The South African government urged Israel on Tuesday to end practices toward Palestinians that it said were reminiscent of its own history of apartheid.
“We call upon the Israeli government to cease their activities that are reminiscent of apartheid forced removals and resume negotiations immediately,” the government said in a statement.
The unusually strong statement criticized the demolition of Palestinian houses and the expansion of Jewish-only settlement on land taken from Palestinians.
“We condemn the fact that Israeli settlement expansion in East Jerusalem is coupled with Israel’s campaign to evict and displace the original Palestinian residents from the City,” the statement read.
The statement also took note of US and European condemnations of Israel’s latest plan to expand by 900 units the settlement of Gilo on Palestinian land south of Jerusalem.
“South Africa maintains that these attempts by Israel to create facts on the ground imperil attempts to achieve a negotiated solution to the conflict, namely that of two states, Israel and Palestine existing side by side in peace within internationally recognised borders,” the statement also said.
While individual South Africans have made the apartheid comparison, it is rare for the government to do so.
In August South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu drew parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa during an interview with Ma’an.
“It’s the same thing that happened in South Africa for a very long time,” he said, referring to Israel’s refusal to negotiate with Hamas. “The apartheid government said they wouldn’t negotiate with Nelson Mandela, and so on – and they had to.”
In July academics released a report finding Israel in breach of international legal prohibitions on apartheid and colonialism.
The report was written by British, Irish, South African and Palestinian legal experts under the auspices of the South African Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). The report finds Israel is committing crimes against humanity, which should trigger legal sanctions.
Newspaper headlines across the world this morning will trumpet the courageous and unprecedented initiative of Israel’s prime minister. Who could have imagined that the right-wing leader Benjamin Netanyahu and the settler Avigdor Lieberman would lend a hand to freezing settlement construction? How the settlers’ fuses will blow. Now Daniel Ben Simon can end his love affair with the Labor rebels and go back to being faithful to Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
Indeed, from Israel’s point of view, the government took a major step yesterday. Prime Minister Netanyahu says the move is designed to return the Palestinians to the peace talks. If this is really his intention, the prime minister has managed (temporarily) to pass the hot potato to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. No peace process will come out of it.
It is hard to decide what would cause greater harm to whatever is left of Abbas’ status in the Palestinian public – American pressure to settle with the deal Netanyahu offered him yesterday, or the prisoner-exchange deal that the prime minister is offering his great enemies in Hamas. It is unlikely that Netanyahu really believed Abbas would thank Israel’s government for deciding to temporarily freeze the settlements in the West Bank, praise it for building synagogues and new schools, agree to the completion of 2,500 partially-built housing units and the construction of 492 new apartments.
It is unlikely Netanyahu thought that on the eve of Id al-Adha the Muslim leader would adopt the Jewish people’s position that East Jerusalem is part of the State of Israel. Is Netanyahu really expecting Abbas to recognize Israel’s sovereignty on Gilo, not to mention Sheikh Jarrah and the Temple Mount?
The really important question, which interests Netanyahu more than anything, is how U.S. President Barack Obama will view his proposal. This is not the first time an Israeli government has committed to freezing settlements. Tomorrow it will be two years since prime minister Ehud Olmert announced in Annapolis his commitment to open negotiations on the basis of the road map.
In that detailed document, the Sharon cabinet undertook in May 2003 to suspend all activity in the settlements, including construction for natural growth.
The list of 14 reservations attached to the cabinet decision said that the settlements in the West Bank would not even be discussed “except for freezing the settlements and removing the outposts.”
Freezing West Bank settlements, even temporarily, has become a necessary condition for saving the two-state solution and the Palestinian faction supporting it. Necessary, but by no means sufficient. In the absence of basic trust between the parties, even if Netanyahu continues to shove building permits into the drawer, as he has been doing since he returned to the prime minister’s desk, it won’t suffice.
Today’s newspaper reports about the settlements are more important than what is actually happening in them. In this situation, the ball – a ball of fire – has returned to the White House’s course.
Two foreign peace activists say they were assaulted by settlers Tuesday in South Mount Hebron while accompanying a Palestinian family to the village of Tuba. One of the activists was reportedly kicked in the stomach and needed medical attention. The two women, who filed a complaint with the police, had their cameras stolen as well.
“My colleague and I were with a family that was on its way home when we were harassed and assaulted by settlers,” Sarah MacDonald, one of the activists, told Ynet.
