Category: In the Media

Canberra Times: “The Other Aussie Heros”

posted in the Canberra Times May 18th

Every Friday for the last fifteen months Palestinian farmers from the West Bank village of Bil’in and their Israeli and international supporters have marched out of the village to reach their lands on the other side of the “Separation Barrier” Israel is building to confiscate 500 acres of their farmland. When they get to within a hundred metres of the barrier, Israeli soldiers and border policemen have attacked them with clubs, rifle butts, tear gas and rubber coated metal bullets.

The large number of Israelis engaged in these demonstrations is a matter of considerable embarrassment for the Israeli government, which insists the barrier is merely a security measure, intended to protect Israel from Palestinian terrorism.

The Palestinians, their Israeli allies, the International Court of Justice and the United Nations, however, reject this claim, noting that only 10% of the 650km barrier is being built along Israel’s border while the rest reaches deep inside the West Bank to annex precious land and water resources which are being taken over by neighbouring Jewish settlements.

Last Friday ten Palestinians and two international protestors were injured in the protest, including Phil Reese, a Sydney man who was shot in the head by a rubber coated metal bullet while filming the demonstration.

The following day Mary Baxter, a 75 year old human rights worker from Melbourne, was pelted with stones to her head and back by a group of teenagers from the Israeli settlement of Tel Rumeida as she accompanied Palestinian children returning home from school in the West Bank town of Hebron.

Reese and Baxter are both volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – an organisation of international peace activists who travel to the Occupied Territories to help Palestinians resist occupation and dispossession through non-violent direct action.

Being an ISM volunteer is dangerous work. In 2003 an activist was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer and another was killed when he was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper. Two other Australian activists have been wounded by live ammunition.

Although the Australian government was quick to denounce Hamas for not condemning last month’s suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, it has consistently refused to protest Israeli violence towards Palestinians and Australian peace activists.

This double standard is regrettable because if Hamas is to acquiesce to the international community’s demands that they “renounce violence”, it will have to be offered an alternative strategy for resisting Israel’s occupation and colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. While the militant Palestinian resistance can point to the success of the armed struggle in forcing Israel to withdraw its settlers from the Gaza Strip, no such
successes can be claimed by communities such as Bil’in.

Though for the past 16 months Hamas has scrupulously observed a unilateral Palestinian ceasefire arranged by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, its leaders are acutely aware that they owe their electoral success primarily to the Fateh Party’s disastrous strategy of renouncing violence in favour of the Oslo Peace Process which Israel used as cover to double the number of settlers in the Occupied Territories.

If Hamas is to meet Australian demands that it renounce violence, it is imperative that some form of peace dividend be offered to the Palestinians. At minimum this would mean calling upon Israel to cease confiscating Palestinian land and supporting the work of Australians like Reese and Baxter who daily risk life and limb to uphold international law and the human rights of the Palestinian people.

Encouraging Palestinian restraint, however, does not seem to be a priority in Australian politics. In his address to the Australian Parliament Tony Blair stated that the international community must redouble its efforts to find a solution to the conflict involving a secure state of Israel and a viable, independent Palestinian state. When Greens Senator Kerry Nettle proposed a motion endorsing his statement, government and opposition senators joined forces to defeat it.

According to a report by the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem, Israel has created a regime of separation in the Occupied Territories “applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality.”The report concludes that: “This system is the only one of its kind in the world and is reminiscent of the distasteful regimes of the past, such as the apartheid regime of South Africa.”

In the 1980s the Australian government understood that the key to peace in South Africa was to support progressive forces in the country that were working to end apartheid.

Today Australian politicians seem to believe that peace in the Middle East can be separated from issues of occupation and human rights.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider this assumption?

Michael Shaik is a former International Solidarity Movement Coordinator and a member of Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine.

BBC: “Villagers fight West Bank Barrier”

By Martin Patience
BBC News website, in Bilin

After prayers at Bilin’s mosque, male worshippers spill from the modest building and begin the short walk to the West Bank barrier running close to the village.


