Tag: The Guardian

No peace from Netanyahu

Laila El-Haddad | The Guardian

16 June 2009

“Eight nos, but nothing new.” This is the reaction I hear over and over again from Palestinian refugees here in Lebanon’s Wavel Refugee Camp, where four generations wait to return to the homeland from which they were brutally evicted over 60 years ago, in response to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s so-called landmark policy speech.

This is from those who even bothered to listen.

The US and Europe saw his speech as a move towards recognising two states (while dismissing the right of return, a divided Jerusalem and an end to settlements, and the list goes on) and thus some sort of advance towards peace; others suggested it was a step backward.

Both analyses are flawed. One confuses a call for a Palestinian ghetto as a call for a sovereign, viable Palestinian state. The other is based on the assumption that progress was made over the past (few) decades vis a vis Palestinian statehood.

The speech was full of rosy conjectures. The word “peace” was repeated 45 times.

Tellingly, the word occupation was not mentioned once. Neither, for that matter, was international law. Or freedom – except in the context of facilitating some freedom of movement only after Palestinians give up their rights to move freely.

“Peace has always been our people’s most ardent desire,” he explained, citing three “immense” challenges that stood in the way (the Iranian threat, the economic crisis and the advancement of peace).

In fact, it is an illegal, draconian and malicious occupation that has stifled peace and continues to pose the biggest threat to Israel’s security.

In his speech, Netanyahu called for negotiations without preconditions while simultaneously imposing the conditions that would make a just and viable peace impossible: an undivided Jerusalem, no right of return, no sovereignty, continued settlement expansion.

The demands to recognise Israel as a Jewish state annuls the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes from which they were systemically and violently expelled in 1948 in what is now Israel – a right enshrined in international law and at the heart of the Palestinian struggle.

Such a state would promote, subsidise and allow Jewish-only immigration and rights as it does now while denying native inhabitants this same right.

Nations are quick to dismiss the Palestinian right of return, but equally quick to facilitate the return of Darfur, Kosovan, or East Timor refugees in recent years.

This demand also consolidates Israel’s discriminatory policies, and would dismiss in one fell swoop the rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel, who make up 20% of the population. It is effectively saying: we have the right to discriminate against you, to take any measures we deem necessary in order to sustain the Jewish majority. Such measures have already been suggested in the Knesset, like a loyalty oath, even population transfer.

Then there is talk of the illegal settlements. New settlements aren’t the issue. Who needs new settlements if Israeli loophole policies in recent years have provided ample room for expansion?

Currently the illegal annexation barrier, together with settlement-related infrastructure (including settler-only roads, army bases, closed military zones and more than 600 checkpoints) consume 38% of the West Bank, annexing land and livelihoods, dividing villages, towns, and families from one another and tearing apart the very fabric of Palestinian social and economic life.

So, we have not moved forward. But we are certainly a step backwards from the heyday of Oslo, some might say. The fact is, during the Oslo years from 1993 to 2000, four under Netanyahu’s reign, the Israeli settler population expanded by 71%.

Such policies are already being implemented in Jerusalem, where land theft and demolitions continue daily, and where Palestinian Christian and Muslim residents are subject to draconian laws that would strip them of their residency rights there if they fail to renew their ID cards regularly.

Netanyahu’s vision of a Palestinian states is bereft of the very factors that make a state sovereign: effective control over land, sky, and sea, among other things. But this should come as no surprise. Israel’s longstanding policy has been one of repackaging the occupation and postponing viable Palestinian statehood indefinitely by rendering it impossible.

It is a goal summed up by the late Israeli sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling, as politicide: a gradual but systematic attempt to cause their annihilation as an independent political and social entity. In tune with this policy, nowhere in Oslo is there mention of a Palestinian state, only limited self-rule. Netanyahu’s own Likud party’s charter flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Neither is Hamas the issue, with whom Netanyahu foreswore talks. It has not even elected prior to 2006. It did not even exist before 1987. But it enjoys broad support among Palestinians; it was rightfully elected in free and fair elections encouraged and unhindered by the US and Israel respectively; and it is deeply entrenched within society; it is a reality with which Israel must come to grips.

