[wvns] What's next for the Jewish State?
IOF troops storm house of Palestinian MP, kidnap her son
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2bcOd87MDI46m9rUxJEpMO%2bi1s7oukXrmoscEqmYKsGCid1cjK5YpgHU8Oo07034GRw7MG9%2bzaErY02ECTgMqCJyJjck3dsX1GwztqK7y%2fyNnb5BOUFh92ESs2QyrbClldj0RA%3d
RAMALLAH, (PIC)-- Large numbers of IOF soldiers kidnapped the son of
Palestinian MP Mariam Saleh in El-Bireh city in the West Bank after
breaking into her house in a pre-dawn raid on Wednesday.
The lawmaker said that scores of IOF soldiers encircled her home
before breaking into and ransacking it. They detained her son Abdul
Rahman Musleh, 23, who works as a reporter for a number of local and
international media channels.
The soldiers detained the MP and members of her family in one of the
house's balconies until they finished searching the house. They also
interrogated Abdul Rahman before kidnapping him and took with them two
computers and private documents and papers of the MP.
The IOA two days ago blocked MP Saleh's travel abroad to offer Umra
(minor pilgrimage) in Saudi Arabia at the pretext she was banned from
travel due at "security pretexts".
The MP said that storming her house and other harassments targeting
PLC elected members and their families were meant to humiliate and
terrorize those deputies and to deter them from practicing their duties.
===
36 Israelis soldiers wounded by Gaza rocket attack
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h_p_dAfheKe9YdJlnBWQXneLegfQ
JERUSALEM (AFP) — Thirty-six Israeli soldiers were wounded Tuesday by
two rockets fired into Israel by Palestinian militants in the Gaza
Strip, a military spokesman and medics said.
The strike, the most bloody for months, was likely to add further
pressure on the Israeli government to find a way to end the incessant
rocket attacks.
The rockets struck the Zikim base located north of the Gaza Strip,
said the spokesman.
There was no immediate information on the extent of the injuries to
the soldiers, who were evacuated to hospitals by two helicopters and
around 20 ambulances.
The toll is the worst from Palestinian rocket attacks in months, when
two Israelis died in separate attacks in May.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned last week that Israel would "without
hesitation and without pity" launch counterstrikes against militants
who fire rockets from the Gaza Strip, which has been under the control
of the Islamist militant group Hamas since June.
Militants in Gaza regularly fire rockets and mortar rounds at Israel
and while most fall in open spaces, some strike populated areas and
have occasionally cause casualties.
Israel has been unable to stamp out the rocket fire from Gaza, despite
launching pinpoint air strikes and regular incursions into the crowded
and impoverished territory from where it withdrew settlers and
soldiers in 2005 after a 38-year presence.
Last week Olmert ordered the army to draw up plans to curb the rocket
fire, but held back from endorsing water and power cuts on Gaza's
beleaguered population.
Pressure on Olmert to respond to the incessant rocket fire against
southern Israel has mounted in recent days after a projectile struck
outside a day-care centre in the hard-hit town of Sderot a day after
the start of the school year, causing no casualties but sparking
widespread panic.
"The cabinet decided to continue the intensive military operations
against those involved in terror and rocket launching," Olmert's
office said last week after a government meeting on the rocket attacks.
The cabinet decided for the time being to not impose punitive measures
against the impoverished population of Gaza, such as cutting water,
electricity or fuel supplies to the territory, but instructed the
security services to develop such a plan, the official said.
Defence Minister Ehud Barak was quoted as telling ministers that until
Israel has completed development of a sophisticated rocket
interception system, "the only solution is deep ground operations in
Gaza."
"The time may be approaching where it will necessary to launch a major
ground operation to stop the rocket fire," he was quoted as saying in
a later speech to directors of Israel's main arms manufacturing firms.
===
Defending Israel from democracy
Jonathan Cook
The Electronic Intifada
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7001.shtml
Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, arrives
at the Jerusalem Shalom court in Jerusalem, 7 February 2007. (Anat
Zakai/ MaanImages)
The second Palestinian intifada has been crushed. The 700km wall is
sealing the occupied population of the West Bank into a series of
prisons. The "demographic timebomb" -- the fear that Palestinians,
through higher birth rates, will soon outnumber Jews in the Holy Land
and that Israel's continuing rule over them risks being compared to
apartheid -- has been safely defused through the disengagment from
Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants. On the fortieth anniversary of
Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel's security
establishment is quietly satisfied with its successes.
