Category: In the Media

Threatened and beaten on the way to Gaza

Adam Shapiro | Huffington Post

17 July 2009

I departed Cyprus with 20 others on June 29 in a converted ferry carrying humanitarian provisions intended for Palestinians in Gaza cut off from the world by the Israeli military siege. Our intent was to bring Palestinians toys, medicines, toolkits, olive tree saplings, and one 50-kilo bag of cement while breaking the sea barrier Israel maintains to imprison Palestinians in their coastal territory.

An independent filmmaker, and human rights advocate, I planned to document the trip and life in Gaza.

Approximately half of Gaza’s population is under age 18. These children suffer the consequences of an Israeli imposed economic collapse ostensibly intended to undermine Hamas rule. As with Iraq, the sanctions serve only to devastate a population and decimate civil society.

At 2:00 am on June 30, somewhere off our starboard side, an Israeli warship shone its searchlights at our boat. A voice called on the radio, “You are navigating towards a blockaded area. You are hereby ordered to change your course. If you do not, we will be forced to use all necessary force to stop you.”

These waters are patrolled unchallenged by the Israeli navy. Our call for help – one previous boat of ours was intentionally rammed by the Israeli navy – to a UN ship we knew to be in radio range went unanswered.

We counted eight Israeli warships and four zodiac boats with boarding parties and divers in hot pursuit. About an hour earlier an F-16 executed fly-overs. This was US-supplied and American taxpayer-subsidized-force all to stop one bag of cement from reaching a ghetto and human-made disaster area.

In a flurry of activity, we were boarded. Those of us with video cameras bore the brunt of the over-zealous navy forces. We were beaten to break our grasp on the video cameras. I have documented events from Afghanistan to Darfur to various locations around the Middle East, but until then I had never been physically attacked on account of my work. Israel’s military censor continues to hold the evidence and I expect never to retrieve it. With the evidence gone, much of the media have treated the event as though it never occurred.

Instead of sailing into Gaza’s bombed and broken port, we were kidnapped at gunpoint, taken to a foreign country, and imprisoned. Instead of delivering toys to children in Azbet Abed Rabbo, where in February I met families living in tents (again) because their homes were left in rubble by Israel’s December-January invasion, we stood at attention for a prison guard to check our cell.
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As other governments spoke up publicly for their citizens, the US government was notably silent.

In his Cairo speech, President Obama asserted, “Palestinians must abandon violence…For centuries,” he continued, “black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights.” He then noted it was peaceful action that had won rights in the United States, South Africa, and elsewhere. Yet how seriously can Palestinians take his exhortation to nonviolence when he allows an ally to kidnap and beat American citizens attempting nonviolently to assist Palestinians in war-ravaged Gaza?

Even President Obama, who seemed so sincere in his Cairo speech, is imprisoned by the status quo of American-Israeli relations that bend American values and interest to the will of a state that is increasingly being labeled internationally with the brand of apartheid. One set of laws for Jews and one set of laws for Palestinians is unacceptable in the 21st century. Washington can only ignore the facts for so long when Israel’s housing minister states, “We can all be bleeding hearts, but I think it is unsuitable [for Jews and Palestinians] to live together [in Israel].”

As for Gaza, Palestinians there are worlds away from hoping for equal rights. Day to day survival is the priority. The International Committee of the Red Cross recently issued a report, “Gaza: 1.5 million people trapped in despair,” in which it details that nothing has been rebuilt that was destroyed during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, over 70% of Gazans live in poverty, and malnutrition is on the rise among the most vulnerable – the children of Gaza. Trauma is a foregone conclusion.

The World Health Organization has reported that one-third of children under five and women of childbearing age are anemic.

In his Cairo speech, President Obama called the present situation facing Palestinians “intolerable,” adding that “just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel’s security.” More recently, President Obama called on Israel to allow in the reconstruction and humanitarian aid that Gaza desperately needs, though he fell far short of calling for the fundamental human rights to movement, education, health and security that all Palestinians deserve.

