Category: In the Media

PCHR: Narratives Under Siege: Remembering the Nakba

In order to highlight the impact of the siege and closure of the Gaza Strip on the civilian population, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) is publishing a series of “Narratives Under Siege” on their website. These short articles are based on personal testimonies and experiences of life in the Gaza Strip, highlighting the restrictions, and violations, being imposed on the civilians of Gaza. To view all the narratives on the website, click here

Handuma Rashid Najja Wishah spends as much time as she can in her garden in Gaza, maintaining her “intimate love of the land.” (Photo from PCHR)

“I am not sure what year I was born. But it was around 78 years ago, in Palestine.” Handuma Rashid Najja Wishah sits on the patio overlooking her large garden, recalling the turbulent story of her long life. “I am a Palestinian from the village of Beit Affa” she says, tucking her long white scarf under her chin. “It was a beautiful village and we had a good life there. There was a small Jewish settlement nearby, called Negba, and we had a good relationship with the Jews. Whenever we had weddings, we would invite them to come and celebrate, and we women all used to dance dabka (Palestinian (traditional dance) together. The muktar (or chief) of the settlement, was called Michael. He used to arrive at the weddings with a gift, like a goat, and we would cook it and share the meat between us.”

Beit Affa was a village of around 500 people, in southern Palestine, 29 kilometers north east of the Gaza Strip. Most of the villagers were farmers, but even those who did not solely earn their living from farming had, says Handuma, “an intimate relationship with the land.” Like many of the local women, Handuma married young and stayed in her village. But in 1948, after the end of the British Mandate in Palestine and the declaration of the new State of Israel on Palestinian land, mass violence erupted. “The Zionists refused the division of the land into two states, and the massacres started” she says. “The first massacre was in Deir Yasin, where they slaughtered more than a hundred people.” The Deir Yasin villagers were killed by the notorious Zionist Lehi and Etsel gangs, which had originally been part of the 50,000 strong Haganah militia (which later became the core of the Israeli Defence Force, or IDF). These heavily armed gangs of Zionists were intent on driving Palestinians from their homes en masse. After the Deir Yasin massacre, they targeted villages across Palestine, threatening the Palestinians that if they did not leave their homes immediately they would be killed like the people of Deir Yasin.

“It was a terrible time. The Zionists killed women and children, young and old. The Haganah would slit women’s throats. We were all terrified.” Handuma and her family, which included her eighteen month old son, Ibrahim, stayed at home, waiting. She recalls the Jordanian and Egyptian armies arriving at the border of nearby Ashdod city, and asking local Palestinians to volunteer to leave their homes, reassuring them they would be able to return within the week. “My family refused to leave our village. It was the wheat harvest and we had just stored our wheat. With the Egyptian and Jordanian troops nearby we hoped we would be safe.”

The Haganah militia entered Beit Affa in the summer of 1948. “They arrived at 1am” Handuma recalls, “and started to kill our people. I saw my husband’s cousin axed to death, and an elderly woman being murdered. We hid in our homes, and the killing continued until 7am. Then the Haganah broke down the front doors of our houses and told us all to get out. They separated us, women from men, and then they took the men and blindfolded them, tied their hands together, and forced outside into the hot sun.” The surviving villagers’ lives were saved when Egyptian troops arrived and drove the Haganah out of Beit Affa. “But we had to leave our village,” says Handuma. “We were still afraid for our lives – and for the honour of our girls. The land would have to wait for us. I took nothing from my home, and left the front door open.” She says all of the Beit Affa villagers left together en masse.

Handuma, her husband Motlaq and young Ibrahim, traveled with many of the villagers for approximately the next six months. She easily recalls the names of villages where they stayed for a month at a time before moving on. “We were in Karateya, then in Al-Falluja (now known as the Israeli town of Kiriat Gat). Then we moved onto Herbya. We kept moving. People from the villages all traveled in large groups. We heard some small news from Beit Affa – we knew it was under Egyptian control for six months, and then the Israelis occupied it.” According to the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, “There are [now] no traces of villages houses; only sycamore and carob trees and cactuses mark the site [of Beit Affa].” Like thousands of other Palestinians, Handuma Wishah still carries the key to the front door of her home in Beit Affa.

