Haaretz: “90% of Palestinian complaints to police ‘unsolved’ “

by Avi Issacharoff, from Ha’aretz, 11th September 2006. Followed by a collection of links to ISM reports on complaints to the Israeli police from which nothing has come.

A total of 90 percent of the complaints filed by Palestinians in the West Bank against Israeli citizens for violent attacks have been closed without charges being filed, according to a report prepared by the human rights organization Yesh Din, which will be made public Monday.

The organization is staffed by volunteers, who focus on the way law is enforced vis-a-vis Israelis in the West Bank, describes the police handling of the complaints as negligent, careless, unprofessional and disrespectful.

During the first 11 months of 2005, a total of 299 police investigations into Palestinian complaints of Israeli violence against them were initiated, according to the Yesh Din report. Data for the total number for 2006 are not included in the report.

The report is based on a sample study of 92 cases, filed with police during both 2005 and 2006. A third of these complain of assault – battery, use of firearms and other weapons, stone throwing – however the report concludes that 80 percent of these cases were closed without any charges being filed against the suspects.

In response, the Judea and Samaria Police said that “the data was passed on to the responsible authorities.”

On the basis of the sample study, it turns out that 90 percent of the cases were closed without charges being brought against anyone. In 83 percent of the cases, the reason was that the suspect could not be found or there was insufficient evidence.

In 7 percent of the cases, the cause was that the forms on which the complaints had been filed were lost – which meant that it was impossible to investigate the case.

A total of 96 percent of the cases, having to do with trespassing – including damage to olive groves – were closed without bringing charges against suspects. All cases involving property damage were closed without charges.

Yesh Din says that Palestinians are sometimes prevented from filing complaints against settlers who damage their property by the unwillingness of police officers to take down their testimony or because they are asked to present documents that they do not have.

According to a closer study of a sample of 42 cases, the following problems emerged in the police treatment of the plaintiffs: Their testimonies were not taken in Arabic; in few instances did the investigators agree to visit the site of the alleged crime; evidence from the crime scene was collected unprofessionally; testimonies of key witnesses were not taken; in almost all cases, no line-ups of Israeli suspects were held; in all 42 cases the police failed to check the suspects’ alibis.

The report points to fundamental problems in the way the Judea and Samaria Police is structured. While it is responsible for the largest police district in the country, it only has 6 percent of the police force at its disposal and receives a mere 2.5 percent of the overall police budget.

In addition, the number of patrol cars available is very limited, and the policemen can only leave their stations to collect evidence if they are accompanied by an IDF patrol.

The report also points to failings in the way the IDF has handled Palestinian complaints. Unlike the police, the IDF is neither limited in manpower nor budgets.

However, the soldiers have not received any instructions on their role in protecting Palestinian civilians from Israeli attackers, even though the IDF claims the contrary. In practice, a great deal of confusion exists.

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The “Justice” of Occupation

by ISM Media group

This report published in Ha’aretz merely confirms what Palestinians have known for years about the Occupation ‘justice’ system, namely that the complaints process is a figleaf for the unaccountable brutality of Occupation. Palestinians are well aware that their complaints of attacks by settlers or the Israeli military are unlikely to be taken seriously. In practice most Palestinians won’t even complain to the Israeli police about all but the most serious attacks for fear of reprecussions from Israeli colonists or soldiers. In the few cases where convictions are secured, sentences for even the most serious crimes like murder are derisory.

The following is a list of examples from ISM eye-witness reports.

Muhammed Abu Solayby from Beit Ummar village made 8 complaints to the police about settlers destroying his orchards and vines but none of these were taken seriously. Even when internationals witnessed and videoed this destruction taking place, the police refused to act.

International human rights workers (HRW) have first-hand experience of this culture of impunity. When two internationals were attacked by masked settlers in Susya near Hebron this summer whilst armed settler guards watched, a complaint was filed with the police. The police promised to investigate and quickly confirmed that they knew the identity of some of those participating. To date, however, no action has been taken against the attackers.

