On Saturday, September 8th, a demonstration has been organized in the village of Jayous.
As the olive season soon begins, more than 30 work permits the local villagers need to access their lands have been denied “because of opposition on the part of security elements.” Many of the people denied permits are free to enter Israel for work or leave the country entirely yet are somehow denied access to their own property and land for “security” reasons. The system of denying villagers these permits prevents them from tending to land that has been in many of their families for hundreds of years and continuing their cultural tradition of harvesting their olives.
Out of the 4,000 residents in the town only 90 of them are today allowed to work on their land. This is not an isolated occurrence. These restrictions are repeated all along the route of the Apartheid Wall.
Even for the farmers who do have permits, they are restricted in their ability to work their lands by gates manned by the Israeli military. They must go through the gates only within certain times dictated by the Israeli military, and it is the military who decide how much time it takes to go through the gate itself.
The short term objective of the planners of Apartheid is to annex the territories west of the Apartheid Wall. The long term objective is to cause social and economic deprivation east of the Apartheid Wall.
Jayous has been the site of joint Palestinian – Israeli non-violent activism for years. People will gather at 10:15 at the gas station Alfei Menashe, on Road 551, 6 kilometers from Hapeirot junction (the old entrance to Kalkilia), the demonstration will begin soon after.
For more information about the demonstration or transportation contact:
ISM Media: 022971824
Amit: 0545450041
Some “dry” statistics:
Jaayus Village population: 3,500, agricultural land west of the wall: 2,200 acres (about 75% of the village total farm land)
The land in question grows citrus and avocado orchards, holds vegetable greenhouses, and the village’s water wells!!!
Number of people prohibited by Shabbak from tending their lands: 34
Fallame Village population: 750
Jammal Village – population: 2,500
We hope you can join us in acting in solidarity with the Palestinian people to help reclaim their stolen lands.
Sharif Omar Khaled had a little bit of satisfaction last week. His guava trees bore fruit for the first time. They had ripened relatively early, he said, because of the hot weather.
Sharif Khaled, who is known to everyone as Abu Azzam, looks like a moshavnik from days gone by. True, he doesn’t have a mustache, but he has a little paunch, an old tractor with a wagon and he can talk about his trees without end: olive trees, citrus trees, avocado, apricot trees,
almonds, guavas. His greatest pride is his loquat orchard: 14 dunams last year yielded 47 tons of fruit. A most impressive record.
In the past two months, Abu Azzam has seen his 3,600 trees only from a distance, from the top of the hill where his village, Jayyous, lies. When I visited this Palestinian village (not far from Qalqilyah) some four years ago, I felt as if I were in a moshav – tractors with drivers in
mud-covered rubber boots filled its streets.
This feeling has dissipated. The number of Jayyous residents who engage in agriculture has decreased for a simple reason: the separation fence. In his area it was completed three years ago and it cuts off the residents of Jayyous from their lands. To reach their farm land, they require a permit from the Civil Administration, and these are given out less and less often. Only 90 of the 4,000 residents of Jayyous are today permitted to work their lands. For three years, Abu Azzam was one of the lucky ones who received a permit. On June 23, he was informed that the permit would no longer be renewed, “because of opposition on the part of security
elements.”
Abu Azzam is not the only person whose permit was not renewed. In the past few months, people in Jayyous say, 29 farmers have had their permits canceled, all of them ostensibly for security reasons. In Abu Azzam’s case, this refusal seems surprising, in the best-case scenario, and evil in the worst case.
Abu Azzam goes abroad three or four times a year. He has been to Sweden, Britain, India and Spain. Now he can chat a little in Italian after studying for three months in Pisa. But he cannot go to his loquat trees.
The word “coexistence” has all but disappeared from the lexicon of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But not with Abu Azzam. He struck up ties with Israelis who participated in the protests against building the fence in the Jayyous area four years ago, and since then he has taken pains to nurture those ties constantly. Every year hundreds of Israelis come to
help him and other farmers from Jayyous with their harvesting in fields that have remained on the Israeli side of the fence. “They don’t want money and even bring along their own food,” Abu Azzam says with admiration. “They simply want to help us.”
