or choose to resist it.

Furthermore, ICSPCA (quoted above), Article 2, Part 4, makes it crystal clear that:

“[t]he term ‘the crime of apartheid’,’ shall apply to “any measures including legislative measure, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate measures and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups The expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof..”

Comrade Jacob, the word apartheid never appears once in your speech before the JBD! A listener would never know that you were speaking to an audience who actively support apartheid in another country.

Did you know that racist laws used to forbid Black property ownership in white areas in apartheid South Africa are in force in apartheid Israel? Indigenous Palestinian citizens of Israel are not only prohibited from living on land owned by “Jewish institutions”, but are also not allowed by force of “law” to reside in any areas designated “Jewish” either.

I, myself, Mr. President, a resident of Gaza, like so many Palestinians, have legal title to my parents’ land in Israel, but have no “legal” right to it because my parents’ property, like that of millions of other Palestinians’, was taken away from us and given over to Jewish ownership. The facts are that Jews owned only 7% of Palestine before 1948; today 93% is considered “state land” and can only be owned by Jews or Israel.

This is only one example, Comrade Jacob, of the nature of the state your government deems “democratic”and “friendly” despite its past strategic ties with apartheid SA. In your presidential campaign, you were quoted singing “kill the Boer!” And yet, in your speech, you “unequivocally” condemn “all forms of violence from whatever quarter”, particularly where civilians are targeted!

I fail to understand this contradiction. Is this a reflection of the difference between comrade Jacob and President Zuma? Do you, as president, think that Palestinians have no right to resist their occupation and dispossession? You even equate our resistance with the War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity committed by the Israeli Occupation forces in the West Bank and, in particular, in Gaza.

Is it too much, comrade Jacob, for us, representatives of Palestinian Civil Society organizations to ask your government to sever all diplomatic ties with apartheid Israel, and endorses not to say lead the growing global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel? Is that really too much to ask a democratic post-apartheid South Africa for?

Is this the embodiment of Fanon’s prophecy about the “Pitfalls of National (Racial?) Consciousness?” Is it because the Black Middle class which your government represents and which has taken power from the White Middle class is underdeveloped? Fanon, whom you must have read while on the run from the apartheid police, says that this national middle class “has practically no economic power, and in any case it is in no way commensurate with the bourgeoisie of the mother country which it hopes to replace.” Is this why you are prepared to kowtow to the South African Jewish community which “has been called one of the most tightly-knit in the world, overwhelmingly united in its support for Israel?”

Your government, Mr. President, turns a blind eye to the war crimes of its own citizens against Palestinians. The South African war criminal David Benjamin was allowed to freely move around South Africa and share his tactics of support and defence for the Israeli Occupation Forces in its recent onslaught against the Gaza Strip with impunity. There are seventy other South Africans that are known to have links with the destruction of the Israeli Occupation Forces who enjoy the same impunity. It is left to individuals and civil society organizations in South Africa to take action against these criminals that should rightly be the task of the government.

Your post-apartheid government, Mr. President, unashamedly, supports the two-state solution: one for Palestinians (Muslim and Christians), and one for Jews. In other words, you support the re-birth of Bantustans, albeit in the Middle East this time. The two-state solution is a racist solution, comrade Jacob. If you did not accept it for yourselves in South Africa, why force it on Palestinians instead of supporting us as we demand the right to our homeland every single inch of it?

Mr. President,

A politics based on narrow-minded, selfish pragmatism was rejected by all anti-apartheid forces, locally and internationally during the years of the anti-apartheid struggle. What was promoted, instead, was adherence to universal principles of equality and dignity.

I truly hope you will reconsider. I know that it is my constitutional right as a citizen of the New South Africa – which I am proud of – to address you directly. I do so to express my deep disagreement and dissatisfaction with your government’s Middle East policy and its continued support for the apartheid policies of the Israeli government, given that this support undermines and actively harms the Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination.

Sincerely,
Professor Haidar Eid
Gaza, Palestine

– Dr. Haidar Eid is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, Al-Aqsa University, Gaza Strip, Palestine. Dr. Eid is a founding member of the One Democratic State Group (ODSG) and a member of Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Palestinian driver forced to unload truck despite papers

Ali Waked | YNet News

10 September 2009

The driver of a truck loaded with boulders drove last Friday to the Palestinian town, Ras Tira, to deliver his truck’s contents.

