Category: In the Media

Battle of Bil’in

Stefan Christof | Hour

16 July 2009

Palestinian activists from Bil’in village say the Israeli military has raided their village almost daily this week. They claim the early morning raids are linked to a recent lawsuit filed by the village in the Quebec Superior Court.

Last month Bil’in launched the lawsuit against two Montreal-based companies, Green Park International and Green Mount International, claiming they played a role in building Israeli-only settlements on Palestinian lands in Bil’in, an act they say is illegal under international law and under Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, established in 2000.

“Israel’s military raids began exactly at the same time that we started court hearings in Canada,” says Mohammed Khatib of the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements in Bil’in. “Israel’s army raids are aiming to stop our struggle, and our court case in Quebec. Israel is collectively punishing us for our efforts to resist [the] Israeli colonization of our lands.”

According to eyewitness accounts captured on video (such as www.youtube.com/user/haithmkatib), Israeli soldiers have been entering Bil’in with heavy weaponry to target Palestinian youth who attend regular demonstrations against Israel’s “separation wall,” built on Palestinian lands in the West Bank.

“Israeli military forces have arrested nine
Palestinian youths this week, some of whom are still in prison,” says Khatib from Bil’in. “These Palestinian youths have not been charged with anything. This clear detention of Palestinian children without charge is illegal under international law.”

An initial ruling on the Bil’in lawsuit in the Quebec Superior Court is still pending. Justice Louis-Paul Cullen is expected to rule within the next six months. Palestinians in the village are bracing for further Israeli raids.

For more information, visit www.bilin-village.org.

HeidelbergCement tries to sell West Bank mines as legal, boycott pressures grow

Adri Nieuwhof | Electronic Intifada

13 July 2009

HeidelbergCement, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of building materials, has become the target of legal action in Israel because of its activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The company’s subsidiary, Hanson Israel, manufactures ready-made cement, aggregates and asphalt for Israel’s construction industry and operates a quarry in the occupied West Bank.

In March, the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din filed a petition with the Israeli high court demanding a halt to illegal mining activity in West Bank quarries, including Hanson Israel’s Nahal Raba quarry. Attorneys representing Yesh Din called upon the court to put an end to this “clearly illegal activity, which constitutes blunt and ugly colonial exploitation of land we [Israel] had forcefully seized.”

Yesh Din’s attorneys argued that the practice is reminiscent of occupation patterns in ancient times when there were no laws of war and the victor could plunder the occupied territory, enslave its economy and citizens, and transfer the natural resources of the vanquished to its own land. In May, Israel ordered a freeze on the expansion of Israeli-run stone and gravel quarries in the occupied West Bank. The Ministry of Justice asked the court to delay a hearing for six months to study the legal position of the quarries. In addition to its mining activity at Nahal Raba, the Israeli Coalition of Women for Peace reported on the website Who Profits from the Occupation? that Hanson owns two concrete plants in the settlements of Modiin Illit and Atarot, and an asphalt plant south of the Elqana settlement.

Five years ago, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) reaffirmed in its authoritative ruling the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people, that Israel is the occupying power in the Palestinian territories, and the illegality of settlement construction, which includes the construction of industrial sites in the settlements.

Transnational corporations like HeidelbergCement are required by international law to comply with international rules governing corporate responsibility with respect to human rights.

In 2003, the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights defined norms on the responsibilities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises with regard to human rights. The norms are framed within the general obligation that “States have the primary responsibility to promote, secure the fulfillment of, respect, ensure respect of and protect human rights recognized in international as well as national law, including ensuring that transnational corporations and other business enterprises respect human rights.”

“Transnational corporations and other business enterprises,” the UN norms state, also specifically “have the obligation to promote, secure the fulfillment of, respect, ensure respect of and protect human rights recognized in international as well as national law, including the rights and interests of indigenous peoples and other vulnerable groups.”

Hanson Israel’s concrete and asphalt plants in the OPT — just like the Israeli settlements — are contrary to international law. Israel’s mining of Palestinian natural resources, mainly for the Israeli market, also violates international law. Through Hanson Israel’s operations in the occupied West Bank, HeidelbergCement is involved in Israel’s violations of international law and the company acts against the rights and interest of the indigenous Palestinian people.

