August 2009: night arrests in Bil’in

B’Tselem

18 August 2009

Since June, armed forces have been entering the village of Bil’in at night and arresting residents. The soldiers arrive at the village, which lies west of Ramallah, with Israel Security Agency agents holding lists of persons suspected of involvement in the weekly demonstrations held in the village against the construction of the Separation Barrier.

According to testimonies given to B’Tselem, in some of the cases, the soldiers and ISA agents cuffed and blindfolded the detainees and took them out of the village, where they were questioned. Only later were they taken to detention facilities. Some of the detainees stated that soldiers had beaten them.

Muhammad Wajih Bernat, 21, told B’Tselem:

On 17 July, around 1:00 A.M., masked soldiers came to our house and took me out of it. A soldier asked for my ID card and told me to stand aside. Two minutes later, a soldier cuffed my hands, blindfolded me, and made me stand behind the house. The soldiers began to search the house.

About three minutes later, some villagers and foreign activists came there and tried to prevent the soldiers from detaining me, but they failed. Two soldiers dragged me by my hands to a place between the groves. I bumped into bushes, thorns, and rocks on the way. Soldiers walked behind me hitting me with their hands and their rifle butts in the legs, stomach, and head. The whole way, I felt the cuffs digging into my wrists. They dragged me about 500 meters, until we got to the separation fence.

From there, they took me by army jeep to a place I don’t know. I was in pain from the beating. They didn’t give me food or water and left me sitting with my hands cuffed and my eyes blindfolded until noon. Then they took me to the Ofer army base. The next day, the second day of my detention, I was interrogated. One of the interrogators asked me about my activity in the Popular Committee against the Wall. He said he had confessions from other persons about stone throwing and hurling back tear-gas canisters that the army throws but don’t explode. I didn’t admit to the things they charged me with. On my fifth day of detention, they took me to a court, and the judge ordered my release. I still had marks from the beating and the handcuffs and scratches on my legs.

Rasha Ayub Yassin, who is 21 years old and has a daughter, gave B’Tselem a testimony about the detention of her brother-in-law:

On Monday, 3 August, at 4:00 A.M., I woke up from the sound of soldiers shouting. I saw about fifty masked soldiers come into our house and go up the outside steps to the roof. This was the third time they came looking for my husband’s brother, ‘Abdallah Ahmad ‘Issa Yassin, who is eighteen years old.

I climbed up to the roof and saw the soldiers cuffing ‘Abdallah’s hands in front of him. He said to me, “Look what happened to my eye.” I saw that his right eye was bleeding badly. He asked me to help him put on his shoes, because his hands were tied. I did as he asked. They didn’t let him get dressed and took him away wearing only shorts and an undershirt.

B’Tselem knows of 26 residents of the village who have been detained, some of them on suspicion of throwing stones and organizing the demonstrations. Among the detainees, seven (including two U.S. citizens and one Israeli) were released on bond. Indictments have been filed against some of the detainees, most of them for stone throwing and damaging the Barrier.

Two of the detainees, Adib Abu Rahma and Muhammad Khatib, are heads of the Bil’in Popular Committee. They were arrested after two 16-year-old minors told interrogators that members of the Bil’in Popular Committee organize the weekly demonstrations held in the village. Indictments were filed against Abu Rahma and Khatib for incitement and soliciting young people in the village to throw stones, among other charges. The indictments did not contain evidence against Abu Rahma and Khatib and alleged they had committed the offenses based solely on their membership in the Committee.

At a court hearing, the judge ordered that Abu Rahma be released. However, the state appealed and the judge of the appeals court accepted its arguments, ordering that Abu Rahma remain in detention until the end of the proceedings. Only afterwards was the indictment against him amended and the count on solicitation, the more serious charge, deleted.

Muhammad Khatib was charged, among others, with throwing stones. This charge was refuted when his attorneys proved that on the day the photo on which the prosecution bases its case was taken, Khatib was abroad.

