Category: In the Media

The Day: “Women Share Challenges Of Daily Life In The Gaza Strip”

by Katie Warchut, The Day 8th June 2006

We hear the tanks, said 23-year-old Fida Qishta.

At least 20 extended family members were huddled in a room of her house in Gaza. Finally, a neighbor came by to state the obvious: “They’re trying to destroy your house.”

We just want one minute to be safe, Qishta said. “Maybe after a month, but not today,” she thought.

It was June 21, 2004, when her house was turned into rubble.

Qishta took long pauses, careful with her sometimes halting English, as she told her story to a small group of women at the Islamic Center of New London Wednesday in Groton.

A few were Muslim; others were members of the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme who visited Israel and its occupied territories last year.

Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian mother and journalist who writes for Aljazeera.net, joined Qishta in describing the challenges of women living in Gaza, who are prevented from traveling in and out of the tiny territory.

Qishta was a teacher, living in Rafah, close to the border with Israel, in 2000 when the second Intifada, or uprising of Palestinians, began. Qishta moved in with her uncle, where it was safer.

Then one day she saw an American woman on the news, Rachel Corrie. Corrie was killed by a bulldozer while trying to protect a family’s home in Gaza.

Back home, Qishta soon realized the smallest events in life had the potential for danger. She was standing on a street, with her mother on the other side. There was confusion with Israeli soldiers about whether they were allowed to cross, she said. One man crossed anyway, and was shot in the head.

Qishta found herself at his side and handed him to an ambulance driver.

“I can’t believe it was me,” she said. “I can’t believe I moved.”

Qishta began helping people empty their houses before they had to leave them. She helped found a nonviolent direct action group of her peers called Rachel’s Way. She also helped found the Lifemaker Center to keep kids out of the street, so they wouldn’t see the demolition and death.

She found that women want to do something, but don’t know how to organize, she said. She started holding meetings in a friend’s store to talk about how they could help.

“We come in peace,” she said they tell soldiers whenever they can. “We just want to help the people.”

El-Haddad, a graduate of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, is from Gaza, but she was living in Boston and three months pregnant when she decided to go back.

It was a decision she calls “my own personal jihad.” When it came time to give birth, she went back to Boston and delivered her son, Yousuf.

But she was soon back in Gaza with him, as one of the few journalists working in the territory. Most journalists stay in hotels in Jerusalem and go into Gaza after the violence is over, she said.

She constantly had to pump breast milk so her baby could be fed, she said, because of the possibility she would not get through Israeli checkpoints.

“I never knew how many days I would be cut off from him,” she said.

When Yousuf was just 4 months old, she had to take him to Cairo to get her passport, and saw lines of cars waiting at the checkpoints in the blistering heat. She could see only the tips of the guards’ rifles and hear their voices, which gave her a feeling of occupation by an invisible force, she said.

“It was like a torture game,” she said, not knowing if one would get through. Some women delivered babies at those checkpoints because they couldn’t get to hospitals, she said. She took a donkey cart, navigating steep slopes, to get around the checkpoint.

El-Haddad showed pictures of earthen streets and a woman washing dishes in a bowl after her home was destroyed.

There were happier photos of the disengagement in the summer of 2005, when the Israelis pulled back, and the Palestinians flocked to the beaches, reunited with family, and re-opened businesses.

El-Haddad’s husband, Yassine, grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. He isn’t allowed into Gaza, and she can’t go to Lebanon. When his student visa runs out for medical school in the United States, she doesn’t know where they’ll be able to live as a unit, she said.

Raising Yousuf: A Diary of a Mother Under Occupation: http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com

Democracy Now: “A Mother Under Occupation”

Palestinian Journalist Laila El-Haddad on Life in the Occupied Territories

From Democracy Now, 9th June 2006. Watch 128k stream or Watch 256k stream

We speak with Palestinian journalist and mother, Laila El-Haddad about life in the Occupied Territories. El-Haddad writes for Aljazeera.net and maintains her own blog titled “Raising Youssef: A Diary of a Mother Under Occupation.” She lives in Gaza and the U.S. [includes rush transcript] A senior member of the Hamas government was assassinated in an Israeli air strike in the Gaza town of Rafah on Thursday. Three of his bodyguards were also killed in the attack. The government official, Interior Ministry general director Jamal Abu Samhadana, was also a founding member of the Popular Resistance Committees who had been accused of plotting attacks inside Israel. Samhadana had narrowly escaped four previous assassination attempts.

