Category: In the Media

Widerstand bedeutet, in Hebron zu bleiben

UN-Solidaritätstag mit dem palästinensischen Volk: Internationale Präsenz in den besetzten Gebieten
Interview by Wladek Flakin
Ursprünglich innen veröffentlicht Junge Welt

Die Israelin Neta Golan ist Mitbegründerin der International Solidarity Movement (ISM) und lebt in Ramallah im Westjordanland.

F: Am Dienstag war der von den Vereinten Nationen proklamierte Tag der Solidarität mit dem palästinensischen Volk. Wie unterstützt Ihre Bewegung die Palästinenser?

Neta: Unsere internationale Solidaritätsbewegung wurde zu Beginn der zweiten Intifada im September 2000 gegründet. Wir unterstützen den gewaltfreien Widerstand in Palästina. Es ist eine gemeinsame Bewegung von Palästinensern und Aktivisten aus dem Ausland, den sogenannten Internationalen. ISM steht aber unter palästinensischer Führung.

Bei uns laufen mehrere Projekte parallel. Ein zentraler Bereich ist die Unterstützung des Widerstandes gegen die Annexionsbarriere, die Mauern und Zäune, die rund um die Westbank gebaut werden. Wir konzentrieren uns auf das Dorf Bilin bei Ramallah. Dort demonstrieren wir seit zehn Monaten Freitag für Freitag.

In Nablus unterstützen wir palästinensische Bauern. Zusammen mit israelischen Gruppen wie “Rabbiner für Menschenrechte” oder “Anarchisten gegen die Mauer” gehen wir auf die Felder und pflücken Oliven in Gebieten, die von den Siedlern bedroht werden.

F: ISM ist aber auch in Hebron in der südlichen Westbank präsent.

Neta: Ja. Wir haben eine Basis in Tel Rumeida, einem Viertel in der Altstadt von Hebron, wo Palästinenser neben Siedlern unter Apartheidbedingungen leben. So können die Palästinenser zentrale Straßen nicht nutzen, weil diese für die Siedler reserviert sind. Palästinensische Kinder werden auf dem Weg zur Schule von jungen Siedlern mit Steinen beworfen. ISM-Aktivisten begleiten diese Kinder jeden Tag zur Schule. Für die Palästinenser bedeutet dort Widerstand, in der Gegend zu bleiben.

F: Wie kommen die ISM und andere Gruppen gegen die Besatzung in der israelischen Gesellschaft an?

Neta: Es gibt eine andauernde Diffamierungskampagne gegen uns – vom Außenamt, das wir nicht wegen Beleidigung verklagen dürfen, sowie von rechtsextremen Siedlergruppen. Sie verbreiten die unglaublichsten Lügen. Über mich wurden wahnsinnige Sachen geschrieben, zum Beispiel, daß ich mein ganzes Leben in einer Psychoklinik verbracht hätte.

F: ISM wird seitens Israels vorgeworfen, terroristische Gruppen oder Aktionen zu unterstützen.

Neta: Alles, was hier passiert, wird von der israelischen Armee als Terrorismus bezeichnet. Als der britische Fotograf Tom Hurndall von Soldaten in Gaza erschossen wurde, hieß es in der ersten Erklärung der Armee, er hätte eine Tarnuniform und eine Waffe getragen. Später wurde behauptet, er hätte neben einem palästinensischen Kämpfer gestanden. Die Wahrheit ist, eine Gruppe israelischer Soldaten hat auf drei Kinder an einer Straßensperre geschossen, und Tom wollte sie aus der Schußlinie holen.

F: Wie können die Palästinenser und die ISM unterstützt werden?

Neta: Ich weiß, es ist verwirrend, wenn jede einzelne Geschichte in zwei völlig unterschiedlichen Versionen erscheint. Deshalb lade ich alle ein, bitte ich, flehe ich, hierher zu kommen und sich selbst die Realität der besetzten palästinensischen Gebiete anzuschauen.

Resistance means to stay in Hebron

Solidarity Day with the Palestinian People: International Presence in the occupied Territories
Interview by Wladek Flakin
Originally published in Junge Welt

An Interview with Neta Golan – Neta Golan is Israeli and a founding member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). She lives in Ramallah in the West Bank.

