UN: Gaza in worst condition since 1967

Ali Waked | YNet News

8 September 2009

A UN report published Tuesday says poverty in the Gaza Strip has deteriorated to levels unseen since 1967.

The UN trade and development agency says 90% of Gaza’s residents are currently beneath the poverty line and rates the damages caused by the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead at $4 billion, a sum it claims is three times larger than the Strip’s annual market performance.

The agency claims the operation halted all trade in the Gaza Strip, creating a deficit of around $88 million. This, in addition to material damages and loss of finances due to the siege and trade limitations later imposed on the Strip, make up the final sum.

The agency’s report claims the Strip has not been in such dire straits since 1967, and that the government has become the residents’ main force of employment.

Gaza’s production capabilities are also on a permanent downslide, the UN agency says, and its economy has been recessing for nine years.

The agency offers no solution, and says it regrets that the $4.4 billion dollars pledged to the Strip during a Sharm El-Sheikh conference has not yet reached its destination.

The conference, held in the Egyptian city in March, hosted representatives from 45 different nations. The US pledged $900 million, a third of the sum pledged during the conference.

Israeli forces raid Bil’in

8 September 2009

Shortly after 2:30am, the Israeli occupation forces invaded the village of Bil’in again with five Jeeps and a military truck. They came to arrest Hamaza Burnat (age 16) but he was not at home at the time. This was the second time this week that the Israeli Army raided his house.

Bil’in is a small village of 1,700 inhabitants near Ramallah in the West Bank. For nearly three months now, the Israeli occupation forces have been conducting night raids several times a week in this village arresting more than 20 people, mainly teenagers.

On behalf of Iyad Burnat, the Head of the Popular Committee, we call on all the supporters to help us in our struggle by organizing demonstrations and sending messages to the Israeli Embassies demanding to stop these night raids in Bil’in. Our children cannot sleep at night because of sound bombs and tear gas being fired by the invading forces. This village is under curfew, we need all your help to be able to lead a normal life again.

Israel’s laws of persecution

Nimer Sultany | The Guardian

8 September 2009

Two cases brought before Israeli courts last week revealed the attitude of the establishment towards Palestinian Arab citizens of the state. One shows how Palestinian citizens are treated as victims of police brutality, and the second shows how they are regularly victimised because of their opposition to injustice.

In the first, a policeman who shot and killed an Arab citizen in 2006 was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. The unbearable leniency of the sentence is more evidence of the total disregard for Arab life inside Israel, where ethnicity of the victim is a de facto mitigating circumstance in the case of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Indeed, this was the only case in which any policeman or soldier was indicted since the mass protests of October 2000, in spite of the fact that about 40 citizens were killed during this period.

The second case involved an indictment against Rawi Sultani, a 23-year-old law student, for “contact with a foreign agent” and “delivering information to the enemy”; two flawed articles in Israel’s laws comparable in their application to use of “national security” laws by authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world. The young student is a political activist of the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), a party that calls for the transformation of Israel from a Jewish state into a state for all its citizens. Rawi is also the son of a well-known leader of the party. He is accused of having contact with another youth, who allegedly turned out to be a Hezbollah member, during a national Arab youth conference in Morocco. Allegedly, Rawi disclosed information regarding the Israeli army’s chief of staff, given their membership in the same gym. Yet the case is based on a tendentious account of one statement of a publicly known fact regarding the chief’s membership in that gym made by the accused.

The identity of the accused, the identity of his father, the party to which they both belong, the timing of the case and the kind of charges chosen cannot be easily overlooked and give grounds to questioning the political incentives behind the indictment and the message behind it. One would be hard put to explain the extensive surveillance against leaders and activists of the NDA as revealed by this case.

Indeed, since the emergence of the NDA in the mid 1990s, it faced mounting legal and public attacks. These attacks took a stronger turn since October 2000 and culminated in the forced exile of Azmi Bishara, the leader of the NDA, who was accused with similar charges in 2007. What was supposed to be a fatal blow to the NDA and its legitimacy within the Arab minority has failed, with the party’s success in the Israeli parliamentary elections in February. However, this did not deter the establishment from mounting further attacks on the cadres of the party. Thus, we have witnessed in the last month show-arrests and interrogations of many young activists of the NDA that are reminiscent of crackdowns on pro-democracy activists in authoritarian regimes.

Its connections with the Arab world is a recurring theme of the persecution of the NDA as a party challenging the Jewishness of the state, and is the real incentive behind Rawi’s case. The NDA has, since its inception, challenged the iron cage surrounding Arab citizens following 1948. Israel has detached Arab citizens from their familial, historical, cultural and sociopolitical milieu. The legislation preventing family unification and the naturalisation of spouses of Arab citizens if they were residents of the occupied territories or other Arab countries surrounding Israel is only the most draconian example of this policy of segregation. Israeli law also defines a long list of Arab states as enemy states and prohibits Arab citizens from visiting them, and prohibits political parties from expressing support of Arab liberation struggles. In short, “national security” is broadly defined to fit the dominant ideology of the state rather than the security of citizens, regardless of their national affiliation.

Yet, as Rawi’s father correctly argues, the Palestinian citizens of Israel cannot be expected to treat the Arab world as an enemy and they cannot be held accountable for the political views or affiliations of other Arabs they meet in their travels outside Israel. Indictments such as Rawi’s aim at forcing Palestinian citizens to adopt the Zionist newspeak and refrain from connections with the Arab world and from identifying with its legitimate cause against Israel’s continuing occupation of Arab lands.

