Tag: Ramallah

Brighton-Tubas Fellowship: Three British nationals go to trial after non-violent demonstration

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Brighton-Tubas Fellowship:

For more info contact Tom Hayes on 00447846506710 or Ann on 0522354477

***Update, after being sent to the Ministry of the Interior to begin the process of deportation, the three women were released.

Three British women, Kate Harrison, Caroline Bailey and Sarah Cobham representing the Brighton-Tubas Friendship and Solidarity group, were arrested during a non-violent protest at Al Mazra’a al Qibilya in the West Bank on Friday 26th October and will appear at 7pm this evening in the Jerusalem Peace Court, located in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem.

The women, aged 45, 60 and 62, who are facing deportation, are being charged this evening with “participating in an illegal demonstration“, “damaging a barbed wire fence” belonging to settlers erected on Palestinian land and uprooting settler owned grape vines planted illegally on Palestinian land.

The women, two of whom are members of Amnesty International, did not actively participate in the demonstration but intended to act as observers. They were arrested as the protesters retreated under live fire.

Members of a ten person delegation to Palestine organised by the Brighton-Tubas Friendship and Solidarity Group joined a demonstration in Al Mazra’a al Qibliya in the occupied West Bank today. Al Mazra’a is surrounded by seven illegal Israel settlements known collectively as Talmund B.

The settlements have been steadily expanding. In the last few years they have expropriated 14,000 dunums of Palestinian land (4 dunums= 1 acre) and uprooted Palestinian olive trees.

The settlement also monopolises water resources in the area. Settlements like Talmund B are illegal under international law. However, the Israeli state encourages the growth of settlements by subsidising colonisers who move to the occupied territories.

Three months ago a further 500 dunums were confiscated from the village and were planted with grape vines.

The Brighton group joined the villagers in marching to the confiscated land. They reached the area where a barbed wire fence marked the boundary of the stolen land. Approximately 50 people crossed the fence and started to remove the grape vines from the land. Also the pipes that take the stolen water were partially destroyed.

As the demonstrators entered the land settlers fired live ammunition at them. Soldiers also fired live ammunition. No warning was given. The group included old people and many young children.

The villagers told the remaining members of the Brighton group that it was because of their presence that no-one was killed.

Ha’aretz: Protesters block Highway 443 to protest ban on Palestinian traffic

Israeli and Palestinian demonstrators blocked Highway 443 early Thursday morning to protest the ban on Palestinian vehicles from the road, which is a major artery connecting Jerusalem to Lod, Army Radio reported.

The protesters, a coalition of Jewish and Arab members of leftist organizations, carried signs which read, among other slogans, “Caution Apartheid Road” and “Paved Road on Pilfered Land,” Army Radio said.

“Highway 443 is an example of what is taking place in the territories,” one of the demonstrators told Army Radio. “[The authorities] are expropriating land from the Palestinians in order to build a highway which is then declared off limits to Palestinian traffic.”

“There is a policy here of apartheid,” Hadar Grievsky, another protester, told Army Radio. “Highways are built on roads that were seized from Palestinians and is only permitted to Jewish drivers.”

Organizers of the protest said that 70 demonstrators participated, most of them Palestinian residents of nearby towns. Israel Defense Forces soldiers and police arrived at the scene to disperse the crowd approximately 10 minutes after the road was blocked. Seven people were taken into custody for questioning, according to Army Radio.

The commander of the Binyamin police station, Chief Superintendent Benny Har-Nes, told Army Radio that law enforcement received information on the demonstrators’ plans to block the highway, enabling authorities to deploy the necessary amount of force.

“We knew of the plan to [block the road] and we prepared accordingly,” Har-Nes said. “We arrived at the scene within five minutes from the start of the event, and after trying to persuade them to evacuate willingly, we declared the matter an unlawful gathering and we cleared them out.

Action Alert! Non-Violent Demonstration at Al Mazra al Qiblya to Protest Illegal Confiscation of Palestinian Land

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

26 October, 2007

Palestinian villagers from al Mazra al Qiblya will again protest the illegal confiscation and cultivation of their agricultural land by Israeli settlers from the illegal settlement of Talmon, who over 2 months ago leveled nearly 500 dunums of land and planted grape vines on it.