Q: The UN called for the solidarity day with the Palestinian People on Tuesday. How does your movement support the Palestinians ?

Neta: Our international Solidarity Movement was founded at the beginning of the second Intifada in September 2000. We support the non-violent resistance in Palestine. It’s a joint movement of Palestinians and foreign activists, so called internationals. The leadership of ISM is Palestinian.

There are several projects we work on it in parallel. A focal point is the support for the resistance against the annexing barriers, the walls and the fences who are build around the west bank. We focus on the village of Billin, near Ramallah. For ten months now, there is a demonstration every Friday.

In Nablus we support Palestinian farmers. Together with Israeli groups like “Rabbis for Human Rights” or “Anarchists against the Fence” we go to the fields to pick olives in areas under treat from the settlers.

Q: ISM is also present in Hebron.

Neta: Yes. We have a basis in Tel Rumeida, a quarter of the old city in Hebron where Palestinians live side by side with Settlers under apartheid circumstances. For example Palestinians are not allowed to use main roads, since they are reserved for the settlers. Young settlers throw rocks at Palestinian kids on their way to school. ISM activists accompany these kids to school every day. For Palestinians there, resistance means to stay in the area.

Q: How is the acceptance of ISM and other opponents against the occupation in the Israeli society ?

Neta: There are many defamation campaigns against us. From the foreign ministry, which we are not allowed to sue because of insult or from right-wing extremist settler groups. They publish incredible lies. They wrote about me, that I spent my entire life in a clinic for mentally ill persons.

Q: Israeli officials accuse ISM to support terrorist groups or terrorist acts.

Neta: Everything that happens here, is branded as terrorism by the army. When the British photographer Tom Hurndal was killed by soldiers in Gaza, the first press release from the army claimed that he was wearing camouflage and a weapon. Later they said that he stood side by side with a Palestinian fighter. The truth is, that a group of soldiers shoot at three children on a roadblock and Tom wanted to get them out of the fire line.

Q: How can we support the Palestinians and ISM ?

Neta: I know that it’s confusing, as every story appears in two different versions. Therefore I invite, I ask and I beg everybody to come to this place, in order to witness the reality in the occupied Palestinian territories by yourself.

West Bank villagers victims of land grab

By Joy Arbor
Originally published in The Daily Nebraskan

Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series on the author’s recent trip to Israel/Palestine.

“Every inch on this land reminds me of memories. These rocks I played with as a child. The trees I planted with my father and grandfather. It makes me sad to see them dying,” said Abu Rani, a 50-year-old man with dark curly hair and a graying beard.

On Nov. 9, we stood under an olive tree in his family’s olive grove. Bright yellow bulldozers and giant cranes were expanding the planned development less than a mile away. At the foot of the slope, between the construction and us, bulldozers cleared what looked like a curvy road.

That road, explained 31-year-old Mohammed Khatib of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in Bil’in, is for the Separation Wall.

Near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Bil’in is a small village of 1,600 residents 2 1/2 miles east of the 1967 Green Line. Two-state solution advocates have hoped that Palestine could forge a state made up of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But in Bil’in, 2-plus miles into the West Bank, the Separation Wall built to protect the growing Israeli settlement city of Modi’in Illit is gobbling up over 575 acres, 60 percent of the villagers’ land.

“Fifty people used to live off this land,” said Abu Rani. The wall will divide people from cultivated land on which they have farmed olives and grazed sheep for generations.

The tall buildings of Modi’in Illit create a skyline, its clouds of dust rising into the air. The winds of this valley blow the dust of Modi’in Illit’s expansion into our faces. Khatib claimed the dust harms the olive trees. The gray-green leaves were browning.

Yards away from us were bulldozer tracks. Abu Rani explained that on the feast day after Ramadan, a private company tried to bulldoze the trees. According to a Nov. 25 story in the Israeli online newspaper Ynet, private contractors have uprooted 190 olive trees. The villagers say soldiers do nothing to intervene.