The UN Norms for transnational corporations are an authoritative guide to corporate social responsibility. Institutional investors and asset managers are increasingly insisting on corporate social responsibility as a requirement for their continued investment. As states fail to meet their obligations to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law, economic pressure can be used as a tool to hold companies who render aid or assistance to Israel’s violations of international law to account.

In early 2008, for example, the Dutch ASN Bank divested from the Irish construction firm Cement Roadstone Holding (CRH), a competitor of HeidelbergCement. CRH owns 25 percent of the Israeli Mashav Group, the holding company for Nesher Cement. According to the Israeli Coalition of Women for Peace, Nesher provided cement for Israel’s wall, checkpoints and illegal settlements in the OPT. Activists in Ireland have demanded that CRH end all of its activities that facilitate the Israeli occupation.

The growing global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel has brought major investor, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund, under pressure to distance itself from companies benefiting from the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In May, 20 Israeli organizations sent a letter to the pension fund calling for divestment from 15 companies, including HeidelbergCement.

Following a sustained campaign calling for an end of French transportation giant Veolia’s complicity with Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, it was reported last month that the corporation planned to abandon its involvement in a light rail project in Jerusalem that would effectively normalize the illegal situation of Israel’s settlements.

Although Veolia’s headquarters in Paris has remained silent, the company’s communications manager in Sweden, Gunhild Saumllvinn, told the Swedish news agency TT on 14 June that heavy criticism of Veolia’s participation in the project and the loss of several major contracts is “probably is one of the reasons behind the decision” to withdraw involvement.

It seems that like Veolia, HeidelbergCement is attempting to sell off its Israeli subsidiary. The Israeli business magazine Globes reported in May that the Mashav Group and Engelinvest Group have shown interest in acquiring Hanson Israel. If Mashav buys Hanson, however, Irish firm CRH can expect to be greeted with increased pressure to divest from the Mashav Group, likely achieving a similar end as the Veolia divestment campaign.

Adri Nieuwhof is a consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland.

Malnutrition begins to bite

Eva Bartlett | Inter Press Service

15 July 2009

“There are some people who buy frozen meat, because it’s much cheaper: 20 shekels (five dollars) per kilo versus 60 shekels for fresh beef.”

According to the 45-year-old father of ten, while business is in general terrible, the better days are early in the month, when those with salaried jobs often receive their pay.

“On average, I might make 200 shekels a day in the first five days of the new month. Before the siege, it was 450 shekels a day. I do have some more regular customers. But they have no money. They keep a tab, and pay when they can.”

Like many Palestinians, Jerjowi used to work in Israel. “When Israel closed the borders, I had no work. So I opened a butcher shop.”

On a normal day, Jerjowi says he only earns at best 100 shekels, not enough to cover the rent of his shop – 4,000 dollars a year – nor that of his family’s homes. “My three sons are all married. Together, our house rents are 200 shekels per month. We’re not earning that money. And there are daily expenses, like electricity and water.”

With unemployment rates at 50 percent in Gaza, and 80 percent of Gazan Palestinians dependent on food aid hand-outs, it’s no wonder that Jerjowi’s business isn’t booming.

But the problem lies not only with Gaza’s siege-shattered economy and the great poverty this has created; it is also the scarcity of beef.

After the three weeks of the Israeli air, land and sea bombardment which killed over 1,400 people, Gaza’s agricultural sector is devastated, and that includes the beef farmers. The United Nations Development Project reports that 17 percent of Gaza’s livestock and nearly ten percent of the poultry were killed during the war. And even before the Israeli attacks, in November 2008 Gaza’s Ministry of Agriculture was already warning of a “real food disaster” due to the siege on animal feed and livestock, directly affecting the well-being of what livestock did exist in Gaza.

Gazan Palestinians have tried to make up for the deficit of cattle by bringing calves and sheep through the tunnels from Egypt. Yet, the prices are high, above the budgets of most.

On Jun. 19, for the first time since Oct. 31 2008, Israel allowed livestock into Gaza: 15 trucks. This number falls far below not only the nutritional needs of Gaza’s residents, but also the capacity of the border crossing to receive trucks.

In 2008 and 2007, according to the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) the monthly total of livestock trucks entering Gaza varied from 20 to 207, keeping with the trend of severely restricting Gaza’s livestock imports under the Israeli-led siege.

