Mohammed Saqer Escapes Death

1.Mohammed Saqer Escapes Death
2. Shofat Camp Non violent action for Right to Worship Successful
3. Bil’in: Un-cage Palestine!
4.Border Police Lash Out
5. Police probe building of West Bank settlement neighborhood
6. Tel Rumeida Journal
7. At last, a peaceful Shabbat in Tel Rumeida
8. “That terrible feeling inside “
9. Tul Karem to Rammalah3 road blocks, 5 check-points, 7 cars

1.Mohammed Saqer Escapes Death- From Israeli Bullet to the Brain
May 2nd, 2006

An update from ISM activists in Nablus on Mohammed Saqer (17), the boy shot in the head a week ago with a rubber-coated metal bullet by the Israeli army:
After being kept in a medically induced coma for 72 hours following emergency brain surgery Mohammed successfully regained consciousness and, amazingly, is able to talk. This is an extremely positive development given the original opinion of his doctor that he was likely to be seriously brain damaged, if able to regain consciousness at all.
His improvement has been so rapid he has been transfered to the “intermediate intensive care” unit.

His entire family are ecstatic, including his mother and aunt who kept a bedside vigil during his coma and was distraught at the seriousness of his condition. The family said that when he fully came out of coma he opened his eyes and immediately said “Marhaba” – arabic for hello!

This is the second time in two years Mohammed has been shot in the head by Israeli forces, and as his aunt said at the time “The first time was much better. Now, I think its worse. It’s bad”.

Certainly, even though he is alive, awake and able to talk he needs constant medical attention and his long term condition is not known. He cannot move the left side of his body and it is uncertain what mobility he will regain. But his delighted mother said his situation is improving everyday.

Extraordinarily he asked us how we were doing, even greeting us in English and asking our names. He talked of how he hopes he will be better soon and how we can visit him in his home in Askar Refugee camp saying “You are always welcome at my home”
As ISM activist Lauren says “It is really amazing that he is even alive. It was surreal to even talk to him. What a miracle that he will laugh and smile again.”

2. Shofat Camp Non violent action for Right to Worship Successful

May 5th, 2006

For photos please see :https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/05/05/shofat-families-first-demonstration-for-right-to-worship-successful-tear-gassed-by-iof/

Residents of Shofat refugee camp in Jerusalem, along with international and Israeli supporters, today demonstrated non-violently against the Israeli Border Polices’ often violent suppression of the camps residents’ right to cross the checkpoint at the camp entrance to pray in Al-Aqsa Mosque on Fridays.

Palestinian men women and children marched peacefully alongside Israeli and international activists to the checkpoint carrying banners declaring their right to worship at Al Aqsa Mosque and protesting against construction of the Apartheid Wall next to the Camp.

Upon reaching the checkpoint Border Police and soldiers, including two mounted officers, attempted to physically block the marchers’ progress. The residents’ leaders asked the Border Police commander why they could not pass and complained about the denial of a basic human right. Unprovoked by any aggression on the part of the demonstrators, the Israeli forces resorted to using sound bombs and tear gas.

Scared but undaunted, the Camp residents continued to press their right to worship and accompanied by Israelis and Internationals over 60 people were able to make their way past the checkpoint, despite continued harassment by the Border Police.

Local resident Ibrahim said: “I am grateful for the people who joined with us today. It’s a first step and we will continue to demonstrate as long as they treat us this way. Today, they held back because of the presence of press and internationals, normally they are asking 10 yr old boys for documents or will not let them pass [documentation is not issued by Israeli authorities to Palestinian children until age 13] and they always treat worshippers brutally. They refuse to let buses through so the people have to go by foot whether it is hot or raining. It’s real suffering every day”

Residents of the camp have been complaining for many months about the behavior of the Border Police in the camp, which included cursing, pushing, beating and throwing concussion grenades. These are common procedures at the checkpoint at the entrance to the camp. The situation deteriorates in particular on Fridays when many worshipers try to go to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Border Police attack those waiting in line with particularly harsh violence. The violence of the Border Police in the camp is not limited only to the checkpoint. In the previous months Border Policemen have injured dozens of residents, mostly children. Among them is Abdel Malek Zalbani, an 8 year old child, who was critically wounded by a concussion grenade thrown during a demonstration against the wall.

The violent behavior of the Border Police in the Jerusalem area is not a new phenomenon. In East Jerusalem the last year alone, Samir Dhari from Essawiya and Mahmood Swara from Noaaman have been murdered by Border Policemen. This violence would not be possible without the agreement of silence by all the parties involved, primarily Marhash (the department for investigating Police), which is not attempting even to pretend to have an investigation in response to the many complaints that have been filed in the last year.

3. Bil’in: Un-cage Palestine!
May 5th, 2006

For photos see :
https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/05/05/bilin-un-cage-palestine/
May 5th- The non-violent demonstration against the Apartheid Wall on the land of Bil’in village this week was themed around the economic siege of Palestine by western powers. Israeli and international activists with pictures of western leaders taped to their chests carried a barbed-wire cage in which a Palestinian dressed in Palestinian flags was symbolically trapped. This was to signify the fact that Palestine is being made a prison created by the Israeli state and it’s western financiers.
The demonstration reached the fence gate which was closed to prevent the villagers accessing their own land. As has been the case for the last few weeks, the Israeli military enforced the closure of the gate by lining up jeeps and Border Police behind it. The demonstrators with the cage tried to open the gate and pass, but were prevented by the Border Police who beat those who got close to them with clubs. After a short while of trying this, the demonstrators gave up and instead dumped the cage on a jeep.
As was the case last week, the chanting group of demonstrators was broken up when the Border Police threw sound bombs at us. In response, several shebab from the village started throwing stones at the soldiers, who then opened fire on them with rubber-coated metal bullets. Most of the demonstrators moved out of the way of this unequal crossfire, shouting at the soldiers to stop firing at children, or talking to them in Hebrew to the same effect. Some from the village Popular Committee convinced the shebab to stop throwing stones. The demonstration regrouped and some tried to start a noise demo (banging in rhythm on a metal barrier which is part of the barrier), but the soldiers tried to arrest one of them – an international activist. Israeli international and Palestinian demonstrators prevented the arrest, simply by piling on the international. The soldiers gave up after a short while.
After a while, the demonstration was declared over by the Popular Committee. The demonstration left peacefully, making sure that the military jeeps were prevented from following us. Shebab from the village exchanged stones with tear gas and rubber-coated metal bullets with the soldiers.
No one was arrested this week. One Israeli demonstrator was mildly bruised (we think by a ricocheting rubber-bullet).