It is in this context of despair and a complete lack of governmental will to challenge Israel in which a generation of Palestinians is growing up in Gaza worse off than their great grandparents who fled there in 1948. Our small boat tried to break the apathy that permits blockade and siege. We were ordinary civilians, taking a risk on the high seas, confronting the region’s most powerful navy, because despite all the words describing the situation in Gaza, nothing is improving. In fact, after the immediate outcry following Israel’s winter invasion, Israel again started reducing the number of trucks allowed to enter Gaza.

The Berlin Wall did not fall in a day. Consequently, our next ship sails for Palestinian freedom in a month

Adam Shapiro is a human rights advocate and documentary filmmaker. His latest film is “Chronicles of a Refugee.”

Wiping Arabic names off the map

Jonathan Cook | Counterpunch

18 July 2009

Thousands of road signs are the latest front in Israel’s battle to erase Arab heritage from much of the Holy Land.

Israel Katz, the transport minister, announced this week that signs on all major roads in Israel, East Jerusalem and possibly parts of the West Bank would be “standardised”, converting English and Arabic place names into straight transliterations of the Hebrew name.

Currently, road signs include the place name as it is traditionally rendered in all three languages.

Under the new scheme, the Arab identity of important Palestinian communities will be obscured: Jerusalem, or “al Quds” in Arabic, will be Hebraised to “Yerushalayim”; Nazareth, or “al Nasra” in Arabic, the city of Jesus’s childhood, will become “Natzrat”; and Jaffa, the port city after which Palestine’s oranges were named, will be “Yafo”.

Arab leaders are concerned that Mr Katz’s plan offers a foretaste of the demand by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state.

On Wednesday, Mohammed Sabih, a senior official at the Arab League, called the initiative “racist and dangerous”.

“This decision comes in the framework of a series of steps in Israel aimed at implementing the ‘Jewish State’ slogan on the ground.”

Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem, meanwhile, have responded with alarm to a policy they believe is designed to make them ever less visible.

Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator in the Israeli parliament, said: “Minister Katz is mistaken if he thinks that changing a few words can erase the existence of the Arab people or their connection to Israel.”

The transport ministry has made little effort to conceal the political motivation behind its policy of Hebraising road signs.

In announcing the move on Monday, Mr Katz, a hawkish member of Likud, Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing party, said he objected to Palestinians using the names of communities that existed before Israel’s establishment in 1948.

“I will not allow that on our signs,” he said. “This government, and certainly this minister, will not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem into Palestinian al Quds.”

Other Israeli officials have played down the political significance of Mr Katz’s decision. A transport department spokesman, Yeshaayahu Ronen, said: “The lack of uniform spelling on signs has been a problem for those speaking foreign languages, citizens and tourists alike.”

“That’s ridiculous,” responded Tareq Shehadeh, head of the Nazareth Cultural and Tourism Association. “Does the ministry really think it’s helping tourists by renaming Nazareth, one of the most famous places in the world, ‘Natzrat’, a Hebrew name only Israeli Jews recognise?”

Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, said Israel had begun interfering with the Arabic on the signs for East Jerusalem as soon as it occupied the city in 1967. It invented a new word, “Urshalim”, that was supposed to be the Arabic form of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, “Yerushalayim”.

“I was among those who intervened at the time to get the word ‘al Quds’ placed on signs, too, after ‘Urshalim’ and separated by a hyphen. But over the years ‘al Quds’ was demoted to brackets and nowadays it’s not included on new signs at all.”

He said Mr Katz’s scheme would push this process even further by requiring not only the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, but the replication of the Hebrew spelling as well. “It’s completely chauvinistic and an insult,” he said.

Meir Margalit, a former Jerusalem councillor, said official policy was to make the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem as invisible as possible, including by ignoring their neighbourhoods on many signs.

The transport ministry’s plans for the West Bank are less clear. In his announcement Mr Katz said Palestinian-controlled areas of the territory would still be free to use proper Arabic place names. But he hinted that signs in the 60 per cent of the West Bank under Israeli military rule would be Hebraised, too.