But like a shark whose physiology requires that, to stay alive, it
never sleeps or stops moving, Israel must remain restless, constantly
reinventing itself and its policies to ensure its ethnic project does
not lose legitimacy, even as it devours the Palestinian homeland. By
keeping a step ahead of the analysts and worldwide opinion, Israel
creates facts on the ground that cement its supremacist and
expansionist agenda.
So, with these achievements under its belt, where next for the Jewish
state?
I have been arguing for some time that Israel's ultimate goal is to
create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from
which all Palestinians -- including its 1.2 million Palestinian
citizens -- will be excluded. That was the purpose of the Gaza
disengagement and it is also the point of the wall snaking through the
West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what little is left of a
potential Palestinian state.
It should therefore be no surprise that we are witnessing the first
moves in Israel's next phase of conquest of the Palestinians. With the
3.7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories caged inside
their ghettos, unable to protest their treatment behind fences and
walls, the turn has come of Israel's Palestinian citizens.
Israel's ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space
in expanded borders from which all Palestinians -- including its 1.2
million Palestinian citizens -- will be excluded
These citizens, today nearly a fifth of Israel's population, are the
legacy of an oversight by the country's Jewish leaders during the
ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1948 war. Ever since Israel has been
pondering what to do with them. There was a brief debate in the
state's first years about whether they should be converted to Judaism
and assimilated, or whether they should be marginalised and eventually
expelled. The latter view, favoured by the country's first prime
minister, David Ben Gurion, dominated. The question has been when and
how to do the deed.
The time now finally appears to be upon us, and the crushing of these
more than one million unwanted citizens currently inside the walls of
the fortress -- the Achilles' heel of the Jewish state -- is likely to
be just as ruthless as that of the Palestinians under occupation.
In my recent book Blood and Religion, I charted the preparations for
this crackdown. Israel has been secretly devising a land swap scheme
that would force up to a quarter of a million Palestinian citizens
(but hardly any territory) into the Palestinian ghetoes being crafted
next door -- in return Israel will annex swaths of the West Bank on
which the illegal Jewish settlements sit. The Bedouin in the Negev are
being reclassified as trespassers on state land so that they can be
treated as guest workers rather than citizens. And lawyers in the
Justice Ministry are toiling over a loyalty scheme to deal with the
remaining Palestinians: pledge an oath to Israel as a Jewish and
democratic state (that is, one in which you are not wanted) or face
being stripped of your rights and possibly expelled.
There will be no resistance to these moves from Israel's Jewish
public. Opinion polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israeli
Jews support "transfer" of the country's Palestinian population. With
a veneer of legality added to the ethnic cleansing, the Jewish
consensus will be almost complete.
But these measures cannot be implemented until an important first
battle has been waged and won in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
One of Israel's gurus of the so-called "demographic threat", Arnon
Sofer, a professor at Haifa University, has explained the problem
posed by the presence of a growing number of Palestinian voters: "In
their hands lies the power to determine the right of return [of
Palestinian refugees] or to decide who is a Jew ... In another few
years, they will be able to decide whether the state of Israel should
continue to be a Jewish-Zionist state."
The warning signs about how Israel might defend itself from this
"threat" have been clear for some time. In Silencing Dissent, a report
published in 2002 by the Human Rights Association based in Nazareth,
the treatment of Israel's 10 Palestinian Knesset members was
documented: over the previous two years, nine had been assaulted by
the security services, some on several occasions, and seven
hospitalised. The report also found that the state had launched 25
investigations of the 10 MKs in the same period.
All this abuse was reserved for the representatives of a community the
Israeli general Moshe Dayan once referred to as "the quietest minority
in the world".
But the state's violence towards, and intimidation of, Palestinian
Knesset members -- until now largely the reflex actions of officials
offended by the presence of legislators refusing to bow before the
principles of Zionism and privileges for Jews -- is entering a new,
more dangerous phase.