The state of Israel claims that villagers were informed of the land confiscation in the early eighties, however villagers challenge this statement. Although this is being challenged legally, settlers have nonetheless already planted grape vines, the first step in taking over Palestinian land and absorbing it into a settlement.

This phenomenon of cultivating so-called ‘uncultivated land’ in Palestinian regions is widespread and often results in the annexation of the land into the illegal Israeli settlements. It is important to note that this is a process being sanctioned by the State of Israel, which is essentially giving permission to Israeli settlers to illegally take over land for private business and expansion purposes.

Palestinian villagers from al Mazra al Qiblya have already protested this land grab and will continue to do so.

The popular committee against the wall and villagers from Al Mazra al Qiblya, along with Israeli and international activists, will meet at the village mosque, at 12 noon and will leave following the noon prayer

Shared taxis leave from the Birzeit servis area near al Manarah in Ramallah.

For more information, contact:
ISM Media Office, 0599-943-157, 0542-103-657

Seattle P-I: Palestinians’ lives invisible to Israelis

By Edward Mast

On a visit to Tel Aviv last month, I asked some Israeli friends what people in Israel were saying about the Palestinian situation. Not much, they told me. Israelis are more concerned about the corruption charges against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, coming on the heels of corruption charges against previous governments. Palestinians and their issues, my friends told me, are becoming more and more invisible to the Israeli people.

Palestinian lives are kept invisible in David Brumer’s Oct. 10 guest column, “Despite concerns, Israel a vibrant country.” Also invisible are Israel’s military occupation and the ongoing takeover of Palestinian land. If Brumer had traveled to the other side of the wall, as I did, he could have witnessed the many ways that the Israeli occupation crushes people with poverty, violence and injustice.

Before visiting Tel Aviv, I spent two weeks working with a theater in the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the West Bank. During that short time, the Israeli army killed at least 15 Palestinians in the occupied territories; several killed were children. For Palestinians, these are regular occurrences. Over the past seven years, the Israeli army has killed more than 4,000 Palestinians. The majority of these, even according to Israeli statistics, have been unarmed civilians. Many thousands more have been wounded or kidnapped. The severe underreporting of Palestinian casualties in the U.S. and Israel can leave the impression that Palestinian lives have less value.

While I was there, Brian Avery came from the United States to testify in Jerusalem against the Israeli army. Avery is a peace activist who was shot in the face by the Israeli army in 2003. At first the Israeli army denied that the shooting took place, but has been forced to launch an investigation now that Avery is bringing a suit.

In Ramallah, I learned that, though there is plenty of water near the city, the several hundred thousand residents had spent the summer with running water available only three or four days each week. That sort of fact tends to be invisible to Israelis, along with the reasons.

Ramallah is near the cluster of West Bank aquifers, which are the main sources of water for both the West Bank and Israel, but 80 percent of the West Bank’s water goes to Israel and Israeli settlements. For decades, Israel has used its military occupation of the West Bank to build an illegal network of settlements around the water sources. Palestinians have been beaten, killed and driven away to make space for these settlements, and Israel has built a continuous wall, not on the border of Israel but inside Palestinian territory, which effectively annexes the settlements and water resources into Israel.

Israelis are told the wall is for their security. Palestinians call it the annexation wall, and it is difficult for them to believe Israel can be a partner for peace while the Israeli government continues taking Palestinian land for settlements, building the wall to annex them and maintaining the system of checkpoints that paralyze movement and life in the West Bank.

With some colleagues, I spent one day traveling from Ramallah to Jerusalem. The eight-mile trip took 2 1/2 hours. In Ramallah, the wall is 25 feet high, and the Israeli checkpoint is like an airport security station. We lined up for more than half an hour with Palestinians at a remote-controlled 8-foot turnstile where people had to crowd like cattle and wait for a green light to get as many through as possible before the light turned red.

Once past X-ray security and more turnstiles, we boarded shared taxis for what should have been a short ride to Jerusalem. However, the Israeli military had set up an additional temporary “flying checkpoint” some 1,640 feet down the road, forcing several lanes of traffic down to a single lane for stopping and searching. That took almost an hour.

Business in Ramallah is at a standstill. Poverty is everywhere; jobs are not to be found. The people at the checkpoint said to us, “Take pictures. Tell people what is happening here.”

