Conghaileach
2nd December 2002, 22:01
MACHINE GUNS AND OLIVES
Israel's Occupation of Palestine
Rodney Vlais <[email protected]>
28th November 2002
When first entering the remaining shell of the house in the West Bank
village of Madama, we thought that we had arrived too late. Stepping
over the rubble and observing that everything of value was stripped
away, we assumed the worst and that the Israeli military had already
done its work.
We were soon told that the missing doors and windows - and almost
everything else bar the concrete walls and floors- were due to the
householders’ own actions. Having received an eviction notice by the
Israeli military, they took everything of value from their home,
knowing that soon it was to be demolished without any recompense.
This was the family of a suicide bomber, and the Israeli Defense Forces
which would be more aptly termed the Israeli Offense Force (IOF)-
threatened to respond in ways that would be unthinkable in our own
societies. It did not matter that the family living in the house did no
harm ... punishment for the crimes of individuals is often extended to
villages and Palestinian society as a whole. In response to an earlier
suicide bombing that killed fourteen people in Tel-Aviv, the military
prevented Palestinian farmers throughout the West Bank from harvesting
their olive trees ... an act of collective punishment of innocent
people that was stopped by a successful challenge through the courts.
Madama is typical of many West Bank towns and villages surrounded by
Israeli settlements and disconnected by roadblocks and checkpoints.
Thevillage’s water supply once came predominantly from two wells
located a few hundred metres from an Israeli settlement ... until
settlers continuously dumped rubbish and chemicals into the wells.
Despite repeated attempts by the village to cover the wells, settlers
persisted in breaking into them to taint the village’s water supply.
Settlers have even shot at villagers attempting to retrieve water from
the wells. This is despite the fact that the water supply to the
village was established in 1928, with the settlement arriving far later
in 1983. Palestinians throughout the West Bank are generally denied
permission by the Israeli occupation forces to dig any new water wells,
of particular note in the context of this water-stressed region.
Villagers have consequently been forced to use a different well some
3kms away. As Palestinians are not permitted to drive on the major road
adjoining the village, accessing this water requires a two hour trip
with donkeys carrying water bags back to the village.On some occasions,
Israeli military at checkpoints have even emptied the water bags,
resulting in villagers returning empty-handed.
Villagers in Madama have been exposed to other forms of suffering quite
common throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. One young man, despite
being seriously ill, was refused passage in a Palestinian taxi past a
military checkpoint through to Nablus ...until he died, after which the
vehicle was permitted to pass. In another situation an ill pregnant
woman was kept at a checkpoint for one and half hours, until her baby
had also died.
Ambulances carrying seriously ill people are often detained at
checkpoints and have in some situations been fired upon by the IOF. In
Jenin, a man with two amputated limbs and suffering from kidney disease
was forced out of the ambulance and detained for ten hours.
The lack of international media attention to these atrocities is
startling, even when it involves injury or death to internationals. A
United Nations worker was recently killed by IOF fire,bleeding to death
as an ambulance was refused to take the injured man through the front
door of the office in which he was shot. While one would think that
this would be a major news item in the press, the Washington Post
printed an article on the man's death on page 34 of the newspaper.
SETTLING THE ISSUE
Like so many other villages and towns, Madama has become the victim of
Israeli settlements which are encroaching throughout the West Bank and
Gaza, having already appropriated some 50,000 acres of land. The
number of these settlements has doubled since the 1993 Oslow accords.
When one thinks of theword ‘settlement’an image typically comes to mind
of temporary housing structures that are ready to be relocated to a
different area. One look through the folding hills of this sacred land
presents a very different picture ... a landscape dotted with firmly
established and densely populated Israeli mini-towns, with rings of
multi-story apartment blocks jutting out from the tops of hills and
small plateaus overlooking valleys. At night, the horizon is littered
with lights from these ‘settlements’, making parts of the West Bank
appear as one big suburban scrawl.
A settlement sometimes begins with a number of Israeli families
illegally claiming land in areas beyond the Israeli border. After some
temporary ‘disquiet’ expressed by the Israeli authorities, the
settlement is permitted to stay and attracts a wide range of
infrastructure services sewerage, public transport, paved roads and all
the features of a modern suburban satellite city. The settlements have
their own private armed security (with automatic rifles and machine
guns) and checkpoints, and may appropriate the land of Palestinian
landowners without objection by the Israeli government, and without
compensation. One farmer told of losing
40,000 square metres of land - occupied by his family for more than 300
years and formally registered with the British in the late 1930’s - to
an encroaching Israeli settlement.