4.Border Police Lash Out
April 28th, 2006

For photos please see the link below:
https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/28/1063/
For Audio Report: https://publish.indymedia.org.uk/media/2006/04/339190.mp3
April 28th – The weekly non-violent demonstration against the Wall in Bil’in was attacked by the Israeli soldiers, as usual. The demonstrators reached the gate in the annexation wall that is stealing some 60% of the village’s land. The gate was blocked by several jeeps with Israeli border police standing on top and menacingly waving their clubs and pointing their M16 rifles at the demonstrators.

The crowd of Palestinians, Israelis and internationals chanted and sang against the wall and called on the soldiers to leave the village. Mohammed Khatib of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements stood on the gate and was beaten by three soldiers at once, seriously bruising him on the arms. Several other Palestinians were also beaten, although there ended up being no arrests this week.

Eventually, the military dispersed the demonstration using sound grenades, which, in conjunction with the beatings, provoked a few stones from some of the shabab. The soldiers then shot rubber bullets and teargas at the crowd. A 14 year old boy was wounded and Many tear gas suffered from tear gas inhalation.

This exchange repeated itself few times. Each time most of the demonstrators moved out of the line of fire. Israelis and internationals tried to stay close to the soldiers at the sides, talking to them and shouting at them – trying to convince them to stop shooting at children. The presence of internationals and Israelis, along with large amounts of journalists and photographers means that they rarely use live ammunition, unlike in places such as Nablus. There, very few internationals and press are present, and they regularly use live rounds against unarmed protesters – often children.

The Popular Committee is expecting the Wall in Bil’in to be completed in July, so they now fear an escalation in the oppression of the army against the village – in terms of both arrests and general levels of violence used against the villagers. Abdullah Abu-Rahme, co-ordinator of the Popular Committee called for as many Israelis and internationals as possible to join them now – both on the weekly demonstrations and to stay overnight in the village and the outpost to act as an presence in case of army entering the village.

5. Police probe building of West Bank settlement neighborhood
April 27th, 2006

By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz Correspondent 27/04/2006

For the original article See: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/709887.html
The Israel Police’s National Fraud Squad has opened a criminal investigation into the illegal construction of hundreds of housing units in the Matityahu East neighborhood of the Modi’in Ilit ultra-Orthodox settlement. A statement to this effect was submitted on Tuesday to the High Court of Justice in response to an injunction issued at the request of the Peace Now movement.

The police investigation is focusing on Modi’in Ilit council head Yaakov Gutterman, other senior council officials, entrepreneurs and large construction companies, Jewish real estate dealers who acquired privately owned Palestinian land, lawyers and settler organizations involved in “land redemption.”

Hundreds of millions of dollars are believed to have changed hands in the affair.
According to police suspicions, a lawyer at one of the settler organizations purchased the land in question based on an affidavit submitted by the mukhtar of Bil’in, who claimed that because of the security situation, he was unable to get to the village and collect the signatures of the landowners.

During the course of Tuesday’s legal debate, the High Court was told of a land-laundering system that allowed the real-estate dealers and settler organizations to convert private land – purchased sometimes through dubious means – into “state land.”
Ahead of the construction of the separation fence in the area, the land was “returned” to the buyers so that they could establish facts on the ground and press the Defense Ministry into moving the route of the fence to the east of the new neighborhood.

Peace Now attorney Michael Sfarad, who is also representing residents of Bil’in on whose land Matityahu East is being built, has provided the state with documents allegedly indicating that Gutterman and other council officials had a hand in illegal construction on an unprecedented scale. The documents include a letter in which the council’s legal advisor warns the council engineer that entrepreneurs are constructing “entire buildings without permits, with your full knowledge and in total disregard for planning process and the law.”

Furthermore, a report sent to the Interior Ministry by the council’s comptroller notes that construction in the new project is going ahead contrary to the state’s approved urban master plan.

Following a Haaretz report on the affair early in the year, and in keeping with a directive from the State Attorney’s Office, the Civil Administration in the West Bank took over law enforcement duties at the new building sites in the settlement, issuing injunctions to cease all the construction work and sending out inspectors to ensure that these were upheld. At the same time, the head of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch unit, Dror Etkes, submitted complaints to the police against all those involved in the affair.

At Tuesday’s High Court debate, the state said it had no objection to extending the construction ban, but said it was opposed to razing the illegal structures that had already been completed or were near completion. The state also said it saw no cause to evict individuals who had already moved into their apartments.

6. Tel Rumeida Journal
May 4th, 2006
For photos see: https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/28/settlers-vandalise-school-property-in-tel-rumeida/

Monday, April the 24th

Today was a quiet day. Volunteers doing a lot of work preparing for the press conference on Wednesday. A Press release and open letter to the police and army about rising settler violence are being drafted.

Jerusalem Post visit Tel Rumeida and visit two families who recount stories of settler and IDF violence. I hope their words get through to the journalists because it is obviously painful for the people to tell their stories. While we are with the journalists and international and a Palestinian are spat at and threatened by settler children on Schuhada Street.

Tuesday, April the 25th

The morning school run goes well. Three settler visitors wearing the orange threads signifying opposition to disengagement come to talk to the soldiers.

As we are leaving a soldier comes to check our passports, he grabs our passports out of our hands and tells us we are being detained. We try to reason with him but he is obviously intent on causing us as much trouble as he can. In the end five internationals from CPT and ISM are detained for three hours at the Bab-a-Zawiyye Machsom. After three hours the shift changes and we are released immediately – it is patently obvious that this particular soldier does not like the internationals and wants to cause as much trouble as he can, his peers do not seem to share his animosity.

The Jerusalem Post are here again and watch what we on the school run with interest. Surely they must wonder why so many internationals are needed to watch this group of schoolchildren walking home.

The soldiers stationed near the Tel Rumeida settlement stop three schoolgirls from walking home. The family that these girls belong to has won a court battle for access to the land below the Tel Rumeida settlement. However, today the soldiers are not aware that the family have permission to use the path to their home and they have to wait by the guards post dangerously close to the settlement buildings. A settler child emerges and throws a stone before he is shooed away by the soldier. This exact same situation occurred last week and could be avoided if IDF soldiers were properly briefed.

