Category: In the Media

J-Post: Ofra rabbi permits Shabbat construction

To view original article, published in the Jerusalem Post on the 12th June, click here

In a dramatic halachic ruling, the rabbi of Ofra, a settlement in the West Bank northeast of Ramallah, has ruled that Palestinian construction workers can build houses in the settlement on Shabbat, in order to “establish facts on the ground” ahead of a Supreme Court review of petitions against building in the settlement submitted by human rights groups Yesh Din and B’Tselem, Army Radio reported early Thursday morning.

The ruling became effective last Saturday and also on Shavuot, which fell on Monday this week. Avi Gisser, the rabbi of Ofra, made the decision after consulting residents of Ofra. The Supreme Court discussion is slated for Sunday.

Yesh Din and B’Tselem seek to halt the building of nine housing units. In a petition against the defense minister and the military’s OC Central Command, the two organizations, acting on behalf of five Palestinians who claim ownership of the land where the housing units are being built, request to implement demolition orders issued in the past as well as prevent the houses from being occupied and hooked up to electricity, sewage and water, at least until the court rules on the matter.

The petitioners charged that the Civil Administration had admitted to them that the construction was illegal and that it had issued stop-work and demolition orders against the project last year.

According to the petitioners, in addition to the nine houses, work is being done to level Palestinian-owned land for the construction of an additional 15 to 20 units in the same area.

Following the petitions, residents in Ofra held an emergency meeting where they decided to allow continuing construction on Shabbat, and the matter was announced to the community during Friday prayers. Residents praying in the synagogue were asked to show tolerance towards the construction workers.

Dan Izenberg contributed to this report

Haaretz: One swift kick

By Gideon Levy

To view original article, published in Haaretz on the 7th June 2008, click here

Even now, six weeks later, his speech and movements are still halting. He says he is emotionally shattered. For him, the moment of crisis was when he awoke from surgery and noticed a plastic jar on the nightstand. The nurse wouldn’t tell him what was in it, but it quickly dawned on him: One of his testicles had been removed. Life will never be the same for Fadi Darabiya.

Darabiya is a 24-year-old construction worker who supported his parents and his siblings. For two years now he has been sneaking into Israel, where he would work at various construction sites in the south for between 10 days and two weeks before returning home for a few days and then starting the cycle all over again. For about NIS 100 per day, almost any young Palestinian is ready to take the risk of infiltrating into Israel. Darabiya says now that he will never go back to Israel to work. He will never forget the day he was captured, beaten by police officers and lay for hours writhing in pain while denied any medical assistance until he was finally released and a relative rushed him to the hospital.

“There are policemen who hate Arabs so much and they constantly want to prove how loyal they are to the state that they would do anything,” Darabiya says now, thinking of the Israeli officer who kicked him in the crotch; one hard kick that caused internal bleeding and led to necrosis, so that the doctors had no choice but to remove one of his testicles. When he sought to file a complaint with the police a few weeks later, he was threatened with arrest for having been in the country illegally. “Either we arrest you and you spend two months in jail and then you can file a complaint, or you give up on the complaint,” a detective named Miriam at the Kiryat Arba police station said. Fadi turned around and walked out, abandoning the idea. The Israel Police are not investigating.

We met Darabiya this week in a furniture store in the town of Dura, south of Hebron, where he has since found work as a driver. He has a neat beard and gelled hair, but his pale face and hushed speech attest to the trauma he has undergone. In Israel, he worked construction in Gan Yavne, Segev Shalom and Be’er Sheva. He spent his nights in the skeletons of the houses he was building. Like everyone else, he returned home through the last gaps in the separation fence in the south. On Sundays, when he and his friends would return to work, they had to be on the lookout for the Border Police officers who lay in ambush for them everywhere, hunting the laborers who come to Israel to build its homes.

On Sunday, April 13, Fadi began working at about 7 A.M. That weekend he and three friends from Dura had, with the owner’s permission, slept in a finished home nearby that was not yet occupied. “Just be careful,” the owner had told them.