Earlier that day three Palestinians were shot dead near a border crossing in the Gaza Strip. Israel said its troops had opened fire on “three suspect silhouettes” moving towards the border. Palestinians said the dead were policemen on patrol.

Meanwhile, Palestinian officials are having talks over a peace plan by the Palestinian Authority president that implicitly recognizes Israel. President Mahmoud Abbas has given Hamas until Saturday to accept the 18-point plan or he will put it to a referendum.

This comes as the Bush administration has cancelled international talks that were expected to lead to emergency payments of salaries for Palestinian workers. Thousands of Palestinian government employees have gone without pay following an international aid-freeze on the Hamas-led government. A European diplomat told the Independent of London the cancellation is stoking fears the US government is committed to “regime change” in the Occupied Territories.

* Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian journalist and mother who lives in Gaza. She writes for Aljazeera.net and other publications. She maintains her own blog titled “Raising Youssef: A Diary of a Mother Under Occupation”

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: We welcome you to Democracy Now! Your response to the latest killings.

LAILA EL-HADDAD: I mean, it’s just unreal to me that, given the current situation and given the tension and given everything that’s going on in the continued closures and asphyxiation of the economy that Israel again would go to these lengths to assassinate, you know — Samhadana, in addition to being the head of the Popular Resistance Committees, was the new P.A. security chief, and it was sort of seen as an effort to rein in all the different armed groups, because he was a very influential figure, and it was seen that he could, you know, kind of bring them all under his umbrella. So, you know, this is just going to further escalate tensions within Gaza, and the security situation is going to further deteriorate. And, of course, that being directly linked with the humanitarian situation.

AMY GOODMAN: And Israel saying that he was responsible for attacks inside Israel.

LAILA EL-HADDAD: Right, as the head of the Popular Resistance Committee, he is considered to be someone who spearheaded a lot of resistance attacks.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what’s happening in Gaza right now?

LAILA EL-HADDAD: The situation is very, very difficult, you know, and it pre-dates the current government. It’s important to remind that since the disengagement from Gaza in the summer of 2006 when Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza, the situation has been continuously deteriorating, because everything continues to be under Israeli control. We’ve heard it time and again, but Gaza literally has become more of a prison than it was before, very much an open-air prison with the skies, and the air, and the borders, and the permit registry system, very significantly, still controlled by Israel. That means that no one can leave or come into Gaza unless they have an Israeli-issued Palestinian ID card. So many families, including my own, not able to unite within Gaza because one or the other lacks the ID card and doesn’t have the family reunification. And more significantly, we can’t go to the West Bank. Before, it was very difficult to obtain a permit. Now it’s pretty much next to impossible for Palestinians to commute between Gaza and the West Bank. So really, just Gaza completely now cut off from the world and from the West Bank and from Israel, and with the continued economic closures, as you mentioned, of the Karni and then [unintelligible] crossing, which has been close to 50% of the year, completely fixating the economy, hundreds of thousands of tons of vegetables and fruits, that were supposed to be exported and help the economy stay afloat, rotted.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you get around? Are you together with your family?

LAILA EL-HADDAD: My husband is a refugee from — a Palestinian refugee who lives in Lebanon. He’s also a physician. He works in this country. He still has a refuge permit. He can’t come join me in Gaza, so I commute with our 2-year-old son, Yousuf, after which my blog is named, back and forth between Gaza and the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: And how hard or easy is it for you to get in and out?

LAILA EL-HADDAD: I’m just like any other Palestinian, I have a Palestinian Authority passport. And that’s significant – we always say it’s not a Palestinian passport, because we’re still not recognized, you know, as a people, as a state, as a nationality, and it’s significant because of all the talk about referendum and recognizing Israel, and I go on that Palestinian authority passport and on my Israeli-issued ID card. I’ve added my son to that ID card so that he can have that right to go back and forth with me. We travel through the Rafah crossing, which is the only exit and entry point into or out of the Gaza strip and continues to be effectively controlled by Israel. While they no longer physically man it, they still control who goes in and out and monitor it by video surveillance.