The indictment further alleges that members of the Bil’in Popular Committee give demonstrators “T-shirts and pieces of iron for deflecting the tear-gas canisters that the IDF fires to disperse the demonstrations.” These “pieces of iron” are tin shields that the demonstrators have begun to carry to protect themselves from the tear-gas canisters that soldiers fire against them in violation of the Open-Fire Regulations. They have done this since a resident of the village, Bassem (Phil) Abu Rahma, was killed by a canister that a soldier fired at him during a demonstration in April. As the videos of the incident and B’Tselem’s investigation show, Abu Rahma was not throwing stones or endangering soldiers in any way.

The military court judge released Khatib, noting that there was no precedent for holding a person charged with incitement in detention until the end of the court proceedings. The judge further stated in his decision that Khatib’s attorney had submitted evidence indicating that members of the Popular Committee “are acting to reduce the violence arising from the processions.” However, he imposed unprecedented restrictions on Khatib’s release, including restraining him from being ten kilometers from Bil’in on Fridays, during the time that the demonstrations are taking place in the village.

More than two years ago, the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled that the route of the Separation Barrier built on Bil’in land was illegal, finding that it was set to enable expansion of the Modi’in Ilit settlement. The High Court rejected the state’s contention that the route was set for security purposes and ordered it to propose an alternative route. In December 2008, the High Court rejected the amended proposed route, as it did not meet the criteria specified in the Court’s decision. The judges ordered the state to pay court expenses to the petitioners. The third route also did not meet some of the criteria, and the village objected to the requisition orders issued pursuant to the proposed route. The state has not yet filed a response to the objection, and the Barrier has not yet been moved.

The recent wave of detentions raises grave concern that the army intends to suppress any kind of protest against the Barrier’s route in Bil’in. It appears that to the army, any kind of protest against building the Barrier along the route that has been ruled illegal, even if nonviolent and non-threatening to security forces, is illegal and warrants arrest.

Protests against Sheikh Jarrah evictions continue

15 August 2009

About 70 Palestinian, Israeli and international activists gathered at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem on Saturday, 15th August to demonstrate against the recent evictions in Sheikh Jarrah and Israel’s ongoing policy of ethnically cleansing East Jerusalem of its Palestinian population.

Protesters were carrying balloons in the colours of the Palestinian flag and banners with messages from the children of Sheikh Jarrah. The children from the evicted families and their friends created the signs to tell the world about their experience with the recent evictions and the reality of living in occupied East Jerusalem. Most of them were talking about their lost childhood and that all they want is to stay in their homes, expressing their fear of being thrown out on the street and living in tents.

One of the local children, Rania (11) wrote: When I look out of my window I see my friends sleeping on the street and settlers throwing stones at them. I feel so sad for them. The settlers are in the house where we used to play.

From Damascus Gate, the demonstration proceeded onto marching towards Sheikh Jarrah. Just before reaching the neighbourhood, the march was stopped by police and border police, who held the crowd for about ten minutes while checking IDs. After a short while, the police allowed the march to continue. The demonstrators visited both evicted families and continued shouting slogans calling for Israel to stop demolishing Palestinian houses and evicting families from their homes.

On August 2, 2009, two Palestinian families, 53 people in total, were thrown out of their homes. Armed Israeli policemen smashed the windows, broke in and evicted the residents. After just one hour, Jewish settlers seized the homes and moved in. They are still there now. As for the Palestinian families, they are now sleeping on mattresses on the sidewalk across from their houses.

The families are refugees from 1948 and were given the houses in Sheikh Jarrah by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the government of Jordan which controlled East Jerusalem then. They have been fighting for their right to stay in their houses for 37 years, since the Jewish settlers produced falsified Ottoman-era deeds showing the land the houses were built on belonged to Jews. After endless court hearings, in which the Hannouns tried to present new documents and evidence, their appeal was rejected and they were issued an eviction order in February. They had been waiting for the eviction since 15th March, continuing their non-violent fight, which drew significant attention of the whole world.

These house evictions amount to a systematic elimination and cleansing of a Palestinian presence in the city, particularly in the occupied areas of East Jerusalem by the State of Israel, through legal and regulatory means. The creation of Jewish enclaves and settlements in these areas and removal of the local Palestinian population which have been living here for generations is against international law.