Wednesday April the 26th

Settlers from Beit Hadassa settlement in Tel Rumeida on the outskirts of the old city of Hebron vandalised a school path at Qurtuba school which is used by local Palestinian children. The path was being built with money from TIPH (Temporary International Presence in Hebron). The builders had just laid bricks along the path above Beit Hadassa settlement.

At 2pm on April 26th builders had stones thrown at them by children from Beit Hadassa. Shortly afterwards international Human Rights Workers (HRWs) saw an adult settler looking at the building work and making several calls on his mobile phone. Between 6 and 7pm yesterday a group of 20 adults and children from Beit Hadassa climbed the steps to the school and began tearing up the bricks and throwing them down the steps. Soldiers are stationed at a guardpost 50 feet away. Local Palestinians said soldiers did try to intervene but did not stop the vandalism. Police attended but no arrests were made.

7. At last, a peaceful Shabbat in Tel Rumeida
May 4th, 2006

This Saturday, the 30th of April everybody was apprehensive about further settler attacks. Over the last three shabbats settlers have mounted more and more organised attacks against internationals and Palestians in Tel Rumeida. There was a large intrernational presence in response.

Internationals and Palestinans have been active this last week in trying to draw attention to the increasing level of violence in Tel Rumeida. On Wednesday a conference was held highlighting the escalating violence and an open letter was sent asking the police and army to protect Palestinans in Tel Rumeida.

Throughout the week international volunteers have been speaking to the army units in Tel Rumeida and impressing on them the danger posed by settler attacks and asking that they intervene if attacks occur.

Settler violence has been covered in the mainstream media including the Jerusalem Post and some TV stations.

On Wednesday an organised group of settlers attacked workers at Qurtuba school in Tel Rumeida and later destroyed school property. Palestinians and internationals made calls to the DCO and the police asking for more policing near the school.

On Saturday an unprecedented number of border police were present at Qurtuba school stationed close to the place where the attack occurred on Wednesday. We can only assume that at least some of our efforts were worthwhile.

The day passed without any trouble whatsoever. It seems that the large numbers of police coupled with the numbers of internationals and the fact that the settlers know that the media is watching has had a preventative effect… My only hope is that we an maintain a focus on Tel Rumeida in weeks to come.

8. “That terrible feeling inside “
April 30th, 2006

By Leila ALHaddad from Gaza
For the photo please see the link below:
https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/04/30/that-terrible-feeling-inside/
or a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/

Ok I admit I’ve been a little lazy this week. Part of that is has to do with the fact that, wrapped up in my pre-travel anxiety as it were, and my mad rush to tie up as many loose ends as possible and write as much as possible, I think I burnt myself out.

That and being here can be overwhelming at times; this week has been one of those times. Sometimes I’m too caught up to notice, but then on a “down” week, it catches up to me. I feel powerless, even crushed, in the face of an ugly, foreboding, larger than life force that seems to grow and mutate with every passing day. It is everywhere and nowhere at once. And try as you might, you cannot hide from it.

It squeezes you tighter and tighter, instilling within you a feeling of helplessness and dejection and isolation, until you begin to feel you are alone, even among 1.5 million others. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Sometimes I don’t want to do anything about it. I just want to run away, somewhere I hope it can’t reach me. Sit on the beach, listen to the troubled stories that the Gaza’s lonely Mediterranean is desperately trying to tell. “Take me to the beach at sunset, so I may listen what the beach says…when it returns to itself, calmly, calmly.”

Yousuf frolicked about in the sand, building and destroying his imaginary creations, pleased with his new-found prowess. He glanced over at me, sensed something of sadness in my eyes, and patted me on the shoulder-“ma3lsh, mama, ma3lish” he said… “It’s ok”…and suddenly, just like that, everything was.

9. Tulkarm to Ramallah: 3 road blocks, 5 check-points, 7 cars
April 29th, 2006

by Abdel-Karim Dalbah

How long does it take to travel from the north-east of the West Bank, to the centre? In such a small area of land, you might think not long. A Palestinian ISM co-ordinator gives an account of a the realities of trying to get out of the prison that the Israeli military is turning the north into.

An average journey
Drive distance: 90 km
Drive time: 90 min max – directly in one car.
Cost: 15 shekels by bus or 20 to 25 shekels by car (service)
On the 23rd of April 2006 and for more than five months
Drive distance: more than 300 km
Drive time + walking + waiting at checkpoints: 5 hrs, 30 min
Cost: 65 Shekels
WHY
Because of the Israeli policies of closure and checkpoints and the fact that I am a Palestinian from Tulkarm (in the north of the West Bank).
HOW
I left my home at 8:30 am and walked to the bus station. There were no buses, and no direct cars so I had to take the sevice to Innap checkpoint (15 km east). Before we reached it, we were stopped by a flying checkpoint after 5 km. We waited about 15 min in a long line of cars before our driver decided to go back and take another road, going around the checkpoint. This added another 15 min as we had to go 200m east around the check point and continue to Innap (the main checkpoint). We reached Innap and waited there about 15 min when the soldier came and told our driver that it was forbidden for anyone to pass today. So the he had to use another road to drive around . We reached a road-block just 1 km east of the checkpoint. The cost had increased from 5 to 10 shekels by then.

The end of the first part.

When we reached the road-block we had to walk about 200 m to cross it. We started waiting for a car to take us to Ramallah. When one arrived the driver was asking for 50 shekels each which is too much – it’s normally 20 or 30 maximum. After 10 minutes, I took a taxi with four others to a village called Funkuk, halfway to Ramallah. This cost 10 shekels each. From there, a taxi driver offered to take us to Borgeen road block for another 10 shekels. We agreed to this but after driving for about 20 minutes we were stopped by another flying checkpoint near Haris. The soldiers prevented us from passing, so the driver took us back to Funduk. He offered another choice – to try another long road through different villages. Along the way we had to get out of the car several times because the parallel road we were taking to avoid the road-blocks was so rough. After driving more than an hour we reached the Borgeen road block – it cost 20 shekels to get there.

The end of the second step.

After we passed the road blocks, we felt like we were about to reach Ramallah, taking one last service. However, the drivers said not it would not be that simple. The soldiers at Attara checkpoint near Bir Zeit were apparently not allowing people from the north of the West Bank to get into Ramallah.