HRWs in the Tel Rumeida district of Hebron are frequently attacked by settlers and do make complaints to the police. None of these has led, however, to any prosecutions of the settlers involved, even where the attacks are recorded on video. Sometimes settlers who assault HRWs will claim they were attacked and the HRW will be detained:
https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/06/28/anat-cohen/
https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/09/11/hrw-detained/

Israeli Settlers Harrass Palestinians, Soldiers Detain Human Rights Worker

by Tel Rumeida Project and ISM Hebron

September 9th, 2006

Around 2pm today, while sitting on the top of the hill in Tel Rumeida, Hebron, soldiers ordered Palestinian children and Human Rights Workers (HRWs) to stop playing football in the street. The HRW asked the soldier what the problem was, and he replied, “You’re bothering me. Stop playing football here.” The HRW asked the soldier if it was illegal to play football in the street, and the soldier said, “No, it’s not illegal, but you’re bothering me. Stop playing football here. Thank you.” The Palestinian children and HRWs continued to play football for about two more minutes, then sat back down. Approximately ten minutes later, HRWs noticed two Israeli settler children looking over the fence and into the yard of a Palestinian home. Israeli settlers have been tearing down and breaking grape vines from this house over the past week, as well as stealing the grapes. One HRW walked towards the direction of the children, and they left. The HRW then stepped inside the Palestinian shoe shop nearby to say hello and see how things were going.

At this point, six settler boys around the age of 16 came down the hill. The international stood in the doorway, continuing her conversation. One settler boy, who approached this HRW the day before and called her a ‘bitch’ in Hebrew, aggressively approached the door of the shop and tried to enter. The HRW blocked his way with her body and told him, “You are not welcome in this shop. This is a private business.” The settler began yelling at the HRW in Hebrew. The HRW continued to block the door. The remaining settler boys surrounded the other HRW and began yelling at him in Hebrew. They then started to lightly whip the HRW with their tzitzit (the tassles that religious Jews wear). Two soldiers posted nearby approached and told the HRW to leave and quit making problems. The settler boys then proceeded to stand in a circle in the middle of the road and jump up and down, holding hands, singing a song in Hebrew very loudly. The soldier who had told the Palestinians and HRWs not to play football then told the HRWs that it would be better if we weren’t sitting outside causing problems and bothering the settlers on Shabbat. The soldier asked us what we were doing there and asked why we couldn’t go somewhere else. The HRWs ended the conversation at this point.

Approximately ten minutes later, eight soldiers came running down the hill. The last soldier in the contingent stopped at the gate of a house and kicked a small child who appeared to be about eight years old. The HRWs yelled at the soldier, but he ignored the HRWs and continued down the hill. He was wearing a red kippa and holding his helmet in his hand. One HRW approached a commander and told him about the soldier. She was able to point out the soldier; the commander called the soldier over to him. As the commander walked back past the HRWs, he told them, “You should file a report. What he did was bad.”

HRWs then received a phone call from HRWs on Shuhada Street saying they had just been attacked by the settlers. These were the same settlers in the incident on the top of the hill. A separate report will follow with the details of this incident.

********************

At approximately 3:30pm, three HRWs were sitting on Shuhada Street. Settler children were milling about the soldier’s post next to Beit Hadassa Settlement. The HRWs noticed three settler boys walking down Shuhada Street towards the settlement, seemingly prepared for violence. As the boys walked past the HRWs, they focused their attention on the two women in the group. The settler boys spit on the HRWs and cursed them in Hebrew. The HRWs then stood up and told the settler boys to leave. One boy had a short stick twice as thick as a broom handle. He threatened one HRW with the stick, but did not hit her. The HRWs yelled at the settler boys to leave and called for the soldier. The soldier eventually came out of his post and smiled gently at the boys. They eventually left, but not without threatening one HRW with the stick again and throwing a few rocks.

