Category: In the Media

HRW: Israel Blocks Rights Defender’s Travel

Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch

Shawan Jabarin of Al-Haq Unable to Collect Human Rights Prize

The Israeli High Court’s decision on March 10 to block travel outside the West Bank of the human rights defender Shawan Jabarin violates his rights to a fair hearing and freedom of movement, Human Rights Watch said today.

Based on secret evidence that neither Jabarin nor his lawyer were allowed to see, the court refused to lift a travel ban imposed on Jabarin by military order in 2006, shortly after he became the director of Al-Haq, a leading human rights organization in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Jabarin had petitioned to have the ban lifted in order to travel to the Netherlands this week, where he was to receive the prestigious 2009 Geuzen Medal, awarded by the Stichting Geuzenverzet Foundation, on behalf of Al-Haq. The Israel-based human rights group B’Tselem was the co-winner of this year’s award.

On March 5, Human Rights Watch sent a letter to Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch foreign minister, asking him “to intervene with [his] counterparts in Tel Aviv, so that they may understand the significance of the Geuzen Medal, and the counter-productive decision to block a human rights defender from conducting his work.”

In May 2008, Human Rights Watch wrote to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, asking him to lift Jabarin’s travel ban.

“The travel ban on Shawan Jabarin does nothing to keep Israel safe, and instead keeps a human rights defender from doing his work,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Jabarin is a strong advocate for the rule of law who routinely criticizes both Israeli and Palestinian authorities for violating human rights.”

Rights group demands freeze on Israeli exploitation of West Bank quarries

Haaretz

9 March 2009

Israel is violating international law by exploiting the West Bank’s mineral resources for its own benefit, an Israeli human rights group charged in a court petition Monday.

In the petition filed to Israel’s Supreme Court, the Yesh Din group charges that 75 percent of the rock and gravel removed from 11 West Bank rock quarries is transferred to Israel. The group is demanding a halt to all Israeli mining activity in the West Bank.

The mining activities are illegal and executed though brutal economic exploitation of occupied territory for the economic needs of the State of Israel, the occupying power, reads the petition.

Israel, which occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, denies any violations. The West Bank is home to some 2.4 million Palestinians and around 280,000 Israeli settlers.

Citing a military document, the petition says 9 million of the 12 million tons of gravel removed from West Bank quarries yearly are sold in Israel. The petition demands that Israel stop granting West Bank concessions to Israeli companies and not renew existing licenses.

The military began issuing West Bank quarry permits to Israeli and international companies in the 1970s, but Israeli courts have never examined the permits’ legality, said Shlomy Zachary, one of the lawyers behind the petition.

International law dictates that an occupying power must manage resources in occupied territory without damaging them, he said, a principle sometimes referred to as picking the fruits without cutting down the tree.

This principle is impossible to observe in mining operations, he said. It is an irreparable situation since most of the fruits of the land are being taken and will never be able to be returned, he said.

Military spokesman Miki Galin said the approval procedures for quarries are in line with the relevant directives of international law and Israel’s interim accords with the Palestinians.

At this time the Civil Administration is carrying out staff work to evaluate the up-to-date policy regarding the operation of the quarries, he said.

Palestinians consider the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip essential parts of their future state.

European Union: Israel annexing East Jerusalem

Rory McCarthy | The Guardian

40-year-old Palestinian Mahmoud al-Abbasi stands amid the rubble of his home after it was demolished by the Jerusalem municipality in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. Photograph: Gali Tibbon
40-year-old Palestinian Mahmoud al-Abbasi stands amid the rubble of his home after it was demolished by the Jerusalem municipality in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. Photograph: Gali Tibbon

7 March 2009

A confidential EU report accuses the Israeli government of using settlement expansion, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies and the West Bank barrier as a way of “actively pursuing the illegal annexation” of East Jerusalem.

The document says Israel has accelerated its plans for East Jerusalem, and is undermining the Palestinian Authority’s credibility and weakening support for peace talks. “Israel’s actions in and around Jerusalem constitute one of the most acute challenges to Israeli-Palestinian peace-making,” says the document, EU Heads of Mission Report on East Jerusalem.

The report, obtained by the Guardian, is dated 15 December 2008. It acknowledges Israel’s legitimate security concerns in Jerusalem, but adds: “Many of its current illegal actions in and around the city have limited security justifications.”

“Israeli ‘facts on the ground’ – including new settlements, construction of the barrier, discriminatory housing policies, house demolitions, restrictive permit regime and continued closure of Palestinian institutions – increase Jewish Israeli presence in East Jerusalem, weaken the Palestinian community in the city, impede Palestinian urban development and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank,” the report says.

The document has emerged at a time of mounting concern over Israeli policies in East Jerusalem. Two houses were demolished on Monday just before the arrival of the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and a further 88 are scheduled for demolition, all for lack of permits. Clinton described the demolitions as “unhelpful”, noting that they violated Israel’s obligations under the US “road map” for peace.