That could mean Palestinians driving across parts of the West Bank to the Palestinian city of Nablus, for example, will have to look for the Hebrew name “Shechem” spelt out in Arabic.

Mr Benvenisti said that, after Israel’s establishment in 1948, a naming committee was given the task of erasing thousands of Arab place names, including those of hills, valleys and springs, and creating Hebrew names. The country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, told the committee: “We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state.”

In addition, the Arabic names of more than 400 Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel during and after the 1948 war were lost as Jewish communities took their place.

Israel’s surviving Palestinian minority, today one-fifth of the population, have had to battle in the courts for the inclusion of Arabic on road signs, despite Arabic being an official language.

Many signs on national highways were provided only in Hebrew and English until the courts in 1999 insisted Arabic be included. Three years later the courts ruled that Arabic must also be included on signs in cities where a significant number of Arabs live.

However, as the political climate has shifted rightward in Israel, there has been a backlash, including an unsuccessful bid by legislators to end Arabic’s status as an official language last year.

Recently the Israeli media revealed that nationalist groups have been spraying over Arabic names on road signs, especially in the Jerusalem area.

Israel has also antagonised Palestinians in both Israel and the West Bank by naming roads after right-wing figures.

The main highway in the Jordan Valley, which runs through Palestinian territory but is used by Israelis to drive between northern Israel and Jerusalem, is named “Gandhi’s Road” – not for the Indian spiritual leader but after the nickname of an Israeli general, Rehavam Zeevi, who called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Greater Israel.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

EU eyes exports from Israeli settlements

Ralf Beste and Christoph Schult | BusinessWeek

14 July 2009

The Israeli settlement known as Maale Adumim sits fortress-like atop a red stone plateau. In the Bible, the road to the plateau was known as the “steep red road.”

As the largest Israeli settlement in the Palestinian-administered areas of the West Bank, Maale Adumim is home to 40,000 people. Bulldozers are clearing lots for new houses on its outskirts. Its population is growing by the week and, in recent years, it has grown faster than any other settlement.

On the edge of the settlement’s industrial zone, there is a factory operated by a company called Soda-Club. The steel gate is painted blue and green to match the company’s curvy, modern-looking logo. A camera records the movements of anyone approaching the gate. The plant produces tabletop devices that add carbonation to flat water, like the ones used in many German kitchens. And for those who prefer a sweeter taste, there’s also syrup coming out of Maale Adumim.

Journalists are not welcome to visit Soda-Club. As marketing director Asaf Snear claims on the telephone, it’s to protect against industrial espionage.

But there’s another reason behind this aversion to media attention: Soda-Club’s products are at the center of a legal dispute with Germany that could significantly intensify the already heated debate over Israel’s settlement policy.

The Hamburg Finance Court must now decide whether Soda-Club devices made in Maale Adumim can be imported into the European Union duty-free, like all other Israeli industrial products. Brussels doesn’t want the company’s products to fall into this category because they are manufactured in Israeli settlements located in the occupied territories.

The real question revolves around whether Maale Adumim is part of Israel. The EU has not formally recognized Israel’s claim to Maale Adumim and other settlements. But, in practice, it has done little to stand in the way of Israeli settlement activities.

But that could now change. The Hamburg court has consulted with the European Court of Justice about obtaining a “preliminary ruling” that would settle the issue in a binding manner for all 27 EU member states. The decision is expected to come down in the coming months. If the court decides that a customs duty can be levied, it will be tantamount to handing down a decision against Israel’s settlement policy. The delicate question at hand is whether Germany and the EU should accept how Israel handles the occupied territories or if they should wield their sharpest sword—economic sanctions.

A ‘Highly Explosive Case’

In formal terms, the judges are merely being asked to reach a decision about €19,155.46. Brita GmbH , a German company, had imported Soda-Club water-carbonating machines and syrup from Maale Adumim. The company also labeled the products as being “Made in Israel” and claimed that they should consequently be exempt from customs duties.

