May 17, 2013 at 06:33 (Collective Punishment, Ethnic Cleansing, Israel, Nakba, Occupation, Oppression, Palestine, Poetry)
May 16, 2013 at 11:37 (Associate Post, Collective Punishment, Corrupt Politics, Ethnic Cleansing, Hasbara, Israel, Land Theft, Nakba, Palestine)
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As Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, our problem is not with Jews who believe in “live and let live” but is rather with this diabolical, fanatical and genocidal Zionism which has drenched this part of the world with blood, hatred and inequity.
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The Nakba revisited
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By Khalid Amayreh
Today marks the 65th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, the violent usurpation and occupation of Palestine by Zionist Jewish invaders coming from around the world. The seizure of Palestine can be considered as one of the greatest acts of theft in the history of mankind. Israel itself therefore is a gigantic war crime and a crime against humanity. Thanks to the infamous Balfour declaration of 1917, Palestine, an Arab country since the seventh century, was given by another country (Britain) to a third people (the Jews) without even consulting the native people of the country. According to the British Philosopher Bertrand Russell:” The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was ‘given’ by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state.” In fact, it can be safely argued that the West, particularly Britain, committed the original sin by envisaging, planning and implanting Israel in the heart of the Arab world in order to protect its colonial and imperialistic interests. In 1905, Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman invited the Western Imperial powers for conference which continued until 1907. The conference of the thieves recommended the establishment of ” a state on the lands of Palestine, to serve as an advanced base for the covetous colonialists, and protect their interests, implement their plans and schemes and ensure the outflow of natural resources from the region, as well as the import of their goods and products into the markets of the region.” The American Jewish writer Noam Chomsky described this evilness committed by these European powers, especially Britain: “When a man brings a snake and puts it in the bed of a child and it stings the child, the man is responsible for the child’s death, not the snake,”. The person who brings the snake into the child’s bed is the real criminal, not the snake. This person cannot claim innocence and say ‘I did not know that the snake is so poisonous!’” The famous British historian Arnold Toynbee, in his book “A Study of History” said that “while the direct responsibility for the calamity that overtook the Palestinian Arabs in A.D. 1948 was on the heads of the Zionist Jews who seized a lebensraum for themselves in Palestine by force of arms in that year, a heavy load of indirect, yet irrefutable, responsibility was on the heads of the people of the United Kingdom. But the “snake” (Israel) has acquired a life of its own, and it no longer depends on its erstwhile western benefactors for its survival and continuity.” None the less, there is no guarantee, historical, moral or religious that the “snake” will have an extended life, e.g. live longer than a century. In the final analysis, Israel is an immoral and illegal being that will have to go. Yes, Israel is a regional superpower, has a prosperous economy, is technologically advanced and tightly controls the government, Congress and media of the United States . But nations don’t live by modern fighter jets and nuclear bombs alone. The Soviet Union had a plenty of these. In order to have a sustained existence nations must possess a moral justification. Justice, not military might, is what guarantees the longevity and continuity of states. In 1948, Zionist leaders such as Ben Gurion thought that that the Palestinian people would go into oblivion, slowly but surely. Indeed, just as the genocidal invaders from Eastern Europe and elsewhere bulldozed and obliterated more than 500 Palestinian villages, Zionist elders thought that old Palestinians will die and young Palestinians will forget! But to the Zionists’ chagrin, the Palestinian cause is still as vivid and relevant in the minds and hearts of the Palestinian people today as it was in 1948. Thousands of Palestinians still retain the keys to their homes from which they were expelled at gunpoint when Israel was created 65 years ago. The trust is bequeathed by the older to younger generations. Today, even the least patriotic Palestinians who would rather reach “a peace deal” with Israel by hook or by crook wouldn’t even dare suggest that they would sell out the right of return even in return for a state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. To be sure, Palestinians and Muslims in general have no problem living with Jews. Jews lived side by side with Arabs and Muslims for close to 1400 years. Jews had never revolted against their Muslim rulers or demanded a state of their own. Indeed, the call for the return of Jews to Palestine did not come from Middle Eastern or Palestine Jews; it rather came from Western Jews. When the Hungarian Jewish leader Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897, which was attended by 196 delegates. Only four of the 196 delegates were Jews from Palestine . As Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, our problem is not with Jews who believe in “live and let live” but is rather with this diabolical, fanatical and genocidal Zionism which has drenched this part of the world with blood, hatred and inequity. Israel claims to be Jewish and following ancient Jewish ideals of justice. But this is a hollow claim, bordering on wishful thinking. The truth of the matter is that Israel represents the antithesis of the prophetic ideals of the ancient Israeli prophets. What happened to “Thou shall not murder, thou shall not steal, and thou shall not lie”? Even Abraham, the purported common forefather of the ancient Israelites and northern Arabs wouldn’t accept to obtain a burial place for his dead wife Sara free of charge in Hebron. Today, one is really affronted by these fanatical Jewish settlers who terrorize and savage peaceable Palestinian villagers, poison and kill their livestock, burn down their fields and orchards. And when the unprotected helpless Palestinians seek redress at Israeli courts, they are told by the Jewish judges that the settlers have a point because “your homes and land once belonged to the settlers’ ancestors some three thousand years ago.”!!! Such a state where inequity and oppression are rampant can’t and will not live long, even if it possessed all the modern warplanes in the world. They killed the two-state solution Israel has already decapitated the two state solution. The intensive expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem , has really left no room for a viable and territorially contiguous Palestinian state. The U.S., EU and the helpless Palestinian Authority (PA) pretend that there is still a chance for reviving the two-state solution strategy. But we who live here in the West Bank know better. We just can’t betray our eyes. We also know rather well two other facts that further enforce our conviction that the chances for establishing a true Palestinian state have vanished rather irreversibly. The first fact is that the Israeli society is moving steadily toward Talmudic Jewish fascism, which makes it extremely unlikely that Israel would agree anytime in the predictable future to give up the spoils of the 1967 war, which would imply the inevitable dismantlement of hundreds of Jewish colonies built on the occupied Palestinian territory. The second fact is that the United States, Israel’s guardian-ally, is utterly unable, even if willing, to exert any meaningful pressure on Israel, which would force or convince the Jewish state to end its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The reason for this is the tight Jewish stranglehold on the American decision-making process. Thus, the Israeli control of the White House, Congress and other American political institutions is too overwhelming to allow for any U.S. maneuver outside the Jewish dragnet. The Demographic situation in Israel/Palestine Apart from the historical rights and moral high-ground, the Palestinians also have a strategic advantage over Zionism, namely the demographic asset. According to the prominent Israeli demographer Della Pergula, there are already more non-Jews than Jews between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. “We have already reached the demographic critical mass, the establishment of a Palestinian state now is therefore more of an urgent Israeli need than a Palestinian need” But the possibility for establishing a viable Palestinian state no longer exists in light of the phenomenal expansion of Jewish settlements mentioned earlier. More to the point, the concept of a bi-national state is a kind of anathema for most Israelis as it would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Hence, the problem. There are millions of Israelis who would think or probably are already thinking of unthinkable scenarios such as expelling large number of Palestinians. But expulsion can’t really be carried out without some sort of a genocide. None the less, the Palestinians have thoroughly learned and imbibed the lessons of 1948 and would never ever leave their country. They would rather die in their own homes, towns and villages rather than give Zionists the joy of watching them repeat the Nakba scenario. The Israeli Zionists have already committed huge and numerous crimes against the Palestinian people. Needless to say, committing still more crimes would be suicidal and fraught with grave consequences for Israel and Jews. In the final analysis, the repetition of what happened in 1948 could speed up the process of Israel’s demise and extinction.