Abu Azzam particularly remembers one of the Israeli acts of assistance: In December 2004, Israeli bulldozers pulled up several hundred olive trees in a private plot belonging to one of the residents of Jayyous. “The Israelis came to replant the trees,” he says. “They walked several kilometers on foot because the army did not permit them to bring their vehicles to the
fields. Even the elderly among them went on foot. How old is Uri Avneri? He also walked. We were altogether some 50 Palestinians, 200 Israelis and 100 policemen and soldiers. Several hundred villagers from Jayyous watched us from behind the fence. They were extremely moved. It was a very good feeling to see the Israelis planting the trees with us.”
But let us not get confused. Abu Azzam is a thorn in Israel’s side, albeit a small thorn. He travels a great deal abroad and on most of his trips speaks out against the “apartheid fence.” He was part of the Palestinian delegation to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, as a
“farmer from the area,” and he says things that are unequivocal and scathing. He appears in international forums abroad, and sometimes his confrontations with Israeli representatives end in unpleasant tones. This year in February, for example, he participated in a discussion at
Cambridge University. “The Palestinian delegate in Briatin did not arrive, and I was the sole Palestinian in a forum with about 10 Israelis,” he says. “They asked me whether suicide bombers can be part of a peace process. I was impolite and asked them whether attacks by an Apache helicopter on schools could be part of a peace process. There was an unpleasant argument.” Did these scathing remarks lead to the cancellation of Abu Azzam’s permit? It is possible.
A Civil Administration spokesman responded that Abu Azzam had a hearing before a committee that considered his request to renew his permit. The request was considered “bearing in mind the security needs of the State of Israel, and it was decided to turn it down.” Abu Azzam says that the committee members asked him where he had gone the last time he visited abroad. “I said that I was in Sweden in May, and then they asked me ‘where
were you in February?’ I had the feeling they were talking about the conference in Cambridge.”
Perhaps there is another reason. One of Abu Azzam’s friends once warned him that eventually they would cancel his permit to work his fields. “Your problem is that you have too many contacts with the Israeli left,” his friend told him.
Either way, Abu Azzam is convinced that the Israeli authorities are not in favor of ties between Israelis and Palestinians. He views the lack of ties as one of the reasons that the number of Israelis who participate in the activities he has organized has not grown. “It is as if the Israelis are not interested in knowing what is happening on the other side,” he says.
Is Abu Azzam indeed a security menace? Anything is possible, but on the face of it, at least, it appears that this possibility would be strange. He is 65 years old, a former Communist, and the distance between him and Hamas is very great. He has been arrested only once, 20 years ago, for refusing to evacuate part of his lands in favor of the nearby settlement of Tzofin. One of his sons was detained for nine months under administrative detention, but that was more than three years ago. Another of his sons always gets permits to go to Haifa port to fetch goods for the company he runs in Ramallah. This son, too, by the way, did not get a permit from the Civil Administration to go to the family’s fields. He can travel to Haifa but not to his father’s guavas and loquats.
Sources in the Civil Administration say that attempts were made on their part to persuade the Shin Bet security service to give Abu Azzam a permit, but the Shin Bet was adamant in its refusal.
Abu Azzam has a simple explanation for this persistent refusal: “They want us to forget about our lands, for us to emigrate from here.”
The footage Footage captured by an independent American filmmaker on Wednesday 15 August, at the Ras at-Tira checkpoint in the Qalqiliya District, and shows the three children attempting to cross the checkpoint
in a horse cart when they are stopped by two Israeli soldiers. The female soldier is clearly shown beating the boys before spitting on them and sending them back the way they came. Her male colleague is then seen picking up stones from the ground and throwing them at the children as they drive away.
The village of Ras at-Tira, with a population of 445 people, lies near the Israeli settlement of Alfe Menashe. It is surrounded by the Apartheid Wall on three sides, while the planned construction of a further section of
the Wall will completely imprison the village, leaving three Israeli military-controlled gates as its only exit points.
Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi MP presented the footage and the fallowing informaiton at a press conference held in Ramallah today. The beatings were reminiscent of the physical assault of 18-year old university student Mohammad Jabali by Israeli soldiers near the notorious Huwwara checkpoint in Nablus on 18 March 2007. Four Israeli soldiers punched and kicked Jabali in the face, head and genitals, causing bleeding and a blood clot in his right testicle. Jabali was forced to undergo surgery and to have part of the testicle removed.
The Israeli checkpoints are the settings of less overt yet equally insidious human rights violations, tragically illustrated by the death of 18-year-old Radi Alwahash, who died at a checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem on 29 June 2007. Alwahash was being transferred to hospital in Jerusalem in an Israeli Magen David Adom ambulance after being critically injured in a traffic accident. Israeli border police and civil administration staff refused to let the ambulance cross the checkpoint and held it there for an
hour and a half while Alwahash’s body systems failed, claiming that the teenager was a ‘security risk.’
Israeli checkpoints are the frequent scenes of Palestinian deaths. Since September 2000, 69 Palestinian women have given birth at Israeli checkpoints. Five women and 35 newborn babies have died as a result.
A recent study on perinatal and infant mortality published together with the John Hopkins University found that four out of every 1,000 Palestinian children born die before the age of one, a factor linked to Israel’s matrix of movement restrictions in the West Bank.
Palestinian children are the victims of other forms of violations by the Israeli military, citing the case of
14-year old Rena Mufid who was used as a human shield by an Israeli unit during a raid on Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip on 12 July 2007. Troops from the same unit fired on the girl after their colleagues had sent her into a house they had surrounded, hitting her in the stomach and leg. This was not an isolated incident, but just one facet of a policy of consistent human rights violations on the part of the Israeli military. In another incident,11-year-old Jihan Daadush was also used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers during an
incursion into Nablus in February this year.
The practice of using human shields is illegal under both the Fourth Geneva Convention and under Israeli law itself. Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that “The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.”; In a ruling by Israeli Supreme Court on 6 October 2005, Judge Aharon Barak stated that “You cannot exploit the civilian population for the army’s military needs, and you cannot force them to collaborate with the army.”
The vulnerability of Palestinian children and youth to the deleterious effects of the occupation is further evident in conflict-related mortality and morbidity statistics, which reveal that 959 Palestinian children have been killed by the Israeli army since 28 September 2000. In addition, over 20,000 have been injured in the same period, of which some 1,500 have sustained life-long disabilities due to the injuries the sustained.
Of the 76 Palestinians killed between 16 June and 15 August 2007, 6 have been children. In addition, 24 of the 210 Palestinians injured during the same period have also been children. No Israelis have been killed during the same time period.
Travelling into Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza Strip, which I visited recently, is like a surreal trip back into an apartheid state of emergency.
It is chilling to pass through the myriad checkpoints – more than 500 in the West Bank. They are controlled by heavily armed soldiers, youthful but grim, tensely watching every movement, fingers on the trigger. Fortunately for me, travelling in a South African embassy vehicle with official documents and escort, the delays were brief.
Sweeping past the lines of Palestinians on foot or in taxis was like a view of the silent, depressed pass- office queues of South Africa’s past. A journey from one West Bank town to another that could take 20 minutes by car now takes seven hours for Palestinians, with manifold indignities at the hands of teenage soldiers.
My friend, peace activist Terry Boullata, has virtually given up her teaching job. The monstrous apartheid wall cuts off her East Jerusalem house from her school, which was once across the road, and now takes an hour’s journey. Yet she is better off than the farmers of Qalqilya, whose once prosperous agricultural town is totally surrounded by the wall and economically wasted. There is only one gated entry point. The key is with the occupation soldiers. Often they are not even there to let anyone in or out.
Bethlehem too is totally enclosed by the wall, with two gated entry points. The Israelis have added insult to injury by plastering the entrances with giant scenic posters welcoming tourists to Christ’s birthplace.
