Category: In the Media

Backed by their army, settlers bid for expansion in three locations

Ma’an News

8 August 2009

Israeli settlers launched a series of actions on Friday in a bid to take over more West Bank land from Palestinians.

In the city of Hebron settlers began planting Palestinian-owned land under military guard in an apparent takeover attempt. Settlers from the illegal Israeli colony of Kiryat Arba moved on to land belonging to Muhammad Mustafa Jaber, in the Al-Beqa’a area, outside of Hebron.

Jaber told Ma’an Israeli soldiers blocked his family from reaching the land. A similar incident took place last week when soldiers cordoned off his land to make way for the settlers’ activities.

In a separate incident dozens of Israeli military vehicles closed the village of Kfil Haris, north of the West Bank town of Salfit, Thursday as they escorted a group of settlers through the area, locals reported.

Shop owners were ordered to close, families out for evening strolls were told to return to their homes and all car traffic in the village was ground to a halt and drivers stranded at the village entrance as troops spread across the area.

Kfil Haris resident Karam Abu Hammad said troops ordered him to leave his car at the entrance of the city and proceed on backloads on foot. On his way home he was ordered off the streets by half a dozen other soldiers.

Israeli troops erected checkpoints throughout the village to ensure locals stayed indoors as a herd of settlers entered the area on busses to visit an area that villagers recognize as a holy shrine to the Prophet Zel Kefl, an ancient local religious figure. The area is surrounded by a village graveyard.

In years past settlers defaced the shrine and nearby tombs with anti-Arab slogans and spray paint, but Thursday night made a pilgrimage to worship at the area.

Meanwhile, in the town of Beit Sahour, outside of Bethlehem, Ma’an reporters observed settler activists converging on an abandoned Israeli military base they are seeking to transform into a settlement. Settler groups have been holding weekly events at the hilltop base, including religious services, lectures, and martial arts trainings, all under heavy military guard.

Taking over Jerusalem

Matt Kennard | The Guardian

5 August 2009

A couple of months ago I spent a fortnight in Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement – activists who help Palestinians non-violently resist Israeli oppression. The most pressing of many issues during my stay was the attempts by an Israeli settler company, Nahalat Shimon, backed by the Israeli courts, to cleanse East Jerusalem of its Arab population, focusing its efforts at that time on the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

I spent a week sleeping on a floor in the house of the Hanoun family – a husband and wife and their three children. Longer-term activists were sleeping there as well, ready to document their inevitable eviction. Well, last Saturday at 5.30am the Israeli border police did come and forceably evict them (so forceably that the son Rami had to be taken to hospital). The activists were arrested, as were protesters who subsequently took to the streets. The Hanouns were offered a tent by the Red Cross.

Sheikh Jarrah is in a valley down from the American Colony hotel where Tony Blair stays in a luxury suite when visiting Jerusalem as the Quartet’s “Peace Envoy”. When you look out of the Hanouns’ window, you can see Blair’s hotel 30 metres away; Blair can probably see the Hanouns’ house during his morning swim. He has said nothing.

The most disturbing fact about Israel’s eviction programme is that when you look around East Jerusalem and the surrounding area there are considerable plots of land without homes. If they wanted to build new illegal settlements without kicking out Palestinians in the area they could do so. The targeting of Sheikh Jarrah and other areas is actually a process of racial purification, the transformation of East Jerusalem into a unified Jewish Jerusalem.

The Hanoun family have been the victims of terror for decades as they have fought off Israel’s attempts to take their homes. Maher Hanoun’s father was a refugee from the nakba (or “the catastophe”, as Palestinians call the founding of Israel in 1948). The Jordanian government gave them the property in 1956 as compensation and transferred the ownership to them in 1962. Maher was born in 1958 so has spent his whole life, and bought up all his children, in his home.

As in other parts of East Jerusalem, Maher was offered payment if he would go quietly. He refused. “This is my home,” he said to me. “I would never respect myself if I sold my home for money. They want to build a settlement on our hearts, on our dreams.”

Across the way, there is a makeshift tent where a 62-year-old woman now lives after settlers took over her house. Initially they only took two parts of her house so she was literally living next to them. Then she was kicked out. Her husband had a heart attack when their house was violently repossessed with the help of more than 50 soldiers (on the night of Barack Obama’s US election victory). After spending some time in hospital, her husband had another attack two weeks later and died. The family again refused money to leave their homes. “I don’t have a life now,” she said from her tent. “With my husband and house gone, there is no life. I just hope with the help of God that this occupation will stop and we can return to our homes.”