The EU report goes further, saying that the demolitions are “illegal under international law, serve no obvious purpose, have severe humanitarian effects, and fuel bitterness and extremism.” The EU raised its concern in a formal diplomatic representation on December 1, it says.

It notes that although Palestinians in the east represent 34% of the city’s residents, only 5%-10% of the municipal budget is spent in their areas, leaving them with poor services and infrastructure.

Israel issues fewer than 200 permits a year for Palestinian homes and leaves only 12% of East Jerusalem available for Palestinian residential use. As a result many homes are built without Israeli permits. About 400 houses have been demolished since 2004 and a further 1,000 demolition orders have yet to be carried out, it said.

City officials dismissed criticisms of its housing policy as “a disinformation campaign”. “Mayor Nir Barkat continues to promote investments in infrastructure, construction and education in East Jerusalem, while at the same time upholding the law throughout West and East Jerusalem equally without bias,” the mayor’s office said after Clinton’s visit.

However, the EU says the fourth Geneva convention prevents an occupying power extending its jurisdiction to occupied territory. Israel occupied the east of the city in the 1967 six day war and later annexed it. The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

The EU says settlement are being built in the east of the city at a “rapid pace”. Since the Annapolis peace talks began in late 2007, nearly 5,500 new settlement housing units have been submitted for public review, with 3,000 so far approved, the report says. There are now about 470,000 settlers in the occupied territories, including 190,000 in East Jerusalem.

The EU is particularly concerned about settlements inside the Old City, where there were plans to build a Jewish settlement of 35 housing units in the Muslim quarter, as well as expansion plans for Silwan, just outside the Old City walls.

The goal, it says, is to “create territorial contiguity” between East Jerusalem settlements and the Old City and to “sever” East Jerusalem and its settlement blocks from the West Bank.

There are plans for 3,500 housing units, an industrial park, two police stations and other infrastructure in a controversial area known as E1, between East Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, home to 31,000 settlers. Israeli measures in E1 were “one of the most significant challenges to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process”, the report says.

Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said conditions for Palestinians living in East Jerusalem were better than in the West Bank. “East Jerusalem residents are under Israeli law and they were offered full Israeli citizenship after that law was passed in 1967,” he said. “We are committed to the continued development of the city for the benefit of all its population.

Israel boycott movement gains momentum

Mel Frykberg | Inter Press Service

3 March 2009

“Standing United with the People of Gaza” is the theme of this week’s Israel Apartheid Week (IAW), which kicked off in Toronto and another 39 cities across the globe Sunday.

A movement to boycott Israeli goods, culture and academic institutions is gaining momentum as Geneva prepares to host the UN’s Anti-Racism Conference, Durban 2 next month amidst swirling controversy.

Both Canada and the U.S. are boycotting the Durban 2 conference in protest over what they perceive as a strongly anti-Israel agenda.

The first UN Anti-Racism conference, held in the South African city Durban in 2001, saw the Israeli and U.S. delegates storm out of the conference, accusing other delegates of focusing too strongly on Israel.

U.S. and Canadian support might have offered some comfort for Israel. However, international criticism of Israel’s three-week bloody offensive into Gaza, which left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead and thousands more wounded, most of them civilian, has breathed fresh life into a Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) campaign.

The BDS campaign followed a 2005 appeal from over 170 Palestinian civil society groups to launch a divestment campaign “as a way of bringing non- violent pressure to bear on the state of Israel to end its violations of international law.”

In the wake of the BDS campaign, critics of Israel have lashed out at what they see as parallels between South Africa’s former apartheid system and Israeli racism.

They point to Israel’s discriminatory treatment of ethnic Palestinians within Israel who hold Israeli passports, and the extensive human rights abuses against Palestinians in the occupied territories by Israeli security forces.

During the apartheid era, ties between Israel and South Africa were extremely strong, with the Jewish state helping to train South Africa’s security forces as well as supplying the regime in Pretoria with weapons.

Meanwhile, Toronto, where the Israel Apartheid Week movement was born, will hold forums, film shows, cultural events and street protests to mark IAW week. One of the guest speakers is former South African intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils.

Kasrils is no stranger to controversy. His parents fled from Tzarist Russian pogroms carried out against Jews, and immigrated to South Africa at the beginning of the last century.

During white rule, as a member of the African National Congress (ANC), working both in exile and underground in South Africa, he was reviled by many white South Africans as a “terrorist”.

He has also been labeled a self-hating Jew by many Israelis and South African Jews due to the strong stand he and the ANC have taken against Israel’s policies.

Meanwhile, in New York, prominent IAW activist Nir Harel, a member of Israel’s Anarchists Against the Wall, will also be courting controversy. His group regularly protests against Israel’s separation barrier, which divides Israel proper from the Palestinian West Bank.

The barrier deviates significantly from the Green Line, the internationally recognised border, into Palestinian territory where it has swallowed huge amounts of land, dispossessing farmers from their agricultural crops.

Another Israeli activist, Matan Cohen, has been central in the first U.S. college implementing a divestment campaign against Israel. Hampshire College in Massachusetts called for divestment from over 200 companies that the college says is responsible for violating its socially responsible investment policies in Israel.