This “judaization” of occupied East Jerusalem is a process that if allowed to continue, will harm all prospects of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, for whom a return to negotiations hinge largely on the sovereignty of the city and of East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Quiet slicing of the West Bank makes abstract prayers for peace obscene

Slavoj Zizek | The Guardian

18 August 2009

On 2 August 2009, after cordoning off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than 50 people) from their homes; Jewish settlers immediately moved into the emptied houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country’s supreme court, the evicted Arab families had been living there for more than 50 years. The event – which, rather exceptionally, did attract the attention of the world media – is part of a much larger and mostly ignored ongoing process.

Five months earlier, on 1 March, it had been reported that the Israeli government had drafted plans to build more than 70,000 new homes in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank; if implemented, the plans could increase the number of settlers in the Palestinian territories by about 300,000 Such a move would not only severely undermine the chances of a viable Palestinian state, but also hamper the everyday life of Palestinians.

A government spokesman dismissed the report, arguing that the plans were of limited relevance – the construction of homes in the settlements required the approval of the defence minister and the prime minister. However, 15,000 have already been fully approved, and 20,000 of the proposed housing units lie in settlements that Israel cannot expect to retain in any future peace deal with the Palestinians.

The conclusion is obvious: while paying lip-service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating a situation on the ground that will render such a solution impossible. The dream underlying Israel’s plans is encapsulated by a wall that separates a settler’s town from the Palestinian town on a nearby West Bank hill. The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the countryside beyond the wall – but without the Palestinian town, depicting just nature, grass and trees. Is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining the outside beyond the wall as empty, virginal and waiting to be settled?

On the very day that reports of the government’s 70,000-home plan emerged, Hillary Clinton criticised the rocket fire from Gaza as “cynical”, claiming: “There is no doubt that any nation, including Israel, cannot stand idly by while its territory and people are subjected to rocket attacks.” But should the Palestinians stand idly while the West Bank land is taken from them day by day?

When peace-loving Israeli liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in neutral, symmetrical terms – admitting that there are extremists on both sides who reject peace – one should ask a simple question: what goes on in the Middle East when nothing is happening there at the direct politico-military level (ie, when there are no tensions, attacks or negotiations)? What goes on is the slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank: the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parcelling up of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop-burning and religious desecration to targeted killings) – all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations.

Saree Makdisi, in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, describes how, although the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the armed forces, it is an “occupation by bureaucracy”: it works primarily through application forms, title deeds, residency papers and other permits. It is this micro-management of the daily life that does the job of securing slow but steady Israeli expansion: one has to ask for a permit in order to leave with one’s family, to farm one’s own land, to dig a well, or to go to work, to school, or to hospital. One by one, Palestinians born in Jerusalem are thus stripped of the right to live there, prevented from earning a living, denied housing permits, etc.

Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as “the greatest concentration camp in the world”. However, in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes all abstract “prayers for peace” obscene and hypocritical. The state of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process, ignored by the media; one day, the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we must accept the fact. The map of the Palestinian West Bank already looks like a fragmented archipelago.

In the last months of 2008, when the attacks of illegal West Bank settlers on Palestinian farmers became a regular daily occurrence, the state of Israel tried to contain these excesses (the supreme court ordered the evacuation of some settlements) but, as many observers have noted, such measures are half-hearted, countered by the long-term politics of Israel, which violates the international treaties it has signed. The response of the illegal settlers to the Israeli authorities is “We are doing the same thing as you, just more openly, so what right do you have to condemn us?” And the state’s reply is basically “Bde patient, and don’t rush too much. We are doing what you want, just in a more moderate and acceptable way.”

The same story has been repeated since 1949: Israel accepts the peace conditions proposed by the international community, counting on the fact that the peace plan will not work. The illegal settlers sometimes sound like Brunhilde from the last act of Wagner’s Walküre – reproaching Wotan and saying that, by counteracting his explicit order and protecting Siegmund, she was only realising Wotan’s own true desire, which he was forced to renounce under external pressure. In the same way the settlers know they are realising their own state’s true desire.

While condemning the violent excesses of “illegal” settlements, the state of Israel promotes new “legal” building on the West Bank, and continues to strangle the Palestinian economy. A look at the changing map of East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians are gradually encircled and their living area sliced, tells it all. The condemnation of anti-Palestinian violence not carried out by the state blurs the true problem of state violence; the condemnation of illegal settlements blurs the illegality of the legal ones.