AMY GOODMAN: You were in Rafah during the first and second Israeli incursions there?

LAILA EL-HADDAD: Yes, yes, in the fall of 2003 and then again in the spring of 2004. Both times I was just arriving. Once I was pregnant, and the second time my son was just 2 months old, and, you know, Israel had just raided the camp for several days, put it under complete lockdown. Very few journalists, I should add, were actually there or even bothered to go and just do the aftermath color shot. It’s difficult to give any kind of snap shot of the devastation that was there. And, you know, it was all the more senseless because a lot of the house demolition that occurred there — you know, 2/3 of the houses that were demolished in Palestine were done so in Rafah. 16,000 people lost their homes, just to give you a sense of the enormity of the destruction. Much of it happened just prior to the disengagement, which made it all the more senseless.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you think this all is being conveyed in the media, and especially since you’ve got your feet in both worlds, there and here, how it’s covered here?

LAILA EL-HADDAD: Very poorly, to put it bluntly. I mean, it’s — I’m constantly surprised. People tell me ‘You shouldn’t be,’ but I am, at how little people know about — I know it’s difficult to get a grasp of all these details, but they’re so significant, because I call them part of the Israeli “matrix of control” that fall under this rubric of occupation that really just invades the very private lives of Palestinians and destroys everything. And it’s not conveyed. I mean, the focus is — you know, I can sum it up, I call it copy and paste journalism done by parachute journalists. It’s Hamas, the militant group that’s dedicated to the destruction of Israel. And that’s all we hear, or gunmen have been fighting, or rockets has been fired. You don’t hear anything about Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians that are just under lockdown now. The fact that the closures — the crossings have been closed 50% of the year. The fact that as you mentioned, 150,000 government employees, they’re not getting their salaries. They support 1/3 of the Palestinian population.

LAILA EL-HADDAD: And you as a woman?

LAILA EL-HADDAD: It’s much more difficult being a journalist as a woman, and also being a mother, and also being a Palestinian. That’s all in one package, and someone once asked me, how can you be objective, you know, being Palestinian, and that it affects you so personally? I’d like to draw on the wonderful Amira Hass – someone one once asked her that, and she said, “there’s a difference between being objective and being fair.”

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Laila El-Haddad. She keeps a blog called Raising Yousuf: A Diary of a Mother Under Occupation and works for AlJazeera.net. Your response to Abbas’ proposal for a referendum.

LAILA EL-HADDAD: I mean, the timing isn’t the greatest, to kind of force this referendum, in such a difficult time and situation. And when there is no acknowledgment of Palestinian rights, of Palestinian rights that exist, and there never has been, and no such, you know, absolutely unheard of conditions imposed on Israel for denying Palestinian rights and continuing the occupation. I think it’s a mistake for him to do it at this time, especially do it so publicly, especially since the current government has indicated, you know, that it’s not its decision to make this decision to recognize Israel’s right to exist. It’s a decision for all the people, implying that referendum would be answered, but it’s a matter of timing. You know, recently I did a photo story speaking with nine Palestinians about this issue of recognition, and time and again, what I heard from them was just this — that, you know, look what 10 years of negotiation has brought us. Yes after yes after yes, and this will just be another yes that’s going to result in nothing but more devastation. And, you know, they said in the context of a extensive and just solution with reciprocated rights, it makes sense, but now it just doesn’t.

AMY GOODMAN: And the Israeli Prime Minister Olmert’s proposal for redrawing the borders, a unilateral proposal.

LAILA EL-HADDAD: We were joking about how — what’s the new phrase he’s come up with? Convergence? But I mean I call it “the annexation plan”, because that’s what it is, it’s destroying the West Bank, it’s chopping it into three parts and annexing large portions of it. And within those three parts, nine separate cantons just divided and riddled with check points and all sorts of other things that just really destroy Palestinian life in every way, and it’s also going to destroy any hope of any kind of just solution or negotiated settlement and render a Palestinian state completely impossible.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll have to leave it there. Laila El-Haddad, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian journalist and mother living in Gaza and here. She writes for Al-Jazeera.net and maintains her own blog, Raising Yousuf: A Diary of a Mother Under Occupation.