But the main customs office in Hamburg’s harbor refused to allow this policy to continue. German customs agents contacted their Israeli counterparts to find out where exactly the products were made. When the response came, it said that they had been made in an area “under Israeli customs administration.” When the Hamburg agents wrote back, asking whether the products had actually been manufactured in Israeli settlements, they received no response. So the Germans slapped a duty on the products.

Then Brita filed a lawsuit against this decision. The matter quickly made its way to the European Commission, which wants to use the legal dispute over Soda-Club to make an example of Israel. In an internal memo, it has asked EU member states for “support.” The German Foreign Ministry is monitoring the “highly explosive case” with some interest—and a certain amount of sympathy.

The EU is already prepared for confrontation when it comes to Israel’s new nationalist, right-wing government. The 27 EU foreign ministers have temporarily put a planned diplomatic “upgrading” of relations with Israel on hold.

Now Europe hopes to use the customs dispute to apply additional pressure on Israel. The EU is the second-largest market for Israeli goods, after the United States. In 2008, for example, Israeli companies exported €12 billion ($16.8 billion) in goods to Europe. An estimated one-third of these goods are either fully or partially made in the occupied territories. Most apparently reach Europe duty-free, and an Israeli reimbursement fund for exports subject to duties was hardly used at all last year.

In response to EU pressure, Jerusalem signed an agreement in 2005 that requires every Israeli exporter to provide the customs agency with the location and postal code of the factory where any given product was produced. But when Israeli importers deliberately declare an incorrect place of origin, customs agents are powerless to react.

The situation has prompted the British government to urge the other 26 EU member states to agree on a procedure that would allow consumers to see exactly where Israeli goods come from. The proposal makes many Israelis uneasy. Could this mean, they worry, that European governments will soon be telling consumers: “Don’t buy from Jews”?

Given the country’s history, this is understandably a very sensitive issue in Germany. This makes it all the more surprising that the German government has been willing to openly comment on the Soda-Club affair. In response to a parliamentary question from the opposition Green Party, the government has said that there can be no exemption from customs duty for “goods from the occupied territories.”

Meanwhile, the Soda-Club company is doing exactly what many Israelis do when it comes to the Palestinian conflict—ignoring the problem. When asked for Soda-Club’s reaction to people criticizing it for manufacturing its products in a settlement, marketing director Snear says: “Soda-Club is an apolitical company.”

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Free Gaza–and Palestine

Huwaida Arraf | The Nation

17 July 2009

Last month I led a group of twenty-one human rights workers on a boat from Cyprus to challenge Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. We carried toys, medicine, olive tree saplings, toolkits, a fifty-kilo bag of cement and school supplies on our small converted ferry boat.

At 2 AM on June 30, almost eighteen hours into the 230-mile journey, a colleague awakened me. The Israeli Navy was calling our boat on the VHF radio. “You are navigating towards a blockaded area. You are hereby ordered to change your course. If you do not, we will be forced to use all necessary force to stop you.”

Nervous after a previous boat of ours was dangerously rammed at sea in December by the Israeli military, I replied, “Israeli Navy, this is Arion (the registered name of our ship). We are twenty-one unarmed civilians carrying aid for the Palestinian people of Gaza. Any blockade on Gaza is unlawful as you are the occupying force in the territory and are therefore responsible for the well-being of the civilian population there. As our boat, its cargo, and the twenty-one civilians on board do not constitute any kind of threat to Israel or its armed forces, you are obliged to allow us entry. We are proceeding to Gaza. Do not use force against us.”

Shortly thereafter our navigational systems were disabled for nearly four hours as the warnings continued. In their “final” warning to us, the Israeli Navy threatened to open fire. “Israeli Navy, we are unarmed civilians; do not use force against us. Do not shoot.” We did not stop.