When Handuma, Motlaq and Ibrahim arrived in Gaza in December 1948, they were, according to UN figures, just three of the approximately 914,000 Palestinians who had been forced out of Palestine as refugees during the Nakhba, or Catastrophe. Around two hundred thousand of the refugees arrived in the Gaza Strip, overwhelming the local Palestinian population of eighty thousand. “We spent our first week in Gaza city” says Handuma. “Then we moved on to Nuseirat (in the middle area of the Gaza Strip) and stayed there. We had nothing. We slept on the land, uncovered, until UNRWA arrived and gave us tents.” The United Nations Relief and Works Agency was established in 1949 to assist the Palestinian refugees, and it remains by far the largest UN operation in the Middle East. In Gaza, UNRWA started to count the refugees, who were allocated tents according to the size of each family. Handuma and her small family were issued with a tent and UNRWA blankets, but had no beds. “The thing we needed the most was medicine” she says. “There was no medicine. My son, Ibrahim was dying in front of me, and there was nothing I could do.” Ibrahim died in Nuseirat, aged two years and two months.

Slowly the refugees divided themselves into camps; there are now eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, and they are some of the densely populated places on earth. Handuma and Motlaq eventually moved from their tent into a small house in the Bureij refugee camp, where she has lived since 1953. “The first years were very difficult” she says. “After the death of my first son I gave birth to another boy, and called him Ibrahim too. But he died 45 days later. If I had known how much suffering it was going to cause my children, I would never have left my village.” She starts to cry silently, and excuses herself for a few minutes. This elderly woman has just recalled the hardest and most bitter battles of her life: the pain of losing her land, and the struggle to save her children.

Handuma’s third son, Jaber survived, and she went on to have another three sons and four daughters. Um Jaber (Mother of Jaber) as she has been known for years in the Gaza Strip and beyond, has also been a staunch political activist more than five decades. She remains grateful to UNRWA for their assistance, but is fiercely critical of both the United Nations, and especially Britain, for their roles in the Nakhba. “We Palestinians are not terrorists” she says. “We are living under occupation and siege from the Israelis, and we will continue to resist until we can return to our homes. We are patient people.”

In 1995, when she was 65 years old, Um Jaber started a major political campaign to support Palestinian prisoners incarcerated in Israeli jails. “All of my four sons were jailed” she says, “and through them I met other Palestinians who also needed support. I used to visit the jails in Israel daily.” The mothers of Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli jails have been denied all visitation rights by the Israeli authorities since June 2007, and Um Jaber still joins the weekly Gaza vigil that demands the right for Palestinian mothers to visit their sons, husband and daughters who are imprisoned in Israel. These days, however, Um Jaber spends as much time as possible in her large garden tending her flowers and herbs and her flocks of hens and pigeons. “I have never lost my intimate love for the land” she says. “I have fed this love to my children and grandchildren, and I practice my traditional village life here as much as I can.”

As she remembers her own Nakhba, Um Jaber says she has never lost the hope of returning to the site of her village. “The Nakhba day will be a difficult and sad day” she says. “I will remember my village, and our lives there. I will also remember the respect between us and the Jews. But we are not the problem, we are the occupied people. The problem is the Israeli occupation of our Palestinian land.”

Haaretz: Plan puts shul in Arab part of Jerusalem

By Akiva Eldar

To view original article, published in Haaretz, click here

The Jerusalem municipality has begun the process of approving a plan for a new housing complex, including a synagogue, in the heart of the Arab neighborhood of Silwan south of the Old City.

The plan, submitted by the right-wing Elad association, includes 10 apartments, kindergarten classrooms, a library and underground parking for 100 cars.