Some Israelis, such as my Tel Aviv friends, no longer accept the excuse that the virtual imprisonment and killing of Palestinians are justified by the need for security.

The Israeli government has recently confiscated more Palestinian land near Jerusalem to build a segregated road, literally underground, for Palestinians. Israeli settlers will be able to commute back and forth from the territories without having so much as to see a Palestinian. Invisibility here is no accident.

Edward Mast is a Seattle playwright who volunteers with the Palestine Information Project; palestineinformation.org.

For the original article click here:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/336015_insivible19.html

Comments on this article are being made here:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/soundoff/comment.asp?articleID=336015

(Updated) …Blocking the road to Apartheid: Palestinian nonviolent protestors are blocking highway 443

By: Apartheid Masked

For another video of the action click here:

October 25th, 2007

An anti-apartheid protest today blocked busy Highway 443, one of many highways that run on occupied Palestinian land but are reserved for Israelis only. Israeli Security forces used force to move the demonstrators. Three of the protesters, Blake Murphy, from Boston and Yonatan Polak, and Dmitri from Tel Aviv were arrested and released with conditions limiting their movement.

The protesters blocked the highway for over fifteen minutes by organising a mass sit down in the road backed by six protestors chained into a four metre pipe. Rush hour traffic was backed up for miles before the protestors were removed by force. They distributing a message to the drivers on the highway: “We know what it feels like to be blocked. We experience it daily.”

The masses of Israelis who regularly travel to Jerusalem via the settlement of Modi’in were surprised this morning to find the highway blocked by non-violent protesters. Despite obvious road blocks at the junctions with roads from the Palestinian villages along the highway, few are aware that for seven years now, Highway 443 has been accessible to Israelis only. Palestinians are forbidden to travel on the highway, even on the 9.5 kilometer-long segment which passes through occupied West Bank territory and is built on land that has been confiscated from Palestinians whose olive trees have been cut down “for the benefit of the local population.” [See comment from Israel’s newspaper Haaretz, “The Law as Roadkill”

The Israeli military claims that the prohibition of Palestinian traffic on the main road is temporary and subject to security considerations. But their actions on the ground suggest otherwise. In order to “compensate” the communities, the military has confiscated more land for the creation of what they term “fabric of life” roads at an estimated cost of 177.9 million shekels (approximately US$44.5 million). These roads will funnel Palestinian traffic under the Israeli road network via tunnels and underpasses connecting communities in nearby enclaves, thus putting the Palestinians out of sight and out of mind for Israelis.

The Israeli Human rights group B’tselem states that the prohibition on Palestinian use of Highway 443 appears to be based on Israel’s desire to annex the area along which the road runs. B’tselem explains that if Israel was only interested in protecting the lives of Israelis, rather than annexing the area, it could limit or even prohibit the travel of Israelis on the road cutting through the West Bank and build roads inside Israeli territory, thus providing safe channels of transportation to connect Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

The policy of prohibiting movement on this road is not an isolated case but is part of a general widespread policy [see map]. On 312 kilometers of main roads in the West Bank, vehicles bearing Palestinian license plates are forbidden or restricted access. The creation of a regime of “forbidden roads” has converted the right to freedom of movement in the West Bank into a privilege that is dependent upon the national origin of an individual. [see International Convention on Apartheid] These roads, in addition to the segregation wall, carve up Palestinian areas into isolated enclaves. This fragmentation is at the root of the West Bank’s declining economy.

In an appeal, The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI ) states that the term “Crime of Apartheid,” applies to acts that are used as a means for establishing and maintaining domination of one racial group of persons over any other racial group and systematically oppressing them. ACRI states that an accepted systematic policy of discrimination against the Palestinian population constitutes a practice of apartheid as defined by the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Separation exists between Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank in many other aspects of life, as with the two separate legal systems that exist for the two populations.

A spokesperson for the Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Movement said: “Israel wants to legitimize apartheid and call it peace. This is the first in a series of popular non-violent protests against the Israeli system of apartheid. ”anti-apartheid activists block highway 443 Thursday morning, protesting the Israeli-only road which traverses occupied Palestinian land. A major highway, it is inaccessible to Palestinians.

For more information see:
www.apartheidmasked.org

…and now for some pictures from activestills.org