On Jan 17th, while Israeli bombs were still raining down on the people of Gaza, six people gained entry to EDO MBM/ITT, a factory in Brighton manufacturing military equipment being used by the Israeli air force, and smashed machinery and computers causing at least 300 000 pounds worth of damage and closing the factory for nearly a week.
According to one witness computers and filing cabinets were hurled out of top floor windows the protesters broke in to the factory in the early hours staging a “citizen’s decommissioning” of the EDO-MBM/ITT arms factory in direct response to the killings of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military.
Elijah Smith, one of the protesters that broke into the factory, said before the action, “I’m looking at the world scene and I’m getting more and more horrified. I’ve been looking at the law and I don’t feel I’m going to do anything illegal tonight, but I’m going to go into an arms factory and smash it up to the best of my ability so that it cannot actually work or produce munitions and these very dirty bombs that have been provided to the Israeli army so that they can kill children. The time for talking has gone too far. I’m not a writer, I’m just a person from the community and I’m deeply disgusted.”
The 6 people surrendered to the police when they arrived and have been charged with conspiracy to cause criminal damage along with three others arrested nearby. Two people, Elijah Smith and Robert Alford, have been remanded in custody since January. The 6 will argue in their defence that they had a lawful excuse to cause the damage because they believed that EDO’s equipment was being used in the commission of war crimes by the Israeli military.
Israel’s bombing of Gaza killed 1400 people including at least 400 children. There is incontrovertible evidence that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. These crimes would not have been possible without weapons supplied by companies like EDO MBM.
The trial of the Gaza 6 may last several months and hinge on whether the jury accepts that crimes were committed by Israel.
If you hear the sound of a child being brutalised in the house next door and you rush in to smash the door down and save the child, should you be charged with breaking and entering? Obviously not. – Eamonn McCann of the Raytheon 9
A member of the al-Ghawe family stands beside a poster inside his threatened house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
7 April 2009
“We are like the roots of a tree. The Israelis may cut us in places, but we will never die. We will not be transplanted from Jerusalem. I will not leave this house,” Maher Hanun tells a crowded room of Palestinian community members supported by Israeli and international solidarity activists. Hanun is one of 51 residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem living in two housing units that are facing imminent eviction by Israeli authorities.
The mood is tense as more than 25 individuals pack into a small room in Hanun’s house to plan how to fight the house evictions. Palestinian residents, organized under the Sheikh Jarrah Committee, have invited solidarity activists to come and support their struggle. Internationals from more than 10 countries and Israelis sit in chairs and on the floor as Hanun tells them his story. After his speech, they divide themselves into groups to cover the two threatened housing units. Both the families and the activists gathered in support are determined to stay inside the houses as long as possible when the police arrive to carry out the evictions.
The people living in these housing units, belonging to the al-Ghawe and Hanun families, are due to be forcibly removed from their homes this week, as the papers from the Israeli court they were served with are valid between 15 and 22 March. The courts have justified these evictions by saying that the land that the houses are built on is disputed. Yet, the houses were built under a joint construction project by the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956, 11 years before Israel occupied East Jerusalem. The houses were given to the families, both made refugees in 1948 after Palestinians living in what became the state of Israel were expelled and dispossessed during what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Now these families are threatened with another Nakba. Israeli settlers that have moved into Sheikh Jarrah have falsified documents claiming ownership of the land. The Hanun and al-Ghawe families have presented their legitimate documents and an Israeli judge has not yet ruled on the legality of these papers. Yet the eviction orders are still proceeding, even though no official decision has been reached as to whom the Israeli courts recognize as the true owners.
Both the Hanun and al-Ghawe families were forcibly evicted once before in 2002, after which they lived in tents for four months within sight of their former homes. This traumatic experience stands out as a vivid memory even for the children of the families. As they brace themselves to be evicted for the second time, the distress and apprehension in both households is clearly noticeable. Family members have spent many sleepless nights waiting for the police, never knowing exactly which night they will come. Women in the al-Ghawe residence often recount how their small children were thrown from a second floor window by police when they were evicted the last time.
In addition to the al-Ghawe and Hanun families, 25 other households are also threatened with eviction in Sheikh Jarrah, though official orders have not yet been issued by Israeli courts. In November 2008, the al-Kurd family was evicted from their home in the middle of the night despite widespread public support and diplomatic pressure from American and European diplomats on the Israelis to halt the eviction order. The al-Kurd family has erected a protest tent in the middle of Sheikh Jarrah from where they continue to demand the right to return to their homes. The Israeli police have destroyed the tent five times on the grounds that it is an “illegal structure” even though it is built on private Palestinian property.