Documents show the land the complex is to be built on belongs to the Israel Lands Administration (ILA); however, the ILA said it was unaware of the plan.

The municipal spokesman said Elad had leased the land, and therefore the plan does not require ILA approval. A municipal document dated January 21, 2008 notes that all necessary recommendations had been received in the planning file.

The area slated for the new project is located 200 meters from the Old City walls, in an area considered one of the most sensitive in the present negotiations with the Palestinians over the final-status agreement.

In a letter yesterday to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, attorney Daniel Seideman, representing the Ir Amim association and a city council member, Pepe Alalo (Meretz), asked whether Mazuz thought it proper that a synagogue be established in the heart of an Arab neighborhood.

The Ir Amim association addresses issues impacting Israeli-Palestinian relations in Jerusalem.

Seideman reminded Mazuz of repeated pledges by the State Prosecutor’s Office to the High Court of Justice to ensure there were no recurrences of the government allowing right-wing associations to take over public lands in Silwan and the Old City. He attached the photocopy of a 1991 deed of sale by the Jewish National Fund of the lands of Silwan to the ILA. The ILA then transfered the land to Elad in a process that was not made public.

“In the heart of Jerusalem, for all intents and purposes, an independent Elad kingdom has been created, in which hegemony, above and below the ground, has been given to a body with a clear ideological bent,” Seideman wrote Mazuz.

He also said the “kingdom” was being established through actions designed to push out thousands of Arab residents from the area.

Seideman demanded that Mazuz instruct the ILA to withdraw the plan and the city to shelve it, and to investigate how the decision was made that led to the proposal for the construction project.

A 1992 government investigation headed by then Justice Ministry director general Haim Klugman found that associations managing properties in East Jerusalem, including Elad, had took them over by continuously submitting false affidavits, misusing the law governing absentee property and illegally transfering tens of millions of shekels public money to the associations, among other allegations.

In November, Haaretz reported that the registrar of non-profit associations was considering demanding that Elad be disbanded as a non-profit association, after it refused to report the sources of contributions of more than $7 million that it had received in 2005.

The Justice Ministry said in response that Elad had given the registrar the names of its donors, but asked that the names remain confidential in its financial report, as the law allows. The request was granted, and there is no intention of disbanding the association, the Justice Ministry added.

The Guardian: Reality check

Despite the rhetoric of peace, on the ground the lives of Palestinians are being made worse by countless checkpoints

By Ben White

To view original article, published in The Guardian on the 14th May 2008, click here

As Bush arrives in Israel, I remember a moment when the gulf between the language of the official “peace process” and the reality on the ground hit me. It was the summer of 2004, and before leaving my house in the morning, I watched then secretary of state, Colin Powell, make all the familiar noises about Israel, the Palestinians and peacemaking. I then walked to work through the Bethlehem checkpoint while over to my left, Har Homa settlement was growing unchecked.

Fast forward to May 2008. Har Homa is even bigger, and the disparity between the language and approach of the international community’s peace process and the situation in the occupied territories is even starker.

Bush is in Israel this week as part of a wider Middle East tour, and while here, will participate in Shimon Peres’s Facing Tomorrow conference, intended to be part of Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations.

Superficially at least, there have been striking contradictions in the Bush presidency’s approach to Israel-Palestine. On the one hand, he has been one of the most pro-Israeli presidents in history, and the first to ever publicly endorse illegal settlement blocs. On the other hand, he is also the first US president to call for a Palestinian state.

What seem like irreconcilably different positions become easier to understand if one decodes the language of the peace process in recent years. It has now become par for the course to verbally support the idea of Palestinian statehood, from Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, to Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair. What it all hinges on, of course, is what that would actually mean.

Furthermore, the Bush administration’s approach to peace, which has been typical of the Quartet in general, has been to view the conflict through an almost exclusively Israeli perspective, while making a nod towards Palestinian humanitarian or economic suffering. A good example is the notorious checkpoints.

