Israeli Arab committee slams ‘racist, fascist’ bills

Jack Khoury | Ha’aretz

28 May 2009

The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee has scheduled an emergency meeting on Saturday in light of recent law proposals submitted by right wing Knesset members, in particular a bill proposing to outlaw the marking of the Nakba, or catastrophe, on Israel’s Independence Day.

The Nakba is observed by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians who mourn the dispersal of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who were forced to leave their homes during the 1948 War of Independence.

Palestinian refugees around the world and Israel’s Arab citizens mark the Nakba on May 15, the day after the British mandate over Palestine ended in 1948. Nakba Day is often observed by the Arab population in Israel with marches through destroyed villages.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s ultranationalist party Yisrael Beiteinu has proposed legislation for a ban on the practice and a jail term of up to three years for violators.

Just this last Wednesday, the Knesset plenum gave initial approval to a bill that would make it a crime to publicly deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, punishable by a sentence of up to a year in prison.

The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee voiced its harshest criticism over the recent spate of bills it described as “racist and fascist proposals aimed against the Arab public in Israel, and there is no doubt that these proposals must be dealt with.”

A third bill that will likely be brought before the ministerial legislative committee on Sunday for a vote is a proposal to require anyone seeking Israeli citizenship to take an oath of loyalty to Israel, renouncing loyalty to all other nations. This bill, proposed by Yisrael Beiteinu’s MK David Rotem, requires that “those seeking citizenship will be required to declare commitment to be loyal to the state of Israel as a Jewish, Zionist and democratic state, to its symbols and its values and to serve the state as required in military service or an alternative service.”

MK Rotem wrote in the explanation accompanying the bill that “during recent years, it has emerged that citizens of the state of Israel are not loyal to the state, its symbols or values, and they avoid serving in the military. This bill aims to link loyalty to the state, its symbols and values, and mandatory military service, to being a citizen of Israel.”

More bills in the same spirit are in the works, including a proposed amendment to a basic law that would add to the current oath taken by Knesset members the words “as a Jewish, Zionist and democratic state, and to its symbols and values.” A similar amendment seeks to add these words to the oath taken by ministers as well.

Never Before Campaign: Palestine, what it’s all about

Never Before Campaign

The Never Before Campaign has created videos as part of a larger communications campaign which was launched during the Gaza war.

The campaign is based in Beirut and is expected to grow to encompass interested people and groups all over the world.

The campaign is a promotion of the ideas that:

  • Never before has an injustice been committed against a people for such an extent
  • The Palestinian people have maintained their resistance and resilience
  • The Palestinian people should not promote an apologetic attitude to garner international sympathy, it is the world who should apologize to the Palestinians
  • The Palestinian cause is not about humanitarian aid but about justice and rights
  • The multi-faceted resistance of the Palestinian people should be supported

Gaza siege also hits disabled people

Luisa Morgantini | Liberazione

15 May 2009

They worked for years for Israeli companies. For years, they paid their taxes and social insurance contributions in Israel in compliance with Israeli labour and fiscal law. But they also had accidents at work suffering serious and invalidating injuries in Israel’s factories, building sites or fields.

Until the period following the Oslo agreements, more than 80,000 Palestinian workers left Gaza every morning, arriving at the Eretz border crossing at 4 a.m. in order to be on time for work in Israel; they returned to Gaza after 6 p.m. dead tired but ready to start again the next morning. Progressively during these years, Israel closed its border crossings for people and goods, including Gaza workers, who were in part replaced by new poor Jewish immigrants but above all by Asian and Romanian workers.

Today, because of the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip, more than 5,000 of those Palestinian disabled workers no longer receive their disability allowances: the transfer of insurance payments for invalidating injuries as well as retirement entitlements were stopped in January 2009 because Israeli Banks suspended all their transactions with banks in the Gaza Strip.