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Disappearing Palestine, a powerful new infographic from Visualizing Palestine (visualizingpalestine.org).
May 15, 2013 at 19:47 (Collective Punishment, Ethnic Cleansing, Israel, Land Theft, Nakba, Oppression, Palestine, Refugee Camps, zionism)
يحمل رجل الأعمال الفلسطيني سام بحور الجنسية الأميركية وهو يسكن في مدينة البيرة في رام الله، فلسطين. ويعمل بشكل مستقل كمستشار ومنسق مشاريع كما يملك شركة لإدارة المعلومات التطبيقية (إيم) وهي تختص في تطوير الأعمال والمشاريع مع تركيز على الشركات الناشئة. ولعب سام دوراً أساسياً في تأسيس شركة الإتصالات الفلسطينية (بالتل)، ومركز بلازا للتسوق. وأصبح مؤخراً عضو فاعل في مجلس الأمناء في جامعة بيرزيت. ويشغل حالياً منصب عضو مجلس إدارة في البنك الإسلامي العربي، كما يشغل عدة مناصب أخرى في منظمات المجتمع المدني. ويركز سام كثيراً في كتاباته على الشؤون الفلسطينية، فتنشر مقالاته على نطاق واسع. ساهم سام في تحرير كتاب “الوطن: التاريخ الشفوي لفلسطين والفلسطينيين” ويمكن معرفة المزيد عنه والاطلاع على مقالاته من خلال تصفح مدونته على الموقع الالكتروني التالي: www.epalestine.com
April 28, 2013 at 09:30 (Ethnic Cleansing, Health Crisis, Human Rights, Israel, Just Plain Disgusting, Racism)
Israelis chant “Sudanese Back To Sudan” during a right-wing demonstration against African refugees in south Tel Aviv, 30 May 2012.
(Oren Ziv / ActiveStills)
It’s a “problem” that too many babies are being born to parents from Africa, a leading Israeli medical official has told lawmakers at the Israeli parliament.
Israel’s Maariv reported yesterday the official’s comments in Hebrew:
“In Tel Aviv, today, there live approximately 80 thousand infiltrators from Africa, who constitute about 15 percent of the city’s population. In the last year about 700 babies were born to Eritrean and Sudanese mothers, and we currently have an average of about two births a day,” thus reported today Professor Gaby Barabash, director of the Ichilov Medical Center, in a hearing the Knesset held by the lobby for returning the infiltrators.
“The problem is that they closed down the fence, but they did not close down the natural growth, and the number of Eritreans born here rises from year to year,” said Barabash.
Barabash’s use of the term “infiltrators” as a general term for Africans marks his comments as part of the long-standing campaign of racist incitement by Israeli leaders and officials that has resulted in horrifying demonstrations and pogroms targeting Africans in Israel, many of whom arrive as refugees.
In December, David Sheen profiled Israel’s “racist ringleaders,” the political leaders and public figures most responsible for racist incitement.
Barabash’s comments are also in keeping with the general outlook in Israel where it is socially acceptable to define the births of non-Jewish babies as undesirable or as a “demographic threat” to the so-called “Jewish and democratic state.”
Even more disturbing, Barabash played on common racist tropes of Africans and people of color as bearers of diseases, recognizable from racist discourses in other places and times, including traditional European anti-Semitic rhetoric:
Professor Barabash reported high percentages of intrauterine deaths, and also contagious viral diseases among the delivering mothers: tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS. The African population constitutes one third of the new cases of AIDS carriers [sic] diagnosed in Israel, and half of the cases of malaria carriers.
All of this testimony was taken at a parliamentary hearing organized by members who voice vocal support for mass expulsions of Africans and for the construction of a desert prison camp to hold them.
Recently, women of Ethiopian origin have accused Israeli officials of forcing them to take long-term contraceptives, allegations that came to light following an investigation into the precipitous drop in births to Ethiopian women in Israel in recent years.
Barabash’s shocking comments also recall those made by Dr. Yitzhak Ravid, a senior researcher at the Israeli government’s Armaments Development Authority at the Herzliya Conference in 2003, who called for Israel to “implement a stringent policy of family planning in relation to its Muslim population.”
Ravid added: “the delivery rooms in Soroka Hospital in Beersheba,” an area with a large Bedouin population, “have turned into a factory for the production of a backward population” (“Herzliya conference sees verbal attacks on Israeli Arabs,” Haaretz, 18 December 2003).
Palestine’s indigenous Bedouin population has long been the target of Israeli forced removal from their lands and other racist practices.
And as David Hirst wrote of Prime Minister Golda Meir in his classic book The Gun and the Olive Branch, “The Palestinians’ birth-rate was so much higher than the Jews’ that her sleep was often disturbed, she would say, at the thought of how many Arab babies had been born in the night.”
With thanks to Dena Shunra for translation and analysis.
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April 14, 2013 at 07:05 (Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing, Illegal Settlements, Israel, Just Plain Disgusting, Palestine, zionist harassment)
I came across this video posted on YouTube titled “Arab Workers in Susiya Unattended.” Susiya is an illegal Israeli colony founded in 1983 in the southern occupied West Bank on land stolen from the 200-year-old Palestinian village with the same name whose inhabitants have been harassed and expelled by settlers and the Israeli army for years.
The videographer appears to be a settler who speaks poor Hebrew with a heavy North American accent.
He marches out of his house toward a man who, it would appear, is Palestinian, and demands, “where is the guard?” The man gestures, and the videographer replies, “Inside?” before marching off toward a building that is under construction.
There the videographer approaches a man who is wearing a Jewish skull cap and tells him: “There are Arabs by my house. Why can’t I go out of my house? There is no guard. I don’t like this. I don’t accept this.”
The videographer again demands, “Where is the guard? where is the guard?” The man in the skullcap who has a pistol on his belt assures him, “I am the guard,” but the videographer sounds skeptical.
Sadly most settlements are built by Palestinians who have few other economic opportunities.
Colonial reality: A screenshot shows a glimpse of a settler’s pistol as a Palestinian laborer carrying construction supplies passes in the background.
The video unintentionally provides a glimpse of the racist and colonial conditions Palestinians live under, where settlers – many from the United States – are happy to exploit Palestinian labor, but only under armed guard lest the oppressed natives revolt against the masters.
It is an old story, as old as colonialism itself.
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April 12, 2013 at 12:28 (Collective Punishment, Ethnic Cleansing, Human Rights, Israel, Oppression, Palestine, Rights of The Child, zionist harassment)
A Palestinian was arrested last week for allegedly throwing stones and is being held in an Israeli jail, a mundane and daily occurrence in the occupied West Bank. But this case has made headlines–and it’s because the Palestinian is a 14-year-old who also has American citizenship.