The problem for Israel is that for the past two decades Palestinian
legislators have been entering the Knesset not as members of Zionist
parties, as was the case for many decades, but as representatives of
independent Palestinian parties. (A state claiming to be Jewish and
democratic has to make some concessions to its own propaganda, after all.)
Palestinian political parties have been calling for Israel's
transformation from a Jewish state into a "state of all its citizens"
The result has been the emergence of an unexpected political platform:
the demand for Israel's constitutional reform. Palestinian political
parties have been calling for Israel's transformation from a Jewish
state into a "state of all its citizens" -- or what the rest of us
would call a liberal democracy.
The figurehead for this political struggle has been the legislator
Azmi Bishara. A former philosophy professor, Bishara has been running
rings around Jewish politicians in the Knesset for more than a decade,
as well as exposing to outsiders the sham of Israel's self-definition
as a "Jewish and democratic" state.
Even more worryingly he has also been making an increasingly
convincing case to his constituency of 1.2 million Palestinian
citizens that, rather than challenging the hundreds of forms of
discrimination they face one law at a time, they should confront the
system that props up the discrimination: the Jewish state itself. He
has started to persuade a growing number that they will never enjoy
equality with Jews as long as they live in ethnic state.
Bishara's campaign for a state of all its citizens has faced an uphill
struggle. Palestinian citizens spent the first two decades after
Israel's creation living under martial law, a time during which their
identity, history and memories were all but crushed. Even today the
minority has no control over its educational curriculum, which is set
by officials charged with promoting Zionism, and its schools are
effectively run by the secret police, the Shin Bet, through a network
of collaborators among the teachers and pupils.
Given this climate, it may not be surprising that in a recent poll
conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute 75 per cent of Palestinian
citizens said they would support the drafting of a constitution
defining Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (Israel currently has
no constitution). Interestingly, however, what concerned commentators
was the survey's small print: only a third of the respondents felt
strongly about their position compared to more than half of those
questioned in a similar survey three years ago. Also, 72 per cent of
Palestinian citizens believed the principle of "equality" should be
prominently featured in such a constitution.
These shifts of opinion are at least partly a result of Bishara's
political work. He has been trying to persuade Israel's Palestinian
minority -- most of whom, whatever the spin tells us, have had little
practical experience of participating in a democracy other than
casting a vote -- that it is impossible for a Jewish state to enshrine
equality in its laws. Israel's nearest thing to a Bill of Rights, the
Basic Law on Freedom and Human Dignity, intentionally does not mention
equality anywhere in its text.
It is in this light that the news about Bishara that broke in late
April should be read. While he was abroad with his family, the Shin
Bet announced that he would face charges of treason on his return.
Under emergency regulations -- renewed by the Knesset yet again last
week, and which have now been in operation for nearly 60 years -- he
could be executed if found guilty. Bishara so far has chosen not to
return.
Coverage of the Bishara case has concentrated on the two main charges
against him, which are only vaguely known as the security services
have been trying to prevent disclosure of their evidence with a
gagging order. The first accusation -- for the consumption of Israel's
Jewish population -- is that Bishara actively helped Hizbullah in its
targeting of Israeli communities in the north during the war against
Lebanon last summer.
The Shin Bet claims this after months of listening in on his phone
conversations -- made possible by a change in the law in 2005 that
allows the security services to bug legislators' phones. The other
Palestinian MKs suspect they are being subjected to the same
eavesdropping after the Attorney-General Mechahem Mazuz failed to
respond to a question from one, Taleb a-Sana, on whether the Shin Bet
was using this practice more widely.
Few informed observers, however, take this allegation seriously. An
editorial in Israel's leading newspaper Haaretz compared Bishara's
case to that of the Israeli Jewish dissident Tali Fahima, who was
jailed on trumped-up charges that she translated a military plan, a
piece of paper dropped by the army in the Jenin refugee camp, on
behalf of a Palestinian militant, Zacharia Zbeidi, even though it was
widely known that Zbeidi was himself fluent in Hebrew.