However, at the road-block before Attara, we would be able to pass and then get another car to Ramallah. What should we do? We agreed to this plan and drove (10 shekels each) to Attara checkpoint which we reached after 45 minutes, passing through some villages that I’ve never been though before. Instead of a car waiting on the other side of the road block there was a Border Police jeep which stopped anyone from being near by. We stayed there about 30 minutes, trying to pass though the main checkpoint, at first with a taxi and then by trying to speak to the commander. We tried to point out to him that we were all over forty years of age. After a long time he said “sorry. You can go and try to get in through Qalandya”. When we asked about going that way we discovered that it would cost 20 shekels more.

The end of the third part.

Eventually, we decided not to go that way but also not to go back since by this point we were less than 4 km from Ber Zeit [which is just north of Ramallah]. Instead, we decided to get past by walking. This meant we had to go over the mountain – but we would have to pass away from the checkpoint so that the soldiers at the military tower couldn’t see us. So after we had walked about 3 km, we finally reached Ber Zeit town, from which we caught a car for only 4 shekels each.
We finally reached Ramallah at 2:30 pm, tired and hungry, but happy.

The end of the fourth step.

The ministry of education was closed, where I needed to go to sign a paper for my sister. I missed it for today. I also missed the training of new ISMers, so I decided to go to my nephew’s house to have a rest for a while, but because I was so tired I slept for about 2 hours.
The day is over.

I spent the next day doing some work till 6.00pm before I went back to the car station to leave for Tulkarm. After 15 minutes the car filled up and we drove directly to Tulkarm. On the way we passed through the roads that were forbidden for us to pass on the way to Ramallah. Not one check-point stopped us! One of the men in the car said “it is very easy to get into the prison”.

This situation has lasted for over five moths for Tulkarm and Jenin residents – it is a collective punishment. The Israeli government claims this is for security reasons.

Palestinian Pain, One Kid at a Time

From CommonDreams.org
By Fareed Taamallah

Every day, world leaders think of new ways to punish the Palestinians for electing Hamas. But the people who suffer most are children like my daughter, Lina.

Lina was less than 1 year old when she caught a virus that gave her a high fever and caused diarrhea and vomiting. We live in a small West Bank village in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In the winter of 2003, when Lina got sick, Qira was under curfew, and we couldn’t reach a doctor. We tried to take her to the hospital in the nearby city of Nablus. But Nablus was also under curfew. The Israeli soldiers manning the checkpoint on the outskirts of Nablus refused to let us in.

Eventually, on a rainy, cold day, my wife, Amina, carried Lina three miles on mountainous roads into Nablus to reach a doctor. One year later, we learned that the infection had caused renal failure and that Lina would eventually need a kidney transplant to survive.

For 16 months, Lina underwent dialysis every four hours. She spent many days in hospitals because of the kidney failure’s side effects, including hypertension and hernia. Her limbs became as thin as toothpicks.

During Lina’s numerous hospitalizations, the Israeli security services denied me permits to accompany her. No reason was given why.

Tests showed that neither her mother nor I was a compatible kidney donor for Lina. In the spring of 2005, a South African friend named Anna offered to donate a kidney to save Lina’s life. I had met Anna in 2003 during a peaceful protest campaign against the Segregation Wall Israel is building in the West Bank

Anna was a compatible donor. We raised $40,000 for the surgery. Hadassah Hospital in West Jerusalem agreed to perform the operation at a discount.

But the next obstacle was obtaining a visa for Anna, who was blacklisted from entering Israel because of her activities — all completely nonviolent — protesting the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Anna fought for a visa — and only received one after the Israeli hospital administrator called the Israeli Interior minister.

For the transplant, the hospital helped me and my wife get permits to enter Israel for a full month — an exceptional feat. Before taking Lina to the hospital, we took her to a nearby beach. Lina had never seen the sea. The sea is 30 miles from our house, but the coast is entirely in Israel. Palestinians do not receive permits to go to the beach.

We considered ourselves lucky. But is anyone really lucky who needs special permission to be with one’s child at a hospital? Imagine that, if you needed to be at your child’s hospital bedside, you had to wait in line at a military base for hours or even days to plead for an entry permit, granted on FBI approval only, approval that often is not forthcoming.

Despite the difficulties, the transplant was successfully performed in October 2005 in Jerusalem. The surgery to save Lina’s life was a collective effort of peace activists from the USA, South Africa, Europe, Egypt, Israel and Palestine.

Unfortunately, this was not the end of Lina’s difficulties. After Hamas won the elections in Palestine, the Israeli government tightened restrictions on Palestinians entering Israel. For a while it looked as if we would not get permission to enter for further treatments, but with difficulty we finally got approval to go to Lina’s appointment scheduled for next week. We fear we will not get future permits.

Additionally, the U.S. and Europe have decided not to continue aid to the Palestinian government, which offered Palestinians free healthcare. As the Palestinian Authority grows poorer and poorer, our benefits will almost certainly disappear, and Lina may not be able to get her very expensive medications. Her life might be in serious danger.

Israel claims it needs to restrict Palestinian movement in response to the new Hamas-led government. But the reality is that Israel first established its system of permits and closures in 1991, and we have been living under these difficult conditions ever since.

My wife, daughter and I are active in a nonviolent movement that includes many Israelis, Palestinians and foreigners. Although we received our permits this time, others who need them have not. Denying permits to innocent men, women and children does not make Israelis safer. It destroys the hopes of Palestinians.

But even if Lina’s health remains stable, that doesn’t guarantee a bright future. Like every Palestinian child, Lina’s future is uncertain. Will Israeli government policy permit her to become a happy, healthy and productive adult, as she deserves? For this to happen, Lina needs not only health, but also an end to occupation.

Fareed Taamallah is coordinator of the Palestinian Elections Commission for the Salfit region. He lives in the West Bank village of Qira.

A shorter version appeared May 6, 2006 in the Los Angeles Times.

Jerusalem Post: “Getting carried away”


Larry Derfner, Jerusalem Post, 4th May 2006

The violence typically begins as hundreds of protesters advance on lines of badly outmanned troops trying to block the way to the village’s land, which lies on the other side of the fence. The pushing, shoving and shouting, along with the troops’ inability to keep the protesters back, is what sets off the use of tear gas, concussion grenades, batons, rubber bullets and, in at least one lethal incident, live fire.