New Orleans-born Mohammed Khalek was taken from his home last week by eight rifle-toting Israeli soldiers. He’s accused of throwing stones at Israeli cars near Silwad, northeast of Ramallah. Khalek has yet to be charged, and his detention has been extended until April 14. Addameer advocacy officer Randa Wahbe toldHaaretz that Khlaek “was told by interrogators that if he confessed to rock throwing quickly, he would be released.”
Khalek’s case has garnered coverage in the Associated Press and Reuters.The media outlets are highlighting how Khalek’s case is an example of Palestinian children routinely being locked up in Israeli military jails.
Reuters’ Noah Browning reports that Khalek appeared in jail with “his ankles shackled together just above his running shoes.” Browning also reports that the boy’s father, Abdulwahab Khalek, said that Mohammed “was maltreated and had his braces broken from his teeth during the course of his arrest in the early hours of April 5.”
“The Israeli military’s treatment of Mohammed Khalak is appalling and all too common,” Human Rights Watch’s Bill Van Esveld told Reuters. “There’s no justification for … shackling him for 12 hours and interrogating him while refusing to let him see his father or a lawyer.”
The Associated Press story notes that a United Nations report recently castigated the Israeli military for its abuses of the rights of Palestinian children. 700 Palestinian children a year are arrested by the Israeli military, according to UNICEF. Here’s more from the report:
Ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized…
The pattern of ill-treatment includes the arrests of children at their homes between midnight and 5:00 am by heavily armed soldiers; the practice of blindfolding children and tying their hands with plastic ties; physical and verbal abuse during transfer to an interrogation site, including the use of painful restraints; lack of access to water, food, toilet facilities and medical care; interrogation using physical violence and threats; coerced confessions; and lack of access to lawyers or family members during interrogation.
Treatment inconsistent with child rights continues during court appearances, including shackling of children; denial of bail and imposition of custodial sentences; and transfer of children outside occupied Palestinian territory to serve their sentences inside Israel. The incarceration isolates them from their families and interrupts their studies.
These practices are in violation of international law that protects all children against ill-treatment when in contact with law enforcement, military and judicial institutions.
The boy’s father lashed out at the American government’s response to his son’s arrest in an interview with Reuters. “The U.S. government is obligated to do something for us, but it doesn’t even care. They’ve lost the issue somewhere in their back pocket,” he told the news outlet.
The indifference is to be expected. American citizens mistreated by the Israeli military are denied adequate help by the U.S. government. For instance, the U.S. government waited three days to contact the family of Furkan Dogan, who was executed at point-blank range on board the Mavi Marmara, the aid ship part of the 2010 flotilla trying to break the blockade of Gaza. Dogan was a U.S. citizen of Turkish descent. The U.S. declined to investigate the death of Dogan, preferring to allow Israel to do so itself.
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April 12, 2013 at 12:13 (Associate Post, Dictatorship, Ethnic Cleansing, Israel, Palestine)
Imagine going 250 days without food. It’s painful, it’s exhausting and it’s frightening.
Palestinians fighting for self-determination often draw inspiration from the Northern Irish, feeling they share a common struggle. The Irish and Palestinians have engaged in many similar tactics to resist political oppression, including hunger strikes. The prisoner hunger strikes in Northern Ireland are some of the most famous in history.
In 1980, a strike yielded many of the prisoners’ demands. The secondbegan in 1981 when it became clear that these demands had not been implemented. This strike resulted in the death of ten prisoners—including Bobby Sands, who had recently been elected to British Parliament—followed by rioting in the streets of Belfast and other areas in Northern Ireland.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expressed no remorse, calling the strike voluntary suicide. The whole affair scarred Thatcher’s reputation and prompted prison guards to treat prisoners with greater respect.
At last count, there were over 4,700 Palestinian prisoners—referred to as “security prisoners”—in Israeli jails. At least a couple hundred of them are political prisoners held in indefinite detention, without being charged or knowing the reason for their arrest. Before the 2011 prisoner exchange, there were over a thousand. These men, women and children are subject to extensions of this administrative detainment without judicial procedure, and conviction with secret evidence that they and their lawyers have no access to.
Although indefinite detention is universally and internationally condemned as inhumane and illegal, Palestinian prisoners have little access to the law and can protest their detainment in very few ways, one of which is refusing to eat.
Currently, detainees are protesting the lack of judicial transparency as well as the conditions of their detainment, including psychological and physical torture. Over the last year, several Palestinian prisoners have participated in a group hunger strike. They have invited death over indignity.
“In order for a hunger strike to succeed, the outside world must learn of it,” Nelson Mandela once said. “Otherwise prisoners will simply starve themselves to death and no one will know.”
The hunger strikes in Israeli prisons over the last year, in which thousands have participated, have drawn considerable international media attention and have put pressure on the Israeli government. As we have seen twice recently, the death of a Palestinian held in Israeli jails is seen as a crime at the hands of an oppressor, and civil unrest becomes an issue that both the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority must reckon with. Following the recent death of an older prisoner diagnosed with cancer, Maysara Abu Hamdiyeh, 4,600 Palestinian prisoners protested with a three-day hunger strike.
In December 2011, Khader Adnan was arrested in the middle of the night and began a hunger strike the next day to protest the conditions of administrative detention. After 66 days, when still no charges had been filed, Egyptian diplomatic intervention helped the Israeli authorities and Adnan’s lawyer to reach a deal that ended the strike.
Mahmoud Sarsak began a strike following Adnan after being held under administrative detention for three years with no charge or trial. After about two months on hunger strike and losing half of his weight, a deal was struck for him and several other prisoners to end their strike.
Samer al-Issawi, 33, is currently in an Israeli jail and has been on strike for more than 250 days. He was released in 2011 in the prisoner exchange and re-arrested in 2012 for violating his release by leaving Jerusalem and entering the West Bank. He has been warned for months that he is at extreme risk of death, but has continued the hunger strike. He is now refusing water and nutritional supplements after the best offer has been release with deportation to Gaza.
In addition, at least 40 prisoners in Guantanamo Bay—the notorious institution in Cuba where most of the 166 prisoners are indefinitely detained by the U.S. without charge or trial—have also began a hunger strike to protest prolonged detainment, invasive cell searches and physical and psychological torture. Lawyers of the detainees claim participation in the strike, which began in February 2013, has spread to at least 130 inmates. In 2005, 130 of about 500 detainees participated in a group hunger strike.
Though their hunger strike is unlikely to get these prisoners sympathy from Americans, the media attention has reminded people that the prisoners are still there—despite at least half of them being cleared for release in 2009—and that Guantanamo is still open five years after Obama’s pledge to close it.
Keeping in mind the words of Mandela, the Guantanamo prisoners’ hunger strike was denied and its scale downplayed early on by U.S. authorities, posing a serious challenge for the secluded prisoners. They have relied on their lawyers to get the word out and, still, the American media has not paid much attention to the strike.
These situations create several ethical dilemmas. For instance, prisoner mistreatment is very easy to hide until hunger strikes or investigations reveal such crimes. Hunger strikes are, in effect, one of the only options and are often successful in raising awareness and achieving prisoner demands. Yet it is easy to see how pressure and criticism on the one hand, and government policy on the other, interjects prison authorities and doctors into the conflict, which may ultimately result in loss of life after prolonged suffering.
At the moment, as has been a response in the past to hunger strikes in Israel and other places, some of the strikers in Guantanamo are being force-fed through a tube.