The “security barrier”, as the Israeli’s term it, is designed to crush the human spirit as much as to enclose the Palestinians in ghettoes. Like a reptile, it transforms its shape and cuts across agricultural lands as a steel-and-wire barrier, with watchtowers, ditches, patrol roads and alarm systems. It will be 700km long and, at a height of 8m to 9m in places, dwarfs the Berlin Wall.
The purpose of the barrier becomes clearest in open country. Its route cuts huge swathes into the West Bank to incorporate into Israel the illegal Jewish settlements – some of which are huge towns – and annexes more and more Palestinian territory.
The Israelis claim the purpose of the wall is purely to keep out terrorists. If that were the case, the Palestinians argue, why has it not been built along the 1967 Green Line border? One can only agree with the observation of Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad, who has stated: “It has become abundantly clear that the wall and checkpoints are principally aimed at advancing the safety, convenience and comfort of settlers.”
The West Bank, once 22% of historic Palestine, has shrunk to perhaps 10% to 12% of living space for its inhabitants, and is split into several fragments, including the fertile Jordan Valley, which is a security preserve for Jewish settlers and the Israeli Defence Force. Like the Gaza Strip, the West Bank is effectively a hermetically sealed prison. It is shocking to discover that certain roads are barred to Palestinians and reserved for Jewish settlers. I try in vain to recall anything quite as obscene in apartheid South Africa.
Gaza provides a desolate landscape of poverty, grime and bombed-out structures. Incon- gruously, we are able to host South Africa’s Freedom Day reception in a restaurant overlooking the splendid harbour and beach. Gunfire rattles up and down the street, briefly interrupting our proceedings, as some militia or other celebrates news of the recovery from hospital of a wounded comrade. Idle fishing boats bob in long lines in the harbour, for times are bad. They are confined by Israel to 3km of the coast and fishing is consequently unproductive. Yet, somehow, the guests are provided with a good feast in best Palestinian tradition.
We are leaving through Tel Aviv airport and the Israeli official catches my accent. “Are you South African?’ he asks in an unmistakable Gauteng accent. The young man left Benoni as a child in 1985. “How’s Israel?” I ask. “This is a f**ked-up place,” he laughs, “I’m leaving for Australia soon.”
“Down under?” I think. I’ve just been, like Alice, down under into a surreal world that is infinitely worse than apartheid. Within a few hours I am in Northern Ireland, a guest at the swearing in of the Stormont power-sharing government of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness.
Not even PW Botha or Ariel Sharon were once as extreme as Ian Paisley in his most riotous and bigoted days. Ireland was under England’s boot for 800 years, South Africa’s colonial-apartheid order lasted 350 years. The Zionist colonial-settler project stems from the 1880s. The Israeli ruling class, corrupt and with no vision, can no longer rule in the old way. The Palestinians are not prepared to be suppressed any longer. What is needed is Palestinian unity behind their democratically elected national government, reinforced by popular struggles of Palestinians and progressive Israelis, supported by international solidarity.
South Africa’s stated position is clear. The immediate demands are recognition of the government of national unity, the lifting of economic sanctions and blockade of the Palestinian territories, an end to the 40-year-old military occupation and resumption of negotiations for a two-state solution.
On a final note, the invitation to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh as head of a national unity government was welcomed by President Mahmoud Abbas, and will be dealt with by our government.
As they say in Arabic: “Insha ’Allah [God-willing].”
Ronnie Kasrils is South Africa’s Minister of Intelligence
Forcing Transfer in Izbat at-Tabib by the ISM Media Crew
Izbat at-Tabib, Qalqilya district
The Palestinian village of Izbat at-Tabib is situated a few kilometers east of Qalqilya and north-west of the town of Azzun, between the large illegal Israeli settlements of Alfe Menashe and Ma’ale Shomeron, in Area C. The majority of the village residents are refugees from 1948, from the destroyed Palestinian village of Tabsur, which is now the Israeli city of Raanana, located approximately 20 kms from Izbat at-Tabib. The first house was built by the Tabib family in the 1920’s on their land and later the village developed after Nakba (1948), when other members of the Tabib family fled from Tabsur. Some of the 226 Izbat at-Tabib residents are from other families and approximately two-thirds of the 226 inhabitants are children. Currently there are no medical services or schools in the village.