Prior to Jun. 19, the only cattle shipment overland into Gaza was on Oct. 31 2008, with a monthly total 78 trucks…to last nearly nine months. The Coordinator of the Israeli Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) previously suggested an amount of 300 cows weekly as the minimum for the nutrition of Gaza’s 1.5 million people.

According to the UN and various non-governmental organisations, the trickle of goods entering Gaza now is just a quarter of that prior to the siege, the majority of which is limited to basic food aid items. The aid-dependent families have moved from a balanced diet to one consisting mainly of sugar and carbohydrates, lacking in vitamins and proteins.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) cites an increase in growth-stunting malnourishment, now at over 10 percent of children, attributed to a chronic lack of protein, iron, and essential vitamins. The WHO further warns of increasing anaemia rates: 65 percent among children below 12 months of age, and 35 percent among pregnant women.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), the World Health Organisation (WHO), and Gaza’s Ard Al-Insan centre for nutrition, among various bodies, note the link between malnutrition and a deficiency of protein and vegetables in the diet.

An International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) June 2009 report notes that the effects of a restricted diet also include “difficulty in fighting off infections, fatigue and a reduced capacity to learn.” The ICRC warns of the long-term ramifications on Gaza’s malnourished children.

In June 2009, 38 NGOs, including Oxfam, Care World Vision, and UN bodies, called for an end to the siege, citing the need for normalised trade with Gaza. The ICRC June report likewise called for resumption of imports and exports, but warned that the situation has deteriorated to an extent that Gaza will need years to recover.

For Yousef al Jerjowi, who has scaled down his opening hours due to the lack of customers, the siege couldn’t end soon enough. Jerjowi’s three sons work in his shop, saving him 40 shekels daily wages for an employee. “If my sons didn’t work here, I’d have to close the shop.”

‘Who will hold us accountable?’

Natalie Abou Shakra | Electronic Intifada

15 July 2009

I will never forget the image of the elderly woman whose son was dying in a hospital in Egypt. She only wanted to be with him. Crying, her hand touching the glass window of the office of the Egyptian intelligence services, she pleaded, “Please, please. I beg you, show mercy, let me go in.” Another woman sat by the State Security office, looking up at an officer blocking her path. “You promised to let me in,” she said with her soft, tired and drained voice. “Please let me in” she repeated calmly with her tired voice, then she looked at me with wide, tearful, sad eyes.

I came to Gaza a week before Israel’s winter invasion began. After seven months, I spent two days at Rafah crossing with the Egyptian authorities refusing to allow me to return to Lebanon, despite having all the necessary coordination documents, approval and permission from the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Egyptian authorities made people wait in the arrival hall at the Rafah crossing, sitting on filthy floors where names for either the entry to Egypt or to return to Gaza were called by the voices of aggressive Egyptian police officers, or state security or intelligence personnel. After hours of waiting, two officers headed towards us: “you are being returned to Gaza.” “No!” we would reply, “We have coordination documents!” But, the officers and intelligence personnel grew angrier and threw the papers in our faces humiliatingly: “This means nothing! Move on! Hurry!”

After being asked numerous times “what were you doing in Palestine for seven months,” I answered the intelligence officer simply, “what you didn’t do.” Another officer asked, “How did you come to Gaza?” “By the boats” I replied, referring to the Free Gaza Movement ship that brought me. “So, now you know why you … can’t leave,” he answered back.

It was a simple message to the Free Gaza Movement and anyone hoping to break the siege: they and the Palestinians will be punished. Yet, it must be done, something must be said, this injustice cannot be allowed to stand in silence, whatever the price. And there is a huge price to pay — that of not being able to go back.

As I was explaining the situation to someone on the phone, a sick, elderly Palestinian man fell to the ground unconscious. I approached as a state security officer began dragging the elderly man across the floor. I was intercepted by Said, the intelligence officer, who pointed his finger at me and said in a cruel and wicked tone, “I will make sure you will never get out of here.” I countered, quoting the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “all that you have done to our people is registered in notebooks.” He replied in a vindictive tone, “Really? Who will hold us accountable?”