We were boarded by force. Before we were separated, I saw Navy forces grabbing my husband, Adam, a filmmaker who has made documentaries from Palestine to Darfur, about the neck. Later, I learned that outside of my view, these government-sanctioned pirates pummeled Adam in order to wrest his videocamera from his grasp.

Though I know it could not have been easy for him, Adam did not fight back. He was a multi-sport athlete in high school, threw out Manny Ramirez stealing second and is one of those rare individuals who bring a football player’s intensity to peace work. But like the rest of us, Adam insists on using nonviolent means to resist Israel’s military occupation. And though in his widely hailed Cairo speech President Obama made an implicit call for nonviolence as the means to challenge the Israeli occupation, the Obama administration made no public statement on our behalf — nor did it do so three months ago, when my dear friend Bassem Abu Rahme was killed while nonviolently protesting Israeli expansionism in the West Bank that threatens to destroy his village of Bil’in.

Perhaps we were politically inept. Had we sailed toward Iran to offer assistance to civilian protesters there, we would have been a cause celebre if the Iranian government had arrested us. Iran, however, for all its troubles, is not now under foreign occupation as Palestine is. Yet as I watched the demonstrations in Iran, I could not miss the similarities to Palestine’s nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation. I cannot count the times I have marched peacefully, waving a flag and demanding freedom for my people — with only my voice and my presence as my weapons. And sadly, the number of friends I have lost — killed by Israeli forces as, like Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, they nonviolently demonstrated for freedom — is becoming too great a pain in my heart.

My colleagues and I invested time and energy in this difficult journey and put our lives at risk because for too long the international community has been complicit in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. For too long, diplomats and world leaders have paid lip service to Palestinian human rights. For too long, the Palestinian people have been told to wait — wait in the checkpoint line, wait on the peace process, wait to have your rights recognized, wait for freedom.

Students I met on a recent successful voyage to Gaza certainly did not want to wait to be slowly suffocated and drained of their dreams. So desperate were they to escape their confinement in Gaza to obtain higher education abroad that they asked us to drop them in international waters and they would swim the rest of the way to Cyprus. This was youthful madness, but indicative of how trapped people in Gaza are today.

I was born in the blanket of freedom of the United States. My parents immigrated here, knowing that I could not be free in my homeland. But today I use my freedom to struggle as a Palestinian for my friends and relatives who endure the yokes of occupation, oppression, discrimination, exile, internment and apartheid.

Most Palestinians in the occupied territories have not lived a day free of Israel’s occupation, and Palestinian citizens of Israel continue to live as a discriminated-against minority. Just the other day, Israel’s housing minister, Ariel Atias, declared, “We can all be bleeding hearts, but I think it is unsuitable [for Jews and Palestinians] to live together [in Israel].

This is the Israel the United States funds with billions each year. Under the leadership of President Obama–or any American president, for that matter–support for this sort of raw bigotry makes no sense and is antithetical to our most cherished principles. Yet when Israeli leaders utter such contemptible language it is ignored. When Israeli soldiers fire lethal weapons at unarmed, peaceful protesters it is too often ignored. When Israeli naval boats become pirate ships — boarding a vessel that poses them no threat, arresting and beating American citizens–it is ignored.

It is ignored and Israel continues to enjoy the patronage of the United States and to present itself as a moral beacon for the world. But my generation finds racist language like that of Atias’–and the actions that result from such outdated thinking–abhorrent.

We find it unacceptable that Palestinians continue to be asked to wait, to improve our self-government and to be patient as we build ourselves toward the same rights that people elsewhere take for granted. With the fourth Palestinian generation born into refugee camps, with a new generation in Gaza being raised poorer and more desperate than the last, with my land being carved and sliced and walled for the exclusive benefit of one ethno-religious group, I say we cannot wait.

The question facing the world now must no longer be about where to squeeze a Palestinian state. The only relevant question is how to advance the immediate freedom of ten million Palestinians. There can be no more waiting, no more prevaricating, no more negotiations on that simple, beautiful human concept–freedom.