Combined with checkpoints that deny Palestinian access to many of the
major roads connecting their towns and villages, these expanding
settlements are dividing Palestinian territory into some 200
increasingly isolated enclaves. Settlers are provided with economic
inducements by the Israeli government to relocate, and establish
themselves in a lifestyle that is hardly temporary. Workers commute to
Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities and in turn are provided with a range
of services from within Israel.
The impact of the settlements on Palestinian life is exemplified by
disruption to local olive harvests. Palestinians have relied on olive
harvesting for over 10% of their GrossDomestic Product,and the harvests
are also symbolically important in a significant psychological way ~
they represent the continuation of a connection with the land and
community-based lifeways through the generations. Not only have
150,000 olive and other fruit trees been lost to Israeli settlements or
military establishments, but many Palestinian farmers have become
afraid to venture into their fields to harvest trees.
In several incidents,settlers wielding automatic weapons have descended
upon Palestinian farmers, confronting and on some occasions killing
them. Three internationals as part of a peace accompaniment campaign to
protect farmers and enable the olive harvest to proceed - including a
woman in her late sixties and a man in his mid seventies -were recently
assaulted by settlers resulting in hospitalization and significant
injuries. Many farmers have also had their olive trees burnt by
settlers, with the IOF or police doing little to intervene.
While many settlers do not hold extreme views against the Palestinians
– a survey has shown that a significant proportion would be prepared to
leave their settlement if it was part of a solid peace plan and if they
were sufficiently compensated – the violence against farmers combined
with the military occupation has had a major impact on the olive
harvests. Due to the difficultly in exporting olives (the roads are
often unavailable for Palestinians to transport their olive oil to a
port or airport), and the shrinking of internal demand as a result of
the increasing poverty, in some areas the price of a kilogram of olives
has dropped 40% in the past two years.
THE NEW WALL OF APARTHEID
The stealing of Palestinian land by the Israeli government is further
seen in the formation of a giant ‘security’ wall dividing the West Bank
and Israel … a wall that is not being built on the dividing line.
This massive wall, with military turrets, security sensors and
paralleled by rings of barbed wire, a military road and a deep trench,
is actually being built within Palestinian territory, in some places 6
or 7kms in from the dividing line. In some areas, the wall and
accompanying features will be one hundred metres in width.
In the village of Jayyous, for example, at least 150 greenhouses
in addition to 7 water wells will either be destroyed or will find
themselves on the Israeli side of the wall. Some 5% of the village's
land will be directly appropriated for the building of the wall, and a
further 70% will soon be cut off from the village through falling on
the Israeli side of the wall. It could hardly be a coincidence that
some of the most fertile and water-rich areas of the West Bank will
find themselves on the Israeli side of the wall, with Jayyous and
surrounding agricultural lands currently supplying 60,000 Palestinians
with fruit and vegetables.
Local protests against the building of the wall have seen
significant human rights violations by the Israeli military, such as
the severe beating of protestors. Tear gas, sound bombs, and rubber
and live ammunition have been used to intimidate the village, with
people from Jayyous openly discriminated against at the main checkpoint
to the regional city of Qalqilya, where they are generally refused
entry. In one protest against the wall, nine internationals were
arrested as they attempted to stand in the way of the military shooting
at Palestinian children, women and men who were fleeing the protest
area.
One morning from approximately 1am - when the electricity supply
is switched off in Jayyous - thirteen jeeps of soldiers invaded the
village, throwing rocks through windows to force people out of their
homes. While the excuse given by the military was to investigate a
stolen car, the timing and extent of the operation makes it most likely
that it was designed to terrorise and frighten villagers from
participating in further protests against the wall.
The wall, which will run for approximately 400kms along much of the
length of the West Bank, is in its early stages of construction but is
being built at a frightening speed. The imposing greyness of the wall
can currently be seen most starkly in Qalqilya, where eight metres
of featureless grey contrasts with people's homes only a few dozen
metres away. Farmers outside Qalqilya and Jayyous can only watch, cry
and wail at the uprooting of the olive trees from what was, only a few
weeks ago, their land.
CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
The system of checkpoints has made travel from town to town within
the West Bank a very complicated affair. While, for example, the trip
from Madama to the northern Palestinian city of Nablus used to take 12
minutes, it now takes two hours due to Israeli checkpoints preventing
the use of the road by Palestinians. Indeed, refused by one checkpoint
to proceed in the most obvious direction to our destination, the
Palestinian driver was redirected to an alternative route that
consisted of a 45 minute journey through hills and quarries, arriving
back onto the main road just a few kilometers past the checkpoint.