I watched as my International Solidarity Movement (ISM) colleague Jenny was dragged across the floor by security officers screaming, “Get off of me! Get off of me!” I watched her disappear behind a wall as I clung to a window and the officers came for me. I looked at each of the men in the eye, knowing I had to humanize them to humanize myself. I asked them, “You have a daughter my age? I am 21.” There was no reply. I tried again, “Would you accept your daughter being treated this way? I am your daughter, and your daughter and your daughter.” I was pulled away by my wrists and dragged along the dirty floor, and the man dragging me said, “You are lucky my shoe is not in your mouth.”

At Rafah, I saw a voiceless Palestinian man in a wheelchair being pulled and shaken. I watched women begging on their knees, children and the elderly sitting on dirty floors. And all us were dragged by the Egyptian security officers and thrown out.

At Rafah I also saw laughter and love. A little girl on a bus asked her mother, “Can we gather a shekel from each to give to the Egyptians to pass through?” I watched as people shared bread and water, share laughter as well as pain and tears. Yes, we laughed. Laughter and love under the bombs, to laugh and love under racism, degradation, humiliation, by monsters clad in the uniforms of a brotherly Arab state.

Coming from Lebanon to Gaza initially seemed surreal. Larnaca, Cyprus was the checkpoint, and the sea was the road to Palestine. In the beginning, breaking the siege was all that came to mind. It was almost three years to the medieval, hermetic siege that the apartheid state of Israel had imposed on Gaza’s million and a half residents. All I thought of then was: Israel, the occupation, the monster. But, the monster, as I later became aware, was not one but many, who were all devouring the souls of Palestinians in Gaza. The official Arab regimes were sharing the crimes that Israel was committing. These regimes, especially Egypt, are not complicit — their participation is direct, clear, observable, noticeable, felt and lived directly, and therefore has transcended complicity into direct participation.

In Gaza, I have lived the “quintessential Palestinian experience.” I have lived a nakba, a man-made disaster, a disease of hatred, racism to the bone. In Gaza, I have lived under occupation, a brutal, savage blockade. The epitome of the Palestinian experience comes in what historian Rashid Khalidi says is lived “at a border, an airport, a checkpoint … at any one of those modern barriers where identities are checked and verified.” It is what the eminent Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani described in Men in the Sun. It is Laila El-Haddad’s description of how she and her children lived suspended, humiliated, and stranded in a Cairo airport waiting and wanting to return home to Gaza.

It is the experience of every Palestinian. I became a Gazan — I am now a refugee, a prisoner. I am now, as El-Haddad explained, holding a passport “that allows no passage. A passport that denied me entry … to mark me, brand me, so that I am easily identified and cast aside without questions; it is convenient for those giving the orders. It is a system for the collective identification of those with no identification.”

I came to stand with the suffering, besieged Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. I came to learn from their resistance, in all its forms, and to fight hand in hand with local activists in acts of non-violent civil resistance. After all, I came from a supposed “resisting Lebanon” and therefore, resistance was no stranger to me. I came to Gaza to confront the occupation and know it through a window other than that of the biased petrol-dollar media of our times. And I did.

I learned that the Arab regimes were Israel’s best friends in the region, not out of love of the colonizer, but out of the intense hatred they hold for the Palestinians and their own people. Oh, Palestinians, you are on your own! Where has the cause of Jerusalem gone? It was certainly not in the eyes, hearts and minds of those intelligence agents and members of the security services based at the Rafah crossing, one of Gaza prison’s gates. All I could find there was hate.

The psychological and physical torture Palestinians are subjected to at the Rafah crossing is a clear message from the Egyptian authorities. It is intended to frighten and punish the Palestinian people and all those who stand in solidarity with them. The Egyptian authorities at the crossing violated our basic human rights, a daily reality for Palestinians. The degrading and the humiliating manner in which we were treated also violated our rights as women.

During my time in Gaza, as in July 2006 in Lebanon, I endured a hellish assault and massacre designed to break a people but which once again only revealed the criminality of the apartheid regime and the complicity of the international community. Gaza is our South Africa, our Guernica. The Palestinian people exceed their unworthy leadership, and if there is a victory it is that of the people who endured, who drank tea above the rubble of their destroyed homes, who still stand up high, steadfastly against their uprooted olive trees, against occupation, betrayal, complicit silence, and neglect.