Here, the role of doctors is even more controversial. Their oath as servants to humanity requires doctors to do no harm, while respecting the wishes of the patient. The World Medical Association adopted a Declaration on Hunger Strikers, which outlines principals protecting prisoner autonomy and preventing maltreatment or coercion. Doctors working in Guantanamo Bay are forbidden from abiding by the principals of the very organization that represents them.
The administration claims to be protecting the safety and welfare of the prisoners by disallowing them to go on hunger strike. Clearly the welfare of the prisoners would be to release those that have been cleared for release and to charge the rest with a crime.
In Guantanamo, Israel and Northern Ireland, the prisoners on hunger strike share one thing in common: their arrest and detainment—in some cases unlawful—is due to political activity.
The imprisonment of politically active Palestinian resistance allows the Israeli government to evade responsibility, accountability and internal or external pressure—until a hunger strike. Thus, where there may be political motivation for the arrest of say, Palestinians in Israel or Palestine, one must take critical stance. One must wonder what causes these prisoners to resort to life-threatening protest in order to seek justice or at least make their voices heard.
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April 5, 2013 at 10:50 (Activism, Associate Post, Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, Israel, Land Day, Occupation, Oppression, Palestine)
Palestinians in Israel proper and the occupied territories this week marked Land Day, which commemorates the murder by Israeli troops of six Palestinians in the Arab Israeli town of Sakhnin in 1976.
The six young men were trying to stop Israeli authorities from confiscating their land for Jewish settlement expansion.
Large rallies and marches took place in several localities in the Galilee, Triangle and Negev regions, with speakers urging thousands of participants to cling to their land and keep up the struggle against Judaisation and ethnic cleansing.
Among the speakers was Arab Knesset member Ahmed Teibi who exhorted a large multitude of Arab Israeli citizens to “consolidate their existence on this land”.
“This is our homeland, this is our ancestral land, this is our patrimony; we have no other homeland. This is the message that we must communicate to the whole world, especially to the Israeli state.” Teibi said Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line (the former armistice line between Israel and the West Bank) ought to leave “no stone unturned” in order to “further consolidate our existence in our land”.
“Our roots have always been deep, but there are those who are trying to extirpate these roots by way of bulldozers and ethnic cleansing. We must foil and thwart these efforts by all means necessary.”
Other speakers reminded participants that Israel is trying to devise “every imagined and non-imagined tactic to steal our land and render us strangers in our own homeland”.
Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Islamic movement in Israel, said Palestine had always been Arab and Islamic irrespective of Zionist lies and fabrications.
“Their lies may prevail for some time. But one day the snow will melt away and the truth shall appear and the falsehood will be consigned to the dustbin of history.”
Similarly, numerous rallies took place in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip amid skirmishes between stone-hurling activists and heavily armed Israeli soldiers.
Land Day commemorations this year coincided with another attempt by messianic Jewish settlers to storm Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest shrines.
According to Israeli and Palestinian sources, settlers were seen reciting prayers at the exclusively Islamic shrine. Palestinian eyewitnesses also reported seeing a Jewish settler urinating in the Mosque’s esplanade.
Messianic Jewish groups make no secret of their goal of earning “prayer rights” at the Haram Al-Sharif complex, or Nobel Sanctuary.
However, for Muslims in general, “Prayer rights” spell “vicious attempts to partition the Islamic sanctuary”.
“They want to do here what they did in Hebron,” said Sheikh Mohamed Hussein, the highest-ranking Muslim cleric in Jerusalem, alluding to the partitioning by Israel of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron following the 1994 massacre, when a Jewish terrorist murdered 29 Arab worshipers and injured many more.
“How would Catholics react if some Jews tried to partition Saint Peters Church in Rome between Jews and Catholics?
“Yet, this is what these invaders from Eastern Europe and other parts of the world are trying to do here; namely, take over holy places that belong to another religion and another people.”
According to reliable Palestinian sources, the Israeli occupation authorities are planning to introduce “far reaching changes” at Haram Al-Sharif, which could alter the legal status of the Muslim sanctuary.
The unspecific Israeli plans seem to have prompted the latest Palestinian-Jordanian agreement, reached in Amman last week, which confirmed “Jordan’s historic role as custodian of the holy sites in Jerusalem”.
The agreement signed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Sunday also stressed “our common goal of defending Jerusalem and its sacred sites” against Judaising attempts.
“This is a historic agreement. Abbas reiterated that the King is the custodian of holy sites in Jerusalem and that he has the right to exert all legal efforts to preserve them, especially Al-Aqsa Mosque,” a statement issued from the Jordanian royal court said.
The statement went on to say: “The agreement emphasises the historic principles agreed by Jordan and Palestine to exert joint efforts to protect the city from Judaisation attempts.”
Palestinian leaders lauded the agreement as a positive step toward putting up a solid front in the face of Israeli efforts to encroach on Muslim holy places in Jerusalem.
“I don’t care if Palestinians or Jordanians or other Muslims carry out this mission. The important thing is that Muslims and Arabs must do everything possible to protect Al-Aqsa Mosque,” said Sheikh Raed Salah in interview with the BBC.
“Whether those who defend and protect this paramount Muslim sanctuary are Palestinians or Jordanian is irrelevant in the final analysis,” he added.
Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 allowing the Jordanian government to administer Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.
However, there have been hints by the right-wing Israeli government that Israel might embark on unilateral action that would effectively wrest legal administration of the holy sites from Jordan.
And not every Palestinian is satisfied with the agreement, described by some pundits as “innocuous”.
Hizb Al-Tahrir, an Islamist party that calls for the reinstitution of the Islamic Caliphate, called the agreement “media hyperbole with no practical benefit for Muslims”.
“This agreement was signed as Jewish settlers stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque. It is utterly unlikely that the agreement will have any practical positive results on the ground. Only a truly Islamic state will be able to protect Islamic holy sites. Jordan has strong ties with the Zionist entity and is unfit to be a custodian or guardian of the holy places,” the party said.
March 31, 2013 at 14:21 (Apartheid, Collective Punishment, Ethnic Cleansing, Holidays, Illegal Settlements, Israel, Oppression, Palestine)
Historically, Passover is a holiday that Hebron settlers regularly exploit for expansionist purposes. In 1969, a small group of settlers led by a hard-line rabbi established the first illegal settlement in the city without the Israeli government’s permission. The settlement in a hotel in Hebron was evacuated, but the settlers moved to a former military base nearby and established what became the Kiryat Arba settlement. The move was carried out with the agreement of the Israeli government, which at the time was led by the Labor Party.
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Hundreds of Israelis traveled over the Green Line to observe Passover in Hebron this week at a carnival-like event as Israeli officials closed the Ibrahimi Mosque to Palestinians in the West Bank’s largest city.
Since at least the mid-1990s, settlers and religious Jews have flocked to the Herodian-era site around the Cave of the Patriarchs for the holy week, which ordinarily is partitioned by religion between Jews and Muslims—or Israelis and Palestinians. But on Wednesday and Thursday, with an increased border police presence, the tombs of the monotheistic forefathers and mothers were only opened to the busloads of Jewish tourists.