And long before Hamas, Israel was similarly destroying civilian infrastructure, assassinating Palestinians, closing borders, de-developing the economy and sowing lawlessness and chaos in Gaza; all punishment for not being “co-operative” enough; “moderate” enough; tame enough.

All of this, of course, is leaving aside the 1.5 million human beings consigned to a life of living death by Israel and its allies – and by allies I also mean the Arab world. Closed in on all sides, deliberately deprived of the most basics rights of life.

Even after the so-called disengagement from Gaza, the landmark event that supposedly reigned freedom unto Gaza and its people, Israel continued to maintain effective control over Gaza’s borders, her air, sea, sky, even the population registry; and continued to impose a longstanding siege. This despite warnings from experts about the dire consequences that would ensue by not guaranteeing movement and access to people and goods. Gaza faced poverty and unemployment unprecedented in 40 years since Israel’s occupation as a result.

But by Netanyahu’s estimates, this is peace. Gaza is the model – the vision – for what a so-called Palestinian state would look like. In his article for Comment is free, Progress in the Peace Process, Jeremy Sharon said that if the Palestinian national movement is to make any progress, its “maximalist demands may have to be walked back”.

The trouble is, Sharon’s maximalist demands are another’s minimalism: Palestinians have already conceded 78% of their historic homeland in favour of the two-state land for peace deal (I am a proponent of a one-state solution, with equal rights for all, as are increasingly many others).

Netanyahu talked idyllically of a peace in which a tourism-driven economy would draw millions to Nazareth and Bethlehem. He forgot to mention the caveat that tourists would first have to face an apartheid barrier twice the size of the Berlin wall, navigate a Kafkaesque matrix of Israeli administrative control and, if they carry the wrong colour ID, scale sewers if they desire to visit a family member across the way in East Jerusalem.

Israel pushes out its own people

Dimi Reider | The Guardian

10 June 2009

Whenever Barack Obama speaks of the Middle East these days, there’s one thing that worries “senior Israeli officials” most. “He didn’t say ‘Jewish state’,” they mutter to reporters. “He had all the time to say these two words, and didn’t. Why didn’t he?”

Binyamin Netanyahu himself utters this phrase at every opportunity. He even went as far as turning this coveted idea into a precondition for negotiating with the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, before being shushed by Washington.

But why this sudden insistence on what is supposed to be an internal Israeli matter, the self-definition of the state? As Abbas rightly commented, Israel can call itself the Hebrew Socialist Republic for all he cares. Why bring up this internal matter with Obama and Abbas, Israel’s primary foreign policy objectives?

The truth is that Netanyahu is speaking neither to Abbas nor to Obama. He is speaking to world public opinion, as he prepares for confrontation with a fourth party to the conflict, one that is as crucial as it is overlooked: the Israeli-Palestinian minority.

Israeli Palestinians, most of them native Palestinians who remained in what became Israel after 1948, constitute 21% of the population. Their very existence poses a critical reality check on Israel’s self-perception as Jewish and democratic, and if one throws in the population of the West Bank and Gaza, the proportion of Jews in Israeli-controlled areas shrinks to a mere 51%.

Despite discrimination in all walks of life – education, housing, civil service, politics – the Palestinian minority in Israel is slowly gaining ground. The number of Palestinian students on Israeli campuses is growing from year to year, discrimination is actively challenged both in court and in public life, and the years of housing neglect are biting back at Jewish hegemony as they push more and more young Palestinian professionals into previously Jewish-only areas.