Now, with the threat of removal again hanging over their heads, community members of Sheikh Jarrah are organizing. “Stop ethnic cleansing” is their main message to the Israeli authorities and the broader international community. These words can be seen on posters hung in the windows of neighborhood shops, on large banners over the entrances to the al-Ghawe and Hanun residences, as well as the T-shirts that organizers have distributed in the community.
This past week has seen a buzz of activity in the neighborhood. The Sheikh Jarrah Committee, supported by the Coalition for Jerusalem, the International Solidarity Movement, and other human rights organizations, have utilized a myriad of tactics to fight the eviction orders. Throughout the week, dignitaries from foreign nations, journalists, consular representatives from numerous European countries, and even Knesset members have all visited the homes and the protest tent to express their support for the residents of Sheikh Jarrah. The committee has held press conferences, demonstrations outside of court hearings and drafted statements condemning the orders.
The community also attempted to host an event as part of the Jerusalem Capital of Arab Culture festival at the protest tent on 23 March. Israeli authorities have banned the festival in occupied East Jerusalem, yet organizers have continued to defy the ban in order to celebrate Jerusalem’s rich Palestinian heritage. Sheikh Jarrah residents also gathered to protest the impending house evictions in addition to the increased repression of Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem. Police violently prevented Sheikh Jarrah residents from praying in front of the tent in conjunction with the festival. Participants were badly beaten and eight people were arrested. The following week, another resident was arrested by police inside the tent for refusing to take down a Palestinian flag hanging inside.
The Sheikh Jarrah Committee members view their struggle against eviction as part of a larger struggle against Palestinian dispossession from East Jerusalem. The nearby neighborhoods of Silwan, Beit Hanina and Shufat refugee camp are also facing large-scale house demolitions and evictions. In the al-Bustaan neighborhood of Silwan alone, 88 houses are slated for demolition. Al-Bustaan residents have erected a protest tent similar to the one in Sheikh Jarrah, and this model of resistance seems to be spreading.
For now, the families and supporting activists wait for the police to come each night. They take shifts to make sure someone is up in each house to alarm the community when the Israeli authorities arrive. Some of the family members have removed all of their furniture in anticipation of the coming raids, but they continue to sleep on mats in the floor. The message is clear: they will not go quietly in the face of this injustice.
Israeli police today shot dead a Palestinian driver they said had tried to attack them during the demolition of a Palestinian home in Jerusalem.
The driver was shot at a roadblock set up by border police in Sur Bahir, a district on the city’s Arab eastern side. A police spokesman described him as a “terrorist”. Three officers were injured.
The incident came after police had begun the partial demolition of a house belonging to Husam Dweiyat, a Palestinian who drove a bulldozer down a busy Jerusalem road last July, ramming a bus and crushing cars, and killing three Israelis, before he was shot dead.
At the time police described it as a terrorist attack, although the man’s lawyer later said the bulldozer driver had been mentally ill. Dweiyat did not appear to have belonged to any armed Palestinian groups.
There have since been two similar bulldozer attacks in Jerusalem.
Last month, Israel’s supreme court rejected an appeal against the proposed demolition of the house and said it could go ahead. Israeli authorities had long argued that demolishing the homes of attackers discouraged further attacks, although the policy changed in 2005 when a military commission argued that it caused more harm than benefit. This demolition was the first since.
Armed police watched as the top floors of the stone house were knocked to the ground. Parts of the house were left standing but sealed with concrete.
Israel’s leading human rights group, B’Tselem, said the demolitions were forbidden by international humanitarian law and constituted “collective punishment”. It said between October 2001 and January 2005 – at the height of the second intifada or Palestinian uprising – Israel demolished 664 houses under the deterrent policy, leaving 4,182 Palestinians homeless.
JERUSALEM — The right-wing coalition of the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, does not bode well for Palestinians in Israel. With the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister, the extremists are going after the indigenous population and threatening us with loyalty tests and the possibility of “transfer” into an area nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority.
Netanyahu’s intransigence vis-à-vis Palestinians in the occupied territories is certainly cause for concern. No less concerning is what the Netanyahu-Lieberman combination may mean to Palestinian citizens of Israel.