MacDonald, who is hear as part of her activities with the Christian Peace Group,” advised the family to travel on a different route because, according to her, many settlers travel on that route.
“They chose to take the long way home, and we went with them. We crossed the hills south of Havat Maon when we saw four settlers on the ridge above us, about 50 meters (yards) away. They stood between the outpost and us. When we kept walking, they started to run after us.”
“The Palestinian man said to them, ‘We just want to go home.’ Then the settler pushed him, and the Palestinian boy started to cry. My friend, Laura Chigi, tried to separate the settler and the Palestinian, but the settler pushed her,” added MacDonald.
“They kicked Laura’s ribs after she had fallen to the ground, and they injured her. They also managed to steal our cameras that were in action throughout the entire incident. They moment they did this, they left in the direction of Havat Maon.”
Laura needed stitches and was evacuated to a Palestinian hospital for medical attention.
When the two activists arrived in Tuba, they called the Judea and Samaria Police. The police came to take their testimonies.
According to MacDonald, the incident only reinforced the reason she came to the territories in the first place. “We walk with Palestinian families, get involved in certain incidents, and try to prevent violence. In addition, we document the events. This is why we had cameras,” she explained.
MacDonald added that the residents of Maon and Havat Maon regularly exercise violence of this sort.
MacDonald and Chigi are slated to arrive at the police station Wednesday in order to identify pictures of the suspects. Judea and Samaria Police reported that testimonies were taken from the two peace activists and that they are conducting searches for the suspects.
A group of 25 settlers from Yitzhar settlement, south of Nablus, cut down 97 olive trees in the village of Burin this morning. The attack comes on the heels of a similar attack made 5 weeks ago, and a continued campaign of intimidation and harrassment of Burin’s residents from nearby settlements Yitzhar and Bracha.
Approximately 25 settlers began hacking the trees to pieces at 3am this morning. Although cutting manually, the noise awoke a Palestinian resident, whose house is located close to the scene on the Yitzhar ‘side’ of Burin. After alerting the village, the Palestinians arrived in the olive grove as it became light to survey the damage, amongst them the owner of the land, Burin farmer Akram Brahim Embran. They counted 97 trees destroyed.
It is not the first time this year that Burin’s olive trees have been caught in the middle of territorial violence, for which Yitzhar settlers are notorious. On 4 October, a neighbouring grove was wiped out when 25 settlers took to the trees with axes in the early hours of the morning, just one day before the village’s olive harvest was due to commence. Previous years have seen fields burnt and crops stolen, in addition to continual settler harrassment and intimidation. The havoc it wreaks on Burin’s economy is obvious, agriculture its main source of income – and identity.
The village of Burin and its surrounding neighbours have been subject to numerous violent attacks from the two illegal settlements of Bracha and Yitzhar that sandwich the local Palestinian villages. Burin village as also lost thousands of dunams of land from annexation by settler construction or proximity, in addition to the repeated attacks on its remaining farmland. In 2006 settlers from the settlement of Bracha fired homemade rockets on the village, burning a house down.
Settlements are illegal under international law and both settlements have numerous outposts that continue to annex further Palestinian land in violation of both Israeli and international law.
In addition to its weekly confrontations with the Israeli army, the village of Bilin has taken its case to a Quebec court. (Silan Dallal/Activestills.org)Abdullah Abu Rahme can no longer sleep in his own home. A member of the Bilin Popular Committee Against the Wall, Abu Rahme explained that since Bilin began its legal proceedings in Canada, Israeli soldiers have made life especially difficult for residents of the small West Bank village.
“[Israeli soldiers] came to my home and they tried to arrest me. They’re destroying my home. It’s not allowed to me to sleep in my home. I feel very bad about this. I’m suffering from this case until now,” he said. “I took my family to another place. It’s very difficult for me.”
Still, Abu Rahme and the villagers of Bilin are pushing forward in their nonviolent struggle against the Israeli occupation by appealing a Quebec Superior Court ruling in their case against two Canadian companies. The residents of Bilin are suing Green Park International and Green Mount International, two companies that, they argue, should be held legally accountable for illegally building residential homes and settlement infrastructure on the village’s land, and marketing these buildings for the purpose of transferring exclusively Israeli civilians therein.
Bilin is a small Palestinian village of approximately 1,800 residents located 12 kilometers west of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. Since the early 1980s, about 56 percent of Bilin’s agricultural land has been designated by Israel as “State Land.” It has been used to build the Jewish-only settlement Modiin Illit, which holds the largest settler population in the occupied West Bank with more than 42,000 residents and plans to grow to up to 150,000.
