Tag: The Guardian

1948 no catastrophe says Israel, as term nakba banned from Arab children’s textbooks

Ian Black | The Guardian

22 July 2009

Israel’s education ministry has ordered the removal of the word nakba – Arabic for the “catastrophe” of the 1948 war – from a school textbook for young Arab children, it has been announced.

The decision – which will alter books aimed at eight- and nine-year-old Arab pupils – will be seen as a blunt assertion by Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud-led government of Israel’s historical narrative over the Palestinian one.

The term nakba has a similar resonance for Palestinians as the Hebrew word shoah – normally used to describe the Nazi Holocaust – does for Israelis and Jews. Its inclusion in a book for the children of Arabs, who make up about a fifth of the Israeli population, drives at the heart of a polarised debate over what Israelis call their “war of independence”: the 1948 conflict which secured the Jewish state after the British left Palestine, and led to the flight of 700,000 Palestinians, most of whom became refugees.

Netanyahu spoke for many Jewish Israelis two years ago when he argued that using the word nakba in Arab schools was tantamount to spreading propaganda against Israel.

Palestinians have always maintained that the 1948 refugees were the victims of Israeli “ethnic cleansing”. But in recent years a new generation of revisionist Israeli historians has rejected the old official narrative that the Palestinians, supported by the neighbouring Arab states, were responsible for their own misfortune.

Reflecting those changing perceptions, Ehud Olmert, Israel’s last prime minister and leader of the centrist Kadima party, referred to Palestinian “suffering” at the Annapolis peace conference in 2007.

Netanyahu’s Likud takes a different view. “There is no reason to present the creation of the Israeli state as a catastrophe in an official teaching programme,” said the education minister, Gideon Saar. “The objective of the education system is not to deny the legitimacy of our state, nor promote extremism among Arab-Israelis.” There was bitter controversy in 2007 when nakba was introduced into a book for use in Arab schools only, by the then education minister, Yuli Tamir of the centre-left Labour party.

“In no country in the world does an educational curriculum refer to the creation of the country as a ‘catastrophe’,” Saar told MPs in the Knesset yesterday. “There is a difference between referring to specific tragedies that take place in a war – either against the Jewish or Arab population – as catastrophes, and referring to the creation of the state as a catastrophe.”

Arab MP Hana Sweid accused the government of “nakba denial”. The follow-up committee for Arab education said: “Palestinian-Arab society in Israel has every right to preserve its collective memory, including in its school curriculums.”

Jafar Farrah, director of Mossawa (Equality), an Israeli-Arab advocacy group, told Reuters the decision to excise the term nakba only “complicated the conflict”. He called it an attempt to distort the truth and seek confrontation with the country’s Arab population.

Yossi Sarid, a dovish former education minister, said the decision showed insecurity. “Zionism has already won in many ways, and can afford to be more confident,” he said. “We need not be afraid of a word.”

Israeli Arab activists have also pledged to carry on marking Nakba Day in the face of planned legislation that would withhold government money from institutions that fund activity deemed detrimental to the state.

These include commemorating the nakba – on the same day as Independence Day – “rejecting Israel’s existence as the state of the Jewish people” and supporting an “armed struggle or terrorist acts” against Israel. An initial version proposed by the far-right foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman would have banned all Nakba commemorations and carried sentences of up to three years in prison.

By the book

Japan has long been criticised for toning down aspects of its wartime atrocities in textbooks, particularly the Nanjing massacre and use of sex slaves. Russia has taken up Soviet techniques of airbrushing history, a book being banned two years ago for positing that Vladimir Putin had established an “authoritarian dictatorship”. A decade after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, black schoolchildren in South Africa were still studying textbooks that extolled the voortrekkers and offered only minimal explanations of their own history. In Britain it was an exam paper that caused offence when a poem by Carol Ann Duffy containing referencing knife crime was removed from the GCSE syllabus. The Carol Ann Duffy poem began: “Today I am going to kill something. Anything./ I have had enough of being ignored and today/ I am going to play God.”

