Settlers attack Palestinian farmers as they work their land in Saffa

Ha’aretz

30 May 2009

Clashes erupted on Saturday between settlers and left-wing activists who were trying to help Palestinians with agricultural work near the village of Safa in the West Bank.

Activists from the Jewish-Arab rights group Ta’ayush arrived at the village, which is located near the settlement of Bat Ayin, and were attacked by 15 to 20 masked settlers, according to one of the activists.

Activist Mairav Zonszein told Haaretz that the settlers assaulted the activists and pelted them with stones, breaking one of their cameras, and flipping over one of their cars, breaking the windshield.

Israel Defense Forces soldiers and Border Police armed with batons arrived and forcefully removed the demonstrators from the scene, according to Zonszein. Border Police then declared the area a closed military zone. No injuries were reported.

Zonszein added that five activists were arrested under the closed military zone order, which she stressed had been enforced only on Israeli and Palestinian activists and not on settlers. Two Palestinians were also arrested, according to Army Radio.

The area around Bat Ayin and Safa has been the site of previous clashes between settlers, left-wing activists and Palestinians. In April, at least 17 people were wounded during altercations between dozens of settlers Palestinians after a 13-year-old boy from Bat Ayin was murdered by an axe-wielding Palestinian.

Israeli Arab committee slams ‘racist, fascist’ bills

Jack Khoury | Ha’aretz

28 May 2009

The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee has scheduled an emergency meeting on Saturday in light of recent law proposals submitted by right wing Knesset members, in particular a bill proposing to outlaw the marking of the Nakba, or catastrophe, on Israel’s Independence Day.

The Nakba is observed by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians who mourn the dispersal of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who were forced to leave their homes during the 1948 War of Independence.

Palestinian refugees around the world and Israel’s Arab citizens mark the Nakba on May 15, the day after the British mandate over Palestine ended in 1948. Nakba Day is often observed by the Arab population in Israel with marches through destroyed villages.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s ultranationalist party Yisrael Beiteinu has proposed legislation for a ban on the practice and a jail term of up to three years for violators.

Just this last Wednesday, the Knesset plenum gave initial approval to a bill that would make it a crime to publicly deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, punishable by a sentence of up to a year in prison.

The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee voiced its harshest criticism over the recent spate of bills it described as “racist and fascist proposals aimed against the Arab public in Israel, and there is no doubt that these proposals must be dealt with.”

A third bill that will likely be brought before the ministerial legislative committee on Sunday for a vote is a proposal to require anyone seeking Israeli citizenship to take an oath of loyalty to Israel, renouncing loyalty to all other nations. This bill, proposed by Yisrael Beiteinu’s MK David Rotem, requires that “those seeking citizenship will be required to declare commitment to be loyal to the state of Israel as a Jewish, Zionist and democratic state, to its symbols and its values and to serve the state as required in military service or an alternative service.”

MK Rotem wrote in the explanation accompanying the bill that “during recent years, it has emerged that citizens of the state of Israel are not loyal to the state, its symbols or values, and they avoid serving in the military. This bill aims to link loyalty to the state, its symbols and values, and mandatory military service, to being a citizen of Israel.”

More bills in the same spirit are in the works, including a proposed amendment to a basic law that would add to the current oath taken by Knesset members the words “as a Jewish, Zionist and democratic state, and to its symbols and values.” A similar amendment seeks to add these words to the oath taken by ministers as well.

Never Before Campaign: Palestine, what it’s all about

Never Before Campaign

The Never Before Campaign has created videos as part of a larger communications campaign which was launched during the Gaza war.

The campaign is based in Beirut and is expected to grow to encompass interested people and groups all over the world.

The campaign is a promotion of the ideas that:

  • Never before has an injustice been committed against a people for such an extent
  • The Palestinian people have maintained their resistance and resilience
  • The Palestinian people should not promote an apologetic attitude to garner international sympathy, it is the world who should apologize to the Palestinians
  • The Palestinian cause is not about humanitarian aid but about justice and rights
  • The multi-faceted resistance of the Palestinian people should be supported

Gaza siege also hits disabled people

Luisa Morgantini | Liberazione

15 May 2009

They worked for years for Israeli companies. For years, they paid their taxes and social insurance contributions in Israel in compliance with Israeli labour and fiscal law. But they also had accidents at work suffering serious and invalidating injuries in Israel’s factories, building sites or fields.

Until the period following the Oslo agreements, more than 80,000 Palestinian workers left Gaza every morning, arriving at the Eretz border crossing at 4 a.m. in order to be on time for work in Israel; they returned to Gaza after 6 p.m. dead tired but ready to start again the next morning. Progressively during these years, Israel closed its border crossings for people and goods, including Gaza workers, who were in part replaced by new poor Jewish immigrants but above all by Asian and Romanian workers.

Today, because of the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip, more than 5,000 of those Palestinian disabled workers no longer receive their disability allowances: the transfer of insurance payments for invalidating injuries as well as retirement entitlements were stopped in January 2009 because Israeli Banks suspended all their transactions with banks in the Gaza Strip.

This is another aspect of the siege of Gaza that, for over two years, has continued to stifle the civil population, oppressing them through a collective punishment in which children, women, elderly people and men are deprived of food, fuel, medicines – which are allowed to enter the Strip, through the closed border crossings, only in few days per week and for few hours per day – and in which many hundreds of Palestinian patients have died and continue to die because of the lack of medical cares as well as a lack of those permits issued by the Israeli Authorities allowing them to go to hospitals abroad for treatments.

After the recent ‘Cast Lead’ aggression, that caused the death of more than 1,400 people – mostly civilians and children, and with more than 5,000 Palestinians from the Strip injured by white phosphorus bombs and unconventional arms- this decision represents an umpteenth insult that worsens the ongoing desperate situation of human rights and legality in Gaza. But as the saying goes: there are no limits to the worst.