Israel began building its wall in the occupied West Bank in 2003. The wall literally cuts the village of Bilin in half. Since 2005, the residents of Bilin have held weekly demonstrations every Friday against the wall, garnering international attention and support for their efforts. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the wall was illegal under international law in a 2004 advisory opinion. A year later, the Israeli high court also ruled that the wall’s route through Bilin was illegal and should be moved closer to the boundary of Modiin Illit. However, neither the ICJ nor the Israeli high court rulings were implemented.
The case against the Canadian companies was heard in Montreal in June 2009. However, Judge Louis-Paul Cullen found that the Israeli high court, not the Quebec Superior Court, was the best venue to hear the case. This ruling was centered on the issue of forum non conveniens, the Latin term for “inappropriate forum.” According to Emily Schaeffer, an Israeli attorney representing Bilin, the term states that “if there’s a better forum for the case, for various reasons, then the case should not be held or heard in the court it’s being brought to but rather in another court.”
Schaeffer maintains that the Quebec court is the only legal forum that can possibly hear the case, since both companies are domiciled in the province. “Israeli courts have repeatedly refused to examine the issue of the legality of settlements. Because that’s the issue for the case in Canada, there’s no other forum than the home of the companies who are registered and domiciled in Montreal,” she said.
“The decision to appeal is because we believe we’re right. We believe that the judge made an error. Our position is that the Israeli courts cannot and will not hear this case. Legality of settlements is not an issue that can be brought to Israeli courts,” Schaeffer added.
The Canadian federal legal system has adopted the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court under the Canadian Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Statute. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 bars an occupying power from transferring part of its civilian population to the territory it is occupying. To do so is considered a war crime under the Rome Statute.
Setting a precedent
While the overall decision was disappointing, the judge’s sub-rulings can be seen as minor victories, Schaeffer explained. “The village of Bilin prevailed in almost every single aspect, and in two of the three motions. Something that we took as a victory [was that] corporations do have liability under Canadian law for their actions and violations of international law abroad. That’s precedence-setting,” she added.
For Schaeffer, a positive ruling would mean setting a precedent to stop other international companies from abetting Israeli war crimes. “If Bilin succeeds in this appeal, it will make more waves [in Israel] and that’s a good thing because what we also want is to discourage other companies from taking similar actions and taking part in war crimes in the occupied territories,” she explained.
Schaeffer added that she was as of yet unsure whether the entire case will be open to appeal, or if only the issue of forum non conveniens would be examined, and that the appeal will likely take several months before being processed.
The struggle continues
According to Freda Guttman, a Montreal-based activist who recently spent three months in Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), being involved with the Bilin campaign in Canada felt like something she needed to do. “It’s a very important cause. If they win this, it will set a precedent not just in Canada but everywhere. It feels like something very important to be involved in,” Guttman said.
Spending time in Bilin demonstrated to Guttman just how strenuous it is for residents to keep fighting the occupation, and the immense burden it places on their daily lives. “My excitement about [the appeal] is sort of tempered by the fact that I see the toll it’s taking on peoples’ lives there. They never know when the army is going to come. It’s just constant,” she said.
For his part, Abdullah Abu Rahme explained that the ruling by the Canadian court left the villagers of Bilin feeling disheartened and upset, but they haven’t lost hope.
“We are very sad about the decision about refusing the case in Canada but we hope to have another decision. We hope to [be restored] our rights and to have justice in this court,” he said. Abu Rahme added that the outpouring of support from international activists has been a huge motivator for residents of Bilin, who are organizing the village’s biggest demonstration yet for the five-year anniversary of their weekly nonviolent demonstrations next February.
Guttman, describing the Canadian legal proceedings as “a roller coaster,” said she too is prepared for the long haul. “I don’t think it’s going to be easy and I don’t think it’s going to be quick. [Bilin is] a very important movement at the forefront of the struggle,” she said.
According to Abu Rahme, that struggle will continue until justice is achieved in Bilin, the West Bank and all of Palestine. “Every Friday we are there. We want to continue our struggle. Until now there is no justice, for the wall and the settlements. We will continue our nonviolent struggle with the support of the internationals and our faith to have justice and to remove the wall and the settlements and the occupation.”
Jillian Kestler-D’Amours is a student and freelance journalist based in Montreal. More of her work can be found at jkdamours.wordpress.com.