The contrasts between the Palestinian and Israeli Jewish areas were stark. While most Palestinians closed up shop in Hebron’s Old City due to the threat of settler harassment, Israeli Jews marked Passover by dancing in the streets, surrounded by high-flying Israeli flags and armed soldiers.
The annual occasion was also marked by clashes between soldiers and Palestinians.Ma’an News reported that a twelve-year old was in “critical condition” after Israeli soldiers fired a rubber bullet in his head during the clashes. Hebron residents told us that the clashes began after the settlers made their way through a Palestinian area.
“If the mosque is closed nobody will come,” said Nawal Slemiah, the founder of Women in Hebron, an embroidery collective. “Last year when they came, more that 8,000 people”–Israelis–walked through the Palestinian neighborhoods of Hebron. Most shops closed this year to avoid the possibility of tensions with the Israelis, but each year Slemiah keeps the women’s collective open. “They took things from outside,” she said, explaining the scene last year. “Some of them they steal things.”
Slemiah’s shop in the historic district of Hebron is full of hand-made Palestinian embroidery garments. Outside the door frame of her one-room shop are two racks of brightly colored taubes, or traditional Palestinian dresses. There is a particular pattern of stitching for each Palestinian city. Slemiah showed us a black and a whitetaube with big flowers over the breast of the dress, indicating the design of Hebron. She said that last year, when Israelis marched through the old city, they dumped her dresses on the ground and stomped on them.
A short walk from Slemiah’s store is Hebron’s Bab al-Zawiya neighborhood. This year it was the site where Israelis marched through Palestinian streets adjacent to Shuhada Street, a downtown road that is closed off to most Palestinians by a checkpoint at its entrance and exit. The march set off the clashes that injured the 12-year-old Palestinian boy. The injury, along with the economic impact that settler harassment has on Palestinian shops, is only the latest example of the hardships Palestinians face in Hebron.
Shuhada Street used to be the central market for Hebron’s Palestinians. But that all changed as a result of the 1994 massacre in the Ibrahimi Mosque, when Baruch Goldstein, a militant Israeli-American, killed 29 Palestinian worshipers. In response to that act, the Israeli military imposed restrictions on Palestinian movement, and forbade Palestinian traffic on parts of the main street. The restrictions on Palestinian movement were made worse by the Israeli military after the Second Intifada, and led to severe economic deterioration in the city. B’Tselem reports that “304 shops and warehouses along Shuhada Street closed down” since these restrictions were imposed. “Most of the properties on or adjacent to Shuhada Street, including homes and businesses, had been abandoned or had been closed by military order,” the Israeli human rights group stated in 2011.
Unlike the desolate Palestinian area of Hebron, during Passover the plaza in front of the Cave of the Patriarchs couldn’t have been a happier scene. Inside of H2, we walked past scores of border police and Israeli security, as a Hebraicized version of Akon’s “Right Now”bumped from two speakers mounted to roof racks on a van. Once we reached the festivities, mostly religious Israelis enjoyed popcorn and pastel cotton candy swirled up by an Orthodox youth. Others who belong to the Na Nach movement, a Hasidic sect known for dancing like in the time of King David to bring on the era of the messiah, bounced to boom boxes. Brief discussions with some of the festival-goers revealed that some of them had come from outside Hebron. Tour buses lined up outside the festival to take people home, with most of the destination signs reading “Yerushalayim” in Hebrew.
Historically, Passover is a holiday that Hebron settlers regularly exploit for expansionist purposes. In 1969, a small group of settlers led by a hard-line rabbi established the first illegal settlement in the city without the Israeli government’s permission. The settlement in a hotel in Hebron was evacuated, but the settlers moved to a former military base nearby and established what became the Kiryat Arba settlement. The move was carried out with the agreement of the Israeli government, which at the time was led by the Labor Party.
Last year, in an action also timed to Passover, settlers again tried to establish a new colony without the permission of the Israeli government. This time, they were evacuated and no new settlement was established in Hebron. Shortly after the Hebron evacuation, though, new construction in Jerusalem-area settlements was announced.
Settler activity in Hebron around the Jewish holiday of Passover is so routine that many Palestinians in the area expect harassment—and are also familiar with the traditional Passover greeting.
“In English I don’t know how to say…” contemplated Mohammed, a teenage unofficial tour guide who regularly stops by the Women in Hebron store. With a smile on his face he continued, “‘happy holidays,’ ‘chag sameach.’”
All photographs were taken by Allison Deger.
Written FOR
March 30, 2013 at 18:54 (Ethnic Cleansing, Hasbara, Israel, Just Plain Disgusting, Occupation, Oppression, Palestine, Rights of The Child)
We couldn’t help ourselves: The sight of the young, newly released detainee drove us into a paroxysm of laughter. But the laughter quickly morphed into sad embarrassment. The detainee was a boy of 8, in second grade. When we met him this week, on the streets of Hebron, he was on his way to his grandfather’s home. He wore a red sweatshirt emblazoned with an image of Mickey Mouse, and he had a shy smile. His mom had sent him to take something to Grandpa. Eight-year-old Ahmed Abu Rimaileh was not the youngest of the children, schoolbags on their backs, that Israel Defense Forces soldiers took into custody early on Wednesday, last week: His friend, Abdel Rahim, who was arrested with him, is only 7, and in first grade.
Twenty-seven Palestinian children never made it to school on that particular day. IDF troops lay in ambush for them from the early morning hours on the streets of the Hebron neighborhoods that are under the army’s control, and arrested them indiscriminately. Only after they were in custody did the Israeli security forces examine the video footage they had in their possession, to see which of the youngsters had thrown stones at Checkpoint No. 160 earlier that morning, which separates their neighborhood from the settlers’ quarter of the city. It was here, a few weeks ago, that IDF soldiers shot and killed a teenager, Mohammed Suleima, who was holding a pistol-shaped lighter.
Most of the young children were released within a few hours. The older ones were kept in detention for a few days, before being released on bail. One adult, who tried forcefully to prevent the arrest of a colleague’s son, was brought to trial this week.
The fact that 18 of the children were under the age of 12, the age of criminal responsibility according to the 1971 Israeli Youth Law (Adjudication, Punishment and Methods of Treatment ), was apparently of no interest to the IDF, the Israel Police or the Border Police. Nor was the severe report issued just two weeks earlier by the United Nations Children’s Fund, which condemned Israel for arresting some 7,000 Palestinian children in the past decade.
“Ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized,” the UNICEF report stated, and added, “In no other country are children systematically tried by juvenile military courts.”
The Youth Law forbids the arrest of children under the age of 12. It also appears that the provision stipulating that older children must not be interrogated without the presence of their parents and their lawyer does not apply to Palestinian children.
A volunteer from the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian activist group, who documented with a video camera the operation in which the children were arrested, forwarded the footage to B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and B’Tselem gave it to us. (The video can be viewed on the B’Tselem website and on YouTube.) One soldier is seen spitting crudely on the ground, another actually carries the schoolbag of his little detainee – as though he were a babysitter who had come to escort the child home from school. The amateur photographer from the ISM was deported from Israel that same day, after she also had the temerity to take part in a demonstration in Hebron against the visit of President Barack Obama.
Indeed, the mass arrest of the youngsters took place on March 20, the day Obama arrived in Israel, and the day before he made his remarks about Palestinian children in Jerusalem. “Put yourselves in the Palestinians’ shoes,” the president told the Israelis.