The editorial noted that it seemed likely the charge of treason
against Bishara "will turn out to be a tendentious exaggeration of his
telephone conversations and meetings with Lebanese and Syrian
nationals, and possibly also of his expressions of support for their
military activities. It seems very doubtful that MK Bishara even has
access to defense-related secrets that he could sell to the enemy, and
like in the Fahima case, the fact that he identified with the enemy
during wartime appears to be what fueled the desire to seek and find
an excuse for bringing him to trial."
Such doubts were reinforced by reports in the Israeli media that the
charge of treason was based on claims that Bishara had helped
Hizbullah conduct "psychological warfare through the media".
The other allegation made by the secret police has a different target
audience. The Shin Bet claims that Bishara laundered money from
terrorist organisations. The implication, though the specifics are
unclear, is that Bishara both helped fund terror and that he
squirrelled some of the money away, possibly hundreds of thousands of
dollars, presumably for his own benefit. This is supposed to discredit
him with his own constituency of Palestinian citizens.
It should be noted that none of this money has been found in extensive
searches of Bishara's home and office, and the evidence is based on
testimony from a far from reliable source: a family of money-changers
in East Jerusalem.
This second charge closely resembles the allegations faced by the only
other Palestinian of national prominence in Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah,
head of the Islamic Movement and a spiritual leader of the Palestinian
minority. He was arrested in 2003, originally on charges that he
laundered money for the armed wing of Hamas, helping them buy guns and
bombs.
As with Bishara, the Shin Bet had been bugging Salah's every phone
call for many months and had supposedly accumulated mountains of
evidence against him. Salah spent more than two years in jail, the
judges repeatedly accepting the Shin Bet's advice that his requests
for bail be refused, as this secret evidence was studied in minute
detail at his lengthy trial. In the closing stages, as it became clear
that the Shin Bet's case was evaporating, the prosecution announced a
plea bargain. Salah agreed (possibly unwisely, but understandably
after two years in jail) to admit minor charges of financial
impropriety in return for his release.
To this day, Salah does not know what he did wrong. His organisation
had funded social programmes for orphans, students and widows in the
occupied territories and had submitted its accounts to the security
services for approval. In a recent interview, Salah observed that in
the new reality he and his party had discovered that it was "as if
helping orphans, sick persons, widows and students had now become
illegal activities in support of terrorism".
Why was Salah targeted? In the same interview, he noted that shortly
before his arrest the prime minister of the day, Ariel Sharon, had
called for the outlawing of the Islamic Movement, whose popularity was
greatly concerning the security establishment. Sharon was worried by
what he regarded as Salah's interference in Israel's crushing of
Palestinian nationalism.
Sharon's concern was two-fold: the Islamic Movement was raising funds
for welfare organisations in the occupied territories at the very
moment Israel was trying to isolate and starve the Palestinian
population there; and Salah's main campaign, "al-Aqsa is in danger",
was successfully rallying Palestinians inside Israel to visit the
mosques of the Noble Sanctuary in the Old City of Jersualem, the most
important symbols of a future Palestinian state.
Salah believed that responsibility fell to Palestinians inside Israel
to protect these holy places as Israel's closure policies and its
checkpoints were preventing Muslims in the occupied territories from
reaching them. Salah also suspected that Israel was using the
exclusion of Palestinians under occupation from East Jerusalem to
assert its own claims to sovereignty over the site, known to Jews as
Temple Mount. This was where Sharon had made his inflammatory visit
backed by 1,000 armed guards that triggered the intifada; and it was
control of the Temple Mount, much longed for by his predecessor, Ehud
Barak, that "blew up" the Camp David negotiations, as one of Barak's
advisers later noted.
Salah had become a nuisance, an obstacle to Israel realising its goals
in East Jersualem and possibly in the intifada, and needed to be
neutralised
Salah had become a nuisance, an obstacle to Israel realising its goals
in East Jersualem and possibly in the intifada, and needed to be
neutralised. The trial removed him from the scene at a key moment when
he might have been able to make a difference.
That now is the fate of Bishara.