We will be free. President Obama can expedite the process by putting pressure on Israel, or he can sideline himself and the process for the next eight years. Sooner or later, however, Israel’s subjugation of us will be overturned. The current situation is untenable. Whether we live in two states or one state with equal rights for all–as in South Africa and, indeed, the United States–we will achieve our freedom. What South Africa was to students in the 1980s, Palestine is fast becoming to younger generations increasingly repulsed by the entrenchment of Israel’s dual system of law, domination of another people and ongoing confinement of 1.5 million Palestinians to a tiny parcel of land in Gaza.

So, yes, this was only one tiny humanitarian boat to Gaza. But Israel’s heavy-handed action shows how much is at stake and how shaky Israel’s grip over another people becomes when the world’s citizens speak out and take action–even as governments fall short.

Bil’in under fire: peaceful resistance meets assailment

Jennifer Urgilez | MIFTAH

15 July 2009

The systematic arrest of Bil’in activists begins with the covert intrusion of Israeli soldiers into Bil’in at the stroke of midnight. From the west, soldiers cross the Separation Wall in military vehicles concealed under a blanket of darkness, each entering one by one in 10 minute intervals dropping off soldiers on the eastern side of the barrier. Five to 30 soldiers, depending on the size of the military vehicle, jump off and immediately transition into combat-mode, laying close to the ground, managing to maneuver across the land on their elbows, while signaling the army car to recede back into isolation within two to three minutes of ensuring no opposition in sight.

From here, the soldiers clandestinely begin their operation towards the village in silence, veiled by the obscurity of night. They slowly proceed without flashlights, some wearing military camouflage paint while others, black masks. The soldiers circumvent the most direct route into the heart of Bil’in, executing their mission through neglected back roads and fields, keeping a careful eye on the lookout for Palestinians, ready to drop and hide. Often, the activists stand on their rooftops, attempting to catch the soldiers in the act and forewarning each other of the troops’ coming. Upon receiving word, Abdullah Abu Rahmah and other activists immediately get in their cars and pursue the predators only to find no evidence of their nearing. Raids usually comprised of approximately 100 soldiers divided into groups of 20-30 men, each encircling the home of an accused stone-thrower at varying hours of the night, are ideal for operations in highly volatile regions, but not to detain a 16-year-old child taking part in a peaceful resistance movement.

Witnessing the injustices endured by the villagers of Bil’in as detonated tear gas bombs adorn the eastern side of the wall relates the oppression of occupation under which Palestinians are subjected. Even while its backdrop tells its tale, it was not until my interview of Abdullah Abu Rahmah, a local Bil’in villager and organizing member of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall, that this story of their subjugation to Israeli raids and arrests became known.

Cognizant of Israel’s tightening grip over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, largely as a response to the Aqsa Intifada, the villagers of Bil’in have shunned away from armed struggle, and instead, banded in uniform as a peaceful, nonviolent resistance to the Separation Wall. Setting the ground for the annexation of 49% of Bil’in territory into Israel, the Separation Wall, far from the 1949 Armistice Line, snakes well into the West Bank isolating 1,968 of Bil’in’s 4,040 dunums, or 486 of its 998 acres of land. The inception of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall in January of 2005 afforded activists ripe ground for the genesis of peaceful, Friday demonstrations reminiscent of Women in Black’s non-violent vigils in Israel demanding the “end of the occupation.” Emblematic of the overall catastrophe befallen Palestinians, activists from all walks of life—Palestinian, Israeli, and international—unite in the struggle against economic strangulation, occupation, and apartheid.

From resisting the uprooting of olive trees for the construction of the wall, to blockading the bulldozers from gaining entrance to Bil’in roads, to building a small edifice in the midst of dusk between the Modi’in Illit settlement bloc and the Separation Wall to secure access to their lands, the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall refuses to allow the Israeli military to tiptoe around UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the International Court of Justice July 2004 ruling declaring Israel’s Separation Wall and Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank in breach of international humanitarian law. Fighting the occupation two-dimensionally, through legal contestments and nonviolent public activism, the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall has monitored and challenged the construction of the barrier every step of the way, cornering the government of Israel in its own courtroom.