‘The army thought there were no Israelis present, then they saw that there were. I heard the commander shout to his soldiers, “Go back to regular open-fire orders, there are Israelis here.”‘ – anti-fence activist Jonathan Pollak

Fromthe city of Modi’in, just on the “Israel proper” side of the Green Line, the drive to Bil’in takes you past the large haredi settlement of Modi’in Illit, past the IDF checkpoint and along twisting roads that pass through a couple of other Palestinian villages before reaching this village of about 1,500 people. The Friday demonstration leaves at about 1 p.m. from the local mosque after prayers.

There are dozens of media people here from all over, including CNN and NBC, along with about 100 Palestinians and some 100 Israelis, foreigners and media. As usual, a group of youngish, exuberant Arab men are leading the chants on the march from the mosque down the road through the valley to the fence, and a smiling Asian man dressed in Buddhist robes, a regular, is beating a drum.

At the end of the road stand about 25 border policemen in riot gear, backed by another 25 or so soldiers standing in front of the gate to the fence. Beyond the fence lie the olive groves that may or may not develop into the Matityahu East neighborhood that Modi’in Illit plans to build – the reason for the demonstration – and beyond them, about 2 kilometers away, is the Israeli settlement itself.

Theoretically, the aim of the protesters is to advance through the gate to the olive groves, but with all the big media present, the demonstration turns into confrontation for confrontation’s sake – a constantly repeating surge by groups of Palestinians and, to a much less frequent and forceful degree, their supporters, to get right into the young troops’ faces, to rage and holler at them to “get off our land!” – to provoke a reaction. They push forward and the troops push them back.

“Where is it you want to go?” an exasperated soldier asks a few of the charging protesters, who ignore the question.

The media presence gives the demonstrators the advantage, restraining the soldiers’ response. There are no batons, no fists, no loss of control. The staged quality of the protest becomes a little ridiculous at times. A Palestinian who has sat down on the ground, defying orders to disperse, is carried off holding out an olive branch to the soldiers straining under his weight, as the cameras close in. A young American woman calls out to journalists to come see how a Palestinian man of about 50 has lost consciousness after being “beaten by soldiers,” as she puts it. On approach it turns out he has a medical condition; his friends are taking pills out of his pocket so he can swallow them.

“No, I was mistaken, he had some kind of attack,” the American girl calls out.

With the soldiers making way for the stricken man and even offering to treat him in the army ambulance stationed at the site, the Palestinian men carry him through the gate and toward the ambulance, then turn around and carry him back.

“We’ll take care of him ourselves,” one of the men says defiantly.

In the heat of the confrontation, with dozens of bodies pressed up against each other, the protesters take wooden mallets they’ve brought along and enthusiastically destroy the styrofoam model they’ve built of red-roofed settler houses. The border police commander declares the area a closed military zone and the demonstration illegal.

“I wanted to let you demonstrate, to express your opinions, that was fine with me,” he says through a bullhorn. “I thought you were adults, but you’re not, you don’t even respect yourselves,” he adds.

Standing next to a line of young border policemen who don’t appear too sure of themselves, the Buddhist, Gyosei Horikoshi, 50, a Japanese man who’s been in Israel since the 1991 Gulf War, beats his drum. The ground near him is smoking with spent concussion grenades fired in a futile try to disperse the protesters.

“This is a Buddhist prayer for peace,” he explains. But it doesn’t seem to be having a calming effect on anyone.

BEYOND THE theatrics, there is a very weighty matter at hand in Bil’in.

“That is my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s land, those olive trees, and they won’t let me go there,” says Othman Mansour, at48 the village elder on the scene.

By Israeli regulation, the farmers are supposed to be allowed to pass through the gate and tend their groves. “But that’s all on paper; in reality the army doesn’t let us through,” says another protester.

During the close-in confrontations, one of the Palestinians demands of a soldier: “Why are you doing this? It’s not for your country, it’s for some contractors who are getting rich.”

Under orders, the soldiers don’t say a word.

Akram Hatib, 33, sitting on a low ridge of rocks, argues that Israelis “don’t even know where the fence is” – they think it’s being built according to security considerations alone, yet it just happens to transfer vast Palestinian agricultural lands to the western, Israeli side. “The fence is being built just so the millionaires can put more money in their pocket,” insists Hatib.

The demonstration passes with relatively little violence; even Jonathan Pollak, a leader of Anarchists Against The Wall, which usually dominates the Israeli presence at the protests, says the troops have behaved “about as well as they can.”

The one serious injury is to a Palestinian protester whose hand is badly bloodied by a concussion grenade – evidently fired in a flat trajectory at fairly close range, although army regulations call for them to be fired in a long-range arc. Soldiers also fire rubber bullets and tear gas at Palestinian boys aiming slingshots at them from about 100 meters away – a distance, by the way, from which it is extremely hard to hit a human target, and virtually impossible if the target takes minimum safety precautions.

By the end of the afternoon, five Israelis, including Pollak, and six Palestinian protesters are arrested.

“They brought the Israelis to the police station at Givat Ze’ev and released us after we signed an agreement that we wouldn’t go back to Bil’in for two weeks,” says Pollak. “The Palestinians arrested were released without being taken in.”

But once the confrontations subside, some of the Palestinians in Bil’in show their “war wounds” from previous protests. Hatib pulls down his shirt to show welts on his neck and shoulders. “I got these from a young woman soldier when she was beating me over the head,” he says.

Mustafa Hatib, a cousin, says he once took a “baton to the balls” that laid him up for awhile. He adds that troops frequently come into the village and “go into people’s houses and beat them up, out of habit.”

PROTESTS LIKE the one at Bil’in on March 24 have been largely ignored here, even as the anti-fence campaign has gained considerable attention abroad. The protests, which have been going on for three and a half years, are seen as part of the intifada, part of the “terror war” – a baseless attack by Palestinians, pro-Palestinian Israelis and foreigners on the barrier that has proven its worth by deterring suicide bombers. The claim by Palestinians that the fence cuts them off from much of their farmland is seen as a negligible issue; after all, of what importance are Palestinian olive groves compared to the lives of innocent Israelis?