Media coverage of the peace process in recent months has been littered with references to the checkpoints, with the likes of Condoleezza Rice making them one of the main issues she has pressed when meeting Israeli officials. Firstly, it is important to note that the fragmentation of the West Bank through checkpoints, closures and the permit system has actually worsened since Annapolis, while Israel plays games with checkpoint removal for PR purposes. Secondly the language used to talk about checkpoints is often supportive of the Israeli security pretence.

It is as if all that is being discussed is an annoyingly time-consuming airport security measure, rather than one component in Israel’s matrix of control in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is a system, moreover, specifically designed to colonise land and enforce a separation between Israelis and settlers, and Palestinians. Even Ha’aretz described a UN report in January as noting that:

” … almost all of the obstacles that create the regime of restricted movement are located along the length of a vast road network reserved first and foremost for the Israeli residents. This is a result of the fact that around 40% of the West Bank is covered by settlements, outposts, military infrastructure, nature reserves and closed areas west of the fence.”

The checkpoints, then, are just one way in which the Palestinians are stripped of their individual and collective independence, a humiliation and enforced subordination that affects everything from water access and where you can plant trees, to getting to work and planning a wedding.

Yesterday, I met Jad Isaac, director general of the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ), an organisation that, among other things, tirelessly documents Israeli colonisation in the occupied territories. He watches as neighbouring settlements grow, and as post-Annapolis, Israel continues to consolidate its grip on its colonies (an assessment corroborated by other organisations, like Peace Now).

One area of the West Bank, vital for any potential Palestinian state, is the Jordan valley. Now, however, the valley is closed to non-resident Palestinians, and local villages face difficulties in marketing agricultural products even to other West Bank cities. These are not, like the separation wall, “temporary security measures”; in April, there was a report that the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, presented a map to the Palestinians “in which any future agreement would see Israel retaining control of the larger settlement blocs in the West Bank as well as the Jordan river valley and Jerusalem”.

Perhaps the key to understanding Bush’s approach is contained in a throwaway remark he made to Israeli journalists this week. Speaking of the proposed Palestinian state, Bush noted that such a state “won’t exist until certain obligations are met”. It continues to be the Palestinians who must meet “obligations”; to rein in the militants, to recognise a Jewish state, to soothe and assuage their occupiers’ security needs.

Even if a Palestinian leadership is able to jump through the hoops, what can they expect to gain in return? A rump statelet, the crumbs thrown from the table after Israel has annexed its major colonies and ringed off major Palestinian population centres into ghettoes. Sadly, on what could be Bush’s last visit to Israel-Palestine during his time in office, he is not even visiting Ramallah, let alone the hundreds of Palestinian communities whose very existence is threatened by a colonising occupation that amounts to a lot more than some inconvenient checkpoints.

LA Times: Forget the two-state solution Israelis and Palestinians must share the land. Equally.

By Saree Makdisi

To view original article, published in the LA Times on the 11th May 2008, click here

There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Forget the endless arguments about who
offered what and who spurned whom and whether the Oslo peace process died when Yasser Arafat walked away from the bargaining table or whether it was Ariel Sharon’s stroll through the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that did it in.

All that matters are the facts on the ground, of which the most important is that — after four decades of intensive Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories it occupied during the 1967 war – Israel has irreversibly cemented its grip on the land on which a Palestinian state might have been created.

Sixty years after Israel was created and Palestine was destroyed, then, we are back to where we started: Two populations inhabiting one piece of land. And if the land cannot be divided, it must be shared. Equally.

This is a position, I realize, which may take many Americans by surprise. After years of pursuing a two-state solution, and feeling perhaps that the conflict had nearly been solved, it’s hard to give up the idea as unworkable.