The companies which provide the Israeli military with equipment and services in the occupied West Bank and Gaza include Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola and Terex.

A Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) petition for divestment was supported by more than 800 students, professors, and alumni at the college, that has only 1,350 students.

Hampshire college may be small but it has been big in social activism. It was also the first U.S. educational institution to divest from South Africa, ten years before other universities and colleges followed suit.

U.S. campus activism is spreading. The University of Rochester in New York and members of the community are also involved in boycott activities.

Students from Macalester College, a liberal arts college located in St. Paul, Minnesota, occupied the Minnesota Trade Office in January and then picketed there Feb. 6, demanding that the state end all trade with Israel. New York University students too began a divestment campaign.

Professors and university employees in Quebec, Canada, endorsed the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees’ call to boycott Israel.

SJP’s actions at Hampshire College follow similar moves by the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education in the UK.

In London, students held sit-ins at Goldsmith University and the London School of Economics, among other institutions. Similar protests have spread throughout the U.K., with some winning concessions from university officials.

At Manchester University, about a thousand students joined a campaign equating Israel with apartheid-era South Africa, and called on the administration and student union to boycott Israeli companies and support Gaza and the BDS movement.

In Australia the University of Western Sydney’s Student Association recently joined the international BDS campaign. International trade union support for political action against Israel has been seen from Spain to South Africa.

The South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, under directive of the Council of South African Trade Unions, refused recently to unload an Israeli ship which docked in Durban, despite threats and pressure from both management and the Israeli lobby.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, with 600,000 members in 55 unions, is preparing to start a boycott of Israeli goods.

Meanwhile, the biggest trade union in Canada’s Ontario province, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), was forced under pressure to moderate its call for a boycott of all academic institutions in Israel. Instead it called for a boycott of Israeli institutions engaged in research which aided the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

Settlers burn Bil’in’s Center for Peace

Kristen Ess | Palestine News Network

The western Ramallah town of Bil’in is known for its unrelenting resistance to occupation, particularly to the Wall that crisscrosses its land.

In the West Bank, the Wall and settlements generally come hand in hand. The Wall is not only routed to take the water supply, but also to bring more territory into Israeli boundaries via the settlements built on Palestinian lands.

During the night a group of Israeli settlers broke into Bil’in’s Center for Peace. It is a room kept by residents to ensure Palestinian presence on the land on the “other side of the Wall” despite harassment by settlers and soldiers.

Until a month ago Bil’iners took shifts 24 hours day. That was until the Israeli soldiers in the area drove them out. Under a ruling by an Israeli court three years ago Bil’in residents are “allowed” to pass through a gate in the Wall in order to reach their land, and that includes the Center for Peace. But last month Israeli soldiers forbade their presence at night. Instead the settlers were given reign to roam freely in view of the soldiers who are omnipresent in this part of the occupied West Bank.

This morning two young men headed out of the center of the village to take their day shift in the room, to enforce their rightful presence on their land and their steadfastness. But what the Bil’in residents found was a Center of Peace trashed and burned.

“They set fire to everything,” said Iyad Burnat of the Popular Committee against the Wall. “They burned the chairs, the furniture, even the Qu’ran.”

The Director of the local nonviolent resistance movement hosts weekly demonstrations against the Wall as he has every Friday, save for the eight times he has been jailed for his popular activities that confront the occupation.

“We called our lawyer who contacted the Israeli police who deal with the settlers from Matayah Mizrah Settlement. They have been on the case recently, before this, because last week the settlers came and broke the windows of the Center of Peace and stole the gas canisters,” Burnat told PNN Tuesday. “It’s been more than four times that the settlers have come at night and broken things, stolen things.”

The people of Bil’in had been guarding their land and their Peace Center 24 hours a day for three years, attempting to protect it from the marauding settlers until the soldiers forbade them last month. The Israeli soldiers themselves are now the only the witnesses to the criminal acts of the settlers.

Burnat told PNN today that the resistance will not be deterred despite what he describes as an increased violence on the part of both the settlers and soldiers who attack Bil’in.

“We are going to fix the room again because we have to have people who stay there and take care of our land, we have to look out for our land.”

Bil’in residents are able to pass the gate in the Wall, however harassment is not rare and there is often a checkpoint in place. The court decision for passage did not return the land to Bil’in, nor did it stop the Wall or the settlements which exist in contravention to international law, the decision of the International Court of Justice, and to existing United Nations resolutions.

Burnat said, “It is clear that the settlers want to destroy the people, our things, our land and lives. The violence is escalating on their part, along with that of the soldiers. But we are still strong in our resistance to the Wall and in protecting our land. We protest the soldiers and the Wall and the settlers. And we will return to our land.”

The Bil’in resident and director of the Popular Committee added, “We are going to return to the room, to the Center of Peace, with new chairs, with new furniture, new everything. We are going to clean it up and fix it. This fire will not keep us away from our land.”