So as almost any honest Zionist will tell you, here’s the dilemma. Israel’s proclaimed raison d’etre is maintaining a rigidly ethnocentric Jewish state, one in which Jews will never be in a minority. Being a minority must be understood in the emotional sense rather than the numerical one. This is important to our own historic memory as persecuted minorities, but even more so because maintaining a democracy is quintessential to Israel’s standing in the world community. On the other hand, given Palestinian advancement within Israel, an open democracy that plays by the rules will inevitably result in the erosion of the purist nation-state. So in the three-part Jewish, Palestinian and democratic conundrum, one element has to be dismissed. Netanyahu’s new catchphrase seems to indicate that that element will be the Palestinian minority in Israel.

Avigdor Lieberman is much maligned for his racism, but his line exemplifies one that had become very mainstream in Israel: a Palestinian state needs to be established – the sooner the better, before Palestinians in the occupied territories despair of nationalism and begin requesting the vote. Yet the geopolitical situation as it stands will, in such a scenario, still leave Israel as a bi-national state. His solution is annulling the citizenship of about half the Israeli Palestinians and redrawing the maps so that they find themselves within the new Palestinian state.

Lieberman’s position is widely shared; even self-proclaimed dove Tzipi Livni said, on several occasions, that “once a Palestinian state is established … we will be able to tell any Palestinian wishing to realise his national identity that he is now able to do it elsewhere”. More ominously, recent developments on the ground suggest the machinery for carrying out such an unprecedented task is already in motion.

The interior minister, Eli Yishay, had launched a legislative project to allow him the annulment of anyone’s citizenship without the authorisation of the attorney general. The IDF announced it would be allocating a special infantry brigade “to deal with a potential Arab uprising in case of war”. Last week’s national defence drill included just such a scenario – while most Israelis practised going into bomb shelters, army and police practised “suppressing a large-scale Arab revolt in the north” – the exact area of Lieberman’s proposed geographical experiment. And the outlandish bills recently tabled at the Knesset, ranging from banning commemoration of the Nakba to making citizenship conditional on a loyalty oath to a Jewish state, contribute to further alienation between the two communities and attach new fuses to an already much-rattled powder keg.

Are we facing the prospect of an ethnic cleansing? To a degree, ethnic cleansing has always been part and parcel of Israeli political life. Despite its bloody connotations, ethnic cleansing can be carried out in many ways. Family-by-family expulsion from “illegal housing” and discriminative economic pressure to emigrate is ethnic cleansing, too. We appear to be marching towards a nasty and brutal escalation on that front.

The reason why Netanyahu is talking over the heads of Palestinian Israeli citizens is precisely because most of them (over 70%) want to remain part of a sovereign democracy rather than the vague and improbably West Bank statelet. The reason he’s trying to create a fictional outside leadership for them in the character of the Palestinian Authority they so despise is precisely because their real leadership – their mayors, intellectuals, politicians and NGOs – persistently call for internal, Jewish-Arab dialogue over their rights and the role each community should play in a joint and truly democratic state.

Netanyahu’s efforts to throw in Israeli Palestinians with the West Bankers must be resisted. If he wants to make them part of the regional process, they should be heard speaking for themselves; if he doesn’t open the door for them as partners, they must be let in through the window, with every discussion of the peace process featuring exploration of the Israeli Palestinians’ exclusive plight. Most importantly, powerful international defence of their rights as Israel’s equal must be mounted and persistently ensured.

Supermarkets may face action on Israeli labels, say lawyers

Afua Hirsch | The Guardian

7 June 2009

Retailers including UK supermarkets may be at risk of prosecution for misleading consumers by selling goods from the Palestinian Territories under the label “West Bank”, lawyers have warned.

Fruit, wine and cosmetics originating from illegal Israeli settlements are among the goods that lawyers representing Palestinian interests argue are regularly being wrongly labelled, so that buyers might conclude they are actually produced by Palestinians. In a separate issue, they say illegal settlements are also wrongly benefiting from preferential trade agreements with Israel, which are meant only for goods from inside its pre-1967 borders.

“The use of the expression ‘West Bank’ may in many cases fail to give the consumer the full picture,” said barrister Kieron Beal from Matrix Chambers. He added that in other cases, “where goods have come from the occupied Palestinian Territories they should not be labelled as having their place of origin as Israel”.