This is one of many examples where checkpoints seem less to be designed
to completely prevent Palestinians from traveling between towns, and
more to disrupt their lives by tripling or quadrupling their traveling
times.
Checkpoints have also been placed by the Israeli military at the
entrances of Palestinian cities. Here soldiers force Palestinians into
lines and at times make them wait for an hour or more to get through.
On the whim of the border police serving at the checkpoint, or if they
are ordered to discriminate against people from certain villages,
people may be refused entry. Whole cities may be closed for days or
weeks at a time to most who attempt to enter. Thousands of
Palestinians have their university studies seriously interrupted
because they are unable to attend their classes held in often-closed
cities such as Nablus.
Roadblocks alongside checkpoints and on the roads leading off from
major highways into Palestinian villages create further frustration.
Piles of rubble and trenches two or more metres deep make it impossible
for vehicles to pass ... ambulances included.
It is not surprising given the massive disruption that the
Palestinian economic situation has deteriorated considerably.
Unemployment is at 65 – 70%, with 22.5% of children chronically
malnourished. Israel’s per capita income is 18 times as high as that
of Palestine.
In addition to the major disruptions caused by settlements,
checkpoints and roadblocks, the actions of the IOF are grossly
disturbing to say the least. Curfews are adopted in several
Palestinian cities, in which local people risk getting shot if they
dare go outside in an attempt to lead normal lives.
Unarmed children throwing stones at tanks are regularly fired upon,
and sometimes killed. Schools and shops in cities throughout the West
Bank are riddled with bullet holes, and across both areas approximately
3,000 homes have been demolished in the past two years (over 9,000
since 1967). Soldiers trash homes and urinate on people’s property, as
part of their search to locate Palestinian resistance fighters ... and
equally as part of a deliberate process of collective punishment of
civilian populations. One readily sees the parallel with U.S. military
tactics, where the School of the Americas has taught several Latin
American regimes to quash resistance movements through terrorizing the
civilian populations from which they came.
When the IOF stormed into the Jenin refugee camp earlier this year,
over 60 refugees were killed in an operation that resembled the effects
of a major earthquake. Houses were flattened by bulldozers often
without checking whether anyone was trapped inside. The Israeli
government denied access to a United Nations investigation team into
the area … with the U.N. capitulating and writing a report of the
effects of the massacre based on reports that they researched over the
internet.
The IOF is causing incredible amounts of trauma. A survey conducted
last year in two neighbourhoods in the Gaza strip showed that almost
every child had witnessed shootings, and almost one quarter witnessed
family members being injured or killed. Approximately one-half had
acute symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, with the figure for
the West Bank estimated at 70% in a different study. An earlier 1993
study in Gaza of 1,200 children showed that over 90% had been tear-
gassed and over two-fifths beaten.
A LAND WITH PEOPLE FOR A PEOPLE WITH LAND
The myth that Israel and its surrounding territories was a ‘land
without people for a people without land’ is clearly not borne out by
the history of the region. Having origins through the Cannanites of
3,000BC and later peoples such as the Philistines, Palestinians have as
equal a right to a state in the region as do Israelis. The region
contains many sites of considerable historical and spiritual
significance, including Jeruselum as the third holiest city in the
Islamic faith. In 1988, 94% of the current land of Israel and
Palestine was occupied by Muslims and Christians, and even as late as
1929 this figure was 82%.
The rule over Palestine by the Ottoman Empire ended in the First
World War, when Britain and France promised that Palestine would be
given its own territorial state in return for military help from the
Arabs. In 1917 Britain produced the Balfour declaration which promised
independent states for both Palestine and Israel ... but tensions grew
as it became clear that the plan was not well thought out. Two decades
of uncertainty simmered tensions as increasing numbers of Jewish
immigrants (who were initially in vastly fewer numbers than the
Palestinians living on the land) entered into the region, and terrorist
activities were committed by both sides.
In 1947, the United Nations drew up a partition plan that
suggested assigning 45% of the overall territory to the Palestinians
and the rest for the formation on an Israeli state ... having 65% of
the region’s population, this was opposed by the Palestinian people.
When events turned rapidly towards the formation of Israel during the
next year, 700,000 Palestinians became refugees as the Israeli military
took siege to Palestinian towns and cities such as Jaffa. Palestinian
refugees have lived in crowded conditions since then, such as in Tul
Karem where 17,000 people are crammed into a camp of only a few square
kilometres.