Therein resides the two-facedness of the much-praised non-biased “honesty” of the Israeli supreme court: by occasionally passing judgment in favour of the dispossessed Palestinians, proclaiming their eviction illegal, it guarantees the legality of the remaining majority of cases.

Taking all this into account in no way implies sympathy for inexcusable terrorist acts. On the contrary, it provides the only ground from which one can condemn the terrorist attacks without hypocrisy.

Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities szizek@yahoo.com

Free Mohammed Khatib and the non-violent activists from Bil’in

The People’s Voice

18 August 2009

At 3AM on Monday, August 3, the Israeli army raided Bil’in and arrested Mohammad Khatib, along with six other Palestinian community activists and one American human rights observer from the village. This move is an attempt by Israeli authorities to silence a popular resistance movement gaining international attention and inspiring other Palestinian communities. This West Bank agricultural village, known for its weekly protests against the Israeli apartheid wall, has become a symbol for the Palestinian popular resistance to Israel’s ongoing military occupation.

While many are quick to condemn Palestinians when they resort to armed resistance, Israel has been left free to harass, imprison and sometimes kill Palestinians who nonviolently resist the confiscation and destruction of their land in Bil’in and elsewhere.

In June 2009, Mohammed Khatib traveled to Canada for preliminary hearings on an historic lawsuit launched by Bil’in village against two Quebec-based companies, Green Park International and Green Mount International. Both companies are building illegal Israeli-only settlements on Bil’in’s land.

Mohammad’s arrest is just one in a series of many carried out by the Israeli military in Bil’in since June 2009, coinciding with the beginning of these legal proceedings. Video of the ongoing struggle in Bil’in, including interviews with Mohammad Khatib and Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard, can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TySr95aKSlU.

To date, 25 people (most under 18) have been arrested, and 18 of them remain in detention. Having experienced Israel’s interrogation/ intimidation/torture tactics, two of the arrested minors ‘confessed’ that the Bil’in Popular Committee urges the demonstrators to throw stones. Then based on these forced ‘confessions’, Israeli forces arrested Mohammad Khatib and other leaders in Bil’in. They have been charged with “incitement to damage the security of the area.”

An August 13, 2009 statement issued by the Bil’in popular committee declared that Mohammad Khatib, Adeeb Abu Rahmeh and other leaders of the Palestinian popular struggle, “are being targeted because they mobilize Palestinians to resist non-violently. “Israel is stealing our land from us and then prosecuting us as criminals because we struggle non-violently for justice,” said the statement.

In September 2007, after four years of Friday afternoon protests in Bil’in that underscored the violence and injustice of the Israeli occupation, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favor of the village. Contrary to the Opinion of the International Court of Justice, the Israeli Supreme Court did not find the apartheid wall was illegal. But it did find the wall’s route through Bil’in was not designed to separate settlers from potential Palestinian terrorists; it was designed to make Modi’in Illit, the giant orthodox Jewish settlement next to Bil’in, bigger by about 2,000 dunams of farmland owned by Bil’in villagers. The Court ordered the army to reroute the fence and give the people of Bil’in back at least part of the land taken from them.

The very next day, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled to legalize the Israeli settlement of Mattiyahu East (part of Modi’inIllit’s expansion), built on Bil’in’s land to the west of the wall, which separates the village from 60% of its farming land. The villagers vowed to continue their resistance against the wall and settlements on its land and hundreds of them along with other Palestinians, international and Israeli supporters are still protesting every week.

Israeli soldiers are still injuring and killing them every Friday afternoon with Billy clubs, tear-gas canisters fired at close range, and rubber bullets. With no justice from Israeli courts, the villagers of Bil’in turned to the international arena and, with the help of Canadian lawyers and backed by the Canadian solidarity movement, filed litigation in Canada.

Mohammad Khatib’s arrest is an attempt by Israel to thwart such international support for justice for Palestinians.

Mohammad Khatib joins an estimated 11,000 Palestinian prisoners – including over 400 children -detained by Israeli authorities, many without charge or trial. According to a recent report from Amnesty International, many Palestinian prisoners “face medical negligence, routine beatings, position torture and strip searches by Israeli prison authorities.” According to the Palestinian section of Defense for Children International, “each year, hundreds of Palestinian children are arrested, interrogated, abused and imprisoned by the Israeli military authorities often amounting to torture.”