But unworkable it is. A report published last summer by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found that almost 40% of the West Bank is now taken up by Israeli infrastructure – roads, settlements, military bases and so on — largely off-limitsto Palestinians. Israel has methodically broken the remainder of the territory into dozens of enclaves separated from each other and the outside world by zones that it alone controls (including, at last count, 612 checkpoints and roadblocks).

Moreover, according to the report, the Jewish settler population in the occupied territories, already approaching half a million, not only continues to grow but is growing at a rate three times greater than the rate of Israel’s population increase. If the current rate continues, the settler population will double to almost 1 million people in just 12 years. Many are heavily armed and ideologically driven, unlikely to walk away voluntarily from the land they have declared to be their God-given home.

These facts alone render the status of the peace process academic.

At no time since the negotiations began in the early 1990s has Israel significantly suspended the settlement process in the occupied Palestinian territories, in stark violation of international law. It preceded last November’s Annapolis summit by announcing the fresh expropriation of Palestinian property in the West Bank ; it followed the summit by announcing the expansion of its Har Homa settlement by an additional 307 housing units; and it has announced plans for hundreds more in other settlements since then.

The Israelis are not settling the occupied territories because they lack space in Israel itself. They are settling the land because of a long-standing belief that Jews are entitled to it simply by virtue of being Jewish. “The land of Israel belongs to the nation of Israel and only to the nation of Israel ,” declares Moledet, one of the parties in the National Union bloc, which has a significant presence in the Israeli parliament.

Moledet’s position is not as far removed from that of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as some Israelis claim. Although Olmert says he believes in theory that Israel should give up those parts of the West Bank and Gaza densely inhabited by Palestinians, he also said in 2006 that “every hill in Samaria and every valley in Judea is part of our historic homeland” and that “we firmly stand by the historic right of the people of Israel to the entire land of Israel.”

Judea and Samaria : These ancient biblical terms are still used by Israeli officials to refer to the West Bank . More than 10 years after the initiation of the Oslo peace process, which was supposed to lead to a two-state solution, maps in Israeli textbooks continued to show not the West Bank but Judea and Samaria — and not as occupied territories but as integral parts of Israel .

What room is there for the Palestinians in this vision of Jewish entitlement to the land? None. They are regarded, at best, as a demographic “problem.”

The idea of Palestinians as a “problem” is hardly new. Israel was created as a Jewish state in 1948 only by the premeditated and forcible removal of as much of the indigenous Palestinian population as possible, in what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, which they commemorate this week.

A Jewish state, says Israeli historian Benny Morris, “would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. … There was no choice but to expel that population.” For Morris, this was one of those “circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing.”

Thinking of Palestinians as a “problem” to be removed predates 1948. It was there from the moment the Zionist movement set into motion the project to make a Jewish state in a land that, in 1917 — when the British empire officially endorsed Zionism — had an overwhelmingly non-Jewish population. The only Jewish member of the British government at the time, Edwin Montagu, vehemently opposed the Zionist project as unjust. Henry King and Charles Crane, dispatched on a fact-finding mission to Palestine by President Wilson, concurred: Such a project would require enormous violence, they warned: “Decisions, requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary, but they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interests of a serious injustice.”

But they were. This is a conflict driven from its origins by Zionism’s exclusive sense of entitlement to the land. Has there been Palestinian violence as well? Yes. Is it always justified? No. But what would you do if someone told you that there was no room for you on your own land, that your very existence is a “problem”? No people in history has ever gone away just because another people wanted them to, and the sentiments of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull live on among Palestinians to this day.

The violence will end, and a just peace will come, only when each side realizes that the other is there to stay. Many Palestinians have accepted this premise, and an increasing number are willing to give up on the idea of an independent Palestinian state and embrace instead the concept of a single democratic, secular and multicultural state, which they would share equally with Israeli Jews.

Most Israelis are not yet reconciled this position. Some, no doubt, are reluctant to give up on the idea of a “Jewish state,” to acknowledge the reality that Israel has never been exclusively Jewish, and that, from the start, the idea of privileging members of one group over all other citizens has been fundamentally undemocratic and unfair.

