Tag: Sheikh Jarrah

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

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.

Court refuses to issue restraining order against evicted Sheikh Jarrah Arabs

Jonah Newman & Abe Selig | The Jerusalem Post

14 August 2009

A Jerusalem District Court rejected on Thursday a request by Jewish families who have taken possession of homes in east Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood by court order to issue a restraining order against the Arab families who were evicted from those homes.

However, Judge Eilata Diskind issued a warning to the Arab families to refrain from violent behavior.

The petition for the restraining order, which was made by the Nahalat Shimon International organization, asked that nine people – three members of the Hanoun family and six members of the Gawhi family – be prohibited from congregating outside the homes.

It was rejected by Diskind, who said there was insufficient evidence to prove the plaintiffs’ claims that members of the families had thrown rocks at the homes and harassed the new occupants.

The judge did issue a warning to the defendants to refrain from such behavior in the future.

Both the Hanoun and Gawhi families have set up makeshift protests across the street from their former homes to protest what they have called the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinian residents from the neighborhood.

In their testimony, the Jewish plaintiffs said the defendants yell, “Your grave will be here” and other curses every time they pass in front of the building.

“They have nothing to do there but bother us,” said Yitzhak Mamo, one of the plaintiffs. “What are they doing there, playing backgammon?”

The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Ilan Shemer, cross-examined each of the respondents after the judge finished asking questions, and asked one of them, Khaled al-Gawhi, why he and his family continued to live on the sidewalk, if their intention was not to bother the new residents.

“I want to show the whole world what kind of law they have in this country,” Gahwi responded.

Gawhi also claimed that the Jewish families had thrown rocks at him, including one which came from the upper floors of the building and landed meters from a five-month-old baby.

Two of the other respondents, Majed and Salim Hanoun, refused to answer questions without their lawyers present.

The respondents complained that the court summons had been far too hasty, arriving an hour before the proceedings were to begin, and hardly giving them enough time to contact their lawyers.

“I called someone to come translate [the court summons] for me, and then it took us 30 minutes to get here,” Maher Hanoun told The Jerusalem Post.

Hanoun and Gawhi’s lawyers, who said they didn’t know about the hearing until almost an hour after it was set to begin, arrived just as the judge was reading her decision.

Nonetheless, both families seemed somewhat relieved after the decision was read, and were seen moments later preparing to return to their ongoing protest vigils in Sheikh Jarrah.

While the Jewish plaintiffs declined to comment on the verdict, Khaled al-Gahwi told the Post simply, “They didn’t get their request, that’s it, it’s over.”

Candle vigil in solidarity with evicted Palestinian families held in Sheikh Jarrah

10 August 2009

At 8pm, around 200 Palestinians, Israelis and international solidarity activists congregated outside the evicted homes of the Hanoun family. Under the presence of the Israeli police, the demonstrators lit candles which illuminated signs and posters condemning the evictions and demanding their homes back. Peacefully, people sang and spoke whilst traffic tooted their horns in support of the families.

As demonstrators began to march towards the al Gwahi home around 9pm (another home that was evicted and is currently being occupied by settlers), the police violently attacked people walking on the sidewalk, dragging kicking and beating them as they pulled them back along the street towards their vehicles. Police units dressed in all black charged through to lend a hand and eventually forced Arik Asherman of the Rabbis for Human Rights into a police van, which hastily left the scene. When things calmed down, an announcement was made that the peaceful protest was an illegal one and everyone had two minutes to leave the area. Taking that as their cue, the protesters regrouped and once again moved towards the home of the Al Ghawi family where they were met with a police blockade. The vigil continued with two groups in separate spaces on the streets with the space in between occupied by settler youth mixing with the police and border police.

As settlers exited their settlement through the groups people jeered and whistled but the candle lit peacefulness prevailed, despite the best efforts of the police. Eventually the banners, posters and protesters made their way back to the space outside on the street where the families are now living and are joined overnight by friends, family and international support.

Evicted Palestinians sleep rough in protest

Jacky Rowland | Al Jazeera

7 August 2009

The Hanouns, a Palestinian family evicted by Israeli authorities from their home in East Jerusalem, are protesting their eviction by sleeping on the street outside the house that was for decades their home.

Al Jazeera’s Jacky Rowland reports from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem where the Hanouns are sleeping rough in protest.