This government, particularly with Lieberman as foreign minister, should be boycotted by the international community, just as it once boycotted Jörg Haider, the late Austrian far-right politician who won global notoriety for his anti-immigrant views.
Lieberman, in one of many outrageous comments, declared in May 2004 that 90 percent of Israel’s Palestinian citizens “have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost.”
But my family and I were on this land centuries before Lieberman arrived here in 1978 from Moldova. We are among the minority who managed to remain when some 700,000 Palestinians were forced out by Israel in 1948.
Today, Lieberman stokes anti-Palestinian sentiment with his threat of “transfer” — a euphemism for renewed ethnic cleansing. Henry Kissinger, too, has called for a territorial swap, and Lieberman cites Kissinger to give his noxious idea a more sophisticated sheen. Lieberman and Kissinger envision exchanging a portion of Israel for a portion of the occupied West Bank seized illegally by Jewish settlers.
But Israel has no legal right to any of the occupied Palestinian territories. And Lieberman has no right to offer the land my home is on in exchange for incorporating Jewish settlers into newly defined Israeli state borders. We are citizens of the state of Israel and do not want to exchange our second-class citizenship in our homeland — subject as we are to numerous laws that discriminate against us — for life in a Palestinian Bantustan.
We take our citizenship seriously and struggle daily to improve our lot and overcome discriminatory laws and practices.
We face discrimination in all fields of life. Arab citizens are 20 percent of the population, but only 6 percent of the employees in the public sector. Not one Arab employee is working in the central bank of Israel. Imagine if there was not one African-American citizen employed in the central bank of the United States.
Israel is simultaneously running three systems of government. The first is full democracy toward its Jewish citizens — ethnocracy. The second is racial discrimination toward the Palestinian minority — creeping Jim Crowism. And the third is occupation of the Palestinian territories with one set of laws for Palestinians and another for Jewish settlers — apartheid.
A few weeks ago, Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu Party led the charge in the Israeli Knesset to ban my party — the Arab Movement for Renewal — from participating in the elections. Netanyahu’s Likud also supported the action. The Supreme Court overturned the maneuvers of the politicians. But their attempt to ban our participation should expose Israel’s democracy to the world as fraudulent.
Lieberman’s inveighing against Palestinian citizens of Israel is not new. Less than three years ago, he called for my death and the death of some of my Palestinian Knesset colleagues for daring to meet with democratically elected Palestinian leaders. Speaking before the Knesset plenum, Lieberman stated: “World War II ended with the Nuremberg trials. The heads of the Nazi regime, along with their collaborators, were executed. I hope this will be the fate of the collaborators in this house.” Lieberman now has the power to put his vile views into practice.
We call for more attention from the Obama administration toward the Palestinian minority in Israel. It is a repressed minority suffering from inadequately shared state resources. The enormous annual American aid package to Israel fails almost entirely to reach our community.
Between Netanyahu and Lieberman, the Obama administration will have its hands full. Make no mistake that Netanyahu and Lieberman will press the new administration hard to accept Israeli actions in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem — as well as discriminatory anti-Palestinian actions in Israel itself. Settlements will grow and discrimination deepen. American backbone will be crucial in the months ahead.
Ahmad Tibi is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a member of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament.
The Israeli military attacked civilians and medics and delayed – sometimes for hours – the evacuation of the injured during the January war in Gaza, according to an independent fact-finding mission commissioned by Israeli and Palestinian medical human rights groups.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society yesterday said their findings showed Israel’s military committed serious violations of international humanitarian law. In their 92-page report, compiled by five senior health experts from across the world, they documented several specific attacks, with interviews from 44 separate witnesses.
Human rights groups have accused Israel’s military, as well as Palestinian militants in Gaza, of war crimes. “The underlying meaning of the attack on the Gaza Strip, or at least its final consequence, appears to be one of creating terror without mercy to anyone,” the report said.
In one incident, the researchers found a Palestinian, Muhammad Shurrab, 64, and his sons Qassab, 28, and Ibrahim, 18, were shot by Israeli troops at close range without warning on 16 January during a ceasefire. Qassab was hit in the face and died soon after. Ibrahim was hit in the leg. The soldiers refused to give medical aid, and only after 23 hours was an ambulance allowed to approach, by which time Ibrahim was also dead.
Yohanna Lerman, a lawyer with the medical rights groups, said although their report was a preliminary investigation this one case alone was enough to indict Israel’s political and military leaders.
The Israeli military has said it does not target civilians and is conducting its own investigations into some cases arising from the war.