Lamya Khatib, whose husband, Mohammad as well as her younger brother, Abdullah, are both imprisoned at Ofer military base, stated: ” It is obvious that the Israeli authorities will do all they can to prevent Palestinians and Israelis from working together towards a just peace, but I know that Mohammed, Abdullah and I, and everyone in Bil’in, will continue our struggle for justice.”

Inspired by their commitment and dedication, the Free Gaza Movement stands with the Bil’in resistance movement and the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice throughout the occupied West Bank, Gaza and Palestine48.

U.S. group invests tax-free millions in East Jerusalem land

Uri Blau | Ha’aretz

17 August 2009

American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, a nonprofit organization that sends millions of shekels worth of donations to Israel every year for clearly political purposes, such as buying Arab properties in East Jerusalem, is registered in the United States as an organization that funds educational institutes in Israel.

The U.S. tax code enables nonprofits to receive tax-exempt status if they engage in educational, charitable, religious or scientific activity. However, such organizations are forbidden to engage in any political activity. The latter is broadly defined as any action, even the promotion of certain ideas, that could have a political impact.

Financing land purchases in East Jerusalem would, therefore, seem to violate the organization’s tax-exempt status.

Daniel Luria, chief fund-raiser for Ateret Cohanim in Israel, told Haaretz Sunday that the American organization’s registration as an educational entity stemmed from tax considerations.

“We are an umbrella organization that engages in redeeming land,” he said. “Our [fund-raising] activity in New York goes solely toward land redemption.”

Although Ateret Cohanim also operates a yeshiva, Ateret Yerushalayim, in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, fund-raising for the yeshiva is handled by a different organization: American Friends of Yeshivat Ateret Yerushalayim.”

American Friends of Ateret Cohanim was founded in New York in 1987. Like all tax-exempt organizations, it must file detailed annual returns with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. An examination of them reveals that the organization describes its “primary exempt purpose” as: “[to] provide funding for higher educational institutes in Israel.”

“That’s because of the tax issue,” Luria said, explaining that due to American law, the American Friends organization “has to be connected in some fashion with educational matters.”

He also estimated that 60 percent of Ateret Cohanim’s money is raised in the U.S.

The Friends organization’s most recent return, filed in 2008 for fiscal 2007, shows that it raised $2.1 million in donations that year. Of this, $1.6 million was transferred to Ateret Cohanim in Israel.

The remainder was used to cover administrative overhead, including fund-raising expenses and an $80,000 salary for Shoshana Hikind, the American organization’s vice president and de facto director, whose husband Dov is a New York state assemblyman and well-known supporter of the Israeli right.

The organization also raised substantial sums in previous years: $1.3 million in 2006, $900,000 in 2005 and about $2 million in 2004.

By comparison, American Friends of Yeshivat Ateret Yerushalayim raised only $189,000 in 2007.

In its IRS returns, American Friends of Ateret Cohanim said its purpose is to “promote,” “publicize” and “raise funds for” Ateret Cohanim institutions in Israel. These institutions, it continued, “encourage and promote study and observance of Jewish religious traditions and culture.”

In reality, Ateret Cohanim in Israel focuses mainly on purchasing Arab property in East Jerusalem. Since its founding in the 1970s, it has bought dozens of Arab buildings for Jews to reside in. Just this April, for instance, it moved Jewish families into an Arab house it purchased in the Muslim Quarter.

One noteworthy donor to its Friends organization is casino magnate Irving Moskowitz, a well-known supporter of rightist causes, who also owns the Shepherd Hotel in East Jerusalem. That hotel made headlines recently when Moskowitz obtained a permit to build 20 apartments for Jews there, sparking angry protests from the U.S. government.

In response, Ateret Cohanim chairman Mati Dan insisted that the Friends organization “is an independent organization that decides for itself whom to fund.” Moreover, he added, “we engage in education constantly … I don’t know what Daniel Luria told you, but we are active in the field of [educational] institutions.”

As of press time, no comment had been obtained from the Friends organization.

Nir Hasson contributed to this report.