Invisible to most Israelis are the injuries that protesters suffer during the demonstrations – injuries like those to Matan Cohen’s left eye, for example, which is discolored and cannot focus. Sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe, Cohen, 17, says he was hit by a rubber bullet fired from 25 meters away by a border policeman during the February 24 protest at Beit Sira. The border policeman was in no danger whatsoever, he adds.

A military source with long-standing, first-hand experience of the anti-fence protests insists that Cohen is doing what his colleagues have been doing throughout the campaign: defaming Israel with lies.

“[Cohen] told me he had been standing near a soldier who fired a rubber bullet that hit him in the eye, but our investigation showed there were no soldiers at all in that area who had fired rubber bullets,” says the military source. “It’s all lies. He was really hit by a rock coming from a slingshot fired by the Palestinians. We have soldiers who say they saw one of the Palestinian boys fire a rock that hit [Cohen] in the eye.”

To this, however, Cohen replies: “No investigator from the police or the IDF ever talked to me. I have eight witnesses, including two Israeli cameramen, who saw the border policeman shoot me, and they’ve never been interviewed either in this so-called investigation.”

There is a huge gap between what the average Israeli thinks of these protests, together with the way Israeli security officials portray them, and the reality from “the other side.”

Pollak says 10 Palestinians have been killed in the anti-fence demonstrations, citing reports by Israeli media, B’tselem, Palestinian villagers he’s in regular contact with and his own experience.

“I was at the demonstration in Biddu on February 26, 2004, when three Palestinians were shot to death. An elderly man there died later in the hospital from the effects of tear gas fired into his home. I was standing 10 meters from a man when he got shot in the forehead and killed. I saw limp bodies with blood all over them being carried away,” says Pollak.

He says he himself has been mildly injured about 30 times, mainly by rubber bullets, but that a year ago during a demonstration in Bil’in, which has become the focus of the Friday afternoon demonstrations, he was hit in the right temple by a tear gas canister fired at him by a soldier from 20 meters away.

“I had two brain hemorrhages, I was in Tel Hashomer for three or four days, I can’t remember exactly how many, and I couldn’t stand up for two weeks,” says Pollak, 23. Besides Matan Cohen, two other Israelis, Gil Namati and Itai Levinsky, have been shot, with Levinsky ending up losing an eye.

Besides the 10 Palestinians killed, Pollak estimates that “hundreds” of them have been severely wounded at the protests, not counting the many more who’ve been mildly injured.

In the face of these accusations, the military source replies: “They could just as easily say 20 dead, or 200. I don’t know of one person who has been killed in these demonstrations, and if there had been, I would have known about it. We would have felt the consequences on the ground. I don’t even know of any demonstrator suffering an injury that required hospitalization – except Matan Cohen, and that was because of a slingshot, not because of us. These people lie, they make this all up to besmirch the army.”

The interview with the military source was arranged by the IDF Spokesman’s Office. The source defended the army and made counter-accusations against the protesters with vehemence, as if he fully believed what he was saying. Yet his account – including his remarks that Cohen’s eye injury at Beit Sira had been “investigated,” and that no anti-fence demonstrator had ever been killed or even seriously wounded by Israeli troops – is simply untenable.

Footage filmed by members of Anarchists Against the Wall at several past demonstrations shows a soldier opening fire with an Uzi submachine gun on advancing demonstrators, with one of the protesters getting hit and having to be carried off. From short range, troops fire tear gas canisters that explode amid tightly-packed protesters, causing panic. From long range, tear gas canisters are fired at a group of wheelchair-bound protesters. Face-to-face, soldiers and border policemen beat milling protesters with batons.

In all these demonstrations, the protesters are unarmed, except for some young Palestinian boys firing slingshots at a great distance. The violence typically begins as hundreds of protesters advance on lines of badly outmanned troops trying to block the way to the village’s land, which lies on the other side of the fence. The pushing, shoving and shouting, along with the troops’ inability to keep the protesters back, is what sets off the use of tear gas, concussion grenades, batons, rubber bullets and, in at least one lethal incident, live fire.

Asked what serious injuries Israeli troops had suffered during the years of anti-fence protests, the military source replies that one soldier suffered “irreversible damage to his eye” from a stone fired by slingshot. Another soldier suffered two broken fingers when a Palestinian demonstrator he was carrying off bit him. Many other soldiers have been hit by rocks, he says, but the wounded eye of one and the two broken fingers of another were the only serious injuries to troops that he can recall.

The thorough imbalance of power between Israeli troops and protesters resembles not the “terror war,” but the first intifada, the “war of stones,” except that the protests are much, much less violent. And if the anti-fence protests are also a “propaganda war,” then Israel – through its military’s implausible accounts of the clashes – is definitely holding up its end.

EVEN FOR Palestinians, this issue has cooled off, at least temporarily. As the “terror war” has subsided, so has the battle over the fence, whose ranks are and always have been filled mainly by Palestinians, with Israelis and “internationals” playing a small supporting role – mainly to keep the issue in the Israeli and world media.

But in principle, the conflict over the fence is still very much alive and entirely unsettled. Villages across the West Bank – Azun, Nebi Elias, Ras a-Tira, Abud, Bitunia, Mas’ha, Kharbata, Jayyus, Beit Likiya, Biddu, Beit Sira, Bil’in and many others – are pressing their cases against the State of Israel in the Supreme Court, fighting to keep many tens of thousands of dunams of their farmland from being placed on the opposite side of the security barrier from them, where much of it stands to fall into the hands of Jewish settlements.

An outsider might look at these demonstrators and wonder why they go through it, what they have gained. After all, the only real victories won by the Palestinian villages to move the fence away from their land happened in the Supreme Court, not at the protest sites. And while the route of the fence has been curtailed, it remains a very hard, and likely permanent, fact on the ground.

Nonetheless, leaders of the movement believe the effort has been a success, even at such a high blood price. After about a year of scattered protests by individual villages, beginning with Jayyus, near Kalkilya, in September 2002, Israelis and foreigners joined in, and the campaign jelled, turning the fence into an international controversy.

“A new movement of joint Israeli-Palestinian resistance that didn’t exist before came to life,” says Pollak. He also thinks the protests and early media attention affected the thinking of the Supreme Court judges, noting that the court’s landmark decision ordering the curtailment of the fence route came only in June 2004 – after the protests gathered steam.