Israel’s wall still deepening the divide

Ben White | The Guardian

9 July 2009

Five years ago today, the international court of justice in The Hague published its advisory opinion on Israel’s separation wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The keenly awaited verdict, requested by the UN’s general assembly, was clear: Israel’s wall is illegal, it must be removed and adequate compensation paid.

The wall’s illegality, and Israel’s obligation to dismantle the structure and pay damages for the consequences of the wall thus far, were all agreed by the judges by a margin of 14-1. (The ICJ also accepted the use of the term “wall”, since “other expressions” are “no more accurate”.) There was also confirmation that Israel’s settlements were “a flagrant violation” of the convention, established “in breach of international law” (contrast this with the mealy-mouthed nitpicking over outposts and “freezes” by Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu). Overall, the court found that the route of the wall threatened to create “de facto annexation”, with the wall itself described as severely impeding “the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination”.

At the time, the ICJ decision was hailed by Palestinians and dismissed by the Israeli government. As Yasser Arafat described it as a “victory for the Palestinian people”, a spokesman for the then prime minister Ariel Sharon, Raanan Gissin, opined that “after all the rancour dies, this resolution will find its place in the garbage can of history”.

Both the US and UK had opposed the entire process, on the odd grounds that the UN’s main judicial body for settling legal disputes was not “the appropriate forum to resolve what is a political issue”. In the words of Jack Straw, it was better not to “embroil” the ICJ “in a heavily political bilateral dispute”.

This opposition was rare – later that same month, the general assembly voted by 150 to six in support of the ICJ opinion. The decision was also welcomed by the likes of Oxfam and Amnesty International, with Oxfam’s director adding that the ruling was a “step in the right direction” but needed “further action” by the international community.

But meaningful “further action” was not forthcoming, and Israel pressed on with the wall. Five years on, the wall loops around the West Bank and cuts through East Jerusalem, isolating Palestinian communities and devastating lives, and has become an integral part of Israel’s apartheid regime in the territories. About two-thirds of the 700km+ route, featuring a 8m-high wall, electric fences, sniper towers and “buffer zones” up to 100m wide, is completed or under construction. Of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 8.5% will be on the “wrong” side of the wall. In terms of size as well as significance, this would be comparable to the UK losing Greater London and south-east England.

For Israel to consolidate its hold on the illegal colonies in the OPT, many Palestinians find themselves hemmed in and surrounded by the wall’s contortions (pdf). About 35,000 Palestinians with West Bank IDs are to be caught between the wall and the Green Line – if you add (pdf) the East Jerusalem Palestinians in the same position, this figure increases to about 260,000.

These are the bare facts five years on from the ICJ opinion. Israel has ignored the judges’ decision, but that’s not a surprise. However, has the Palestinian leadership sufficiently exploited the opinion? Speaking to Palestinians involved in monitoring the wall’s progress, or in directly resisting it on the ground, there is a feeling that Palestinian diplomats have not done as much with the ICJ result as they could have.

Palestinians in communities directly affected by the wall continue to put up resistance, sometimes at their cost of their lives: 18 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces during anti-wall protests, the youngest victim a 10-year-old boy. While they fight for survival, the wall has also played a key role in changing the big picture, delineating the borders of the Palestinian enclaves Israel will grant “statehood”.

In 1994, the then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin said that “we have to decide on separation as a philosophy”. However, this is not separation on equal terms – the following year Rabin also made it clear that the Palestinian “entity” would be “less than a state”. There is a term for unequal separation in international law – apartheid. The wall urgently needs dismantling; but it is only one part of a bigger whole.

Israel criticised for thwarting medical mission to Palestinian territories

Vikram Dodd | The Guardian

7 July 2009

Israel was yesterday criticised after it refused to allow a group of doctors on a humanitarian mission organised by the French government to enter Gaza.

The team, including three British medics, was turned back by Israeli border guards on Sunday and Monday. They say their mission is purely humanitarian, aimed to helping those in medical need, and some of whom were left injured and in need of surgery after Israel’s attack on Gaza earlier this year.

One of the Britons refused entry to Gaza, Sonia Robbins, who is a reconstructive plastic surgeon, said: “I don’t know why we are being refused permission to enter.

“The consequences are that patients will not be operated on, children will have to wait until next time for surgery, and that won’t happen until six months time.