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The Nation: “A Thirst for West Bank Water”

Fareed Taamallah, Op-ed for The Nation, June 9, 2006 (web only).

During Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s recent visit to Washington, President Bush declared Olmert’s “convergence” plan “bold.” For Palestinians, however, it is disastrous, because it will annex much of the West Bank’s water and fertile land to Israel.

Under Olmert’s plan, Israel aims to keep the two main Palestinian West Bank aquifers: the lower Jordan River basin in the east, and the eastern mountain aquifer, trapped behind Israel’s wall in the west. This will force Palestinians to depend on Israel for water, preserving the status quo, a dramatically unjust division of water resources.

One example of this vastly unequal division of water resources is my West Bank village of Qira. Every summer the Israeli company that supplies water to our village and that provides about 53 percent of the total Palestinian domestic water supply deliberately cuts off our water, thus generating a crisis. Last year Qira, a village of 1,000 residents, had no water for more than three continuous weeks, despite the summer heat.

Water reductions and total cuts force villagers to find alternative water sources. We collect rainwater in cisterns during the winter, but by the start of the summer, the cisterns, unfortunately, run dry. Palestinian communities are thus obliged to purchase additional water from expensive and unsanitary tankers. A high proportion of children in Qira suffer from kidney problems thought to be related to drinking stagnant water. My 4-year-old daughter was forced to have a kidney transplant.

Across the main road from Qira, deep inside the West Bank, is the Israeli settlement of Ariel, where water is supplied to irrigate gardens, wash cars and fill swimming pools. The water in Ariel and other Israeli settlements is never cut off. Ironically, we feel lucky because we look out onto beautiful settlement houses with green yards, while Israeli settlers view the gloomy scene of our poor, parched community.

The Palestinian Hydrology Group (PHG), nongovernmental organization, reports that there are .75 billion cubic meters of total groundwater potential in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are allocated only .25 billion cubic meters of that groundwater.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends 100 liters of water per person per day as the minimum quantity for basic consumption, but many Palestinian West Bank villages have considerably less. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, per capita water consumption for Palestinians in the West Bank is just seventy liters per person per day. In the nearby village of Kafr Ad-Dik, for instance, the allotment is but twenty-one liters per person per day. In contrast, Israel’s per capita use reaches 350 liters per day.

The Oslo II agreement, signed in September 1995, stipulated “the equitable utilization of joint water resources for implementation in and beyond the interim period.” But in reality, this never happened. Instead, according to B’Tselem, a Joint Water Committee (JWC) was established to approve every “new water and sewage project in the West Bank. The JWC is made up of an equal number of representatives of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. All its decisions are made by consensus, and no mechanism is established to settle disputes where a consensus cannot be attained. This method of decision-making means that Israel is able to veto any request by the Palestinian representatives to drill a new well to obtain the additions stipulated in the agreement.”

Additionally, if a well approved by the JWC is situated in Palestinian Area C, which is under Israel’s complete control according to Oslo, the Israeli Civil Administration must also approve the project and issue a permit to drill a well. This entails a lengthy, complicated bureaucratic process, and the vast majority of applications submitted are denied.

The Israeli assumption is that Palestinians have only minimal water needs–less than the WHO’s minimum quantities, and a fraction of Israeli needs. However, Palestinians, like Israelis, need sufficient water to drink and bathe, to develop industry and agriculture, and to build a modern country. Until that happens, my fellow villagers will remain with their eyes fixed on the water-tower gauge.
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Israel’s planned annexation of West Bank aquifers will perpetuate high Israeli water-consumption levels while denying basic Palestinian needs, and will dim any hope for a viable Palestinian state and for peace.

Fareed Taamallah, a peace activist, works as the coordinator for the Palestinian Central Election Commission for the district of Salfit in the West Bank.

Khaleej Times: ” ‘You will be killed for this’ “

by Grera Berlin. Khaleej Times, 8 June 2006

The little girl clung to my hand, her backpack falling down one arm as she tried to climb the steep stairs on her way to school. She was dressed in a checked uniform with a grey hijab pushed to the back of her head, her shiny black hair peaking out the front. She was scared. At the bottom of the steps were two Israeli police vans, a jeep and several soldiers standing around watching.