Fadi worked on the roof, the others on the first floor. After about an hour, he noticed two mounted police officers approaching. They dismounted, entered the site and apprehended two of Fadi’s friends. The other managed to escape. Then the officers – one, a Russian immigrant, the other from Ethiopia, Fadi says – came up to the roof and trapped him. The Russian took Fadi by the neck and brought him down to the first floor. He took Fadi’s ID card. The Ethiopian grabbed Fadi’s arms and held them behind his back. Fadi says he didn’t try to resist. “Who’s your boss?” the Ethiopian officer asked, and Fadi said that he was a Jew and that he was on the way. The second officer stood in front of Fadi, whose hands were being held behind his back, without a word of warning whatsoever, kicked him hard in the crotch. Fadi felt as if the world was spinning around him. The officers dragged him outside, to two waiting police cars. His two friends were already sitting inside one of them. The second held five other Palestinian laborers without permits to work in Israel, who had been apprehended earlier.

Fadi says he yelled in pain. He was put in the cruiser and driven to the Gan Yavne police station, where he was placed on a bus with other Palestinian laborers. He was in too much pain, however. “I tried to get off the bus, but the policemen wouldn’t let me. I tried again and again, but they stopped me.” Eventually the officers relented, and the bus stopped to let off Fadi. He lay there on the road, half-conscious and shouting in pain. The police refused his friends’ pleas to summon medical help.

One officer gave him a bottle of water, and after about an hour he was returned to the bus. It carried 17 Palestinian workers. By the time they reached Kiryat Malakhi, Fadi realized the injured area was badly swollen and he says he knew he was hemorrhaging. At the town’s police station he again lay on the ground, writhing in agony. He says that when he pleaded for a doctor or ambulance one of the officers said, “You’re lying. You’re trying to escape. You’ll get well by yourself. You don’t need a doctor.”

From 1 P.M. until 4, Darabiya lay on the road next to the police station. No one tried to help him. At about 4 P.M. he was asked to sign a declaration indicating that he had not been mistreated, as a condition for his release. All the laborers were forced to sign. “Because of my condition I had to sign. I knew I needed to get to a hospital.” They were brought to the Tarqumiya checkpoint and sent on their way at around 4:30 or 5 P.M.

From the checkpoint, Fadi called a cousin, who came in his car and rushed Fadi to the Alia government hospital in Hebron. A CT scan indicated that he needed emergency surgery. The doctors said he was bleeding internally.

When he woke up the next morning, after the operation, he saw a plastic jar by his bed containing the testicle that had been removed. It embarrasses him to talk about it. “I was destroyed when I saw that.” After three days he was discharged and sent home to rest for another 10 days. Then he went to relatives in Jordan to recover emotionally from the ordeal.

But before doing so Fadi contacted Musa Abu Hashhash, the Hebron District field researcher for the B’tselem human rights organization, and asked him how he could ensure that proper punishment was meted out to the officer who kicked him. Abu Hashhash advised him to lodge a complaint with the police.

On April 29, after Abu Hashhash arranged for his visit to the police station in Kiryat Arba – no simple matter – Fadi was referred to a detective named Miriam. He told her that he wished to file a complaint against the officer who had assaulted him. After Fadi admitted that he had been in Israel without a permit, Miriam told him: “First we’ll arrest you, for illegal residency, and you’ll pay a NIS 2,000 fine, you’ll sit in jail for two months, you’ll be brought to trial and after that you can file a complaint.”

A police translator suggested that Fadi sit down, smoke a cigarette and consider his options: a fine, two months in detention and only then the right to file a complaint, or to forget the whole thing and go home. Fadi, of course, chose to go home, frustrated, crippled and bitter.

“I’m an emotional wreck,” Fadi mutters softly. “I can’t do physical labor now, and I’ll never go to work in Israel again.”

The Southern District Police Spokesperson’s Office issued the folllowing response: An examination of the evidentiary material in our possession did not reveal any claim of violence against him on the part of the complainant, or even any request for medical care.

After the suspection were questioned they were transported to the Tarqumiya checkpoint. Any claim of violence on the part of police officers must be submitted to the Police Investigations Department so that an investigation can be initiated.

Haaretz: Welcome to year 41

By Michael Sfard

To view original article, published by Haaretz, click here

The military commander of the West Bank, Major General Gadi Shamni, is a busy man. He has a country to run, and he has no separation of powers to worry about. He is at once legislator, judge, and director general of his little government that comprises his minister-officers aged 20-something.

Only a small portion of his activities are known to the public, because running occupied territory includes countless daily decisions, instructions and actions. The following are some examples of his recent activities.