I don’t know what happened to this women in the eviction on Saturday night, but one report I read said even her tent had been destroyed.

The one good thing about the Netanyahu-Lieberman administration is that they are much more honest about their colonisation programme than their “centrist” predecessors. The Netanyahu administration is now willing to get rid of some “outposts”, in return for continued expansion in East Jerusalem and “natural growth” in existing settlements throughout the West Bank. That was the policy negotiated by Ehud Olmert and George Bush before the Annapolis conference in 2007. Netanyahu is just more honest in saying that it obviates the possibility of a Palestinian state.

Maher agrees: “I can’t see how we can have a capital if there is no land, no houses, no people,” he said.

The next stop in this attempt to cleanse the putative future capital of Palestine of its indigenous population is the Bustan area of Silwan which sits in the valley down from the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall. When I first arrived in Israel I went on the City of David tour, which functions as a three-hour Israeli propaganda extravaganza (dressed up as an archeological experience). King David in Biblical lore is said to have been the first Jewish leader to settle the land in Jerusalem and his son King Solomon is said to have built the First Temple in 960 BC.

In 2005, some archeological finds purported to provide evidence that the lore was true. Now, the Israeli government wants to turn the homes of the people of Silwan into an archaeological theme park. Eighty-eight houses are due for demolition, home to about 1,500 Palestinians.

Israeli police deliver East Jerusalem demolition orders

Ma’an News

5 August 2009

Eight Palestinians were injured when they were assaulted by Israeli forces who delivered demolition orders in the Al-Bustan neighborhood of East Jerusalem on Wednesday.

Jerusalem Police used tear gas to disperse residents who confronted the Israeli officers serving five demolition orders in the densely populated neighborhood, where there are already 90 standing demolition orders.

Israeli police also seized the ID card of Musa Odeh, a member of the Al-Bustan Committee, a popular organization dedicated to peacefully opposing the demolitions.

Al-Bustan is part of the Silwan area, in a valley next to Jerusalem’s Old City. The Israeli-controlled Jerusalem municipal government says it intends to level the neighborhood and build a park.

Israeli authorities contend the Palestinian houses were built without construction permits, which are rarely issued to Palestinians. Some of the structures, however, were built before Israel occupied and annexed East Jerusalem in 1967.

The international community does not recognize Israeli control over East Jerusalem, which is part of the West Bank.

Evicted Palestinians stand their ground – on thin mattresses

Ilene R. Prusher | Christian Science Monitor

4 August 2009

It was 13-year-old Diala who was awoken first, just after 5 a.m. on Sunday morning, by the commotion outside. She rushed to the window, saw special riot police in black uniforms, and ran to wake her parents.

By the time she did, the Israeli police were already breaking in through doors and windows, forcing the 17-member Hanoun family – three brothers, their wives, and children – to leave the home their relatives acquired a half-century ago. In all, 58 Palestinians were evicted in this predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah.

Though they had received – and refused to obey – a court order in May to leave after losing a longstanding dispute over property rights, it was still a shock.

“I had one shoe on and one off, and the policeman who was ordering me out tried to move aside the glass they broke to make sure that I didn’t cut my feet,” says Diala’s mother, Nadia Hanoun. A few hours later, they stood across the street and watched as the police escorted a few families of Jewish settlers into their homes.

“He was concerned about my feet bleeding, but he doesn’t see the bleeding in my heart. It’s so difficult for us to see them move in people who are not from here, into our house, into the home my husband was born in, while we’re on the street,” says Mrs. Hanoun, sitting in the shade of a tree about 50 feet from their front door, now blocked off by a line of security barriers and several police vans with flashing lights. The family has for two nights slept on the thin mattresses piled behind her; she says they have no other place to go.

The events in Sheikh Jarrah garnered international censure from the European Union, the United Nations (UN) and from Britain, which said it was “appalled” at the move. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday night called the Israeli evictions “deeply regrettable” and “provocative.” Such a move “is not in keeping with Israeli obligations and I urge the government of Israel and municipal officials to refrain from such provocative actions,” she said.

Who is responsible?

Neither the Jerusalem municipality nor any government office is taking responsibility for the incident, pointing instead to the courts. There, a decades-long battle over the houses has ensued, in which a group of Jewish families say they can show that their forbearers owned the houses here as far back as the late 19th century, when the area was administered by the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish families say they were forced to abandon the houses during a spate of Arab attacks in the area in the 1920s and 30s. In the war for Israel’s establishment in 1948, the territory became part of Jordan.