He was shocked to discover that, despite having all the proper documentation for delivering the goods signed by Israel’s Coordination and Liaison Authority, IDF soldiers at the checkpoint asked him to unload the boulders so that the bed of the truck could be checked.

The separation fence splits Ras Tira from the main bloc of Palestinian towns in the West Bank, creating an enclave on the side of the fence near Qalqilya.

Ras Tira Mayor Hisham Mara’adeh told Ynet that the driver reached the entrance of the town around 6:30 am, but was detained there until 12 pm explaining the situation to the soldiers.

The driver explained to the soldiers that he had no problem unloading the boulders from the truck.

However, because of their large size, he had no way of reloading them onto the vehicle and transporting them to their final destination.

This did not seem to deter the soldiers. They insisted that he unload the rocks, and the driver ultimately gave in. He then had to order a tractor with a crane, paid for at his expense, in order to reload the weighty goods back onto the truck. Only at 3 pm did the driver and his load enter the town.

“These scenes are almost daily. When we happen upon an officer who is not nice, the life of the village, mainly residents and drivers – especially those who have to deliver a load – turn into a nightmare,” said Mara’adeh.

The mayor said that all petitions to the Coordination and Liaison Authority and to human rights organizations have failed to change the situation. Mara’adeh, who filmed the event together with the women of MachsomWatch, also said that “the soldiers bully the residents.”

The women of MachsomWatch said that this incident occurred during a period when Israel is actually easing up on checkpoint activity in honor of the Ramadan holiday.

The IDF Spokesperson declined to comment.

Benefit Sunday for former Berkeley tree sitter severely injured in Israel

Kristin Bender | The Oakland Tribune

9 September 2009

Six months after Tristan Anderson, a former UC Berkeley tree sitter and Bay Area activist, nearly died after being struck in the head with a tear-gas canister fired by Israeli troops, friends are holding a benefit Sunday to raise money for his recovery costs.

Anderson, 38, remains at a rehabilitation hospital near Tel Aviv and continues to have setbacks and infections after skull surgery last month, supporters said.

The operation came after doctors learned Anderson was suffering from post-traumatic hydrocephalus, a blockage of the ventricles — open spaces in the brain — that causes poor circulation of cerebral spinal fluid in the head, supporters said.

“His girlfriend, Gabrielle Silverman, and his parents are hopeful and giving Tristan as much encouragement and support as they can, even though by all appearances he is struggling to get better,” said friend Karen Pickett. “There has been progress, but there have been times when they have lost ground because there have been setbacks.”

Anderson, a freelance photojournalist, sustained life-threatening injuries March 13 as he was taking photographs after a regular Friday demonstration over Israel’s West Bank separation barrier, Pickett said. He was struck in the right temple with a tear-gas canister fired by Israeli troops, according to peace activists with the International Solidarity Movement.

His skull was fractured, and some of the bone fragments entered his brain, friends said. He sustained a large hole in his forehead where he was struck by the canister, and he was blinded in his right eye, friends said.

The benefit is at 8 p.m. Sunday at La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave., in Berkeley. There will be music from Rebecca Riots, a female folk trio; the Funky Nixons; American Indian singer and songwriter Phoenix; spoken word, an art auction and an update on Anderson.

The doors open at 7:30 p.m., and organizers are asking for a donation of $5 to $20 to cover Anderson’s recuperation costs. The event is sponsored by Friends of Tristan and Palestine and the International Solidarity Movement. For details, call 510-548-3113 or visit justicefortristan.org.

“We are trying to raise as much money as we can in support of his recovery costs,” Pickett said. “But it’s also a time to raise support and let people know what is going on with Tristan, and to make the point that things are still serious and he needs continuing support.”

On the day Anderson, of Oakland, was injured, there were several hundred protesters in the West Bank town of Naalin, where Palestinians and international backers frequently had gathered to demonstrate against the barrier. Israel says the barrier is necessary to keep Palestinian attackers from infiltrating into Israel, but many Palestinians view it as a thinly veiled land grab because it juts into the West Bank at multiple points.

Before going to the Middle East, he was involved in the tree-sit at UC Berkeley to protest the building of a sports training center. That protest lasted 21 months, but Anderson, who was known as “Cricket” during the sit, did not sit in a tree the entire time.

It is not known how long he was in the trees, but he came down from his perch on June 19, 2008, and was given a stay-away order, police said.

He was found near the tree-sit the following day, arrested and sent to trial, where he was found not guilty. The tree-sit ended last September, when the university razed the trees.