One day the commander declared war on the handicapped of Qalqilyah. In an order he signed, he declared organizations he suspects of terrorist activities to be outside the law: the Association for the Rehabilitation of the Handicapped in Qalqilyah, the Handicapped Association, the Handicapped Rehabilitation Association, the Qalqilyah Association for the Rehabilitation of the Handicapped, the Qalqilyah Association for the Handicapped, the Organization for Assisting and Caring for the Handicapped, the Qalqilyah Association for the Rehabilitation of the Handicapped. These organizations thus became illegal and their members criminals.

Several days later he announced an extension of the two-year ban imposed on Shawan Jabarin, director of the largest Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Haq, from traveling to conferences abroad. According to the commander, Jabarin as well is up to his neck in terrorism.

Last week Major Shmuel Lavie, a judge at the military court in Camp Ofer and Shamni’s counselor on legal issues, ruled that two Palestinians who rented shops in Hebron – which were taken over by settlers from the Avraham Avinu neighborhood – lost their rights as renters because they “abandoned” their assets. The judge was aware of the orders issued by the military commander several years earlier, which banned Palestinians from entering their shops, so they were not there in recent years. Nonetheless he ruled that forced abandonment of property also constitutes abandonment.

Last Friday, as he has done every week for the past six weeks, the Hebron military commander signed an order declaring the area a closed military zone, banning members of the group Breaking the Silence from holding information tours in the city. The settlers in the city opposed the tours, and some of them attacked the organizers, so the commander found a way to preserve the peace.

A representative of the military commander was a key speaker at a Hebrew University conference entitled “Permissible distinction or unacceptable discrimination – does the security argument constitute relevant differentiation?” This is indeed the central question in the activities of the military commander, who has recently been signing orders preventing Palestinians from traveling on this or that street, or entering particular areas in the West Bank. It would have been possible to give the conference a less complicated title: “Apartheid – for or against.”

These are only some examples of the commander’s job: fighting aid organizations and limiting the actions of human rights activists, entrenching discrimination in the law on the basis of nationality, and stripping Palestinians of their property while permitting the settlers’ injustices.

But it is not only the military commander who is doing all this. It is us. Welcome to year 41.

———
The author is the legal counsel for the human rights organization Yesh Din, and represents plaintiffs in some of the cases mentioned in the article.

LRB: Diary from Gaza

London Review of Books

By Louisa Waugh

‘Don’t ask me how I am,’ a colleague said to me when I arrived at the office yesterday morning. ‘You know how bad things are here now, so please don’t ask.’

Things are certainly very bad in the Gaza Strip. The fuel crisis grinds on, and though Israel has just allowed a small consignment of fuel in, nearly 90 per cent of private cars remain off the road. Bus and taxi services are overwhelmed, and since the taxis have more than doubled their rates, most of us are still walking. Black market fuel prices are extortionate, and the streets reek with gassy and oily fumes because drivers have resorted to converting their cars to use cooking gas, or even cooking oil. These crude conversions are potentially dangerous, liable to induce nausea, eye infections and asthma. The lack of industrial fuel has sparked widespread power cuts (Gaza’s sole power plant is operating at partial capacity), as well as shortages of drinking water: the electric pumps shut down when the power goes off. Up to half of Gazans only have access to drinking water at home for between four and six hours a day. Domestic cooking fuel is increasingly scarce, and on some days there are long queues for bread, because bakers have started turning off their ovens to save gas.

The fuel crisis didn’t start last week, or even last month. Israel has been steadily reducing fuel supplies since October. In February, ambulances in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza were temporarily grounded when the diesel ran out. In April, Israel permitted 152,000 litres of petrol to enter and 33,280 litres of diesel, a tiny fraction of demand.

Last week I drove from Gaza City, where I work with a British aid organisation, down to Rafah, where I talked to several ambulance drivers. Samir Abdul Akil has been driving ambulances for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society for the last five years. ‘The situation is miserable,’ he said. ‘We have to restrict our movements and can only answer emergency calls, but demand for our services has soared, because people have no other way of getting to hospital.’ People are turning up on donkeys or mule carts. Another driver, Asad Daoud, who works at the Emirates Hospital in Rafah, told me his ambulance ran out of fuel completely ten days ago. Despite having a large obstetrics unit, where up to twenty babies are born every day, the hospital can afford only one ambulance. Daoud regularly has to transfer patients to the European Hospital, seven kilometres away, but doesn’t always have enough fuel for the return journey.