The Defense Ministry told Ynet: “The incident in question was not related to the construction of the security fence, but was the work of a private contractor who was operating in the area.” Villagers claim the police have done nothing.

The world’s eyes have been on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, lauding him for the generally peaceful evacuation of the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. But Sharon’s left-leaning critics suspected his motives from the start.

I withheld judgment for a long time. Settlements are always used as facts on the ground to justify military presence, so evacuating the Gaza Strip settlements seemed nothing less than an audacious turnaround of a political agenda from the father of the settler movement.

But seeing the expansion of Modi’in Illit and the lands usurped by the wide barrier loop of the Separation Wall, I have to admit that Sharon, ever the shrewd military strategist, pulled out of the Gaza Strip in order to firm up and expand the holdings in the West Bank.

According to a March 2005 UN report, Modi’in Illit has 27,000 residents. Khatib claimed that far from pulling settlers out of this West Bank settlement, 5,000 new settlers are expected in the next two weeks to move in to a new building. By the time of the writing of this column, those settlers, drawn to Modi’in Illit by the brand-new houses, government subsidies and cheaper housing rates, are probably already there.

A year ago, the International Court of Justice handed down an advisory ruling that Israel’s construction of a wall on Palestinian land violated international law. While the Israeli High Court of Justice disagreed, the September decision did order the military to reroute the Separation Wall in the city of Qalqilia because the Palestinian people were being harmed disproportionately to security needs.

The people of Bil’in are hoping for a similar decision. While their initial appeal to the High Court failed, they have hired a new attorney and are preparing for a new court battle.

Every Friday at noon, Bil’in residents are joined by Israeli and international activists to protest the expropriation of Palestinian land and the building of the wall. Khatib states the demonstrations are intended to be peaceful, but the IDF often uses tear gas and rubber bullets to try to disperse the crowds.

David Pred, an American human rights activist at the protest in Bil’in last Friday, said he stood hand-in-hand with Palestinians, Israeli teenagers and ex-soldiers, and internationals, including a Japanese Buddhist monk. During the demonstration, Pred reports, there was a half-hour sit-in in front of a line of soldiers with a giant bulldozer behind them. The bulldozer finally turned back.

There was little violence during the course of the demonstration, Pred says, but the soldiers did use tear gas.

An online petition to protest the expropriation of Bil’in’s land is available at www.petitiononline.com/Bilin/petition.html. For more information on Bil’in and their struggle against the Separation Wall, go to www.palsolidarity.org.

Bil’in demonstrators: 14-year-old hit in the head by rubber bullet

From Ha’aretz

A 14-year-old demonstrator was hit by a rubber bullet in the head in clashes with security forces during what has become Friday’s weekly protest against the separation fence near the West Bank of Bil’in, demonstrators said. The teen was taken to hospital and his uncondition is still unknown.

Five Israel Defense Forces troops were also lightly injured in the clashes. At least 15 protesters were injured and three were arrested during the clashes in the security fence area in the West Bank village.

Among the wounded was the chairman of the Bil’in council who fainted after inhaling teargas. The demonstrators claimed that they were beaten by soldiers and policemen, and that security forces threw stun grenades at protesters without provocation.

Around 100 Israelis and Palestinians participated in the demonstration against the construction of the separation fence in the area, and some of them succeeded in stopping construction work on it.

The Israel Defense Forces said that the protesters blocked one of the engineering vehicles in the area. The IDF said that when the protesters refused to get away from it, they had to use special means to disperse the demonstrators.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/644420.html

Speakers bring struggle against the wall to Detroit

By Ali Moossavi
Originally published in The Arab American News

If a Palestinian and an Israeli walked into an Orthodox church, most people would expect a punch line.

On the evening of Nov. 7th at St. Mary’s Orthodox Church in Berkley, Michigan, that’s precisely what happened, in front of 60 participants wanting to listen and learn. What the Palestinian and the Israeli had to say, however, was no joke.

As the audience gathered to listen, the odd couple – the Palestinian farmer Ayed Morrar and the 23-year old Israeli punk rock scenester/anarchist activist Jonathan Pollack – brought to life the struggle against the separation wall Israel has constructed allegedly to prevent suicide bombings.