Criminalising dissent is not unique to Israel. Many oppressive states, such as apartheid South Africa, have used it to de-legitimise parties, ideas and activities disliked by ruling elites and security apparatuses. Furthermore, persecution on grounds of “security” creates an immediate divide between Arab and Jewish citizens. In 2007, the head of Shabak, the Israeli general security agency, stated that struggles against the Jewishness of the state, even if lawful and democratic, would be deemed subversive. The current right-wing government is seeking to condition citizenship on loyalty to Zionist ideology, a demand unparalleled in any democracy and contrary to the most basic of human rights. With this kind of attitude, it is no wonder that young Arab men and women inside Israel are victimised because of their noble aspirations to equality and freedom.

How does Israel decide who gets a visa to Ramallah?

Amira Hass | Ha’aretz

8 September 2009

Sven Ouzman, a 39-year-old archaeologist from South Africa, violated the terms of his “Palestinian Authority only” visa six times, when unintentionally and for lack of choice, he drove on roads under full Israeli control, between Palestinian Authority enclaves in the West Bank.

Ouzman, who was attending a conference of the World Archaeological Congress in Ramallah last month, was late for a lecture he was scheduled to deliver on the evening of August 9. He had arrived at the Allenby Bridge crossing on Saturday morning, August 8, after having passed through passport control on the Jordanian side and entering the Israeli-controlled area, but the Israel Airport Authority employees demanded he come back the next day. When he asked them why, “they were very rude and would not reply,” Ouzman said this week by phone from South Africa.

Acquaintences later told him that such arbitrariness is standard on the Israeli side. Ouzman returned to Amman for the night. In the morning, he spent about two hours on the Jordanian side and about another nine hours on the Israeli side. “Then began a long process, go there, come here, lots of questions I found offensive, and a lot of waiting, especially waiting,” Ouzman said.

Ouzman, is on the faculty of the ethnography and archaeology department of Pretoria University, and also teaches archaeology in prisons. He said that at the Allenby Bridge crossing he recalled an anthropological lesson he learned from teaching in prison, where the authorities intentionally break the monotony and shout at prisoners to disorient them. He suggested that this is similar to what he encountered at the Israeli-controlled border.

“They are all very young. You wonder what training they got; you can’t get angry at them, they just obey orders,” Ouzman said.

At one point, Ouzman showed officials at the Allenby Bridge his invitation to the archaeology conference, and gave them the phone number of one of the organizers, Adel Yahya from Ramallah. The clerks called Yahya, and asked for the list of conference participants. Ten guest lecturers (out of about 20) had come through Allenby, three of whom were Turkish citizens. Two of the Turkish nationals were refused entry, Yahya said, and the third received a “Palestinian Authority only” visa. A Portuguese guest lecturer also received a “Palestinian Authority only” stamp. These two, along with Ouzman, could not participate in the tour in Silwan, Jerusalem, guided by the archaeologist Dr. Rafi Greenberg.

Haaretz’s query as to why some visitors receive regular visas, while others receive “Palestinian Authority only” stamps, went unanswered.

Ouzman shortened his trip by two days due to his restrictive visa. However, in some cases, the damage is much greater: the Palestinian Authority-only visa ruined the research plans for L., a British scholar who had spent time at Bir Zeit University over the summer.

L. received a one-day visa for Israel from the Civil Administration, and set up a meeting at the Interior Ministry in Jerusalem to request a regular visa. “Once [the Interior Ministry official] noticed the visa on my passport saying ‘Palestinian Authority only,’ she screamed that I shouldn’t be in Israel and yelled at me for entering without a visa. I tried to explain that this is why we are here, and that I have work to do in Israel as well as the West Bank. She didn’t listen, and said angrily that I have to leave and go back to the West Bank.”

L. told the clerk he had a one-day visa, and that he comes to the country at least twice a year and always received a regular visa. L. said the clerk spoke to someone over the phone, still sounding very angry.

“Then she told me that [her superior] said I shouldn’t be in Israel because I don’t have the proper visa, and that if I insisted on applying for a full visa at the ministry I could do so but that I would be denied the visa on the spot,” L. said.

The Interior Ministry said it does not have representatives at the Allenby Bridge crossing.

The Israel Airports Authority said, “Israel Airports Authority employees fulfill their function in keeping with directives while maintaining the dignity of the travelers and insuring a proper level of service. The authority supervises the employees by means of a variety of methods. Stamps are given by border supervisors only (who are not authority employees).”

The Negotiation Support Unit, which advises the PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department, prepared an opinion paper on the Israeli visa policy, which was sent to consulates and foreign missions. The opinion stated: “Third states whose nationals are subjected to such illegal policies have an obligation to object once the facts are made known to them and their nationals ask them to respond or to take action. Choosing not to object would imply third states’ acceptance of Israel’s unlawful acts, in violation of third states’ duty of non-recognition [of these acts.]”

Palestinians protest land seizure

Al Jazeera

Hundreds of Palestinian villagers have made a short but symbolic march to the separation wall that Israel has built on their land, a non-violent protests that they regularly undertake.

Equally, the protesters, marching from the village of Bilin, are regularly met with a violent response from the Israeli army.

“The village of Bilin is literally on the frontline of Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian land and the construction of its separation barrier,” Jacky Rowland, Al Jazeera’s correspondent reporting from the village, said.

“Later today the villagers of Bilin will protest the fact that not only they, but also five neighbouring villages, have lost their land which has been seized to build an Israeli settlement.

“This huge settlement will result in 40,000 Jewish settlers living on occupied land here in the West Bank and as Prime Minister [Binyamin] Netanyahu is planning to give the go ahead for even more of these settlement homes to be built,” she said.

Netanyahu is set to approve plans to build hundreds of new homes on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, before considering US demands for a construction freeze.