Indications that the Shin Bet wanted Bishara's scalp over his campaign
for Israel's reform to a state of all its citizens can be dated back
to at least the start of the second intifada in 2000. That was when,
as Israel prepared for a coming general election, the departing head
of the Shin Bet observed: "Bishara does not recognise the right of the
Jewish people to a state and he has crossed the line. The decision to
disqualify him [from standing for election] has been submitted to the
Attorney General." Who expressed that view? None other than Ami
Ayalon, currently contesting the leadership of the Labor party and
hoping to become the official head of Israel's peace camp.
In the meantime, Bishara has been put on trial twice (unnoticed the
charges later fizzled out); he has been called in for police
interrogations on a regular basis; he has been warned by a state
commission of inquiry; and the laws concerning Knesset immunity and
travel to foreign states have been changed specifically to prevent
Bishara from fulfilling his parliamentary duties.
True to Ayalon's advice, Bishara and his political party, the National
Democratic Assembly (NDA), were disqualified by the Central Elections
Committee during the 2003 elections. The committee cited the "expert"
opinion of the Shin Bet: "It is our opinion that the inclusion of the
NDA in the Knesset has increased the threat inherent in the party.
Evidence of this can also be found in the ideological progress from
the margins of Arab society (such as a limited circle of intellectuals
who dealt with these ideas theoretically) to center stage. Today these
ideas [concerning a state of all its citizens] have a discernible
effect on the content of political discourse and on the public
'agenda' of the Arab sector."
But on this occasion the Shin Bet failed to get its way. Bishara's
disqualification was overturned on appeal by a narrow majority of the
Supreme Court's justices.
The Shin Bet's fears of Bishara resurfaced with a vengeance in March
this year, when the Ma'ariv newspaper reported on a closed meeting
between the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and senior Shin Bet officials
"concerning the issue of the Arab minority in Israel, the extent of
its steadily decreasing identification with the State and the rise of
subversive elements".
Ma'ariv quoted the assessment of the Shin Bet: "Particularly
disturbing is the growing phenomenon of 'visionary documents' among
the various elites of Israeli Arabs. At this time, there are four
different visionary documents sharing the perception of Israel as a
state of all citizens and not as a Jewish state. The isolationist and
subversive aims presented by the elites might determine a direction
that will win over the masses."
The secret police were worried that the influence of Bishara's
political platform was spreading
In other words, the secret police were worried that the influence of
Bishara's political platform was spreading. The proof was to be found
in the four recent documents cited by the Shin Bet and published by
very diffrerent groups: the Democratic Constitution by the Adalah
legal centre; the Ten Points by the Mossawa political lobbying group;
the Future Vision by the traditionally conservative political body
comprising mostly mayors known as the High Follow-Up Committee; and
the Haifa Declaration, overseen by a group of academics known as Mada.
What all these documents share in common is two assumptions: first,
that existing solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are based
on two states and that in such an arrangement the Palestinian minority
will continue living inside Israel as citizens; and second, that
reforms of Israel are needed if the state is to realise equality for
all citizens, as promised in its Declaration of Independence.
Nothing too subversive there, one would have thought. But that was not
the view of the Shin Bet.
Following the report in Ma'ariv, the editor of a weekly Arab newspaper
wrote to the Shin Bet asking for more information. Did the Shin Bet's
policy not constitute an undemocratic attempt to silence the
Palestinian minority and its leaders, he asked. A reply from the Shin
Bet was not long in coming. The secret police had a responsibility to
guard Israel "against subversive threats", it was noted. "By virtue of
this responsibility, the Shin Bet is required to thwart subversive
activity by elements who wish to harm the nature of the State of
Israel as a democratic Jewish State -- even if they act by means of
democratically provided tools -- by virtue of the principle of
'defensive democracy'."
Questioned by Israeli legal groups about this policy when it became
public, the head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, wrote a letter
clarifying what he meant. Israel had to be protected from anyone
"seeking to change the state's basic principles while abolishing its
democratic character or its Jewish character". He was basing his
opinion on a law passed in 2002 that charges the Shin Bet with
safeguarding the country from "threats of terror, sabotage, subversion".
In other words, in the view of the Shin Bet, a Jewish and democratic
state is democratic only if you are a Jew or a Zionist. If you try to
use Israel's supposed democracy to challenge the privileges reserved
for Jews inside a Jewish state, that same state is entitled to defend
itself against you.