The Gaza Strip is 26 miles long and six miles wide, with a total of eight commercial and pedestrian crossings: apart from the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt, they all lead into Israel. The main pedestrian crossings, at Erez in northern Gaza and Rafah in the south, have been effectively sealed since June 2006, after the abduction by Hamas of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who is still being held hostage in Gaza. Hamas and the Egyptian government are now negotiating over whether to open the Rafah crossing on a regular basis, and Gazans are desperately hoping that they will. Everyone in the Strip, even children, requires a travel permit from the Israeli military in order to cross Erez, and the overwhelming majority of applications, including those from people who need emergency medical treatment, are denied on grounds of ‘security’. Over the last year, 33 Gazans, including several young children, have died after being refused a permit, or having their permits delayed. There are 1.4 million people living in the Gaza Strip, and Khalil Shaheen, a human rights activist here, estimates that less than 3 per cent of the population has freedom of movement into and out of the Strip.

The Israeli siege began in the wake of Hamas’s takeover last June, and has been steadily tightening ever since. Imports and exports are severely restricted: Israel has gradually increased the categories of food items allowed to be imported via the commercial crossings from nine to 40, but this apparent liberalisation doesn’t make much difference because the crossings are open so rarely that very little can be brought in. Other goods, including medicines, hearing aids, computers, cardboard and electrical elements, are either in short supply or are not coming in at all. Importing construction materials has been prohibited for months and, apart from small quantities smuggled through the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the border with Egypt, there is nothing to build with. Houses and streets that have been damaged, or bombed, are left as they are. Strangely, Coke is available because it is brought in through these tunnels from Egypt, but fruit juice and milk are impossible to find. The WHO produces a drug list of 480 essential items; Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, is 90 items short, and has less than three months’ supply left of another 130. Exports, too, have been drastically curtailed: family-owned strawberry and flower farms have been ruined; the annual catch of Gaza’s fishermen is less than a sixth of what it was five years ago. The people of the Strip are now one of the most aid-dependent populations on earth.

It’s not surprising that morale is at rock bottom, and that my colleagues don’t want to make small talk about how they’re feeling. You can’t watch what’s going on without asking why Israel is so intent on destroying civilian life in Gaza. Israel does have legitimate concerns about the home-made rockets and mortars being fired towards its borders almost every day. Two Israelis have recently been killed and dozens injured; doctors are trying to save the legs of an Israeli toddler wounded in last week’s rocket attack on a clinic in the centre of Ashkelon. But Israel’s main assumptions – that the siege would force the militants to stop launching rockets, and that the Gazan people would rise up and overthrow Hamas – have proved to be false. Though the number of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza has dropped over the last three months, the targeting has become more precise, and the militants are starting to upgrade their rockets, enabling them to strike further into Israel. Hamas has consolidated its power base and is politically and financially secure. As the International Crisis Group noted in a recent report, ‘the belief by some that the siege somehow will lead to Hamas’s overthrow is an illusion.’

Hamdi Shaqqura, a senior researcher at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City, says that ‘when we talk about a political power struggle in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, we are talking about the struggle between the governments in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But there is no real opposition to Hamas here in Gaza. Hamas started to accumulate strength right after the takeover last June, and they have also institutionalised their power base; for instance, they re-established the entire police force. Hamas is now stronger than ever.’

I know many Gazans who say they hate Hamas; the huge majority, including some of those who say they support Fatah, also feel that they have been completely abandoned by the Palestinian Authority. President Abbas, recently forced to deny rumours of his own resignation, has done little to counter accusations that the PA doesn’t really care what happens inside Gaza. Instead, he remains caught up in increasingly pointless talks with the intransigent Olmert, who is once again under investigation for corruption and could be forced out of office himself. The negotiations between Hamas and Israel being brokered by the Egyptians are crucial: until Israel ends its siege, the two sides will remain locked in this ugly stalemate that is making life hellish for almost one and a half million people. The siege is illegal under international law, amounting as it does to the collective punishment of a civilian population. But Palestinian politicians also have a lot to answer for. The political and economic chasm between the Palestinian West Bank and the Gaza Strip has neutered the PA and strengthened Hamas, which, while offering a ceasefire to Israel, has continued to fire rockets over the border. There is no effective political opposition in either the West Bank or Gaza, and while Palestinians on the West Bank continue to endure humiliation at more than five hundred Israeli military checkpoints, the vast majority of Gazans are struggling to survive. Palestinians are fed up with politics, with their inept and greedy leaders, and with everything the Israelis have imposed on them.