“I think it is unacceptable to refuse a humanitarian mission.”

The team had tried to enter through the Erez crossing. Robbins said she had been allowed to work in Gaza before. She said the team of nine medics were concentrating on surgery to the upper limbs, and that their papers to gain entry into Gaza were all in order. She added the border guards had been courteous as they refused the medical team permission to enter Gaza, where as well as treating the injured, they would help teach Palestinian doctors.

The mission is organised by the French doctor Professor Christophe Oberlin. His lawyer has sent a letter to the Israeli defence ministry, demanding an explanation, and wrote: “The purpose of their meeting was for the both teams, to hold activities together of medical consultation, surgery and teaching.”

The letter says the denial of entry to the medical team amounts to Israel violating “the basic international humanitarian law principles, the obligations of Israel as the occupying power of the occupied territories, [and] its obligations under the international covenant of civil and political rights and the convention on the rights of the child.”

The blue velvet hills of my youth have been destroyed

Raja Shehadeh | The Guardian

5 July 2009

I can remember the appearance of the hills around Ramallah in 1979, before any Jewish settlement came to be established there. In the spring of that year I walked north from Ramallah, where I live, to the nearby village of A’yn Qenya and up the pine-forested hill. A gazelle leapt ahead of me. When I reached the top I could see hills spread below me like crumpled blue velvet, with the hamlets of Janiya and Deir Ammar huddled between its folds. On top of the highest hill in the distance stood the village of Ras Karkar with its centuries-old citadel that dominated the area during Ottoman times. I had been following the worrying developments of extensive settlement-building elsewhere in the West Bank and wondered how long it would be before these hills came under the merciless blades of the Israeli bulldozers. I didn’t have to wait long. A year later the top of the hill was lopped off and the settlement of Dolev, then a cluster of red-tiled Swiss-style chalets, was established.

Now, more than 25 years later, Dolev has expanded and taken over the hills to its north for vineyards. Numerous highways for the exclusive use of its Jewish settlers connect it to the many other settlements in the area and to Israel’s coastline. Those settlers travelling to and from Israeli cities where they work can only see road signs indicating other Jewish settlements. They encounter no Palestinian traffic on the roads nor do they see any Palestinian villages. No wonder then that I was once stopped by an armed settler and interrogated as to why I was taking a walk in his hills. When I asked him what right he had to be there, he answered: “I live here.” He then pointedly added: “Unlike you, I really live here.”

Not a single year has passed since Israel acquired the territories in 1967 in which Jewish settlements were not built. Had it pursued peace as assiduously, surely it would have achieved it by now. Instead, whenever the US pressed for a peace initiative, the “proper Zionist response” was the creation of new a settlement. The pattern of settling the Ramallah hills illustrates well the workings of this doomed policy. The Jewish settlement of Talmon was established in 1989 on the lands of the Palestinian village of Janiya, when the government of Yitzhak Shamir was being pressured to agree to start negotiations with the Palestinians. Talmon B was established, about two miles away, when the US secretary of state, James Baker, arrived in Israel two years later to broker the first ever peace conference between Israel and Arab countries.

At that time, Shamir dismissed the new settlement as “just a new neighbourhood”. The signing of the Oslo accords under a Rabin government in 1993 led to the building of a road connecting Dolev to Beit Eil, running through private Palestinian land. This winding road passed through the beautiful wadi linking Ramallah to A’yn Qenya, causing extensive destruction to the ancient rock formations and olive orchards along the way. One rockface that I particularly miss used to be studded with cyclamens during the late winter months, coming down all the way to the spring – which was also destroyed.

The Israeli policy of speeding up settlement construction in the face of US diplomatic pressure shows no sign of changing. Following the latest US administration declaration that Israel must impose a complete freeze on settlements, the country’s defence minister, Ehud Barak, declared last week the decision to establish 300 housing units in Givat Habrecha (Hebrew for hill of the blessing), one of the 12 outposts near the settlement of Talmon in the Ramallah hills. A few days later, on 29 June, he announced a further expansion of the illegal settlement of Adam, where 50 families are to move to a new neighbourhood located on a relatively large parcel of land outside the built–up area of the settlement. This also violates the Israeli commitment in the road map agreement not to expand the area of existing settlements.