The extension in the future of this principle from Bishara to the
other Palestinian MKs and then on to the wider Palestinian community
inside Israel should not be doubted. In the wake of the Bishara case,
Israel Hasson, a former deputy director of the Shin Bet and now a
right-wing Knesset member, described Israel's struggle against its
Palestinian citizens as "a second War of Independence" -- the war in
1948 that founded Israel by cleansing it of 80 per cent of its
Palestinians.
The Shin Bet is not, admittedly, a democratic institution, even if it
is operating in a supposedly democratic environment. So how do the
state's more accountable officials view the Shin Bet's position?
Diskin's reply had a covering letter from Attorney-General Menachem
Mazuz, the country's most senior legal officer. Mazuz wrote: "The
letter of the Shin Bet director was written in coordination with the
attorney general and with his agreement, and the stance detailed in it
is acceptable to the attorney general."
So now we know. As Israel's Palestinian politicians have long been
claiming, a Jewish and democratic state is intended as a democracy for
Jews only. No one else is allowed a say -- or even an opinion.
Jonathan Cook, a journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, is the author
of Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic
State (Pluto Press, 2006). His website is www.jkcook.net.
===
Israeli policies target Palestinian families
Ida Audeh
The Electronic Intifada
Israel's practice of denying family reunification
permits and denying entry to foreign passport holders
(many but not all of whom are of Palestinian origin)
is part of a campaign of ridding the occupied
territories (including East Jerusalem) of Palestinians
and tightly controlling those it is obliged to retain.
The practice takes aim at Palestinian families: it
splits families apart, denies Palestinian communities
access to foreign and expatriate talent, deprives the
economically hard-hit territories of foreign currency,
and further isolates the Palestinians under
occupation.
The Campaign for the Right of Entry/Re-Entry to the
Palestinian Occupied Territories (www.righttoenter.ps)
estimates that more than 150,000 family reunification
applications were submitted to the Israeli occupation
authorities between 1973 and 1982 but that only 1,000
were approved each year. Between 1983 and 2000, the
annual number of approved applications has fluctuated
between 1,000 and 3,000. Since the second intifada
began in September 2000, Israel has not processed
about 120,000 family reunification applications.
Multiply that by four or five (a conservative
estimate; most Palestinian families are much larger),
and the number of people affected by the Israeli
refusal to grant residency rights to Palestinians with
foreign passports becomes apparent. As applied to
Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem, the policy is
clearly designed to drive out as many indigenous
Palestinians as possible, with the aim of maintaining
a Jewish majority in the city.
Palestinian citizens in Israel are targeted by
legislation that violates their rights in similar
ways. In May 2002, the Israeli Knesset enacted
Government Decision #1813, thereby freezing all
unification applications for the West Bank or Gazan
spouse of an Israeli citizen or permanent resident.
The 2003 Law of Nationality and Entry into Israel
(Temporary Order 2003) effectively denies Israeli
citizens the right to marry Palestinians from the
occupied territories and to live with their spouses in
Israel. These laws violate international legal
covenants which affirm the fundamental right to
privacy and family life when Palestinian citizens of
Israel are denied this on the basis of the ethnicity
of their spouses.
The denial of legal residency has meant that foreign
passport holders have had to leave the country when
their visas expired and then re-enter in hopes of
receiving another tourist visa, typically good for
three months. These visas had been granted routinely,
but in March 2006, Israel began to withhold them.
Thousands of people whose families, businesses, and
jobs -- in short, their lives -- were centered in the
occupied territories have been turned back from the
borders.
As a result, families live in a state of chronic
uncertainty. Not only can they not make long-term
plans, they can't even trust that they will be
permitted to live together for more than a month (or
two, but not more than three) at a time. Even those
who manage to get a visa cannot be sure that they will
be so lucky the next time they apply.
Israel's denial of entry to the occupied territories
and its refusal to grant permanent residency to
spouses of Palestinian residents -- Israeli officials
insist that it is not a policy, although they have
imposed this practice with increasing regularity since
March 2006 -- is a violation of international
humanitarian law and the 1949 Fourth Geneva
Convention, which Israel, as occupying power, is
obligated to respect. Third-party states have an
obligation to insist that Israel respect the law,
since it can do so easily; when they ignore Israel's
violations, they violate their own obligations not to
acquiesce to unlawful and deliberately harmful acts by
other states.