The demonstrations at Bilin have become a weekly Friday ritual

Every Friday for the last 15 months, members of the community have marched along the village’s winding tarmac road past the olive orchards and up a steep hill to where the barrier is protected by helmeted Israeli soldiers in full riot gear.
For the 1,700 villagers, the protest has become an article of faith.

According to Abdullah Abu Rahma, 35, the organiser of the weekly protest, the barrier annexes about 60% of the village’s land, cutting farmers off from their fields, making it almost impossible to make a living.
”The wall is a catastrophe for the village,” says the 35-year-old Arabic teacher. ”We must destroy the wall and we will protest until it falls.”

Tear Gas

Swelled by a number of Israeli and foreign peace activists, the weekly protest is the longest running demonstration against the barrier in the West Bank. Each week, the protesters are met by the Israeli troops and a face-off ensues.

Chanting slogans, the protestors clank stones on a waist-high yellow metal gate a few feet away from soldiers protected by three armoured military jeeps. The demonstrators say they want to access the village’s land on the other side of the barrier.

While billed as a peaceful demonstration, the protest normally ends in violence – with both sides accusing each other of provocation.


The Israeli army says the protesters specifically aim to provoke soldiers

On the Friday I attended the march, it was not clear which side started the violence. But within minutes, the protestors were running for cover from the rubber bullets and stinging tear gas.
Some teenagers, with slings, crouched behind rocks, before briefly standing up and hurling stones at the Israeli soldiers on the other side of the barrier.

The Israeli army only responds to protect the barrier or when stones are thrown at soldiers, says army spokesman Captain Jacob Dallal.
“The protestors are only interested in provoking the Israeli army,” he adds.

Farm Land

Two settlers from a nearby settlement standing on the Israeli side of the barrier, provoked a furious response from some of the protestors. ”It’s our land, it’s our land,” one man cried, as he ran up the hill to get closer to the settlers.
But for many Palestinians, the 685 km barrier, which annexes 8% of the West Bank and puts East Jerusalem on the Israeli side, amounts to a land grab of territory earmarked for a future Palestinian state.
The International Court of Justice issued an advisory ruling in 2004 that the barrier breached international law where it is built on occupied territory and should be dismantled.
”All over the world people think that the Palestinians are terrorists,” says Rateb Abu Rahma, 40, a university lecturer. ”All we want is our rights.”

Walks of Life

In the last year, Bilin’s villagers have seen some successes. Represented by Tel Aviv lawyer, Michael Sfard, the residents have challenged the route of the barrier round their village. Their case will be heard by the Israeli High Court later in May.

They have also secured a temporary ban on a nearby settlement continuing its construction work on 750 new housing units. The villagers say the construction is taking place on their land.
By aligning the villagers with Israeli and foreign peace activists, many of the protestors believe that the success of the demonstration has been in its broad appeal.

“People turning up from all walks of life is the heart of this demonstration,” says Israeli Yuval Halperin, 26, a book editor from Tel Aviv.

For some of the protestors, the Bilin demonstration represents a new way of tackling the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Mansour Mansour, 29, believes that the protests at Bilin can be repeated successfully across the West Bank.

”Palestinians believe that ending the occupation is their right,” he says. ”But it is only when we start asserting our right that the occupation will end.”

Ha’aretz: “Supreme Disgrace”

A Haaretz Editorial

The bottom line is the decisive one in yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on family reunification. In light of such serious damage to the equal rights of Arab citizens of Israel, it does not matter at all what the ruling says or how instructive the position of the minority justices, led by Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, was. It also does not matter that the decision to rob Israel’s Arab citizens of the right to marry the person they choose and live with that person in Israel was made by a 6-5 majority.

There is no country in the Western world that does not limit immigration and set priorities in accordance with its needs at a given time. Immigration laws make it difficult for foreign partners of citizens to receive citizenship, and they combat fictitious marriages. But not one single Western country discriminates against some of its citizens by passing laws that apply only to them, and that impose limits only on their choice of a partner with whom they can live in their homeland.