The warnings come as government proposals for implementing new EU rules on product labelling, which make it illegal to deceive consumers, are expected within a month. Departments including the Office of Fair Trading, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) have been grappling with the issue. Under UK law it is already illegal to present food products in a way which is “likely to mislead”, while European rules include strict measures requiring accurate “country of origin” information to be given.

Concerns about consumers being misled have been compounded by claims that Israeli exporters have benefited from preferential trading terms that allow goods from inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders exemption from import duties.

“It is a breach of the agreement for settlement goods to be imported as Israeli products getting preferential tariffs,” said Liberal Democrat MEP Sarah Ludford. “The labelling of herbs sold as ‘West Bank’ [for example] seems to me such an abuse. It is up to UK customs authorities to enforce the origin rules.”

“[Officials] should consider referring the matter to the anti-fraud office of the European commission,” said Sarah Macsherry, a lawyer at Christian Khan solicitors and member of Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, a UK-based group.

HMRC denied that goods from the Palestinian Territories could take advantage of the system. “Any claim to Israeli preference which is accompanied by a proof of preferential origin indicating production [in a location] brought under Israeli administration since 1967 is immediately refused,” a spokesman said.

But officials are concerned about the issue. “The department is aware … that the location shown on the proof of origin may be that of a head office in Israel, when the goods concerned may have originated in a settlement,” HMRC said.

How ‘the busy one’ ekes out a living from the devastation of Gaza

Peter Beaumont | The Guardian

Mahmoud Mohammed Imad in front of his curtain made of garbage in Jabaliya refugee camp east of Gaza City. Photograph: Antonio Olmos
Mahmoud Mohammed Imad in front of his curtain made of garbage in Jabaliya refugee camp east of Gaza City. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

31 May 2009

Mahmoud Mohammed Imad sits in front of his curtain made of rubbish. The opening to his shop in the Jabaliya refugee camp could be a work of art. A single black army boot hangs threaded through its eyes. It dangles among coils of plastic pipe, skeins of used string, a football boot, the wheel of a child’s scooter. Disconnected electrical fittings are strung like beads. Shoes and more shoes. Fragments of the discarded and the broken.

It is a suspended, frozen waterfall of junk that partially conceals the room that lies behind it, a place piled high with unruly heaps of clothes that threaten to fall through the door and out on to the street.

In front of Imad are wooden sticks, stretchers for the kites the children make to fly or sell for a few shekels.

Imad is missing an eye. A young man in the street in a striped shirt – who describes Imad as a local legend – says that he lost it in the first intifada, in which his son also died. Nonsense, Imad says, when I ask him later. He lost his eye as an infant. “A woman told my mother I was a beautiful baby. Then two weeks later something went wrong.”

The camp’s residents call Imad the “busy one” and say the street is named after him. The loud guffawing men, and the gang of boys who crowd around him, speak over Imad, mocking him. One in particular, a neighbouring shopkeeper in a blue shirt, elects to speak on his behalf, and pushes Imad roughly from time to time to punctuate his points until finally the “busy one” explodes in anger.

Imad says more quietly that he is afraid the boys will try to steal his stuff, so one of the men threatens them with a piece of hose to drive them away. But still they laugh at him.

There are things in Imad’s tapestry of wreckage, he says, that were rescued from houses damaged in Israel’s assault in Gaza at the year’s beginning. But mostly the “busy one” buys his stuff from the Fras market in the centre of Gaza City, he says, bits and pieces for those who cannot afford to buy new things from the shops in a place where inflation is rampant and unemployment high.

Imad lists his prices: 15 shekels for the army boot; one shekel for the scooter wheel; six shekels for a piece of plastic pipe.

I head to the Fras junk market the following morning but find it was moved two months ago on the orders of Hamas from the street it once occupied in the city centre to a patch of sandy ground in the Yarmouk district next to a rubbish dump. As the horse carts drop off the waste, rag pickers scour the piles for things to salvage.

None of the traders like their new location much. There was a better passing trade, they say, in Fras than here where no shops exist.