Political divisions inside Palestine have played into Israel’s hands. Tamer Qarmout, a Gazan friend of mine who has just been accepted onto a PhD programme in the US to study conflict analysis and resolution, believes the situation has never been so bad for the Palestinians. ‘There is deep fragmentation in our society,’ he said, ‘with families divided because they belong to separate political factions. The moderate voices of Fatah and Hamas need to put their differences aside and reach a political agreement so they can work together. Basically, they need to put the national Palestinian interest above everything else.’ Any dialogue, he says, has to take place ‘outside the political influence of the US, Israel, Syria and Iran’. ‘We have a very just cause. It is very depressing to see how we’ve harmed it and given Israel a perfect excuse to manipulate their legal obligation to end the occupation.’ Whatever the sharply dressed Israeli government spokesmen say, this is not a ‘war against terrorism’. Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967; 41 years later it is still expanding its illegal settlements in the West Bank while controlling the movement of every Palestinian inside the Gaza Strip. Tamer has no idea whether he will be allowed to leave to study for his PhD.

No one – Bush, Olmert, Abbas, the Egyptians – knows what to do with the Gaza Strip. Gaza has very few friends, and people here don’t understand why the outside world seems to hate them so much, to care so little about what is happening to them. ‘We have no life here,’ Khalil Shaheen said to me last week. The Israelis ‘deprive us of everything – and then what? Our life becomes so fucking difficult that we think freedom means having enough fuel to drive our cars around Gaza, electricity in our homes, and bread in the shops. We are caged.’

Sometimes, living in Gaza is like watching a bizarre experiment in how much people can endure before they crack. Yesterday a friend of mine went to buy a pizza from his local bakery, but the baker had no flour. So he went to another bakery – but the second baker had no flour either, and no fuel. Another friend, Ehab, has not been able to buy shoes for months, because none of the shops has any left in his size. A neighbour, Aitemad, called round to tell me about the trouble she had getting her hair cut. Her hairdresser had no electricity in her shop, so she drove Aitemad to another hairdresser – but her car ran out of fuel on the way. So they had to leave the car and wait an hour for a taxi. I went to see Aitemad last night: we had a candlelit dinner because there was a power cut. Her hair looked great.

While the ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas go on in Sharm El-Sheikh, I am sitting in my living-room in Gaza City with the doors and windows open for some cool air. I can hear bombing in the north; more people may be dying as I write this. The death toll is climbing on both sides, but the number of Israeli and Palestinian fatalities can’t be compared. Fourteen Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinians this year, two by rockets fired from the Gaza Strip and two by snipers from inside Gaza. In the same period, 333 people in Gaza have been killed by the Israeli military, including 127 adult civilians and 56 children. More Gazan children were killed in the first four months of this year than in the whole of last year. Israel’s siege has achieved nothing but misery and bloodshed.

20 May

Louisa Waugh is the author of Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia and Selling Olga: Stories of Human Trafficking and Resistance.

Haaretz: Israel to build over 800 new homes in East Jerusalem areas

By Nadav Shragai, published in Haaretz. To view original article click here

Israel announced plans on Sunday to build more than 800 hundred new homes in eastern parts of the Jerusalem municipality, despite U.S. and Palestinian calls to halt settlement expansion.

The announcement was issued two days before Prime Minister Ehud Olmert embarks on a three-day visit to Washington.

The 2003 peace road map, reaffirmed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders at a conference hosted by U.S. President George W. Bush in November, requires a halt to all settlement activity on occupied land where Palestinians seek statehood.

Housing Minister Zeev Boim instructed his office to publish a tender to build an additional 763 housing units in Pisgat Zeev and 121 housing units at Har Homa, an area Palestinians refer to as Jabal Abu Ghneim.

Both sites are located on lands captured by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War, and were incorporated into the municipal borders of Jerusalem in an act not recognised internationally.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said Olmert’s government “talks about peace while at the same time works on undermining the basis of peace by increasing settlement activity in Jerusalem and around it.”

A Boim spokesman said the new tenders were a part of steps the government was taking to “strengthen Jerusalem.”

However, Olmert, in keeping with the previous government’s policy, has vowed to keep West Bank settlement blocs, including enclaves near Jerusalem, under any future peace accord.

Israel regards all of Jerusalem as its capital. Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of the state they hope to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Last month Boim instructed his office to publish a tender to build 286 new homes in the settlement of Beitar Illit, near Jerusalem.

Palestinian leaders say settlement expansion around Jerusalem could cut off Palestinians’ access to the holy city and carve up the West Bank in a way that would deny them a contiguous state