It is difficult to accept the argument that the amendment to the Citizenship Law, which won the Supreme Court’s approbation yesterday, comes in response to a genuine security need. It is easier to accept the skeptical position of Justice Ayala Procaccia, who wrote that in light of the facts before her, she doubted whether the security explanation is the only one behind the law. The facts presented by the security establishment do not explain the law, since out of the tens of thousands who have become Israeli citizens since 1967 in the framework of family unification, only 26 have been questioned on suspicion of abetting terrorism. Since 1993, 16,000 requests for family unification have been submitted. This number also does not justify the demographic frenzy at which the justice hinted. The relatively small number of people suspected of abetting terrorism does not justify the blow the Knesset dealt to family unification in general, nor does it justify the injustice done in particular to hundreds of married couples who were barred from living in Israel because the law applied retroactively to couples whose cases were pending.

The justices did agree that the law infringes on the equality and human rights of Arab citizens of Israel, but they decided that this was trumped by the risk of terror. It is tough to be impressed by the security rationale when recalling the approximately quarter of a million Arabs from East Jerusalem who were annexed against their will, and who have given rise to more terrorists and terror accomplices than did all those who entered Israel as a result of marriage.

In the minority opinion, Barak wrote things that the Knesset and the majority justices chose to forget: “Democracy does not impose a sweeping ban, thereby cutting off its citizens from their partners and not allowing them to live a family life … It does not give its citizens the option of living in it without their partners or leaving the country … Democracy cedes a certain amount of security in order to obtain an immeasurably greater amount of family life and equality.”

The fear is that the position expressed by the Supreme Court president will fade and disappear once the Knesset turns the Citizenship Law into a Basic Law, aided by a tailwind from the Supreme Court in one of its most shameful hours.

Israel/Occupied Territories: High Court decision institutionalizes racial discrimination

By Amnesty International

The decision by the Israeli High Court of Justice on 14 May to uphold a law which explicitly denies family rights on the basis of ethnicity or national origins is a step further in the institutionalization of racial discrimination in Israel.

The “Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law” bars family reunification for Israelis married to Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. It specifically targets Israeli Arabs (Palestinian citizens of Israel), who make up a fifth of Israel’s population, and Palestinian Jerusalemites,(1) for it is they who marry Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Thousands of couples are affected by this discriminatory law, which forces Israeli Arabs married to Palestinians to leave their country or to be separated from their spouses and children. Israeli military law forbids Israelis from entering the main population centres in the Occupied Territories and Israeli citizens cannot join their Palestinian spouses there, and at the same time Palestinian spouses staying in Israel without a permit are constantly at risk of being deported and separated from their families. Thus, Israeli-Palestinian couples would ultimately be forced to move to another country in order to live together – an option which is neither feasible nor desirable for those concerned. In addition, Palestinian Jerusalemites would lose their residency and their right to ever live in Jerusalem again if they move out of the city.

Five of the 11 High Court of Justice’s judges who ruled on this law on 14 May, including the Court’s President, voted against upholding the law, recognizing that it infringes human rights. The Court’s President, Aharon Barak, stated that the law violates the right of Israeli Arabs to equality.

Indeed, the law violates the absolute prohibition on discrimination contained in international human rights law, notably several treaties which Israel has ratified and is obliged to uphold, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

The provision in the law which allows for the discretionary granting of temporary residence permits for Palestinian male spouses over 35 and female spouses over 25 is arbitrary in nature and does not alter the discriminatory character of the law. It will also not benefit the majority of Israeli-Palestinian couples, who marry at a younger age. Moreover, the permit applications of spouses who meet the age criteria can be rejected on the grounds that a member of his/her extended family is considered a “security risk” by Israeli security services. Thousands of Palestinians seeking family reunification prior to the passing of this law were rejected on unspecified “security” grounds in circumstances where the failure to provide detailed reasons for each rejection made it impossible for those rejected to mount an effective legal challenge to the decision.