The Israeli occupation and illegal confiscation of Palestinian lands for the purpose of the Apartheid Wall, Israeli settlements and settler-only roads are having a grave impact on the village of Izbat at-Tabib.
Denial of Building Permits
The Israeli policy of denying building permits is wide spread in the West Bank. Despite the fact that the Izbat at-Tabib is well established, the Israeli government claims that the village and surrounding area is only agricultural land. Since 1991, inhabitants have been applying for building permits for new homes, house additions, barns and service buildings since 1991, but their applications have been denied by the Israeli government. There are approximately 40 homes in the village. Some of the residents live in corrugated iron and cement block homes, while others live in crowded homes. Because Israel refuses to issue building permits, they are unable to build a house with a cement roof or expand their existing homes.
Apartheid Wall
The village has suffered grave consequences from the construction of the Israeli Apartheid Wall, which is illegally built well inside the 1967-green line to annex the illegal Israeli settlements to Israel. The sections of wall affecting the village began in 2002 and were completed at the end of 2003. With the construction of the Apartheid Wall the village has lost 250 dunnums from one section of the wall and 20 dunnums from another section of the wall. For many families in Izbat at-Tabib, the loss of access to their lands has resulted in severe economic hardship as they depend on the olive harvest and other crops for their livelihood. Many olive trees have been uprooted in order to build the wall in the area. Up to this point in time, two families have been forced to move because the Wall has taken away their means of livelihood in Izbat at-Tabib. The village has taken their illegal land confiscation case to the Supreme Court and the decision was granted in favor of the village in 2005. In 2006, they were supposed to be given access to a portion of their confiscated land once the route of the wall is re-located, but the construction of the new section of the wall has not yet been built.
Demolition Orders and Settler Roads
The existing settler-only road has cut right into the agricultural land of Izbat at-Tabib resulting in the loss of 15 dunnums. The Israeli government is threatening Izbat at-Tabib with home demolitions and is trying to force the illegal transfer of village residents to the neighboring town of Azzun, in order to clear an area for the new settler-only road. On March 1, 2007, the village received official documentation indicating the details of the plan for the new settler-only road cutting right through several homes in the village, as well as eviction notices for many families in the village. A total of 21 demolition orders have been issued for homes and barns, as well as the two-story service centre (kindergarden and clinic) still under construction.
Military Incursions, House Raids and Checkpoints
The residents of Izbat at-Tabib are currently experiencing daily incursions by the Israeli Army, one to six military vehicles (jeeps and/or hummers) patrolling the village and sitting in their vehicles on the edge of it. During several incursions, boys have been taken from the village by the army, on occasion have been beaten, and then returned to the village after two to nine hours. On April 13, 2007 the level of harassment from the Israeli Army increased in the village. After 8:00pm, the Israeli Army entered the village, imposed a curfew and established checkpoints around the village, preventing anyone from entering or exiting. Seventeen houses, nearly half of the houses in the village were raided and forced outside. In many houses, the army damaged the contents. Twenty-five men and fifteen boys, some as young as four or five years old, were forced to line up with hands behind their backs for one to two hours facing a wall off the main road of the village. The reason they gave the army gave for the incursion was a complaint by a settler that stones were thrown on to the main road. The men were told the village would be punished for any rock throwing, regardless of who was responsible.
The Israeli Army has a history of destruction in the village. The road behind the village, leading to the village of ‘Isla, has been dug up twice. The village was finally granted a permit to rebuild the road within the last two years.
International House
In response to the threat of further violent incursions and home demolition orders in Izbat at-Tabib, the mayor, Bayan Tabib, on behalf of the village council, has invited international solidarity activists to establish a presence in the village. A small house has been set up for internationals to live in during their stay.