This is another aspect of the siege of Gaza that, for over two years, has continued to stifle the civil population, oppressing them through a collective punishment in which children, women, elderly people and men are deprived of food, fuel, medicines – which are allowed to enter the Strip, through the closed border crossings, only in few days per week and for few hours per day – and in which many hundreds of Palestinian patients have died and continue to die because of the lack of medical cares as well as a lack of those permits issued by the Israeli Authorities allowing them to go to hospitals abroad for treatments.

After the recent ‘Cast Lead’ aggression, that caused the death of more than 1,400 people – mostly civilians and children, and with more than 5,000 Palestinians from the Strip injured by white phosphorus bombs and unconventional arms- this decision represents an umpteenth insult that worsens the ongoing desperate situation of human rights and legality in Gaza. But as the saying goes: there are no limits to the worst.

And so, the worst has arrived with the news released by the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights (http://www.mezan.org/en/), reporting that a private Israeli law firm is seeking power-of-attorney for Gaza residents entitled to Israeli national insurance allowances but who cannot receive them because of the siege: these Israeli lawyers would personally manage the transfer of the money but they would demand an undetermined percentage of the insurance allowances.

A practice of clear profiteering, and a fraud.

A further violation of legality, denounced the Al-Mezan Center that, in cooperation with Adalah – the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel – delivered letters to the Director of the Bank of Israel, the Director of the National Insurance Institute of Israel and the Israeli Minister of Finance, demanding the payment of the indemnities owed to disabled Palestinians, and launched a legal campaign through a petition – still to be defined – to be submitted to the Israeli High Court in order to demand the unconditional transfer of the accrued allowances entitled to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

This practice also represents an explicit form of racial discrimination, as affirmed by Al Mezan lawyers, since Israeli counterparts continue to receive their insurance allowances and Palestinians in Gaza have the same right.

These people are entitled to receive their allowances without any cuts: those workers, in fact, were obliged to pay insurance and taxes from when they took up their work right up to the date of their injury, in the same way as all Israeli workers.

After they were injured, they submitted requests to the insurance institute to receive their disability allowances in accordance with the Israeli National Insurance Law. Each request was assessed by a medical committee, which approved the nature and the size of the disability allowance and confirmed that it was as a result of a work injury. In some cases, the disability amounted to 100%. Some of these disabled people have been receiving their insurance allowances since 1978. Then, the Bank of Israel decided to suspend all transactions with all banks in the Gaza Strip, including the Bank of Palestine.

The siege and the closure of Gaza continue and the International Community once again demonstrates its powerlessness and complicity with the illegal policies of the Israeli Government. The International Community is not able to operate for the respect of minimal humanitarian rules, while the United Nations continue to denounce the lack of freedom of movement for humanitarian goods: John Ging, UNRWA Director, affirmed that it is not right to define Gaza as an open-air prison since even in prisons there is food. For now, Palestinian disabled people have not received their retirement and insurance allowances and the military occupation and expansion of settlements continues in the West Bank.

Luisa Morgantini is the Vice-President of the European Parliament

Israelis accused of settlement by stealth

Dominic Waghorn | Sky News

24 May 2009

The Israeli Government is being accused of a plot to transform East Jerusalem with Jewish settlements and drive out Palestinians by stealth.

The Hannoun family protest against the loss of their home: Photos by Sameer Bazbaz
The Hannoun family protest against the loss of their home: Photos by Sameer Bazbaz

Ir Amim, a Jerusalem based NGO specialising in Israeli Palestinian issues, claims Israeli authorities in collusion with radical Jewish settlers are cementing their hold on occupied East Jerusalem..

“The policy of the government of Israel is to establish the supremacy if not the hegemony of an exclusionary Jewish narrative in Jerusalem,” Ir Amim’s Daniel Seidemann told Sky News.

The British government also told us it is concerned by actions in East Jerusalem that threaten to “not only undermine the peace process but undermine the trust that will be needed to renew that process towards a two state solution”.

These are two examples where Israel is alleged to be altering facts on the ground and changing the status of occupied East Jerusalem against international law.