On tables and sheets laid on the ground are rusty pickaxe handles, gas burner rings for stoves.

Mohammed Ahmed’s stall sells broken Moulinex food mixers, falafel makers and pieces for meat grinders. One of his mixers has a hole exposing the motor within, coiled with copper wire, damaged during the war. Some of the items on his stall were sold to him by people who lost their homes, but most of his stock – like the majority of things being sold at market – came originally from Israel before the border closed after Hamas assumed full power in 2007.

The goods made it into Gaza by that peculiar osmotic flow that occurs between the wealthy, powerful state and the impoverished entity – not even a country – where broken parts can be cannibalised, reinvented, resurrected.

Now even Israel’s junk cannot enter a Strip under economic siege. So what cannot be procured through the tunnels from Egypt, or cannot be afforded, is fixed and recycled.

It is a wearying process of constant attention where parts must be hunted for with vigour. One day the Daewoo car belonging to a friend’s husband starts bleeding oil. He searches the shops and workshops for a day for something that will fix it – until another part, in the wheel this time, breaks the following day and the whole business must be repeated.

Nothing that can be recovered and reused is discarded.

I run into Abdullah Ijnad working among the ruins of a mosque that has been moved by bulldozer from where it was blown up in northern Gaza by Israeli soldiers in January to a place where the concrete can be dismantled for its metal strengthening rods without offending its former worshippers.

Two amputated columns lie together in the rubble out of which Ijnad has already beaten out the metal with a sledgehammer. Now he pulls out the twisted corkscrews, warped by his hammering, to place them in a pile. The work is not yet finished.

Across the road Ijnad’s employer, Awni Sultan, 47, has set up a powerful hand-operated vice to straighten each individual rod, squeezing and bending out the kinks until they seem like new. Heavy. Arrow straight.

I am reminded of a story I heard earlier that day about the furniture shops performing the same renewal, growing wealthy in a place where new furniture is nowhere to be found. Taking old furniture, re-upholstering it, repairing the legs and selling it as newly made. And so Gaza recycles by necessity. Making and mending. Becoming the “busy one” as it survives.

Peter Beaumont is a senior foreign correspondent for the Observer and author of The Secret Life Of War

The Palestinian village of hope

Matt Kennard and Wilson Dizard | The Guardian

27 May 2009

Ramallah is tired. The feeling you get walking around the streets here is that the Palestinians are weary of the struggle against the incremental destruction of their homeland, happening right now while the world looks the other way. You hear things like, “Our struggle has been long and it has got us nowhere”. And people ask how the world can stand by while the Israelis annex more land. It’s a good question.

In one village the flame of non-violent resistance still burns. Last week, we went to the weekly demonstration against the annexation wall in Bil’in, where it cuts deep into the farmland of this old Palestinian village and the Green Line (the internationally recognised border of Israel-Palestine). Since Israel started building the wall here in 2005 (stealing about 60% of the village’s land) the people of Bil’in have been inventively and non-violently resisting.

While helplessness pervades in occupied Palestine, the successful tactics of the people of Bil’in provide some hope and inspiration. Abdullah al-Rahman, head of the Popular Resistance Committee in Bil’in, described the various tactics the villagers have used to stall the erection of a new settlement (called “West Mattiyahu” in Israeli legalese, which tries to say it is merely a “neighbourhood” of an existing settlement). First, to oppose the wall, Bil’in’s residents tied themselves to their olive trees to stop the bulldozers razing their land. Then, in sight of the settlements, they constructed a one-room house overnight on the other side of the wall, a building that became the basis for a legal challenge. The high court slapped down their petition twice before they and their Israeli lawyer, Michael Sfard, realised Israel had made a mistake under its own unfair rules. Generally the Israelis use two excuses for land grabs: one, the land is uncultivated, and two, that there is a security threat. With Bil’in they’ve tried both.