In his judgment of September 4, 2007, President D. Beinisch of the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled that the government of Israel must implement an alternative route of the separation barrier on Bil’in land relinquishing both agricultural land in the Dolev riverbed and terrain seized for future development of the eastern region of the Mattityahu settlement. Irrespective of the Israeli High Court of Justice’s decree, the Israeli government has not rerouted the barrier, rather finalized its erection, depicting the already-suspected disconnect between the Israeli government’s judicial and military branches. Inferring from President Beinisch’s judgment and Israeli military operations, settlement growth, and not security motives, lay at the heart of Israeli expansionist policy.

Despite the brokering of the Oslo Accords in 1993 partitioning the West Bank into three distinct security enclaves—Area A under absolute Palestinian Authority (PA) control, Area B under PA civil control and Israeli security control, and Area C under complete Israeli military control—as Mr. Abu Rahmah denotes, “Nothing is Area A, everything is Area C.” Commencing on June 23, 2009, the Israeli military initiated its most recent string of raids into the village of Bil’in in spite of its Area A demarcations.

In the past three weeks, 15 youth activists have been detained—13 Palestinians, one Israeli, and one American—and scores injured at Friday’s peaceful demonstration with sound bombs, tear gas canisters, rubber-coated bullets, and a foul-smelling chemical spray, a clear use of excessive force against unarmed protesters. Hence, regardless of the detainee’s culpability, an entire military unit is not needed to arrest one individual. Judging from their actions, the Israeli military’s goal is psychological warfare—the brewing of helplessness and terror among Bil’in’s 1,800 residents aimed at freezing the resistance. Surrounding the house, destroying everything in their path, and even confiscating the detainee’s mobile phone at 3:00am can certainly break Palestinian morale. Luma, Mr. Abu Rahmah’s seven-year-old daughter, depicts the constant panic in which these children live. As of late, Luma awakes in the middle of the night, sometimes in screams and tears, calling out for her father. Luma’s sleepless nights are illustrative of the emotional and psychological despair of children in conflict.

Moreover, in their attempts to dismantle the movement, the Israeli military specifically targets the youth. For example, on June 23 and 25 of 2009, four children were detained ranging from 16-17 years of age, who during interrogation were forced to release the names of peace activists and information related to the movement’s organizing body. In response, the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall, recognizing that the children do not have “experience” in these types of matters, gathered all the youths and with the assistance of a lawyer, “trained” the children on how to act during an Israeli interrogation, and further instructed them not to answer any questions—“I don’t want to speak. I have rights.”

If the systematic arrest and injuring of activists is the military’s methodological plan to demolish the movement, it fails to understand the struggle’s resilience—“If they want to arrest us all, they can. But our wives and children will continue the struggle,” admits Abdullah Abu Rahmah. On April 19, 2009, Bassem Abu Rahmah, a peaceful demonstrator, was shot in the chest with a tear gas bomb during one of Bil’in’s nonviolent, Friday protests. Thus, if neither the murder of Abu Rahmah, Abdullah’s extended family member, nor the 1,300 injuries and 60 arrests endured by activists has broken their spirits, virtually nothing can affect them now. As Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi pursued satyagraha—nonviolence—in his quest for Indian independence, the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall too employs this philosophy in the pursuit of achieving Palestinian sovereignty and absolute freedom from Israeli occupation.

The picture is clear: concessions to Israeli “democratic” values and security modus operandi deprive Palestinians of their inalienable human rights. Our common humanity generates a moral duty to uphold the United Nations’ explicit benchmark for an occupying power’s conduct in its occupied territories. Despite big brother’s backing in the Security Council, Israel is not absolved of its responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War—the Separation Wall and settlement activity in the West Bank indeed constitute war crimes. The international community needs to stop playing big-power politics and start dodging the aura of taboo accompanying espousal of the Palestinian plight—accountability is a must and exoneration, pure blasphemy.