From early that same morning, Palestinian residents of Hebron noticed dozens of Israeli soldiers taking up positions in the streets and on rooftops in the neighborhood. One frightened resident called B’Tselem fieldworker Manal al-Jaabari, to ask what was going on.
Divided by age
For his part, Ahmed Abu Rimaileh woke up at 7 that morning and, with the NIS 2 he received from his mother as pocket money, set out for school; sometimes he gets NIS 1.5, sometimes 2. He attends the Hadija Elementary School down the street. Adjacent to it are three other schools that are part of an educational complex, which is located a few hundred meters from the checkpoint.
His father, Yakub, is a construction worker. His mother, Hala, is now sitting with us in their home. On the way to school, Ahmed says he stopped at the corner grocery store and bought a packet of cookies for NIS 1, and kept the other shekel for recess. As he was about to leave the store, he relates, seven or eight other children suddenly came running in, some his age, some older. Hard on their heels were soldiers, who arrested all the children in the store.
One soldier ordered Ahmed to put the cookies in his schoolbag before grabbing him by the shoulder and hauling him toward the checkpoint. Ahmed says he was very scared. He also admits that he cried, though only a little. At the checkpoint, he and all the other detained youngsters were thrust into an army vehicle – 27 children in one vehicle, some sitting, some standing, according to Ahmed’s description.
There were three soldiers with them in the vehicle. Some of the children were crying, and the soldiers told them to be quiet. One child was hit, Ahmed says. They were all taken to the nearby Israeli police station, next to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where they were told to sit on the ground, in a closed courtyard. The children above age 12 were separated from the younger ones and taken to the police station in Kiryat Arba and afterward to Ofer Prison, north of Jerusalem.
Ahmed Burkan, 13, was not released until the evening. Malik Srahana, also 13, was held in custody for three days at Ofer Prison before being released on NIS 2,000 bail. B’Tselem fieldworker Musa Abu Hashhash, who met with him immediately after his release, says the teenager showed signs of trauma.
According to a report transmitted by the International Red Cross to B’Tselem, 18 of the detained children were under the age of 12. They were kept in the courtyard, with a policeman guarding them for almost two hours. No one offered them food or water.
Children asked to go to the bathroom but were forbidden to do so, Ahmed recalls. The policeman asked who among them had thrown stones, but no one confessed. He then asked if they knew which children had thrown the stones and they named two of the older ones, who had been arrested and separated from them.
After a time, three jeeps arrived and took the younger group to Checkpoint 56, next to the settler neighborhood of Tel Rumeida. There the children were met by three Palestinian police “security coordination” jeeps, which took them to their police station. The Palestinian police gave them food and asked all those who had thrown stones to raise their hand. All the hands went up.
The parents were called to come to the station to collect the children. Ahmed’s parents and those of four other youngsters did not show up. Those five children were driven home in a car of the Palestinian Ministry of Education. Their worried parents were waiting for them.
Hala says she is not angry at her son. She only asked him not to cry the next time he is arrested by soldiers. “We are used to it,” she says, adding that her son had a dream about the arrest that night.
The IDF Spokesman’s Office provided the following statement in response to a query from Haaretz: “Last Wednesday, March 20, 2013, Palestinian minors threw stones at a force that was manning the checkpoint in Hebron. An IDF force that waited in ambush close to the site caught the stone-throwers in action. The Palestinian minors were detained on the spot, and seven of them, who are above the age of 12, were taken for interrogation by the Israel Police. As the Israel Police interrogated the minors, the question about the non-presence of a parent/lawyer during the interrogation should be addressed to them.”
The day after the incident, Ahmed did not want to go to school, but was persuaded by his parents to do so. For one day he was a hero among the children: Ahmed, the released detainee. He did not enter the classroom that day, staying instead in the principal’s office. He wants to be a doctor when he grows up, like a few others in his extended family, he tells us. His mother says he is a good student and a good boy.
Ahmed has seven brothers and sisters. The five boys sleep in one room, on two beds and on mattresses on the floor. There is an old computer in the room, which is turned off; they do not have an Internet connection. Out in the street a young peddler, of the same age as Ahmed, can be heard hawking his wares. After school the boy sells halabi, a sweet homemade pastry oozing with oil, for half a shekel.
March 9, 2013 at 23:27 (DesertPeace Editorial, Ethnic Cleansing, Israel, Just Plain Disgusting, zionism)
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In 2007 the company established a major training facility and became Caliber 3 Co.
The company works in close cooperation with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)
in the field of Counter Terrorism. This includes high level training operations against
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The companies’ specialty is in developing emergency response systems.
These response systems are based on the specific community, its reactive force,
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There is no wonder that when the IDF needed a special anti-terror system for high risk areas,
it used Caliber 3 to plan and effectively execute this system.
Note: All the materials in this site are actual Caliber 3 training methods and facilities.
February 26, 2013 at 11:47 (DesertPeace Exclusive, Ethnic Cleansing, Gaza, Germany, Israel, Oppression, Palestine, Photography)
February 26, 2013 at 09:29 (DesertPeace Exclusive, Ethnic Cleansing, Israel, Racism, Social Media, zionist harassment)
February 24, 2013 at 06:35 (Collective Punishment, DesertPeace Editorial, Ethnic Cleansing, Gaza, Genocide, History, Israel, Media Blackout, Palestine, zionism)
February 22, 2013 at 07:20 (Apartheid, Civil Rights, Collective Punishment, Corrupt Politics, Ethnic Cleansing, History, Israel, Palestine, Racism, zionism)
There are no shortage of parallels between oppression of blacks in the Jim Crow South and Israel’s present-day oppression of Palestinians.
The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama does a good job of showing what blacks endured before the civil rights victories of the 1960s. I visited there last fall and was especially struck by one particular image — a 1926 map of the small and isolated patches of Birmingham where city zoning regulations allowed blacks to live.
What struck me was the similarity of this map to maps of the isolated patches of the West Bank including East Jerusalem where Palestinians are allowed to live. The map then made me think about other similarities between the oppression of blacks in the Jim Crow South and Israel’s present-day oppression of Palestinians.
The methods for keeping blacks within their enclaves in Birmingham were more direct and brutal than the redlining agreements among banks and realtors that maintained a de factosegregation in the North. Municipal zoning laws in Birmingham prevented sales to blacks outside designated areas, and if a black person somehow acquired a house outside the designated area, even if just across the street, the house would be blown up.
Similarly, the Israeli legal system keeps Palestinians within restricted areas of East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the West Bank. Palestinians living outside those areas have been evicted and their homes destroyed or occupied by Jewish settlers. Eighteen thousand Palestinian homes have been destroyed by Israel since 1967, according to theIsraeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
The black areas and white areas of Birmingham were very different physically. The black areas often lacked municipal amenities or services such as street lighting, paved streets, sidewalks, garbage collection and sewers that the white areas had. Similarly, the Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem often lack these same basic facilities and services, and the differences between Palestinian areas and those reserved for Israeli settlers are clear to all.