About ten minutes later, a Palestinian woman coming from the Qurtuba girls school stairs said that settler boys had thrown rocks at her. One HRW went towards the stairs and saw about 15 kids about the age of 8-10 sitting on the path to the school, destroying it. The HRW asked the soldier to help stop the kids, but he said that it wasn’t his job; he then went back into his post. The Palestinian woman who had come from the path ten minutes before came back; HRWs immediately offered to accompany her back on the path. She was extremely relieved that we said we would go with her. HRWs walked her past the settlers without incident and then went back to Shuhada Street. This went on with three more Palestinians, all without major incident. HRWs had called the police in the meantime to report the damage to the path. The police came and began yelling at the children. HRWs continued to accompany Palestinians on the path. Each time, the settler kids were more aggressive towards the Palestinians and HRWs, spitting on them and blocking their path. The last time HRWs walked a Palestinian on the path, settler girls about the age of 12 forcefully blocked the path and stopped the HRWs from passing. HRWs non-violently pushed their way through the group of settler kids. Anat Cohen, a settler woman well-known for being aggressive towards Palestinians and HRWs, blocked the second HRW. Anat Cohen said over and over again, “Go to Aushwitz! Go to Aushwitz you Nazi!” The HRW did not reply.

Fifteen minutes later, the border police and regular police approached the HRWs sitting on Shuhada Street. They filmed one female HRW, then surrounded her and demanded that she hand over her passport. The HRW had been travelling earlier in the day and had left her passport in the house. The police officer ordered another HRW to get the passport from the house. The police arrested the first HRW in the meantime. The HRW was held at Kiryat Arba Police Station for four hours then released without charges.

RMIT University press: “Mary’s Middle East mission”

Interview from community radio of RMIT university, Melbourne, Australia

A former RMIT University lecturer has become a volunteer peacekeeper on a Middle East frontline – at 75.

Mary Baxter, who lectured in statistics and mathematics from 1968 to 1996, is based in Tel Rumeida, a suburb of the Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank.

“My chief task is to get Palestinian children to and from school safely. Israeli settlers train their children to throw rocks and stones and often watch them doing this,” Ms Baxter said.

“The young Israeli soldiers stationed in the area are supposed to protect the Israeli settlers but it is the Palestinians who need protection.”

Ms Baxter pays her own way, working with International Solidarity, a Palestinian-led non-violent organisation. Her work involves collaboration, too, with Machsom Watch (Israeli mothers and grandmothers), Christian Peace Teams and the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel.

“I work at getting the soldiers to see the Palestinians as people. It helps that I automatically like the soldiers and am able to separate who they are from what they do. They are very like the engineering students that I taught for 30 years at RMIT.”

Ms Baxter was the first permanent woman lecturer in a technological area at RMIT.

She told Openline: “In the early days, Brigadier Jackson (Principal of RMIT) would visit each department for morning tea. When he met me, he asked, ‘How do you manage classes who are all young men?’ My boss replied for me, ‘She has five sons’. The Brigadier then said to me, ‘I take the question back’.”

What made her take up her new and challenging role?

“A mixture of things. I know the area. I was in Jerusalem for an International Ecology Congress (Statistics section) in 1978. Then, again, with my husband Alan (who was an Anglican priest) in 1987 on a Melbourne Jewry-sponsored tour for Christian clergy. Alan did a locum in Damascus in 1988 and I joined him for two months.

“I was definitely bored in retirement. And I think it is a call from God. I am certainly healthier in Palestine, in spite of the danger, than in Melbourne.”

Are there signs of hope?

“Not much from governments. Israel says they will remove settlers but keep taking more land. Positive signs are that young Israelis come to help, as do overseas Jews.

“Also a lot of the soldiers are nice kids. Sometimes a soldier will say, ‘I’ll look after the children, Mary’. Then I don’t have to antagonise settlers by going so close to where they live.”

What are the signs that things are getting worse?

“There are more and more roadblocks. Just south of Hebron, the Israeli army is building a wall one metre high. As usual, they say it is for security. But people can get over it. Tractors and donkeys can’t. And, of course, it is right in the middle of Palestinian land.”

Are you fearful for your personal safety?

“Not really. I do get hurt at times but if the settlers really wanted me dead, I would be by now.

“I have five sons and 12 grandchildren who all agree that being in the West Bank suits me.”

Olive Harvest 2006

Your presence is needed for the Olive Harvest 2006 in Palestine!