Although not accepted in 1947 by the Palestinians, the partition
plan provides a benchmark from which to compare the situation today.
The partition plan assigned the whole of the West Bank (a region
immediately to the west of the Jordan river) and the Gaza strip (a
densely populated territory bordering Egypt in the south of Palestine)
in addition to other areas to the Palestinians. Currently, 42% of the
West Bank is occupied by Israeli settlements, in addition to other vast
areas controlled by the Israeli military ... including a significant
proportion of the road network that Palestinians are not permitted to
use. Israel controls 40% of the Gaza strip in which approximately
7,000 settlers live, compared to 1.2 million Palestinians squeezed into
the remaining 60%. In negotiations over the past ten years,
Palestinians have been resigned to calling for only 22% of historical
Palestine to be used to form a Palestinian state.
The first intifada or uprising against Israeli occupation of
Palestine from 1987 to 1992 saw mainly nonviolent means and mass
demonstrations to call for an end to occupation. It ended with the
1993 Oslo accords which, despite considerable Palestinian concessions
in agreeing to focus only on this 22%, could have led to a peaceful
resolution if not for the assassination by a right-wing extremist of
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in 1995.
A renewed attempt at peace was made in 2000 (despite the previous
two years representing the greatest growth of Israeli settlements),
with meetings being held by Ehud Barak (the then Israeli Prime
Minister) and Yasser Arafat well beyond the failure of Bill Clinton to
stitch an end to the conflict. The controversial visit by right-wing
Israeli (then)opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Al Aqsa mosque in
the Muslim quarter of the old city area of Jeruselum later that year
sparked off the second and current intifada, severing the peace talks.
Since then, over 1800 Palestinians and 600 Israelis have died,
including over 250 and 75 children respectively. In a recent report,
Amnesty International has condemned the killing of children by both
groups. It found that the majority of Palestinian children killed this
year by the IOF was the result of the latter randomly opening fire, or
from shelling and bombing residential neighbourhoods in Palestinian
cities and villages.
With Sharon now in power, the last two years has seen a marked
worsening of the conflict and renewed suffering for both the
Palestinian people and Israelis affected by the suicide bombings.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had previously survived by
living in or commuting to Israel to work in lower-paid jobs have been
replaced by labour from countries such as Thailand and the continued
influx of Russian Jews. Many of the over one million Palestinians who
remain in Israel face major discrimination in their day to day lives.
SHOOTING AT CHILDREN WAS ONCE CALLED TERRORISM
The new rhetoric of the ‘war against terrorism’ has only
strengthened Sharon’s hand in the right wing fundamentalist drive
against the Palestinians. In the same way as U.S. state terrorism
against countless civilian populations has been ignored in the fight
for the ‘values of the free world’ against evil, Israel’s atrocities
are covered up under the propaganda of a ‘backs to the wall’ country
fighting for survival. Many Palestinians fear that a U.S. military
invasion of Iraq will worsen the atrocities by the IOF, as the world’s
attention will be focused to the east of Israel.
Palestinians are an amazingly warm, generous and community-minded
people. Despite a long history of the most traumatic suffering
imaginable, they are somehow able to maintain a positive spirit and to
patiently live with a sense of dignity and normality. While suicide
bombings are acts of terrorism that clearly need to stop, the first
onus is on Israel to put an end to its occupation of Palestine, and to
end its acts of state-sponsored terrorism and collective punishment
that is traumatising hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.
This issue is not a case of two waring parties needing to come to
the table to bring about peace. There can be no peace with the massive
crimes against civilian populations incurred by the Israeli government
and military, backed by its international supporters. What is
happening here, in Palestine, is nothing less than the wholesale
terrorizing and traumatising of a civilian population. The world must
show compassion by demanding an end to the military occupation as a
precondition to peace ... as a vital step towards the relief of
suffering for both Israeli and Palestinian custodians of this sacred
land.
Despite the terrible effects of Palestinian suicide bombing, we must
wake up from the media spin presented to us of Palestinians as
terrorists. Imagine the desperation and despair that you would feel if
your home was invaded by the army of an occupying force at 1am in the
morning, with a rock flying through the window of your bedroom to mark
the soldiers' entry ~ imagine the fear you'd feel as your children, as
an act of resistance, demanded to walk to school despite the calls of
curfew and the likely response of tear gas and sound bombs by military
jeeps circling the streets ~ imagine much of the control over your life
being in the hands of occupying soldiers who will decide for you
whether you can get to work or the regional hospital on any given day ~
imagine the land held for generations by your family suddenly being
uprooted for settlements and military bases by the occupying force to
establish themselves.