Natalie Abou Shakra is an activist from Lebanon and is affiliated with the International Solidarity Movement and Free Gaza Movement. She defied Israeli orders for Lebanese citizens not to go to Gaza and was able to get in with the Free Gaza movement’s SS Dignity on the 20 December, 2008.

‘Israeli ad makes light of separation barrier’

Robert Mackey| New York Times News Blog

14 July 2009

According to Noam Sheizaf, who writes the blog Promised Land from Tel Aviv, “the Israeli blogosphere is boiling” this week with discussion of this new television commercial for Israel’s largest cellphone company, Cellcom, which seems to make the “good fences make good neighbors” argument in favor of the controversial separation barrier being built in and around the West Bank:

In Mr. Sheizaf’s first post on the ad, which depicts Israeli soldiers and unseen Palestinians playing a game with a soccer ball across the barrier, he explained the Hebrew tag line and added his own interpretation of its deeper meaning:

The voice-over in the end goes: “What do we all want? Some fun, that’s all.” And what’s more fun than not seeing the Palestinians around anymore, thanks to the 10 meters high wall?

Mr. Sheizaf, writing that the ad “breaks some records in bad taste, even by Israeli standards,” also pointed to this comment from another Israeli blogger, Dimi Reider, who argued that this kind of fiction matters:

Ads aimed at the general market, like this one, are invaluable time capsules, representing public mood much more faithfully than any art. They can’t afford to affront and lose a single customer – and thus they document not just what a society really is, but what it really thinks itself to be, which can be just as decisive as facts and figures.

Mr. Reider also suggested that “this one minute ad says a lot about how mainstream Israel likes to see itself and the Palestinians,” noting, for instance:

The invisible, too-terrible-to-show-on-prime-time Palestinians, are perfectly happy to play with the people who locked them up (note how the wall bends, creating the impression of a tiny pen instead of a gargantuan project choking up an entire country). We so much so believe they should be happy to play with us that when they don’t return the ball (their ball), we are in every right to indignantly shout, “Nu?!” (”Well?!”)

Reuters reported on Sunday that “Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of Israel’s Parliament, said he had written to Cellcom demanding it pull the ad.” Mr. Tibi told the news agency: “The advertisement presents the barrier as though it were just a garden fence in Tel Aviv.”

Taking a different view, a blogger at the American Web site Jewlicious calls the ad “cute,” while a reader of that Web site made a convincing case that this effort runs a poor second to this one, for the Israeli satellite company Yes, in the “Most Offensive Israeli Ad Ever” sweepstakes.

On another American blog, Mondoweiss, Adam Horowitz argues that video shot last Friday, documenting a protest against the barrier by Palestinians near the West Bank village of Nilin, shows “how this encounter usually plays out in reality.” This video, produced by the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement — shot by two Israeli activists and a foreign volunteer — shows Palestinians who had cut a section of the barrier in protest being arrested by Israeli security forces:

In an interview with The Lede, one of the three people who shot this video, Sarit Michaeli, who works for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, explained that she was allowed to shoot this video of one of the arrests being made just a few feet in front of her because she informed the security forces, in Hebrew, of her identity.

The second Israeli cameraman to document the clash at the barrier last Friday, an artist named David Reeb, posted more of his video in this edit on his YouTube channel:

Mr. Reeb’s video focuses on another aspect of Israeli-Palestinian relations near the separation barrier — the fact that two members of the Israeli security forces initially took part in the demonstration disguised as protesters.

Protests against the construction of the barrier in Nilin have been going on every Friday for about a year, as my colleague Isabel Kershner reported from the West Bank in March.

At one of those protests an American volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement, Tristan Anderson, from Oakland, Calif., was badly wounded when he was hit in the head by a tear-gas canister fired by an Israeli soldier. The activist group posted this graphic, disturbing video of Mr. Anderson being attended to by medics immediately after being hit during what it said had been “a peaceful demonstration.” As my colleague Ethan Bronner reported in March, a spokeswoman for the Israeli military took issue with that characterization of the protest:

The army spokeswoman said there were about 400 violent demonstrators at the village of Nilin, west of Ramallah, many of them throwing rocks at the troops. The forces shot back, she said, but not with live fire.

Still, no matter who you think is responsible for the violent clashes near the separation barrier in Nilin, the complex reality there, when Israelis and Palestinians actually meet, is very different from the simple fiction Cellcom is selling.