Palestinian communities are calling for the presence of international activists to support them in the 2006 Olive Harvest. Throughout the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian land continues to be stolen for illegal Israeli colonies and the Apartheid Wall as well as settler roads, checkpoints, and closed military zones.

Since October 2000, hundreds of thousands of olive trees have been bulldozed, uprooted, or burned by the Israeli military and Israeli settler colonists. The olive tree has been a native symbol for Palestinians for hundreds of years. As well as a source of livelihood and a symbol of the people’s bond to their land, the olive tree is also a powerful symbol of cooperation between peoples.

Cooperative actions between internationals and Palestinians have concentrated around the olive tree. Palestinian communities remain steadfast and are strengthened in refusing to give up their olive harvest. The solidarity offered by international activists enables many families to pick their olives and stay in their communities.

ISM will be providing training, media and legal support to international activists in response to the demand from local communities. Activists will use their creativity, determination and courage to support these communities at this important time of year. There is an especially big need for the campaign this year, as a big harvest is expected. Ground work has been done by ISM activists in the Nablus region on making contacts with at least 18 villages in the region who would like to have international accompaniment because of dangers they will face from Israeli colonists, and obstruction and harassment from the Israeli army. Many of these villages have worked with internationals before.

An international presence makes it less likely that Palestinian farmers and landowners will be met with brutal and sometimes lethal violence as they care for their land and harvest their olives.

The Olive Harvest Campaign, part of the people’s non-violent resistance to the occupation, will begin 15th October and last until the middle of December. Some villages have expressed a desire for internationals from mid-October although most villages we have contacted will start picking after the three day religious holiday of Eid il Fitr, which is expected to be from October 25-27. The majority of villages will be picking during November. The first Olive Harvest orientation and training will be held on October 15th and 16th and will continue every Sunday and Monday until the end of the Olive Harvest. During Eid il Fitr there will be no olive picking. Olive harvesting is expected to be finished by the middle of December. Please contact Hisham at hishamjamjoum@yahoo.com for questions about training.

Please register to join us at: palsolidarity.org
For more information, please contact info@palsolidarity.org
or see: palsolidarity.org

Important Notes

  • It is recommended that you stay for at least two weeks, though if this is not possible, your presence anytime throughout the duration of the campaign is appreciated.
  • As a guide, it will cost you approximately $100 per week for food, accommodation and travel in Palestine.
  • The two-day training and orientation is mandatory for activists participating in the non-violent resistance including the Olive Harvest.

Updated 14th September: the paragraph in this call about dates has been updated and clarified.

Ongoing Campaigns

In the meantime, we also invite internationals to join our on-going efforts to support Palestinian non-violent resistance all over the West Bank. In recent months Israeli aggression has increased in the West Bank whilst more international attention has been focused on Israeli atrocities in Lebanon and Gaza.

Palestinians in the Tel Rumeida district of Hebron suffer some of the worst settler violence in the West Bank. There has been an international presence in Tel Rumeida for 1 1/2 years. Activists who have attended ISM training have a permanent presence in the international apartment in Tel Rumeida. The work there involves accompanying Palestinian schoolchildren to school and protecting them from and documenting attacks by settlers. Internationals also maintain a presence on the streets in the settlement to document and intervene in the regular settler attacks on local Palestinian residents.

Israeli settler colonists in other areas in the Hebron region also frequently attack and intimidate Palestinian farmers. This involves physical assaults or the destruction of farmland. As with the Olive Harvest the presence of internationals enables farmers to work their land. This summer, internationals supported farmers in this way around Beit Omar village. Although the Wall has been largely built in the northern West Bank and around Jerusalem, land is currently being destroyed for the route of the Wall in the south of the West Bank, in the Bethlehem and Hebron regions. Internationals have supported weekly demonstrations against the Wall this summer in Al Khadr village west of Bethlehem as well as participating in actions around Karme Zur settlement between Halhoul and Beit Omar. There will be continuous non-violent resistance to land theft and the destruction of olive trees, vines and other agricultural land in the Hebron region.