Suppression of the human rights of blacks in the South was maintained by both “legal” and extralegal means. State and municipal Jim Crow laws restricted residence, use of public facilities, use of public transport, interracial marriage and other aspects of life in the South. White courts and police forces enforced these laws and the whole system of segregation. Arbitrary arrests under vagrancy laws yielded large numbers of black prisoners (who were often forced to do hard labor). Nonviolent civil rights marches and protests were met with police and state National Guard violence.
Similarly, Israeli control over the lives of Palestinians is maintained by a system of laws, courts, police and Israeli military that discriminates against Palestinians. Laws restrict where Palestinians can live, where they can travel, what roads they can travel on, and whether they can live with their spouse in another part of the country. Permits to travel from the West Bank to East Jerusalem for work are tightly controlled and dependent on “good” behavior.
“Administrative detentions” have led to the indefinite incarceration of thousands of Palestinians without trials. The Israeli military meets unarmed protests against theseparation wall and the taking of Palestinian land with violence.
Black compliance with the system of segregation in the South was ensured by extralegal as well as legal means, including economic threats, harassment of various sorts, and extreme violence. More than 5,000 lynchings were recorded between 1882 and 1959, and many beatings and killings went unrecorded. Violence against blacks increased as the civil rights movement grew in strength during the 1950s and 1960s. In one year alone 30 black homes and churches were bombed in Birmingham. The white-controlled legal system only rarely prosecuted white-on-black violence.
Similarly, harassment and violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank including East Jerusalem occurs almost every day. The settlers try to force Palestinians off their land or to leave the region entirely. The settlers threaten or attack children on their way to school and shepherds in the fields. Palestinian land, wells and olive groves are occupied. The Israeli military protects the settlers, and the Israeli legal system only rarely prosecutes settler harassment or violence.
Blacks in the Jim Crow South had no control over the governments that oppressed them and denied them their share of common resources. The 15th Amendment of 1870 gave blacks the right to vote, but that right was progressively taken away in Southern states following the failure of reconstruction. Discriminatory registration procedures were introduced and were enforced by violence. As late as the 1960s, many counties in the South, even those with black majorities, had no registered black voters. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally changed that.
Similarly, the four million or so Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, have no say in the government that in fact controls them. They cannot vote in the Israeli elections.
Palestinians did vote for a virtually powerless Palestinian government in 2006 in which a majority of seats in the parliament went to Hamas, a political party. The Hamas legislators were immediately arrested and jailed by Israel. Many were kept in prison for more than five years and the elected parliament has never been able to meet. Even if the parliament could meet, it would have only limited control over limited enclaves of the West Bank. Israel controls the water, electricity, borders, airspace, exports and imports of the enclaves, and the Israeli military enters the enclaves and arrests Palestinians at will.
Nonviolent methods such as marches, boycotts and direct actions are a critical tool for the success of any human rights movement, such as the American civil rights movement, that confronts a power structure with a monopoly on physical force. The civil rights movement in the United States maintained the practice of nonviolence to a heroic degree over many years, even in the face of violent repression from the Southern white power structure. Participants aroused the conscience of the rest of the nation and the world.
Similar methods are now of central importance for the Palestinian rights movement. Protest marches against the separation wall, “Freedom Rides” on Israeli-only public transit, and “camp-ins” on land illegally expropriated for Israeli settlements are becoming common now in Palestine. Internationally, boycotts of all sorts and divestment from companies that maintain and profit from the occupation of Palestinian land are taking hold.
The blacks in the American civil rights movement made their appeal to the federal government for redress of wrongs committed at the lower levels of state and local governments. The federal government was already formally committed to the rights of blacks through the 14th and 15th amendments as well as various Supreme Court decisions. They also had authority and power over local governments.
The aroused conscience of the nation and of the world finally forced the United States federal government to act. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson could not continue to present the United States to the world as the land of freedom and democracy when its own citizens were being beaten for asserting their freedom and their right to vote.
Here too there are parallels between the civil rights movement in the American South and today’s movement for Palestinian rights. Israel cannot indefinitely present itself as a law-abiding, humane and democratic state when it denies the human rights of the four million or so Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
The federal government of the United States shares responsibility for the continuing denial of Palestinian human rights, just as for many decades it shared responsibility for the denial of human rights to blacks in the Jim Crow South by not enforcing federal law. Now, and for many decades, United States diplomatic support has allowed Israel to violate international law with impunity.
The United States has blocked United Nations sanctions against Israel for such violations of international law as the occupation of Palestinian land, the colonization of the West Bank by placing settlers on that land, and the annexation of East Jerusalem, the historic home of Christian and Muslim Palestinians.
In addition, the United States federal government provides about $3 billion in military aid to Israel every year, and may be violating its own laws in doing so, as pointed out by a recent letter to Congress from 15 leaders of major American Christian churches (“Religious leaders ask Congress to condition military aid to Israel on human rights compliance,” Presbyterian Church USA, 5 October 2012).
The letter urged an “investigation into possible violations by Israel of the US Foreign Assistance Act and the US Arms Export Control Act, which respectively prohibit assistance to any country which engages in a consistent pattern of human rights violations and limit the use of US weapons to ‘internal security’ or ‘legitimate self-defense.’” The letter cited evidence for human rights violations on the part of Israel and for Israel’s use of US arms against Palestinian civilians.
The tactics for resisting segregation brought significant changes for blacks in the South. Hopefully, with commitment and perseverance, similar methods may someday accomplish the same for Palestinians.
*Curtis Bell is a peace activist in Portland, Oregon. He is a member of the board of Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East, an organization that works for Palestinian rights within the Unitarian Universalist denomination.
Written FOR
February 19, 2013 at 08:35 (Ethnic Cleansing, Eyewitness Report, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Photography, War Crimes)
Award-Winning Photo Shares
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Paul Hansen of Sweden, a photographer working for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter,
poses holding his picture that won the World Press Photo of the year for 2012, at Dagens Nyheter’s
office in Stockholm Feb. 15, 2013. (photo by REUTERS/Fredrik Sandberg/Scanpix)
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By: Dalia Hatuqa*
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On the evening of Nov. 19, a bomb dropped by an Israeli aircraft struck the Jabalya refugee camp home of the Hijazi family, tearing it down and killing Fouad Hijazi and two of his infant sons. This horror story was one of many told by neighbors and loved ones, and documented by Human Rights Watch (HRW) (among other groups) in the aftermath of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza last year. In addition to crushing Fouad and his two sons — Mohamed, 4, and 2-year-old Sohaib — the bomb that leveled the two-story cinderblock house wounded Fouad’s wife, Amna, and the rest of their children.
The aftermath of this tragedy was documented by Swedish photographer Paul Hansen, who captured the funeral procession taking the two toddlers to their burial site. The picture, which shows weeping men holding the children shrouded in white cloth with nothing showing but their listless faces, earned Hansen the 2012 World Press Photo award. Hansen’s picture, one of the many searing images of the eight-day war in Gaza, was taken just one day after the Hijazis were killed, as their bodies were marched through the neighborhood to the cemetery and as their mother lay in an intensive care unit, unable to receive or be consoled by mourners and now homeless.
A staff photographer for Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter newspaper, Hansen submitted the image as just one of more than 103,000 photos sent by 5,666 photographers from 124 countries. Awards in nine themed categories were given to 54 photographers from 32 countries under what is widely known as one of the most prestigious prizes in photojournalism.