One of the Palestinian leaders of the movement, Ayed Morrar, 44, of Budrus, near Bil’in, agrees that the protests influenced the Supreme Court, adding that this has convinced many Palestinians in the West Bank that non-violent protest can be effective. Calling the Palestinian boys’ long-range slingshot attempts “a game” that poses no threat to the soldiers, Morrar says the unarmed protests were chosen both for moral and pragmatic reasons.

“First, we don’t want anyone to be killed on our side or any side, and second, we need all the people around the world to support us, and they won’t support us if we use violence,” says Morrar, who has been jailed repeatedly by Israeli authorities.

Pollak maintains that Israeli troops clearly have one set of use-of-force and open-fire regulations for Israelis and foreign demonstrators, and another, much more permissive set of regulations that they use on Palestinians.

“At one demonstration in Bil’in last year, I think it was in May,” Pollak says, “the army thought there were no Israelis present, then they saw that there were. I heard the commander shout to his soldiers, ‘Go back to regular open-fire orders, there are Israelis here.'”

IN REPLY, the military source acknowledges that there are, in effect, different open-fire regulations against some Palestinians than there are against Israelis and foreigners, but this is because it is only Palestinians who use rocks. Israelis and foreign supporters limit themselves “to provocations, to fanning the flames of Palestinian violence,” he notes.

The source lays 100 percent of the blame for the violence on the protesters: “I’m happy to say that I have never witnessed an incident in any of these protests when the violence was started by Israeli troops.”

The demonstrations, he says, aim to provoke violence for the purpose of making Israel look like the bully in the media. “These are illegal demonstrations, they are held in closed military zones. Even so, our interest is that they remain peaceful, which is the opposite interest of the protesters. They always go out to confront the soldiers, to hurt them and to damage the fence, and when that happens, we stop it by force,” the military source maintains, repeating his claim that all the deaths and serious injuries to Palestinian demonstrators are “made up.”

Yet the footage from past anti-fence demonstrations taken by Anarchists Against the Wall tells an entirely different story. The soldier firing the Uzi that severely wounds one of the demonstrators is standing far from the action, in no danger. The crowd is unarmed.

The concussion grenades exploding among the demonstrators are not being fired in an arc, but in a flat trajectory, which makes them quite dangerous.

A slightly-built Palestinian man, seen with a few foreign supporters arguing with soldiers who will not let them pass, is soon seen again on his knees, holding his head, his face bleeding. The outraged foreigners demand to know why he was beaten. “He was resisting arrest,” replies one of the soldiers.

A gathering of Palestinians in wheelchairs set out on the road that leads from Bil’in to the fence when troops fire tear gas canisters in their direction.

“This is a demonstration of handicapped people in wheelchairs!” shouts a protester through his bullhorn at the troops. “Are you crazy?”

As for the reported 10 Palestinian deaths and far more numerous severe injuries at the hands of Israeli troops, it’s unclear what evidence could conceivably convince the military source that all of them weren’t, as he says, “made up.” The names of the dead are: Taher Ahmed Nimr Assi, 15; Jamal Jabber Ibrahim Assi, 15; Uday Mufid Mahmoud Assi, 14; Ala Muhammad a-Rahman Khalil, 14; Islam Hashem Rizk Zaharan, 14; Diah a-din Abd el-Karim Ibrahim Abu Eid, 23; Hussein Mahmoud Awad Alian, 17; Mahmoud Daoud Salah Beduan, 21; Zakaria Fadl Hashem Rian, 25; Abd el-Rahman Abu Eid, 62. (The first nine names were documented by B’tselem; the 10th by Pollak.)

REGARDING MATAN COHEN’S eye injury, a leading Israeli pathologist hired by the boy’s family says the initial results of his examination of the eye “point to a very high probability that the injury was the result of a rubber bullet.”

On that day in Beit Sira, Cohen recalls, the protesters and the IDF had an agreement that the demonstration would go off without physical confrontation.

“Then at one point a border police jeep drove up in the middle of the crowd, and the troops got out and started firing in the air, shooting tear gas and concussion grenades, beating people with rifle butts and batons, and firing rubber bullets,” he says.

“Some Palestinian boys starting firing slingshots at the troops from, I’d say, about 80 meters away. I saw and heard the IDF commander go up to the border police commander and tell him to order his men to stop shooting, but the border police commander told him, ‘I want to hit each of these people with a rubber bullet so they’ll know that there will be no demonstrations here.’

“There were four of us Israelis standing about 25 meters from the border policemen,” Cohen continues. “We were telling them, ‘Don’t shoot, nobody is threatening you.’ We were trying to calm them down. Then one of them raised his rifle and shot me.”

Cohen was taken by ambulance to Tel Hashomer Hospital, where he spent two weeks undergoing two operations on his left eye. He hopes that in about six months the eye will have recovered to the point where surgeons can perform a lens transplant that could diminish the eye’s impairment. The Hebrew media gave Cohen’s story a lot of play.

“The only reason is because my hair is light,” he says. “Palestinians get injured like I did all the time – and they get killed. But what happens to Palestinians doesn’t interest Israelis, so it’s as if it never happened at all.”

Bil’in’s beef

At stake in the weekly protests at Bil’in are approximately 1,000 dunams of village olive groves that now lie on the far side of the security barrier, and on which the large haredi settlement of Modi’in Illit plans to build a 3,000-unit housing project.

The question posed by the protests isn’t why Israel must build a security fence, but why the fence must run along a route that slices off so much land that has been farmed for so long by Palestinian villages. The question is all the more pressing now that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is vowing that this route is the base line for the country’s permanent border.

The police National Fraud Squad is reportedly investigating how Modi’in Illit acquired the land on which Matityahu East was being constructed. The State Attorney’s Office told the Supreme Court that the roughly 1,000 dunams in dispute is “state land” that includes land purchased by Israeli buyers from Bil’in villagers.

However, the villagers say that at most, eight dunams were actually sold, according to attorney Michael Sfard, who is representing Bil’in. Targets of the fraud investigation reportedly include Modi’in Illit municipal officials, settler organizations, construction companies and real estate dealers.-

Trying to provide health care in Tubas

By Tom

At the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) in Tubas we heard about the impact of the occupation, the checkpoints, and the road blocks on the ambulance staff. When we heard that ambulance staff had been made to walk on the bodies of dead people by the Israeli Army we didn’t want to believe it, but it was clearly true.