This is happening to millions of Palestinians, day in, day out.
Rodney Vlais is an independent writer currently volunteering in
Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement. To learn more
about the situation and what you can do to help, see
www.palsolidarity.org and
www.palestinemonitor.org
Israel's Occupation of Palestine
Rodney Vlais <[email protected]>
28th November 2002
When first entering the remaining shell of the house in the West Bank
village of Madama, we thought that we had arrived too late. Stepping
over the rubble and observing that everything of value was stripped
away, we assumed the worst and that the Israeli military had already
done its work.
We were soon told that the missing doors and windows - and almost
everything else bar the concrete walls and floors- were due to the
householders’ own actions. Having received an eviction notice by the
Israeli military, they took everything of value from their home,
knowing that soon it was to be demolished without any recompense.
This was the family of a suicide bomber, and the Israeli Defense Forces
which would be more aptly termed the Israeli Offense Force (IOF)-
threatened to respond in ways that would be unthinkable in our own
societies. It did not matter that the family living in the house did no
harm ... punishment for the crimes of individuals is often extended to
villages and Palestinian society as a whole. In response to an earlier
suicide bombing that killed fourteen people in Tel-Aviv, the military
prevented Palestinian farmers throughout the West Bank from harvesting
their olive trees ... an act of collective punishment of innocent
people that was stopped by a successful challenge through the courts.
Madama is typical of many West Bank towns and villages surrounded by
Israeli settlements and disconnected by roadblocks and checkpoints.
Thevillage’s water supply once came predominantly from two wells
located a few hundred metres from an Israeli settlement ... until
settlers continuously dumped rubbish and chemicals into the wells.
Despite repeated attempts by the village to cover the wells, settlers
persisted in breaking into them to taint the village’s water supply.
Settlers have even shot at villagers attempting to retrieve water from
the wells. This is despite the fact that the water supply to the
village was established in 1928, with the settlement arriving far later
in 1983. Palestinians throughout the West Bank are generally denied
permission by the Israeli occupation forces to dig any new water wells,
of particular note in the context of this water-stressed region.
Villagers have consequently been forced to use a different well some
3kms away. As Palestinians are not permitted to drive on the major road
adjoining the village, accessing this water requires a two hour trip
with donkeys carrying water bags back to the village.On some occasions,
Israeli military at checkpoints have even emptied the water bags,
resulting in villagers returning empty-handed.
Villagers in Madama have been exposed to other forms of suffering quite
common throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. One young man, despite
being seriously ill, was refused passage in a Palestinian taxi past a
military checkpoint through to Nablus ...until he died, after which the
vehicle was permitted to pass. In another situation an ill pregnant
woman was kept at a checkpoint for one and half hours, until her baby
had also died.
Ambulances carrying seriously ill people are often detained at
checkpoints and have in some situations been fired upon by the IOF. In
Jenin, a man with two amputated limbs and suffering from kidney disease
was forced out of the ambulance and detained for ten hours.
The lack of international media attention to these atrocities is
startling, even when it involves injury or death to internationals. A
United Nations worker was recently killed by IOF fire,bleeding to death
as an ambulance was refused to take the injured man through the front
door of the office in which he was shot. While one would think that
this would be a major news item in the press, the Washington Post
printed an article on the man's death on page 34 of the newspaper.
SETTLING THE ISSUE
Like so many other villages and towns, Madama has become the victim of
Israeli settlements which are encroaching throughout the West Bank and
Gaza, having already appropriated some 50,000 acres of land. The
number of these settlements has doubled since the 1993 Oslow accords.
When one thinks of theword ‘settlement’an image typically comes to mind
of temporary housing structures that are ready to be relocated to a
different area. One look through the folding hills of this sacred land
presents a very different picture ... a landscape dotted with firmly
established and densely populated Israeli mini-towns, with rings of
multi-story apartment blocks jutting out from the tops of hills and
small plateaus overlooking valleys. At night, the horizon is littered
with lights from these ‘settlements’, making parts of the West Bank
appear as one big suburban scrawl.
A settlement sometimes begins with a number of Israeli families
illegally claiming land in areas beyond the Israeli border. After some
temporary ‘disquiet’ expressed by the Israeli authorities, the
settlement is permitted to stay and attracts a wide range of
infrastructure services sewerage, public transport, paved roads and all
the features of a modern suburban satellite city. The settlements have
their own private armed security (with automatic rifles and machine
guns) and checkpoints, and may appropriate the land of Palestinian
landowners without objection by the Israeli government, and without
compensation. One farmer told of losing
40,000 square metres of land - occupied by his family for more than 300
years and formally registered with the British in the late 1930’s - to
an encroaching Israeli settlement.