In Bil’in village west of Ramallah, the illegal Apartheid Wall has stolen over half of the village’s agricultural land. Internationals have supported their 1 1/2 year struggle against the Wall which has focused around weekly Friday demonstrations. Internationals aim to maintain a permanent presence in the village which has been targeted by Israeli forces for its non-violent resistance.

Training Dates

We hold trainings every Sunday and Monday if there are at least 5 people. Please contact Hisham at hishamjamjoum@yahoo.com for questions about training.

Update, 7th October

See this post on our site for a more detailed plan for the Olive Harvest 2006.

Update, 16th October

Read about the recent ruling in the Israeli Sureme Court that orders the Israeli military and police to protect Palestinian farmers from settlers. See coverage of the ruling in the Israeli media: in Ha’aretz and the Jerusalem Post. See also this investigative article in Ha’aretz which brings up evidence that suggests the Israeli army will not live up to their promises. Compare also with reports from the early Olive Harvest (i.e. before Eid, which is likely to be either the 22nd or 23rd of October).

Counter Punch: “From Bil’in to Birmingham”

A Missing Link in Support for Palestinian Human Rights
From Bil’in to Birmingham
By DAVE HIMMELSTEIN

One of the latest in the long series of unpublicized Israeli attacks on civilians took place on August 25 in the West Bank village of Bil’in, a longstanding bastion of nonviolent Palestinian resistance. It occurred during the weekly protest against the Israeli de-facto-boundary wall being constructed in their midst. About 100 protestors — Palestinian, Israeli and international activists — were walking to the site of the wall when, without provocation, soldiers in riot gear waded in and began clubbing demonstrators and firing rubber bullets at close range.

An Italian, an Israeli and two Palestinian activists were beaten so badly they had to be taken to hospital. One American suffered a concussion and another sustained hand injuries, in addition to taking a rubber bullet in her back and another one in her hip. Besides being clubbed, a Palestinian coordinator was shot with three rubber bullets in the back and one in the leg.

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, this mayhem remains an unknown reality for mainstream-media consumers in North America. Despite the long-running nature of such activity and the graphic brutality of Israel’s response, coverage of these actions in Canadian and U.S. media is scant to non-existent. And, of course, the public invisibility of such activity abroad contributes to making it such a tough sell on the ground. The media blackout was dissected by Patrick O’Connor in October 2005, his report pointing out that the New York Times had published only three feature reports on Palestinian nonviolent resistance in the previous three years — “this despite the fact that Palestinians have conducted hundreds of nonviolent protests over the last three years throughout the West Bank against Israel’s construction of the Wall on Palestinian land, and despite the fact that the Israeli army killed nine Palestinian protesters, wounded several thousand protesters, harassed and collectively punished villages that protested, and arrested hundreds of protesters, including nonviolent protest leaders.”

Palestinians have grown used to a prevalent refrain in expressions of support received from international well-wishers: If only you guys acted like Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, the whole world would jump on your bandwagon. That message, of course, is superfluous–indeed, counter-factual. Organized non-violent Palestinian resistance has been going on for decades and continues to be actively exercised in the struggle against the occupation and the separation wall. Israeli products and services have been boycotted; military orders have been refused; confiscated properties have not been vacated. “Newsworthy” incidents gain sporadic attention, as when Israel was obliged to bring in the bailiffs in 1989 to deal with Palestinians’ refusal to pay taxes in the town of Beit Sahour. Higher profile was Israel’s 2003 siege of the Church of Nativity to crack down on Palestinian priests who were protecting fellow Palestinians.

Yet the exhortations continue. In fact, Palestinians have gotten the Go-Gandhi message from only two generations away from the horse’s mouth. It was delivered in 2004 by Arun Gandhi, 70-year-old grandson of the Mahatma, a naturalized American citizen who directs the Institute for Non-violence in Tennessee. While standing next to Israel’s separation wall in Abu Dis, Gandhi framed the non-violent option in terms of necessity: “I don’t think Palestine has the economic and military capacity to confront a huge state like Israel, which has not only a powerful military arsenal but powerful friends.”