Tubas is a town of 24,000 people. It is in the west of Tubas region, which covers an area aproximately 24km accross and 28km north to south. Most of the Tubas region is in the Jordan Valley and only accessible by via checkpoints.

In 1999, the PRCS (an NGO) was set up in Tubas. They have the only ambulance in the area. A part-time ambulance from Jericho is stationed at Al Jifflik in the Jordan Valley from 8am-2pm each day. What happens if soembody needs an ambulance at any other time? To try and overcome this problem, they are training local volunteers who can set up ’spot centres’ if there is a major incident in their area.

The Tubas Red Crescent provides:

* Primary health care
* Mental healthcare
* Rehabilitation for adults and children with physical and learning disabililties
* A phyco-social project for children affected by armed conflict (funded by the EU)
* An ambulance

They never charge for service costs and charge as little as possible for medicines. Despite this, they are operating against the odds. They have constant problems of being held up at road blocks, with the ambulance often being stuck for hours. As if the army wanted to prove to us that this was true, when we left the area the next day, we saw them causually holding up and searching an ambulance at Huawa Checkpoint. I wanted to photograph this, but was warned that the army could use this as an excuse to close the checkpoint altogether.

So far this year, they have had to perform two births at checkpoints, and 3 people have died because an ambulance could not get to them.

They have to run a psycho social project specifically for the ambulance staff who continuously have to deal with traumatic situations. We were given the following examples:

* People have been injured by landmines left in the mountains by the Israeli army
* Tayasir school was attacked by the army, who fired bullets and rockets into the school
* Ambulances are fired at by the army
* On one occaision, the ambulance was on its way to see a sick man when they found the army there. it was dark and the army directed them where to walk – they found themselves walking on the bodies of people who had just been shot by the army.
* We met an ambulance man who told us about a time when he had been doing a long shift with nothing to eat. He stopped for something to eat, and the army informed him to eat his food off of the body of soembody they had just shot.

They have international volunteers working with their ambulances because they are deperately short of money and staff, and they believe that the presence of internationals can curtail some of the more extreme behaviour of the army.

http://brightonpalestine.org/blog/?p=21

Al Nakba Remembered

Palestinian children
Palestinian children
By Joharah Baker | MIFTAH

On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence. Although it is not unprecedented in history that countries gain their independence through war, either by conquest or by flinging off the yoke of colonization, there are few examples in history that match the circumstances under which Israel was created.

The Palestinians, the people at whose expense the Jewish state was established, have another word for Israel’s Independence Day – Al Nakba or The Catastrophe. In a matter of months, over 800,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes throughout Palestine. Hundreds of others were massacred by Jewish gangs in Deir Yassin and Ein Al Zaytoun as a tactic to terrorize people into fleeing. Villages were destroyed, people killed and homes left behind as horrified Palestinians fled the fighting between Jewish troops, Arab armies and Palestinian resistance groups, believing they would be allowed to return home in a matter of days.

That was not to happen. As Jewish troops continued to launch attacks against both Palestinian resistance groups and unarmed civilian populations, pushing back the much weaker and far less organized Arab armies, more and more people fled the battle scenes, crossing borders in the north into Lebanon and Syria, across the river into Jordan and into the West Bank and Gaza in the south. As the fighting raged on, little did the Palestinians, the Arabs or even the international community realize a deep-rooted problem that would prove to be one of the thorniest issues in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, was in the making.

Still, even after the war ended and Israel declared its independence, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had left behind their entire lives still believed they would be allowed to return home. Thinking they would only be away from their homes for a few days at most, people took the bare minimum, trudging across the borders with thin mattresses slung over their backs, children on their hips and the keys to their homes securely hanging from their necks.

The journey was to become the Palestinians’ worst nightmare. After months of sleeping in makeshift tents with whatever provisions they could scrap up or were provided them by their unexpecting host countries, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194 in December, 1948 which, “declared that in the context of a general peace agreement ‘refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so’ and that ‘compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.’”

And as history will later lend evidence to, this was just one of the many hypocrisies perpetrated by the international community and Israel against the Palestinians. Not only was the resolution disregarded by the fledgling Jewish state, it was swept under the rug by the West and the rest of the world. Fifty-eight years later, Palestinians across the board are asking for no more than for UN resolutions to be enforced as they so often are in other areas of conflict.

However, as it became apparent that the refugees would not return to their homes in Palestine, now either destroyed or inhabited by new Jewish immigrants, the world was at least obliged to deal with the disaster that had come into being. On December 8, 1949, UN General Assembly resolution 302 (IV) called for the establishment of UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. The agency has since provided homes, schools, food and work for the approximately 4.3 million registered Palestinian refugees throughout its areas of operation.

Now, 58 years later, the double standards of Israel – the self-proclaimed democracy of the Middle East – and the world at large have never been so stark. As Israel celebrates its day of independence, the Palestinians continue to languish in sprawling refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza under extremely poor living conditions and even poorer political horizons. The right of return for Palestinian refugees has been a “national constant” for the Palestinian leadership and people for over half a decade and a most serious sticking point for Israel, which claims it cannot allow the refugees to return to their prior homes for fear that this would sabatoge the demographic composition of its Jewish majority.

In addition to the refugee problem, Israel has little to be proud of when it comes to its neighbors, the Palestinians. Crammed into demeaning cantons, each city severed from the next, fighting off poverty, unemployment and international condemnation for resisting 39 years of Israeli military occupation, the Palestinians are clear proof that Israel is a country based on racism and double standards. As it oppresses, occupies and aims to annihilate the national cause of an entire people, it portrays itself to the world as a democracy and a peace-loving nation under fire.

Even Israelis themselves have truly come to believe this fallacy. On May 3, as Israelis marked the beginning of independence celebrations, Acting Knesset Speaker Shimon Peres said Israeli citizens can look back on their past with satisfaction. Peres was also quick to add the Palestinians into the mix as well.

“I turn, first and foremost, to our neighbors the Palestinians. This evening too we are proffering beautiful days of peace, the squeeze of a handshake of peace rather than a squeezing of the trigger,” he said.

After 58 years of displacement, expulsion and oppression, when will the world finally realize that the Palestinians have and continue to be on the receiving end of the gun?

Joharah Baker is a Writer for the Media and Information Programme at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She could be contacted at mip@miftah.org.