To maintain the interest of the media, essential to their demonstrations’ success, the Popular Committee brings out new initiatives every Friday in its non-violent struggle. Last month at the height of the swine flu hysteria, the Bil’in residents went down for the demonstration wearing flu masks to say that they had all had occupation influenza for decades. When we went on Friday they had a slightly less subtle but equally creative tactic of filling balloons with chicken faeces to chuck at the soldiers.

While the Bil’in residents maintain their adherence to nonviolence, the same can’t be said for the IDF. Last month a beloved activist from the village, Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rammah, was killed by a high-velocity tear-gas canister, and one 16-year-old child we spoke to survived a live round to the head. These are definitely not “mistakes”, when you shoot a high-velocity tear-gas canister horizontally and not up in the air you only have one goal. They managed to murder Bassem with a shot to the heart. This is where the chicken faeces idea came from. “They shoot bullets at us, so we will respond with our animals faeces,” said al-Rahman. At the demonstration hundreds of tear gas canisters were shot at us, and rubber bullets aimed at the children throwing stones.

This Israeli tactic of harsh and violent repression has one goal: to stop Palestinian resistance through instilling fear. This is what happened during the second intifada, and it is happening again now as pockets of resistance are starting to form against the annexation of their land. And it works. We asked our Palestinian friend if she wanted to come with us on Friday. “No,” she replied, “I don’t want to die for nothing.” In recent months, since the Gaza War, the IDF have started using a new cocktail of weapons against the Bil’in demonstrators, which include stronger military-grade tear gas with nerve toxins, high-velocity machinegun-style tear gas, and aluminium bullets that have crippled protesters. The IDF has also made it a tactic to come into the village in the middle of the night and arrest the members of the Popular Committee, and children as young as 13, as well as throwing sound bombs and tear gas around.

According to a farmer from Bil’in, Farhan Burnat, 30, who spent eight months in prison after Israeli soldiers arrested him at a Friday demonstration, the Israelis take the kids to prison in Israel and will keep them for four to six months as punishment for participating in the demonstration. “In Ofer prison about 25% of the prisoners are children,” he said. “These lengthy periods of imprisonment severely stunt the educational development of our children.”

We went down to the wall the day before the protest and talked to Wahid Salaman, a 44-year-old farmer from Bil’in who was walking home after work. “The ability of us to get to our land depends on the mood of the soldier,” he said. “Sometimes we have to wait for five or six hours to get to our fields.” Salaman’s land is on the wrong side of the wall so he has to go through a checkpoint every day to go to work. He pointed out a huge pole with a CCTV camera on top of it. “They watch us at all times as well,” he said. The Israelis assign each farmer a number corresponding to points on the wall where he is allowed to go about his work.

Afterwards we spotted a young boy going through the checkpoint with his herd of goats. “I look after the goats after school for my parents,” he said. “The wall took 60% of our land, and as punishment for the demonstration we’re not allowed to work on Fridays.” He says that his goats have been injured by the barbed wire around the wall. Like everyone in Bil’in, he says he misses his friend Bassem. “I feel very sad,” he said, “but it will not stop me from doing the demonstration. We’re strong enough to continue to do it, they shot Bassem because we are achieving something here.”

The brutal behavior of the IDF at the demonstration has motivated a broad contingent of activists from around the world and Israel to descend on Bil’in every Friday – as they know the IDF will be less inclined to murder at will if they have passports belonging to countries that sell them the guns. When we were there on Friday there was a 15-strong contingent of trade unionists, artists and charity workers from Canada, alongside a group of young Israelis. The IDF’s explicit policy is not to fire live ammunition when Israelis or internationals are in the area, which gives you an indication of their attitude to the expendability of Palestinian life. It also makes it clear how vital it is that the brigade of internationals and Israelis continue to show up and protest peacefully alongside Palestinians.

At a bleak time for Palestinians, when they are watching the live destruction of any hopes of a viable future state, the heroic and successful resistance of the people of Bil’in (and their analogues along the line of the annexation wall) provide a glimmer of hope, and a template of how to fight this epic injustice with a mixture of consistency, courage and creativity.