Back in North America, socio-ecumenical rabbi Michael Lerner is explicit about the homegrown icon of nonviolence. “Imagine,” he told Al-Jazeera, “a parallel with Martin Luther King Jr: if blacks had been adopting violent methods at the same time as he was giving speeches in Washington, could he have achieved what he did? Peaceful protest is the only way the Palestinians can ever win.” And Lerner sets the bar high: “It will have to be an all or nothing. It cannot be that some sections of the community resist non-violently while others do not.”

A parallel between Palestinians and African Americans seems to have occurred to at least one American president. In Perceptions of Palestine, Kathleen Christison reports that Jimmy Carter made the explicit comparison in arguing against the view that the Israel-Palestine situation was hopeless. (She offers a contrapuntal reality-check by pointing out that Carter didn’t actually meet a real live Palestinian till a few years after leaving office.)

Among African Americans, since the days when Dr. King took pains to position himself as supportive of Israel, a perceived parallel between their human rights struggles and those of Palestinians has been more widespread at the grass-roots than at the elite level, with certain notable exceptions. Of course, all such perceptions are filtered through the convoluted multi-level interface that exists between African Americans and Jewish Americans. But, in a nutshell, Israel has turned out to be a bridge-burner. Jews were highly active in the early civil rights movement, but many of them felt rudely shaken when Martin was eclipsed by Malcolm. Things have never been the same. Any rekindling of Black-Jewish solidarity will probably take place outside established channels and, psychologically, will entail cornerstone realignment towards Israel on the part of North American Jews. Potential role models are the courageous Israeli Jews who have joined with Palestinians in direct action campaigns for decades–not to mention “righteous gentiles” from abroad like Rachel Corrie, the young activist from Olympia, Washington who was bulldozed to death while trying to prevent a home demolition.

The raw material for a North American shock of recognition exists. If the Bil’in confrontation were played out on TV screens in the United States and Canada, memories of historic King-related TV newscasts would undoubtedly be evoked. These would certainly include unforgettable images from spring 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, when a “Bull” named Connor turned police dogs, fire hoses, stun guns and tear gas on civil rights protestors. Advocates for Israel would respond by brandishing a handful of quotes where MLK praises Israel for its democracy and supports its right to protect itself. But those guarded remarks would likely be overshadowed by the visual flashback, supplemented perhaps by a rereading of King’s celebrated “Letter from a Birmingham jail.” That missive lays out the operational dynamic of passive resistance (“nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue”) and confronts the law-and-order crowd (“everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal'”).
The King legacy is certainly a homegrown influence on the many brave Americans and Canadians who have asserted their own spiritual “birthright” by going to Palestine and joining in nonviolent direct action against the Israeli occupation. Rachel Corrie’s unacknowledged but ongoing presence hovers over the U.S. State Department, which is doing its best to discourage Americans from joining such actions. According to a recent advisory: “Those taking part in demonstrations, nonviolent resistance, and ‘direct action’ are advised to cease such activity for their own safety.”

While Bil’in has become emblematic of non-violent resistance, it is far from alone, as pointed out by Mohammed Khatib, secretary of the Bil’in village council and resistance committee member. During an interview in France last fall, he mentioned Budrus as another “notable” example of resistance, attributing Bil’in’s visibility to operational originality and media coverage. Khatib sees the presence of supporters from abroad as natural and inherent in the situation: “It is the international community which created the state of Israel, and, through its tribunals, has also condemned the construction of the wall, settlement activity and the Occupation. Together we must make Israel comply with international law.”

A mighty thread connects Birmingham with Bil’in. The organic outrage which was channeled into, and given form by, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is the same passion that sustains the International Solidarity Movement, Ta’ayush, Gush Shalom, Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement, Holy Land Trust, and others. It animates a trans-national community of purpose for which, as is the case with Zionism, overall outlook is more important than organizational structure. However unlike Zionism, it bears the mark of a defining restraint and self-discipline that gives it unique built-in credibility.

Dave Himmelstein is a writer and editor in Montreal. Reachable at chebrexy@hotmail.com