Yet that is exactly what Israel does. Even among its citizens, Israeli law grants rights to Jews that it denies to non-Jews. By no stretch of the imagination is Israel a genuine democracy: It is an ethno-religiously exclusive state that has tried to defy the multicultural history of the land on which it was founded.

To resolve the conflict with the Palestinians, Israeli Jews will have to relinquish their exclusive privileges and acknowledge the right of return of Palestinians expelled from their homes. What they would get in return is the ability to live securely and to prosper with – rather than continuing to battle against — the Palestinians.

They may not have a choice. As Olmert himself warned recently, more Palestinians are shifting their struggle from one for an independent state to a South African-style struggle that demands equal rights for all citizens, irrespective of religion, in a single state. “That is, of course,” he noted, “a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle — and ultimately a much more powerful one.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA and the author of “Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation”.

60 years of apartheid-60 years to long!: 20 Jewish activists arrested, disrupting Jewish Community & Relations Council’s (JCRC) 60th anniversary of Israel celebration

Jewish Activists Draw Attention to 60 years of Palestinian Forced Exile and Dispossession

By M.
Published in Indybay 08-05-2008. To view original article click here

San Francisco—In response to Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations, 20 Jewish activists were arrested, demonstrating Jewish opposition to Israel’s 60-year-old policy of dispossession, and highlighting the often-silenced struggle of Palestinian refugees. For over two hours, 20 Jewish activists disrupted San Francisco’s anniversary event, bunkering against the main atrium of the Jewish Community Center (JCC).

In conjunction, over fifty Jewish and Palestinian supporters held a rally outside the center to call attention to ongoing Israeli policy of apartheid against the Palestinian population. With banners reading, “Jews in Solidarity with 60+ years of Palestinian Resistance,” activists declared anniversary, “No Time to Celebrate.”

“The dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a brutal example of Israel’s long history of ethnic cleansing and collective punishment against Palestinians,” Sara Kershnar, anti-Zionist Jewish activist arrested. “We are here today to condemn the JCRC’s celebration of this history along with unconditional economic and political support for Israeli policy.”

The action in San Francisco, organized by the local International Jewish Solidarity Network, is part of “No Time to Celebrate,” a national Jewish campaign opposing Israel’s 60th Anniversary celebrations, while simultaneously amplifying the American Jewish community’s critique of Israeli policy. The Israeli Consulate and the Jewish Community and Relations Council (JCRC), who have attempted to silence any and all criticism of Israeli policy, a were the sponsors
of this event.

“As Jews of conscience, acting in solidarity with 60-plus years of Palestinian resistance, we’re here today to promote an “Independence” that does not depend on an ethnically or religiously exclusive state or on the displacement of indigenous people,” said Eric Romann, IJSN organizer. “We want is joint liberation, not isolation.”

Throughout the month of May, Jewish organizations in cities across the U.S. and Canada are sponsoring celebrations of “Israeli Independence Day.” Simultaneously, Palestinians around the world are mourning 60 years since the Nakba—Arabic for the “catastrophe”—of 1948, when Zionist militias destroyed and depopulated over 400 Palestinian
villages and caused over than 725,000 Palestinians to become refugees in order to create the Israeli state*.

Today, there are over 4.5 million registered Palestinian refugees, and more than one million not registered, scattered throughout the world**. These Palestinian refugees are still awaiting the implementation of international law allowing the Right to Return to their homeland. The majority of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, descendents of those refugees who fled their homes and villages in 1948, are subject to Israel’s crushing blockade and are undergoing intolerable living conditions. Israel’s policies of preferential laws and treatment for Israeli-Jews—not Palestinian Israelis—within Israel-proper, and military impunity for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are reflective of a long history of horrific
discrimination.

For more information, please visit http://notimetocelebrate.wordpress.com/.
* United Nations Conciliation Commission, 1949
** UNRWA, December 2006