In 1956, 28 Palestinian families who were refugees from Israel after 1948 were resettled in Sheikh Jarrah as part of an UN project to assist people made homeless in the war. The Hanoun family, who say they are originally from Haifa, was one of the recipients – and Maher Hanoun, Nadia’s husband, was born in the house.

The story gets more tangled from there. Both the Israelis and Palestinians involved in the dispute say that they have Ottoman-era property ownership documents called tabu which proves that they are the rightful owners. Palestinians say that the Hijazi family – who now live elsewhere in Jerusalem – can show they own the land. But the Jewish families, represented legally by a real estate group called Nahalat Shimon International also have Turkish tabu papers they say prove the land is theirs.

According to a briefing (PDF) by Israeli advocacy group Ir Amim, an Israeli group that opposed the evictions and advocates a Jerusalem “equitably shared by the two peoples,” Nahalat Shimon is seeking to build a 200-unit settlement, Shimon HaTzadik, in the area. It’s unclear who is behind the real-estate company, which is sometimes characterized as a settler group.

“We don’t focus on the specific settlers’ groups because in our view the one who is really responsible in these cases is the Israeli government and the municipality,” says Orly Noy, a spokesperson for Ir Amim,

After an Israeli court ruled in the Jewish families’ favor, the Palestinian families were given a court order to leave by July 19. The families refused. “We know their documents are forgeries,” says Rami Hanoun, whose arm is in a sling after being injured by police when he was evicted from the house.

Arabs see ethnic-cleansing of Jerusalem

Hosni Abu Hussein, a lawyer for the two extended Palestinian families – which include eight nuclear families – says that six of the eight nuclear families who were evicted were thrown out illegally, when police overstepped their orders. But two of the eight families, including Maher, Nadia, and three children, don’t have a strong case for getting reinstated.

“This eviction was done in an illegal matter and without due process,” says Abu Hussein. “The duty of the authorities as they see it is to cleanse Jerusalem of Arabs.”

Though that’s a harsh accusation, it is a sentiment that is felt throughout East Jerusalem, where many Palestinian residents are facing either eviction or demolition orders. Just two weeks ago, Israeli officials approved the construction of settler apartments in another part of Sheikh Jarrah on the grounds of the old Shepherd Hotel. Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat defended the move, saying it was inconceivable that Jews not be allowed to live anywhere they chose in the city Israel has declared as its undivided and eternal capital.

Two different spokesman – one for the Justice Ministry and one for the Jerusalem mayor’s office – said they could not comment on the case because it was solely in the hands of the court.

A plethora of international organizations have expressed dismay over the evictions, which came amid attempts to revive the peace process. The Obama administration in particular has asked Israel to freeze settlement growth in the West Bank and not to authorize projects that aim to settle Israelis in the heart of Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, thereby changing the “status quo” and frustrating hopes for a two-state solution that would include a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem.

Some Israelis vehemently disagree with their government’s policy in Sheikh Jarrah. Two of them are professors Yaron Ezrahi and Ruth HaCoheh, a couple who came down the hill from a conference at nearby Hebrew University to visit with the Palestinians families and sit with other visitors empathetic to their plight.

“It’s going on under our noses, so how can we not come? We find it outrageous,” says Prof. Ezrahi, a political scientist who has been a frequent critic of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. “These kinds of actions destroy the moral fabric of our society.”

And still they run these taxis

Eva Bartlett | Inter Press Service

3 August 2009

“It cost over 1,000 dollars. Before the siege, it would have been 500 to 1000 shekels (roughly 125 to 250 dollars), at most 250 dollars. Anyway, I had to buy it; you need to maintain the car when you use it all the time.”

The father of five drives one of Gaza’s many run-down taxis, working round the clock but earning just enough to get by. “I work day and night, but only for 20 shekels (five dollars), or sometimes 50 shekels (12 dollars) per day. That’s only enough to buy food and cover my children’s needs.”

Salleh lists the other expenses his meagre salary will not cover: “I can’t afford a licence or car insurance, they’re very expensive. I’ve gone four years without them. If I have an accident, I could go to jail for not having the licence on insurance.”

Rami Dawoud, translator for Adnan Abu Oada from the Ministry of Transport says the ministry offers discounts to some people whose financial situation is dire. But a licence which costs 100 shekels, and insurance that costs 1,500 shekels or more are beyond the reach of many like Salleh who can’t make ends meet as it is.