Academic institutions have been hard hit by this
policy, too. A Birzeit University press release dated
6 January 2007 notes that 50 percent of foreign
passport-holding staff have had to leave, which has
put most departments at risk of dropping courses or
losing specialists they cannot replace. One department
may lose as much as 70 percent of its staff. Programs
such as the Arabic language and cultural program were
funded by foreign student tuitions; when foreign
students are denied entry to the region and cannot
study at Birzeit, the loss of tuition revenue means a
loss of emergency funding that had helped the
university cover its expenses. Because of the growing
problem with denial of entry, applications to the
program have dropped by 50 percent.
Since Oslo, Israel has speeded up implementation of
the policy it has followed even before the state of
Israel was established -- grab as much land as
possible but as few indigenous Palestinians as
possible. To establish a Jewish state in a part of the
world that has not had a Jewish majority since
biblical times, Zionist militias wiped off the map
more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages and made
around 700,000 Palestinians refugees. In the 40 years
since the 1967 war, it has illegally established
Jewish-only colonies in the occupied territories; it
has established more than 400 checkpoints; it has
built a monstrous separation barrier complete with
patrol roads and watchtowers that seal off Palestinian
towns from each other; it is building a separate road
network to connect settlements in the West Bank with
Israel to make sure they never come into contact with
Palestinians; and it has sealed geographic districts
for months on end, preventing the movement of people
and goods, with predictably devastating effects on the
Palestinian economy.
One of Israel's thorniest problems has always been the
presence of an indigenous non-Jewish population
(typically referred to in racist terms as a
"demographic problem") residing within its
(undeclared) borders as well as in the territories it
occupies. Through a combination of laws and policies
designed to make life in the occupied territories
impossible, Israel has sealed all large Palestinian
population centers, cutting them off from one another.
For example, Qalqiliya, at one time referred to as the
West Bank's bread basket, has been completely
encircled by a wall since 2003, with a single gated
road leading into and out of the city. Qalqiliya once
had a population of 43,000, but by 2006, several
thousand had moved. No doubt they left in search of
work -- the wall has had that effect on many
communities. But who can gauge the psychological
pressure of living in a city where a monstrous
concrete wall higher than the former Berlin wall
blocks view of the sunset?
Israel's policies will ultimately fail. According to
the US State Department's annual Country Reports on
Human Rights Practices for 2004, the number of Muslim
and Christian Palestinians in Mandate Palestine
(including Israel proper, the West Bank, including
East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip) slightly exceeds
the number of Israeli Jews. With the higher
Palestinian birth rate, these differences will only
become more pronounced over time. A state narrowly
defined in terms of a religion adhered to by a
minority of the residents under its rule cannot
indefinitely control the majority population or
extinguish its demand for a life with dignity and
political, civil, and human rights.
Ida Audeh is a Palestinian from the West Bank who
works as a technical editor in Boulder, CO. She is the
author of the five-part series, "Living in the Shadow
of the Wall," published by Electronic Intifada on 16
November 2003; "Picking Olives and Removing Roadblocks
as Acts of Resistance: An Interview with Ghassan
Andoni," Counterpunch, 28 October 2002; and
"Narratives of Siege: Eyewitness Testimonies from
Jenin, Bethlehem, and Nablus," Journal of Palestine
Studies, no. 124 (Summer 2002). She can be reached at
idaaudeh AT yahoo DOT com.
===
Where the West Bank meets Bavaria
By Martin Asser
BBC News, Jerusalem
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6987897.stm
Taybeh beer festival (Photo: Martin Asser)
A couple of Taybeh locals enjoying the local Taybeh
Probably one of the things one least expects to come across on a visit
to the Israeli-occupied West Bank is a high-spirited beer festival in
full swing.
But that is exactly what visitors to the small Palestinian Christian
village of Taybeh were treated to at the weekend.