Many critics in Israel and throughout the world counter that it’s an apartheid wall, to control and stifle Palestinian society, while illegally annexing land inside the “Green Line,” the internationally recognized border between the Jewish state and the Occupied Territories.

It was when the non-violent struggle against the wall erupted in the village of Jayyous in 2002 that protests spread to other West Bank villages. The protests garnered international support, from activist organizations like the International Solidarity Movement as well as organs of international law, most notably the 2004 ruling by the International Court of Justice, which ruled the wall illegal.

In response to the protests, which have been non-violent, the Israeli Defense Forces and Border Police have used tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets, live ammunition and batons in efforts to suppress the actions. Pollack himself was hit in the head by a tear gas canister in the village of Bi’lin from approximately 20-30 meters at the end of a demonstration.

“I heard a shot and I turned around,” he said, in the stairwell after the event, “and I saw the canister flying towards me and I had the time just to turn my head and it hit here, above the temple.”

In addition to the tear gas canister, Pollack was also shot four times with the rubber bullets at various times.

“I couldn’t walk for two weeks because of internal hemorrhaging,” he said during the presentation.

The presentation began with Tel Aviv-born Pollack explaining the foundations of the present conflict with a PowerPoint display, from the origins of Zionism and the 1948 war to the beginning of the settlement project and the current intifada. He described the three levels of citizenship: full citizenship, permanent residency for East Jerusalemites and orange IDs for Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories.

After that introduction, he proceeded to break down the official propaganda surrounding what he called the marketing of the wall.

According to him, only 5 percent of the wall is a 25 foot high concrete structure, about twice as high as the Berlin Wall, while the overall length is “double the length of the Green Line,” he said. The rest of the “wall” is a series of barbed wire fences and other obstacles. Additionally, 80 percent of the barrier is built on Palestinian land, making the seam line a permanent military zone.

“That means, if you want to enter the West Bank, then you must have permission from the military authorities,” Pollack noted.

He went on to describe the effect the wall had on Palestinian life. Qalqilya, once the richest city in the area, is now caged from four sides. Unemployment has risen from 13 percent to a staggering 80 percent since the wall was built. As a result, after one year of the wall’s construction, one-third of Qalqilya’s residents have left, according to official statistics; Pollack feels the number is higher.

“The wall is not a means of security, but as a means of ethnic cleansing,” he said.

The impact that Pollack described on the Palestinians was further elaborated by Palestinian farmer and Budrus resident Ayed Morrar.

Morrar made clear that the Palestinians want peace, but on the condition that peace cannot occur in the absence of freedom. The occupation, he said, is a catastrophe not only for Palestinians, but for any nation and the catastrophe can be felt in the destruction of Palestinian culture, economy and in their lives overall.

To give an example, Morrar described his daily routine – to go to his job in Ramallah, he has to go through two different checkpoints. Another routine is suffering the treatment meted out by Israeli soldiers.

“One time they arrested me in 1989, and they put us in the military bus. I saw Hebrew writings by Israeli soldiers,” he said, writings that said the best Arab is a dead one.

He went on to describe the impact the olive tree has on the Palestinian economy and life, especially when the Israelis uproot them. The olive tree is mentioned in the Qu’ran and the Bible, grandparents pass on proverbs about the tree’s wonder and that a 5,000 year old tree stands in Jenin, the sight of an Israeli assault in April, 2002.

“We really cry when we see them uprooted,” Morrar said.

Afterwards, the speakers showed a video of non-violent protests from the past two years, where unarmed demonstrators were beaten and concussion grenades were used, sometimes exploding right beside what appeared to be children. In one shot, Palestinian protestors were viciously beaten, only to have their ambulance windshield shattered by a tear gas canister and explode inside the vehicle after they had been placed inside.

Despite having endured violence and attending hundreds of protests, both Pollack and Morrar were in good spirits. Their tour had already lasted three weeks and they have two more weeks to look forward to. Morrar summed up their optimism this way:

“This is our slogan: ‘We can do it.'”