On a good day when we escort the children, we are met with just swear words as the settler children march down to their school across the road from the Palestinian girl’s school. Their parents walk them to school with Uzis strapped across their chests, a civilian terrorist squad whose presence has made many of the original owners, the Palestinians, leave.

In September 2005, I was part of a human rights group that stays in the Tel Rumeida district of Hebron to make sure Israeli settlers don’t injure and kill Palestinians. Since Israel refuses to allow UN peacekeepers in to monitor settler behaviour, we are it. We mostly are a part of organisations such as Christian Peacekeeping Team (CPT), and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).

About 450 illegal settlers live in this small area of Hebron, guarded by 3,000 soldiers and police, and surrounded by 130,000 Palestinians. They come from a fanatic orthodox sect in Brooklyn, and have made the lives of Palestinians miserable. The once-bustling market on Shuhada street is a ghost town. Raw sewage seeps from the settler apartments above into the streets. The smell as we walk through the winding streets is overwhelmingly vile, yet Palestinian merchants try their best to open their few remaining shops. Settlers have spray-painted huge stars of David on many of the doors and windows along with epithets in Hebrew and English.

Over the tops of our heads stretches wire netting filled with used baby diapers, food wrappings and broken furniture that these settlers have thrown from their windows. The merchants shrug their shoulders and whisper, “What can we do? Inshallah! No one cares.” The first day I arrived was Saturday, September 2, the day most settlers run rampant over everyone; we were told to immediately go to the top of the hill that separates settlers from Palestinians.

Within a half hour, settler boys between 10-17 came strutting down the road toward the small Palestinian children playing in front of us. We turned on our cameras as they advanced. The older boys encouraged the younger ones to pick up stones and throw them at us. Stones came flying through the air, hitting me in the hand and thigh. Two soldiers — who had been standing there watching — finally called the police.

I started up the hill after them, only to be pulled back by the soldier who said, “I’m sorry, but they get very upset when they see a camera. You need to put it away.”

“Put it away? Not on your life. You think I’m going to let them get away with throwing stones at two women who were sitting there doing nothing?”

“I know, I know, but there’s nothing we can do about it. They’re under 12 years old.”

These kids began a full-on riot, throwing stones at the police and army, throwing pipes off the top of their settler apartment at homes beneath them, screaming obscenities, throwing garbage and flashing mirrors in the faces of the soldiers. Little settler girls started to come down and throw stones. As I stood watching, an old woman marched up to me and spit, “God will get even with you. You will be killed for this. This is our land, it doesn’t belong to these Arabs.” I clinched my teeth and didn’t respond, because the Israeli military is just looking for a reason to drive us out.

The next day, a Palestinian teacher called us and asked us to come to his home. The settlers had come in a month before, and had cut through every grapevine that he had, vines that were over 100 years old, thick as my thigh. When he called the army, they had come in and said, “Go back in your house or we’ll kill you.” He had no choice, and every single vine was cut in half. He took us out and pointed at one in the back of his house. “Look. That one has a shoot growing already. They’ll come back someday.”

My God, what could any of us say? We bear witness to the ongoing destruction of Palestinian society, and no one cares. Palestinians look at us with despair, asking us why the Western governments do nothing as Israel commits slow-motion genocide against them. What can I say or do except continue to bear witness and continue to write.

Haaretz: “Sweden Labels Golan Wines: Made in Occupied Syrian Land”

By Amiram Barkat, Haaretz , 8th June 2006

Sweden has started to note that wines produced in the Golan Heights originate in “Israel, occupied Syrian land,” the Golan Heights Winery has informed the Israeli Embassy in Sweden. Winery sources told Haaretz that the step is unprecedented and worrisome. The embassy is investigating claims that the warning is being issued for several wines on the Web site of the Swedish government’s chain of shops that sell wine. The chain is the only Swedish body permitted to market alcoholic beverages.

Swedish Jews have protested the step, claiming that the new way of listing the wines from the Golan Heights is a political move by a government body. The sources also said such an indication had never been made regarding any other country – not even South Africa during apartheid. The Golan Heights Winery approached the commercial attache at the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm this week, and requested Foreign Ministry intervention. “We produce wine, not politics,” the winery said yesterday, adding, “happily, this subject does not bother most consumers in Europe.”