The Israeli authorities have sought to justify the law on security grounds but have brought no convincing evidence to substantiate such claims. Even claims that some 25 people, some of whom were born to Israeli parents and were not in Israel as a result of family reunification, have been involved in attacks in security-related offences, cannot justify denying family reunification to every Palestinian. Doing so is discriminatory and disproportionate and would constitute a form of collective punishment, prohibited under international law. Moreover, statements by Israeli officials and legislators who support the new law indicate that it is primarily motivated by demographic, rather than security, considerations – that is, a determination to reduce the percentage of Israeli Arabs among the country’s population.

The ban on family unification for Israeli-Palestinian couples, initially introduced by an administrative decision of the Interior Minister in 2002 and subsequently passed into law by the Israeli Knesset in July 2003, is due to be reviewed by the Israeli Knesset next July. Amnesty International reiterates its call on the Israeli government and on Members of the Knesset to repeal this law and to ensure that any steps taken to address security concerns, including any amendments to the citizenship law, comply with international human rights law – notably the principle of non-discrimination.

(1) Palestinians who remained in Israel after the establishment of the state in 1948 became Israeli citizens, whereas the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem received a special status as permanent residents after Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967 and its subsequent annexation. Today, there are about 230,000 Palestinian permanent residents of Jerusalem.

Internationals Injured at Anti-Wall Demonstration in the Press

1. In the Danish TV News May 14, 2006
To view, go to this website and click on the headline: “Dansk fredsvagt såret på Vestbredden”

2. In the Australian Channel 9 TV news May 15, 2006
To view, go to this website and click on the headline: “Rubber Bullet to the Head”

3. “Man Shot in Protest out of Hospital” May 15, 2006 From The Australian

4. “Violent Anti-Fence Protest on Friday” From the Israel National News

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Man Shot in Protest Out of Hospital
The Australian May 15, 2006

A SYDNEY man shot in the head with a rubber bullet during a protest in the West Bank has been released from hospital, and may sue the Israeli Army.
Phil Reiss, from the southern Sydney suburb of Yowie Bay, was filming a protest in the town of Bilin on Friday (AEST) when he was hit in the head with a rubber bullet apparently fired by an Israeli soldier.
About 300 people were taking part in a weekly demonstration, protesting against Israel building the separation wall and fence, when the violence broke out.
On his release from hospital today, Mr Reiss described Israeli soldiers involved in quelling the protest as “thugs”.
“I think they behaved like thugs, to be honest,” he told Channel 9.
“Their tactics were heavy-handed and completely unnecessary and were not warranted by the circumstances of the situation.”
Activist group International Solidarity Movement (ISM) said Israeli soldiers started throwing sound grenades and firing rubber-coated bullets during the demonstration, injuring five people.
ISM spokeswoman Zadie Susser said 26-year-old Mr Reiss had been doing volunteer work with the organisation for two weeks and filming the demonstration for them when he and a Danish demonstrator were shot.
Mr Reiss is not the first Australian injured while protesting in Israel.
Perth university student Joshua Taaffe, 24, was shot through both legs by Israeli soldiers during an ISM protest in the West Bank in October 2003, and Sydney woman Kate Edwards, 26, was shot in the stomach while volunteering with ISM in April 2002.
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Violent Anti-Fence Protest on Friday
Israeli National News
09:12 May 14, ’06 / 16 Iyar 5766

(IsraelNN.com) Hundreds of Palestinian Authority (PA) residents and left-wing Israelis took part in a violent protest Friday afternoon in opposition to the partition fence near Bilin, in the Modi’in area.

Border police were compelled to use teargas and stun grenades as the crowd began pelting them with rock, bottles and other objects. Protestors reported a foreign activist who joined them was moderately injured in his head after being hit with a rubber bullet by border police.

A number of border policemen were lightly injured as well.