The village is home to a successful family-owned microbrewery, the
Taybeh Brewing Company, whose co-owner, Nadim Khoury, and his
sister-in-law, Maria Khoury, staged its third annual Oktoberfest,
modelled on the great beer-drinking event in Munich.
One of the curiosities of the original Bavarian version is that it
starts in September - something to do with timing of the brewing process.
This year, Taybeh's Oktoberfest also took place in September -
although Mr Khoury says he brought it forward out of respect for his
Muslim neighbours, who begin their holy month of Ramadan this week.
On Saturday and Sunday, thousands of Palestinians and international
visitors milled about in the pleasant late summer weather listening to
musical performers - Christians and Muslims.
Many visitors quaffed different varieties of Taybeh beer, at 10
shekels ($1.60) a glass, though Mr Khoury was a very generous host and
many a glass was topped up for free.
'Wonderful experience'
"The people are fabulous, gracious, wonderful people, and - oh! -
great beer," said Huey Gardner, who is on a Holy Land tour from Alabama.
Because of the Israeli occupation we wanted the Oktoberfest to open up
Taybeh to the outside word
Nadim Khoury
In pictures: Taybeh Oktoberfest
"It's been a wonderful experience, so much fun, great people, dancing,
learning about the culture," said a lady with the same group.
The festivities continued throughout the day and late into the
evening, with mainly folklore music and dance, but also the cutting
edge sounds of an Israeli-Arab rap group, DAM, and local hip hop
performers, Boikutt and G-Town.
As well as the all-important beer, there were stalls selling local
produce such as honey, soap and traditional handicrafts.
The brewery's main challenge is getting its product to market under
the strict travel restrictions imposed by the Israeli military on this
part of the West Bank.
The only route in and out of the village is controlled by an Israeli
military checkpoint, there for the protection of three settlements
lying east and west of the village. Taybeh residents and their wares
need special permits to use the roads.
"Because of the Israeli occupation we wanted the Oktoberfest to open
up Taybeh to the outside word, not just the brewery but all our fellow
producers, so people will come here and taste our wonderful beer and
see other products," said Mr Khoury.
Hold-ups
Taybeh brewery (Photo: Martin Asser)
The brewery had prepared extra kegs ahead of the annual beer-fest
Taybeh - which means "good" and "tasty" in Arabic - makes three
varieties of beer, the original Gold, a stronger Dark (which is 6%
alcohol) and the latest addition to the stable, Amber, half-way
between them in body and strength.
Mr Khoury is currently testing a way of producing alcohol-free beer,
which means he will be able to sell in more conservative Muslim areas
in the West Bank and beyond.
The beer is brewed using a 500-year-old German purity law which allows
only four ingredients: malt, hops, pure water and yeast.
But this means Taybeh has a limited shelf life and is not suited to
being left at checkpoints or held up at Israeli ports.
"Many times the Israeli troops stop deliveries to check every bottle,
saying they are looking for explosives, though of course they have
never found anything," said Mr Khoury's sister, Beth.
"They ask us to open our sealed kegs, but we explain it is not
possible as the beer will be spoilt."
"Sometimes our kegs do explode, but only because of too much pressure
inside from fermentation," she joked.
Shy militant
Taybeh beer festival (Photo: Martin Asser)
The atmosphere was boisterous, but there was no bad behaviour
As the afternoon shadows lengthen into evening, many of the beer-fest
conversations develop a greater volume and an extra frankness.
A couple of Austrian theology students, who have come up from
Jerusalem, are delighted to observe an outbreak of Palestinian
"schunkeln" - the German word for linking arms and swaying to music
seen in the best bierkellers.
But despite the empty kegs of beer being piled up outside the festival
venue - the Taybeh municipality compound (Mayor: David Khoury) - there
is absolutely no uncouth behaviour.
At one point, a young man who has come from Ramallah confides to me
that he is a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant
offshoot of the Fatah faction.
This shy young man tells me why he - a Christian - wanted to join the
quasi-Islamist group, branded a terrorist organisation by Israel and
its allies for a string of suicide bombings in Israeli cities.
Then he looks down at the glass of beer in his hand, and around at the
smiling crowds, and says it is the first day he has been truly happy
for many years.
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