And so, the worst has arrived with the news released by the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights (http://www.mezan.org/en/), reporting that a private Israeli law firm is seeking power-of-attorney for Gaza residents entitled to Israeli national insurance allowances but who cannot receive them because of the siege: these Israeli lawyers would personally manage the transfer of the money but they would demand an undetermined percentage of the insurance allowances.

A practice of clear profiteering, and a fraud.

A further violation of legality, denounced the Al-Mezan Center that, in cooperation with Adalah – the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel – delivered letters to the Director of the Bank of Israel, the Director of the National Insurance Institute of Israel and the Israeli Minister of Finance, demanding the payment of the indemnities owed to disabled Palestinians, and launched a legal campaign through a petition – still to be defined – to be submitted to the Israeli High Court in order to demand the unconditional transfer of the accrued allowances entitled to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

This practice also represents an explicit form of racial discrimination, as affirmed by Al Mezan lawyers, since Israeli counterparts continue to receive their insurance allowances and Palestinians in Gaza have the same right.

These people are entitled to receive their allowances without any cuts: those workers, in fact, were obliged to pay insurance and taxes from when they took up their work right up to the date of their injury, in the same way as all Israeli workers.

After they were injured, they submitted requests to the insurance institute to receive their disability allowances in accordance with the Israeli National Insurance Law. Each request was assessed by a medical committee, which approved the nature and the size of the disability allowance and confirmed that it was as a result of a work injury. In some cases, the disability amounted to 100%. Some of these disabled people have been receiving their insurance allowances since 1978. Then, the Bank of Israel decided to suspend all transactions with all banks in the Gaza Strip, including the Bank of Palestine.

The siege and the closure of Gaza continue and the International Community once again demonstrates its powerlessness and complicity with the illegal policies of the Israeli Government. The International Community is not able to operate for the respect of minimal humanitarian rules, while the United Nations continue to denounce the lack of freedom of movement for humanitarian goods: John Ging, UNRWA Director, affirmed that it is not right to define Gaza as an open-air prison since even in prisons there is food. For now, Palestinian disabled people have not received their retirement and insurance allowances and the military occupation and expansion of settlements continues in the West Bank.

Luisa Morgantini is the Vice-President of the European Parliament

Israelis accused of settlement by stealth

Dominic Waghorn | Sky News

24 May 2009

The Israeli Government is being accused of a plot to transform East Jerusalem with Jewish settlements and drive out Palestinians by stealth.

The Hannoun family protest against the loss of their home: Photos by Sameer Bazbaz
The Hannoun family protest against the loss of their home: Photos by Sameer Bazbaz

Ir Amim, a Jerusalem based NGO specialising in Israeli Palestinian issues, claims Israeli authorities in collusion with radical Jewish settlers are cementing their hold on occupied East Jerusalem..

“The policy of the government of Israel is to establish the supremacy if not the hegemony of an exclusionary Jewish narrative in Jerusalem,” Ir Amim’s Daniel Seidemann told Sky News.

The British government also told us it is concerned by actions in East Jerusalem that threaten to “not only undermine the peace process but undermine the trust that will be needed to renew that process towards a two state solution”.

These are two examples where Israel is alleged to be altering facts on the ground and changing the status of occupied East Jerusalem against international law.

The Hannouns' home has been in their family for over 50 years
The Hannouns' home has been in their family for over 50 years

The plight of the Hannoun family

Maher Hannoun’s home in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem has been in his family for more than 50 years. Last week an Israeli court ordered his family to leave, to make way for Jewish settlers.

The Jewish settlement company Nahalat Shimon claims the land was bought by Jews more than a century ago and says the Hannouns have not paid rent.

The Hannouns say they were given the property by the Jordanian Government in the 1940s and the settler’s claims are based on forged papers.

“Jerusalem was given to the Jewish people by God three thousand years ago”, a spokesman for the settlers told Sky News. He confirmed plans to evict more than twenty Palestinian families and move in 300 Jewish families instead.

Maher says he has been offered a lot of money to leave but has no intention of giving in to the settlers.

“For us it’s not about money,” he said. “Nobody can sell his identity, his dreams his memory. I will fight to remain where I was born, where my kids were born.”

The European Union and US Government have both protested to the Israeli Foreign Ministry about the planned evictions. The Israeli Government says it is a matter for the courts, despite the political implications of the case.

Signe Breivik gazes at the remains of the hotel she once ran
Signe Breivik gazes at the remains of the hotel she once ran

The Cliff Hotel

Ali Ayad and his wife Signe Breivik, who is Norwegian, met in his family’s hotel in Abu Dis and married there. He took over running the Cliff Hotel and they lived there with their family, until the Israelis seized it.

In 2003 when they moved out to renovate the place, the Israeli military moved in and refused to let the couple return. The Israelis have built the infamous security barrier right through the property.

They are using an absentee property law to take possession, even though Israel’s attorney general has said the law should not be applied in Jerusalem.

Making matters worse are Israeli plans to build a major settlement in and around the hotel. Some jewish families have already moved in nearby.

Ali is barred from Jerusalem because he has only West Bank ID papers and has been branded a security risk. Meeting the affable dispossess Palestinian it is hard to imagine someone less threatening.

He is not even allowed to attend court hearings determining the fate of his property, but remains calm and unbowed in his resolve to fight the Israelis taking his land.

“This is not an issue that I have a stubborn head. This is simple reason. It’s my own property. I did not sell it. My family did not sell it. We have no intention to give it up,” he said.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband has intervened several times in the case of the Cliff Hotel but Israeli authorities appear to have no intention of handing it back.