Even though six months have passed since Israel’s brutal three-week bombardment of Gaza, Salleh, like many other Palestinians, has not been able to repair the damage. “I can’t replace the windows and doors in my house, they were broken during the war. For the most part you can’t find them in Gaza, and if they’ve been brought in through the tunnels then they’re far too expensive.”

Facing the debt of an unpaid car part, needed insurance, and daily expenses, the driver is considering other ways of making money. “Maybe I’ll have to sell my wife’s only jewellery to pay the bills. Maybe I’ll have to sell our refrigerator and television. That might bring 700 shekels (under 200 dollars).”

Salleh isn’t alone in his financial worries. “It’s not just me. All of the drivers have problems: problems getting spare parts to service our cars; problems earning enough money; even problems giving correct change. Every day I have difficulties because of change: there are almost no half-shekels in Gaza any more.”

The copper pieces equivalent to about 12 cents are indeed scarce in Gaza. This is a part of the siege-induced currency crisis which is affecting all Palestinians in Gaza. “Some customers don’t care about the change. I give others items worth half a shekel, like gum or tissues.

“But some people want the half shekel…maybe they are students, jobless, or poor, so they need it. But what can I do if I can’t find them?”

Awad Zarga has eight people in his family to care for. Two of his children are in university. “Each semester costs 400 dollars per student. My kids need 10 shekels a day to go to and from university and for their expenses.” Zarga drives a taxi which he says earns him 50 shekels on a good day. Within five minutes of driving, the car stalls twice. “It’s the Egyptian petrol,” he says. “It’s no good.” But this fuel which comes through the tunnels is cheaper, at 2.5 shekels a litre. Israeli fuel, when it’s allowed into Gaza, costs six shekels per litre.

Zarga’s route takes him over some of Gaza’s ruddier streets, pot-holed and in need of re-paving. Many of Gaza’s roads have long been in a state of disrepair, or were more recently torn apart by invading Israeli tanks and bulldozers during the war on Gaza.

Issam drives a beat-up two door car. Torn plastic sheeting replaces the rear window, the fumes of cheap gasoline permeate the car. The windshield has two large crack points, obscuring the view outside. Bits of tape are plastered on doors and surfaces, somehow holding things together, including the door panelling.

The left back passenger door must be opened from the outside. And the ignition has stopped working, meaning every time the car is turned on or off it has to be done by hot-wiring it.

“We pay rent for our house. Whatever I earn goes towards our daily needs and the rent. I dream of owning and farming my own land, but with this kind of money that’s impossible,” he says.

Under the Israeli-led siege on Gaza, import of spare parts for all types of machinery including automobiles has largely stopped, save via the tunnels. Replacements are expensive and of poor quality.

Rami Dawoud confirms that no cars, new or used, have been allowed into Gaza in the last three years. Gaza currently has around 45,000 cars, of which many are worn-down, damaged, in need of parts unavailable in Gaza, or on their last legs. According to the Ministry of Transport, 1,197 cars were damaged during the war, another 565 were completely destroyed.

“The only new vehicles we’ve gotten in the past three years have been donations from the convoys entering Gaza or other outside supporters,” said Dawoud. “We used to get spare parts for car maintenance from the West Bank, from Egypt, and from Israel. But that has stopped.”

Nabil, a central Gaza resident, drives only at night. “I can’t afford the insurance,” he says, “and I’m worried that if I drive during the day, the police will stop me and take away my car.”

Before the borders between Gaza and Israel were sealed, Nabil worked as a taxi driver in Israel. When he was relegated to finding work in Gaza’s destroyed economy, he opted like so many others to drive a taxi, one of the few remaining types of work. The 25 years old car he bought for 1,200 dollars suffices for the task, but requires upkeep.

The father of 18 struggles on the 40-50 shekels he can earn per night. From this income, Nabil must spend roughly 200 shekels per month on car maintenance and fuel.

“When I do get stopped by the police, I ask them: ‘How can I pay for the insurance? Where will I get the money? I can barely feed my kids.”

Nabil also fails to pay his water and electricity bills, and cannot afford the wheelchairs his two 18-year-old disabled twins need. Thirteen of his children are in school, and over the school year have different expenses. Four of his sons sometimes get work with fishers, if the haul is good. On such a day they might bring home another 20 shekels for the family’s needs.

If he had the choice, Nabil says he’d take any type of employment. “I just want to work without problems with police, like in construction. Work like anyone else.”

Taxi drivers in Gaza, many of whose former professions are no longer possible, can either wait for the day when borders open, or make do with the cars they have, such as they are.