This demand for a freeze on new settlements – which is not accepted by Israel even temporarily, as one Likud minister underlined today– falls short of what should happen if a viable peace is to be achieved: a complete evacuation of all the settlements built illegally in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. Some would say this cannot possibly happen, given that there are around half a million Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. But who would have thought in 1962 that it would be possible to evict a million French Algerians who had been living in the country for almost a century and who represented roughly 9% of the population ?

Until this happens, we will have a continuation of the present reality where there is a single apartheid Israeli state encompassing pre-1967 borders and the Palestinian occupied territories. The sad truth is that when Israeli illegal settlements come to an end, as they must, Palestinians will not be able to undo the damage caused to the landscape by this massive, politically motivated development.

UN public hearing in Gaza broadcasts accounts of war victims

Rory McCarthy | The Guardian

30 June 2009

The UN has held an unprecedented public hearing in Gaza to broadcast live witness accounts from Palestinians who described seeing their relatives killed and injured during Israel’s January war.

One after another, they detailed Israeli rocket strikes and artillery shelling near a mosque, a UN school and on several homes across Gaza during the three-week war. The two-day hearing is part of an inquiry by the UN human rights council into the war led by the respected South African judge, Richard Goldstone.

Israel has refused entry for the inquiry team, accusing the UN council of an anti-Israel bias even though Goldstone himself is Jewish. But another round of hearings will be held in Geneva next week, for which some Israeli witnesses are expected to be flown in. They may include residents of Sderot, near Gaza, which has suffered repeated Palestinian rocket attacks.

“The purpose of the public hearings in Gaza and Geneva is to show the faces and broadcast the voices of victims – all of the victims,” Goldstone said last week. He had sat on South Africa’s constitutional court after the fall of apartheid and was a chief prosecutor on the UN criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Yesterday’s public hearing was the first in a UN fact-finding mission, though there is little chance it will lead to prosecutions. Up to 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed during the war.

Mousa Silawi, 91, described an explosion at the entrance to a mosque in the Jabaliya refugee camp late on 3 January, which killed 17 people, including three of his sons and two grandchildren.

“After evening prayer a huge shell hit the mosque,” he said. “It was absolutely incredible. We starting screaming and calling for God.” Silawi, who is blind, was led away to safety and was then told that his sons had died. “Where is law? Where is justice? I have lived 91 years. I have seen everything, but nothing of this sort. It was such a catastrophe,” he said. His son, Moteeh, the mosque’s sheikh, said there had been no warning before the missile struck. “People came to the mosque for safety and we saw bloodshed,” he said. “I was leading my father out when my own foot stepped on the head of a small child,” he said. “I saw people carrying decapitated heads and parts of bodies. I cannot describe what I saw … What crime did the children commit?”

In another case Ziad al-Deeb, a university student, described how an Israeli shell struck in the courtyard of his family home in Jabaliya on 6 January. The blast killed 11 of his relatives and sliced off both his legs. First he heard an explosion just outside the wall of the house and then moments later a second shell landed in their yard.

“In a single instant we had all of our joys replaced with blood,” he said. “There was a severe whistling in my ears and a pillar of smoke and dust and that obliterated what happened. When I looked up I found I had lost both my legs. I was sprawled over the body of my own brother. I looked for my father and others, and I found them motionless. Most of them were dead.”

He lost his father, grandfather, two brothers and a sister in the blast, which was one of several mortar shells that fell in quick succession that afternoon near a UN prep school being used as a shelter for those fleeing the fighting. Between 30 and 40 Palestinians were killed near the school. An earlier UN inquiry has already found Israel responsible for the shelling.

After hearing his evidence, Goldstone said: “We extend our deep condolences to you and your family for your terrible loss and it makes your coming here all the more painful for you.”

Yesterday’s hearing was held at a UN office in Gaza City and then broadcast live to a hall at a nearby cultural centre, deserted save for a handful of journalists. However, the hearing was broadcast on some television stations, including one al-Jazeera channel. The UN inquiry team will issue a final report in August.