Hansen’s picture is telling: Out of last year’s 165 Palestinians killed throughout Israel’s “Operation Pillar of Defense,” at least 33 were children, according to numbers provided by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. During the November onslaught, “several Israeli missiles and a bomb struck civilians and civilian objects, such as houses and farm groves, without any apparent military objective,” said Human Rights Watch, which determined earlier this week that these air strikes were in violation of the laws of war.
Cameras did not capture many of the deaths during that time. Of these, HRW mentions “three men in a truck carrying tomatoes in Deir al-Balah and a science teacher who was sitting in his front yard with his 3-year-old son on his lap, talking to an acquaintance — only the toddler survived, but was seriously wounded.” Israeli-manned drone attacks also killed a 79-year-old man and his 14-year-old granddaughter in the family’s olive grove in Abasan, and a young woman in her backyard in the town of Khuza’a.
On Nov. 18, an attack on a Gaza City house led to the death of 12 people, the single largest number of Palestinians killed in a single incident throughout the war. One day before the Hijazi family tragedy struck, an Israeli bomb leveled the three-story house of the Dalu family, killing ten of its members and two neighbors. Of the family, one man, five women, four children, a grandson and grandmother who lived next door were killed, according to HRW. The strike only spared a 16-year-old, who survived the attack, in addition to the head of the household and his son, who had gone out to buy food.
Gaza was still reeling from this tragedy (the bodies of two of the victims — Yara and Mohamed Al Dalu — were not recovered until Nov. 22) when the Hijazi family was struck. The harrowing retrieval of the bodies of Fouad, Mohamed and Sohaib Hijazi was captured on video. According to HRW, no one knew why their home was targeted. A neighbor was quoted as saying no shooting was ever heard in the neighborhood, and according to the group, the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center stated that the three victims were “non-involved” civilians.
The rights group’s field investigations of the incident found no evidence of any military objectives at the time of the attack. Under international law, individuals who deliberately order or take part in attacks which target civilians or civilian infrastructure — whether intentional or unintentional — are responsible for war crimes.
Labels by Israeli authorities aside, the human loss captured by Hansen’s camera is striking. The body of the father of two can barely be seen in a stretcher behind the grieving men carrying the dead toddlers. What Hansen’s camera left out was a story of a family that was at home, many of its members just watching television one November evening before they met their doom. Nur Hijazi, 18, relayed to HRW the events of that fateful night. “Mohamed and Sohaib were with my father in another room. The rest of the family was in another room watching TV. At 7:30, I saw the whole place turn red and suddenly the whole house collapsed on our heads.”
*Dalia Hatuqa is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor‘s Palestine Pulse. A print and broadcast journalist specializing in the Middle East, she is based in the West Bank city of Ramallah and writes for several publications about politics, the economy, culture, art and design.
Written FOR
February 18, 2013 at 07:42 (anti-Semitism, DesertPeace Editorial, Ethnic Cleansing, Gaza, Hasbara, Israel, Palestine, Photography, War Crimes, zionist harassment, zionist Slander)
February 15, 2013 at 12:32 (Ethnic Cleansing, Gaza, Genocide, Israel, Palestine, Photography, War Crimes)
Paul Hensen wins prestigious photojournalism World Press Photo award for picture of Palestinian child funeral procession in Gaza
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Hensen’s winning photo (Courtesy of: AFP)
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Full AP Report HERE
February 5, 2013 at 11:40 (DesertPeace Editorial, Ethnic Cleansing, Israel, Ramblings..., zionism)
February 3, 2013 at 06:22 (Collective Punishment, Corrupt Politics, Ethnic Cleansing, Hasbara, Illegal Evictions, Israel, Occupation, Oppression, Palestine, zionist harassment)
In December 2012, a Jerusalem court ruled to evict a Palestinian family from its Sheikh Jarrah home, where it had been living for decades, on March 1. The eviction suit, filed by the Justice Ministry’s Custodian General, was engineered entirely by far-right activists.
The Shamasna family of Sheikh Jarrah is one of several Palestinian families to have been evicted in recent years using a similar method.
The law enables Jews, but not Palestinians, to reclaim property they left behind enemy lines in 1948. A number of rightist NGOs have been acting vigorously in recent years to track down the Jewish heirs of properties in East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhoods and assist them in “releasing” the property, held in trust by the Custodian General. They then buy the property from the heirs or rent it to Jewish settlers.
The Shamasna family home, like many others in the predominantly Palestinian neighborhood, was built on land that belonged to Jewish families who had fled to west Jerusalem during the War of Independence. This method has raised much protest from both Palestinians and Jerusalem peace activists.
The Shamasna family – father Ayoob, 79, mother Fahima, their son, his wife and their six children – live in a tiny, shabby house that once belonged to Haim Ben Sulimani.
Sulimani’s granddaughter, Ashira Bibi, filed the claim to evict the Shamasna family with the help of rightist activist Aryeh King, who was number four on Otzma Leyisrael’s ticket. Bibi was represented in the court hearing by attorney Avi Segal, from Yitzhak Mina’s law firm, which often represents rightist NGOs against Palestinians.
Before filing the claim, Bibi and King asked the Custodian General to register the house in the heirs’ name. The process was almost completed in 2008. But then, says the Shamasnas’ attorney, Mohand Jabara, the plaintiffs decided to halt the process in order to be able to ask the court to evict the Palestinian family in the State of Israel’s name rather than their own.
Jabara suspects this move was intended to impress the Jerusalem District Court. “They had all the documents to take over the property but they wanted to keep it in the state’s name,” Jabara says.
“It makes a bigger impression when you ask the court in the state’s name to evict Palestinians,” he says.
The Justice Ministry responsed that it was convinced the verdict was accurate, regardless of the plaintiffs’ identity. But the Magistrate Court, which heard the case initially, attributed importance to the fact that the party demanding to evacuate the house was the state.
“The court has been faced with a difficult question,” wrote Magistrate Anna Schneider in her ruling. “On the one hand the plaintiff, an administrative authority presenting apparently freely-made leases … and on the other side the respondent, an elderly, poor man who doesn’t speak Hebrew at all.”
The case for the state was run by a private law firm representing the settlers. Two courts rejected the family’s argument that they were protected tenants because they had been living in the house since before the Six-Day War.
The judges also rejected the family’s argument that they did not understand that, for decades, they were signing an unprotected lease, because the contracts were in Hebrew.
Two weeks ago, the family filed for permission to appeal against the eviction to the Supreme Court. If their request is denied, they are to be evicted on March 1.
“This is the new government’s first challenge regarding its policy in East Jerusalem,” says Peace Now’s Settlement Watch Director, Hagit Ofran. “Will it take responsibility for the house and show it is heading for peace, or let the settlers use the Custodian to advance their interests and lead to conflagration in Jerusalem?”
King dismisses the objections. “They made that argument in the Magistrate’s Court and were rejected,” he says. “The state authorized the lawyer to continue handling the case for the owners.”
“It makes no difference who runs the case; the house belongs to the heirs,” says Segal.
The Justice Ministry said: “The Custodian General managed the house in trust for the owners, who are private people. In 2008 the Custodian allowed the release of the property to the heirs for a management fee. The eviction suit was filed by attorney Mina, who represented the heirs after their ownership had been proven.”