Combined with checkpoints that deny Palestinian access to many of the
major roads connecting their towns and villages, these expanding
settlements are dividing Palestinian territory into some 200
increasingly isolated enclaves. Settlers are provided with economic
inducements by the Israeli government to relocate, and establish
themselves in a lifestyle that is hardly temporary. Workers commute to
Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities and in turn are provided with a range
of services from within Israel.
The impact of the settlements on Palestinian life is exemplified by
disruption to local olive harvests. Palestinians have relied on olive
harvesting for over 10% of their GrossDomestic Product,and the harvests
are also symbolically important in a significant psychological way ~
they represent the continuation of a connection with the land and
community-based lifeways through the generations. Not only have
150,000 olive and other fruit trees been lost to Israeli settlements or
military establishments, but many Palestinian farmers have become
afraid to venture into their fields to harvest trees.
In several incidents,settlers wielding automatic weapons have descended
upon Palestinian farmers, confronting and on some occasions killing
them. Three internationals as part of a peace accompaniment campaign to
protect farmers and enable the olive harvest to proceed - including a
woman in her late sixties and a man in his mid seventies -were recently
assaulted by settlers resulting in hospitalization and significant
injuries. Many farmers have also had their olive trees burnt by
settlers, with the IOF or police doing little to intervene.
While many settlers do not hold extreme views against the Palestinians
– a survey has shown that a significant proportion would be prepared to
leave their settlement if it was part of a solid peace plan and if they
were sufficiently compensated – the violence against farmers combined
with the military occupation has had a major impact on the olive
harvests. Due to the difficultly in exporting olives (the roads are
often unavailable for Palestinians to transport their olive oil to a
port or airport), and the shrinking of internal demand as a result of
the increasing poverty, in some areas the price of a kilogram of olives
has dropped 40% in the past two years.
THE NEW WALL OF APARTHEID
The stealing of Palestinian land by the Israeli government is further
seen in the formation of a giant ‘security’ wall dividing the West Bank
and Israel … a wall that is not being built on the dividing line.
This massive wall, with military turrets, security sensors and
paralleled by rings of barbed wire, a military road and a deep trench,
is actually being built within Palestinian territory, in some places 6
or 7kms in from the dividing line. In some areas, the wall and
accompanying features will be one hundred metres in width.
In the village of Jayyous, for example, at least 150 greenhouses
in addition to 7 water wells will either be destroyed or will find
themselves on the Israeli side of the wall. Some 5% of the village's
land will be directly appropriated for the building of the wall, and a
further 70% will soon be cut off from the village through falling on
the Israeli side of the wall. It could hardly be a coincidence that
some of the most fertile and water-rich areas of the West Bank will
find themselves on the Israeli side of the wall, with Jayyous and
surrounding agricultural lands currently supplying 60,000 Palestinians
with fruit and vegetables.
Local protests against the building of the wall have seen
significant human rights violations by the Israeli military, such as
the severe beating of protestors. Tear gas, sound bombs, and rubber
and live ammunition have been used to intimidate the village, with
people from Jayyous openly discriminated against at the main checkpoint
to the regional city of Qalqilya, where they are generally refused
entry. In one protest against the wall, nine internationals were
arrested as they attempted to stand in the way of the military shooting
at Palestinian children, women and men who were fleeing the protest
area.
One morning from approximately 1am - when the electricity supply
is switched off in Jayyous - thirteen jeeps of soldiers invaded the
village, throwing rocks through windows to force people out of their
homes. While the excuse given by the military was to investigate a
stolen car, the timing and extent of the operation makes it most likely
that it was designed to terrorise and frighten villagers from
participating in further protests against the wall.
The wall, which will run for approximately 400kms along much of the
length of the West Bank, is in its early stages of construction but is
being built at a frightening speed. The imposing greyness of the wall
can currently be seen most starkly in Qalqilya, where eight metres
of featureless grey contrasts with people's homes only a few dozen
metres away. Farmers outside Qalqilya and Jayyous can only watch, cry
and wail at the uprooting of the olive trees from what was, only a few
weeks ago, their land.
CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
The system of checkpoints has made travel from town to town within
the West Bank a very complicated affair. While, for example, the trip
from Madama to the northern Palestinian city of Nablus used to take 12
minutes, it now takes two hours due to Israeli checkpoints preventing
the use of the road by Palestinians. Indeed, refused by one checkpoint
to proceed in the most obvious direction to our destination, the
Palestinian driver was redirected to an alternative route that
consisted of a 45 minute journey through hills and quarries, arriving
back onto the main road just a few kilometers past the checkpoint.
This is one of many examples where checkpoints seem less to be designed
to completely prevent Palestinians from traveling between towns, and
more to disrupt their lives by tripling or quadrupling their traveling
times.
Checkpoints have also been placed by the Israeli military at the
entrances of Palestinian cities. Here soldiers force Palestinians into
lines and at times make them wait for an hour or more to get through.
On the whim of the border police serving at the checkpoint, or if they
are ordered to discriminate against people from certain villages,
people may be refused entry. Whole cities may be closed for days or
weeks at a time to most who attempt to enter. Thousands of
Palestinians have their university studies seriously interrupted
because they are unable to attend their classes held in often-closed
cities such as Nablus.
Roadblocks alongside checkpoints and on the roads leading off from
major highways into Palestinian villages create further frustration.
Piles of rubble and trenches two or more metres deep make it impossible
for vehicles to pass ... ambulances included.
It is not surprising given the massive disruption that the
Palestinian economic situation has deteriorated considerably.
Unemployment is at 65 – 70%, with 22.5% of children chronically
malnourished. Israel’s per capita income is 18 times as high as that
of Palestine.
In addition to the major disruptions caused by settlements,
checkpoints and roadblocks, the actions of the IOF are grossly
disturbing to say the least. Curfews are adopted in several
Palestinian cities, in which local people risk getting shot if they
dare go outside in an attempt to lead normal lives.
Unarmed children throwing stones at tanks are regularly fired upon,
and sometimes killed. Schools and shops in cities throughout the West
Bank are riddled with bullet holes, and across both areas approximately
3,000 homes have been demolished in the past two years (over 9,000
since 1967). Soldiers trash homes and urinate on people’s property, as
part of their search to locate Palestinian resistance fighters ... and
equally as part of a deliberate process of collective punishment of
civilian populations. One readily sees the parallel with U.S. military
tactics, where the School of the Americas has taught several Latin
American regimes to quash resistance movements through terrorizing the
civilian populations from which they came.
When the IOF stormed into the Jenin refugee camp earlier this year,
over 60 refugees were killed in an operation that resembled the effects
of a major earthquake. Houses were flattened by bulldozers often
without checking whether anyone was trapped inside. The Israeli
government denied access to a United Nations investigation team into
the area … with the U.N. capitulating and writing a report of the
effects of the massacre based on reports that they researched over the
internet.
The IOF is causing incredible amounts of trauma. A survey conducted
last year in two neighbourhoods in the Gaza strip showed that almost
every child had witnessed shootings, and almost one quarter witnessed
family members being injured or killed. Approximately one-half had
acute symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, with the figure for
the West Bank estimated at 70% in a different study. An earlier 1993
study in Gaza of 1,200 children showed that over 90% had been tear-
gassed and over two-fifths beaten.
A LAND WITH PEOPLE FOR A PEOPLE WITH LAND
The myth that Israel and its surrounding territories was a ‘land
without people for a people without land’ is clearly not borne out by
the history of the region. Having origins through the Cannanites of
3,000BC and later peoples such as the Philistines, Palestinians have as
equal a right to a state in the region as do Israelis. The region
contains many sites of considerable historical and spiritual
significance, including Jeruselum as the third holiest city in the
Islamic faith. In 1988, 94% of the current land of Israel and
Palestine was occupied by Muslims and Christians, and even as late as
1929 this figure was 82%.
The rule over Palestine by the Ottoman Empire ended in the First
World War, when Britain and France promised that Palestine would be
given its own territorial state in return for military help from the
Arabs. In 1917 Britain produced the Balfour declaration which promised
independent states for both Palestine and Israel ... but tensions grew
as it became clear that the plan was not well thought out. Two decades
of uncertainty simmered tensions as increasing numbers of Jewish
immigrants (who were initially in vastly fewer numbers than the
Palestinians living on the land) entered into the region, and terrorist
activities were committed by both sides.
In 1947, the United Nations drew up a partition plan that
suggested assigning 45% of the overall territory to the Palestinians
and the rest for the formation on an Israeli state ... having 65% of
the region’s population, this was opposed by the Palestinian people.