The Hannouns' home has been in their family for over 50 years
The Hannouns' home has been in their family for over 50 years

The plight of the Hannoun family

Maher Hannoun’s home in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem has been in his family for more than 50 years. Last week an Israeli court ordered his family to leave, to make way for Jewish settlers.

The Jewish settlement company Nahalat Shimon claims the land was bought by Jews more than a century ago and says the Hannouns have not paid rent.

The Hannouns say they were given the property by the Jordanian Government in the 1940s and the settler’s claims are based on forged papers.

“Jerusalem was given to the Jewish people by God three thousand years ago”, a spokesman for the settlers told Sky News. He confirmed plans to evict more than twenty Palestinian families and move in 300 Jewish families instead.

Maher says he has been offered a lot of money to leave but has no intention of giving in to the settlers.

“For us it’s not about money,” he said. “Nobody can sell his identity, his dreams his memory. I will fight to remain where I was born, where my kids were born.”

The European Union and US Government have both protested to the Israeli Foreign Ministry about the planned evictions. The Israeli Government says it is a matter for the courts, despite the political implications of the case.

Signe Breivik gazes at the remains of the hotel she once ran
Signe Breivik gazes at the remains of the hotel she once ran

The Cliff Hotel

Ali Ayad and his wife Signe Breivik, who is Norwegian, met in his family’s hotel in Abu Dis and married there. He took over running the Cliff Hotel and they lived there with their family, until the Israelis seized it.

In 2003 when they moved out to renovate the place, the Israeli military moved in and refused to let the couple return. The Israelis have built the infamous security barrier right through the property.

They are using an absentee property law to take possession, even though Israel’s attorney general has said the law should not be applied in Jerusalem.

Making matters worse are Israeli plans to build a major settlement in and around the hotel. Some jewish families have already moved in nearby.

Ali is barred from Jerusalem because he has only West Bank ID papers and has been branded a security risk. Meeting the affable dispossess Palestinian it is hard to imagine someone less threatening.

He is not even allowed to attend court hearings determining the fate of his property, but remains calm and unbowed in his resolve to fight the Israelis taking his land.

“This is not an issue that I have a stubborn head. This is simple reason. It’s my own property. I did not sell it. My family did not sell it. We have no intention to give it up,” he said.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband has intervened several times in the case of the Cliff Hotel but Israeli authorities appear to have no intention of handing it back.

The Palestinian village of hope

Matt Kennard and Wilson Dizard | The Guardian

27 May 2009

Ramallah is tired. The feeling you get walking around the streets here is that the Palestinians are weary of the struggle against the incremental destruction of their homeland, happening right now while the world looks the other way. You hear things like, “Our struggle has been long and it has got us nowhere”. And people ask how the world can stand by while the Israelis annex more land. It’s a good question.

In one village the flame of non-violent resistance still burns. Last week, we went to the weekly demonstration against the annexation wall in Bil’in, where it cuts deep into the farmland of this old Palestinian village and the Green Line (the internationally recognised border of Israel-Palestine). Since Israel started building the wall here in 2005 (stealing about 60% of the village’s land) the people of Bil’in have been inventively and non-violently resisting.

While helplessness pervades in occupied Palestine, the successful tactics of the people of Bil’in provide some hope and inspiration. Abdullah al-Rahman, head of the Popular Resistance Committee in Bil’in, described the various tactics the villagers have used to stall the erection of a new settlement (called “West Mattiyahu” in Israeli legalese, which tries to say it is merely a “neighbourhood” of an existing settlement). First, to oppose the wall, Bil’in’s residents tied themselves to their olive trees to stop the bulldozers razing their land. Then, in sight of the settlements, they constructed a one-room house overnight on the other side of the wall, a building that became the basis for a legal challenge. The high court slapped down their petition twice before they and their Israeli lawyer, Michael Sfard, realised Israel had made a mistake under its own unfair rules. Generally the Israelis use two excuses for land grabs: one, the land is uncultivated, and two, that there is a security threat. With Bil’in they’ve tried both.

To maintain the interest of the media, essential to their demonstrations’ success, the Popular Committee brings out new initiatives every Friday in its non-violent struggle. Last month at the height of the swine flu hysteria, the Bil’in residents went down for the demonstration wearing flu masks to say that they had all had occupation influenza for decades. When we went on Friday they had a slightly less subtle but equally creative tactic of filling balloons with chicken faeces to chuck at the soldiers.

While the Bil’in residents maintain their adherence to nonviolence, the same can’t be said for the IDF. Last month a beloved activist from the village, Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rammah, was killed by a high-velocity tear-gas canister, and one 16-year-old child we spoke to survived a live round to the head. These are definitely not “mistakes”, when you shoot a high-velocity tear-gas canister horizontally and not up in the air you only have one goal. They managed to murder Bassem with a shot to the heart. This is where the chicken faeces idea came from. “They shoot bullets at us, so we will respond with our animals faeces,” said al-Rahman. At the demonstration hundreds of tear gas canisters were shot at us, and rubber bullets aimed at the children throwing stones.

This Israeli tactic of harsh and violent repression has one goal: to stop Palestinian resistance through instilling fear. This is what happened during the second intifada, and it is happening again now as pockets of resistance are starting to form against the annexation of their land. And it works. We asked our Palestinian friend if she wanted to come with us on Friday. “No,” she replied, “I don’t want to die for nothing.” In recent months, since the Gaza War, the IDF have started using a new cocktail of weapons against the Bil’in demonstrators, which include stronger military-grade tear gas with nerve toxins, high-velocity machinegun-style tear gas, and aluminium bullets that have crippled protesters. The IDF has also made it a tactic to come into the village in the middle of the night and arrest the members of the Popular Committee, and children as young as 13, as well as throwing sound bombs and tear gas around.

According to a farmer from Bil’in, Farhan Burnat, 30, who spent eight months in prison after Israeli soldiers arrested him at a Friday demonstration, the Israelis take the kids to prison in Israel and will keep them for four to six months as punishment for participating in the demonstration. “In Ofer prison about 25% of the prisoners are children,” he said. “These lengthy periods of imprisonment severely stunt the educational development of our children.”

We went down to the wall the day before the protest and talked to Wahid Salaman, a 44-year-old farmer from Bil’in who was walking home after work. “The ability of us to get to our land depends on the mood of the soldier,” he said. “Sometimes we have to wait for five or six hours to get to our fields.” Salaman’s land is on the wrong side of the wall so he has to go through a checkpoint every day to go to work. He pointed out a huge pole with a CCTV camera on top of it. “They watch us at all times as well,” he said. The Israelis assign each farmer a number corresponding to points on the wall where he is allowed to go about his work.

Afterwards we spotted a young boy going through the checkpoint with his herd of goats. “I look after the goats after school for my parents,” he said. “The wall took 60% of our land, and as punishment for the demonstration we’re not allowed to work on Fridays.” He says that his goats have been injured by the barbed wire around the wall. Like everyone in Bil’in, he says he misses his friend Bassem. “I feel very sad,” he said, “but it will not stop me from doing the demonstration. We’re strong enough to continue to do it, they shot Bassem because we are achieving something here.”

The brutal behavior of the IDF at the demonstration has motivated a broad contingent of activists from around the world and Israel to descend on Bil’in every Friday – as they know the IDF will be less inclined to murder at will if they have passports belonging to countries that sell them the guns. When we were there on Friday there was a 15-strong contingent of trade unionists, artists and charity workers from Canada, alongside a group of young Israelis. The IDF’s explicit policy is not to fire live ammunition when Israelis or internationals are in the area, which gives you an indication of their attitude to the expendability of Palestinian life. It also makes it clear how vital it is that the brigade of internationals and Israelis continue to show up and protest peacefully alongside Palestinians.

At a bleak time for Palestinians, when they are watching the live destruction of any hopes of a viable future state, the heroic and successful resistance of the people of Bil’in (and their analogues along the line of the annexation wall) provide a glimmer of hope, and a template of how to fight this epic injustice with a mixture of consistency, courage and creativity.