When events turned rapidly towards the formation of Israel during the
next year, 700,000 Palestinians became refugees as the Israeli military
took siege to Palestinian towns and cities such as Jaffa. Palestinian
refugees have lived in crowded conditions since then, such as in Tul
Karem where 17,000 people are crammed into a camp of only a few square
kilometres.
Although not accepted in 1947 by the Palestinians, the partition
plan provides a benchmark from which to compare the situation today.
The partition plan assigned the whole of the West Bank (a region
immediately to the west of the Jordan river) and the Gaza strip (a
densely populated territory bordering Egypt in the south of Palestine)
in addition to other areas to the Palestinians. Currently, 42% of the
West Bank is occupied by Israeli settlements, in addition to other vast
areas controlled by the Israeli military ... including a significant
proportion of the road network that Palestinians are not permitted to
use. Israel controls 40% of the Gaza strip in which approximately
7,000 settlers live, compared to 1.2 million Palestinians squeezed into
the remaining 60%. In negotiations over the past ten years,
Palestinians have been resigned to calling for only 22% of historical
Palestine to be used to form a Palestinian state.
The first intifada or uprising against Israeli occupation of
Palestine from 1987 to 1992 saw mainly nonviolent means and mass
demonstrations to call for an end to occupation. It ended with the
1993 Oslo accords which, despite considerable Palestinian concessions
in agreeing to focus only on this 22%, could have led to a peaceful
resolution if not for the assassination by a right-wing extremist of
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in 1995.
A renewed attempt at peace was made in 2000 (despite the previous
two years representing the greatest growth of Israeli settlements),
with meetings being held by Ehud Barak (the then Israeli Prime
Minister) and Yasser Arafat well beyond the failure of Bill Clinton to
stitch an end to the conflict. The controversial visit by right-wing
Israeli (then)opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Al Aqsa mosque in
the Muslim quarter of the old city area of Jeruselum later that year
sparked off the second and current intifada, severing the peace talks.
Since then, over 1800 Palestinians and 600 Israelis have died,
including over 250 and 75 children respectively. In a recent report,
Amnesty International has condemned the killing of children by both
groups. It found that the majority of Palestinian children killed this
year by the IOF was the result of the latter randomly opening fire, or
from shelling and bombing residential neighbourhoods in Palestinian
cities and villages.
With Sharon now in power, the last two years has seen a marked
worsening of the conflict and renewed suffering for both the
Palestinian people and Israelis affected by the suicide bombings.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had previously survived by
living in or commuting to Israel to work in lower-paid jobs have been
replaced by labour from countries such as Thailand and the continued
influx of Russian Jews. Many of the over one million Palestinians who
remain in Israel face major discrimination in their day to day lives.
SHOOTING AT CHILDREN WAS ONCE CALLED TERRORISM
The new rhetoric of the ‘war against terrorism’ has only
strengthened Sharon’s hand in the right wing fundamentalist drive
against the Palestinians. In the same way as U.S. state terrorism
against countless civilian populations has been ignored in the fight
for the ‘values of the free world’ against evil, Israel’s atrocities
are covered up under the propaganda of a ‘backs to the wall’ country
fighting for survival. Many Palestinians fear that a U.S. military
invasion of Iraq will worsen the atrocities by the IOF, as the world’s
attention will be focused to the east of Israel.
Palestinians are an amazingly warm, generous and community-minded
people. Despite a long history of the most traumatic suffering
imaginable, they are somehow able to maintain a positive spirit and to
patiently live with a sense of dignity and normality. While suicide
bombings are acts of terrorism that clearly need to stop, the first
onus is on Israel to put an end to its occupation of Palestine, and to
end its acts of state-sponsored terrorism and collective punishment
that is traumatising hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.
This issue is not a case of two waring parties needing to come to
the table to bring about peace. There can be no peace with the massive
crimes against civilian populations incurred by the Israeli government
and military, backed by its international supporters. What is
happening here, in Palestine, is nothing less than the wholesale
terrorizing and traumatising of a civilian population. The world must
show compassion by demanding an end to the military occupation as a
precondition to peace ... as a vital step towards the relief of
suffering for both Israeli and Palestinian custodians of this sacred
land.
Despite the terrible effects of Palestinian suicide bombing, we must
wake up from the media spin presented to us of Palestinians as
terrorists. Imagine the desperation and despair that you would feel if
your home was invaded by the army of an occupying force at 1am in the
morning, with a rock flying through the window of your bedroom to mark
the soldiers' entry ~ imagine the fear you'd feel as your children, as
an act of resistance, demanded to walk to school despite the calls of
curfew and the likely response of tear gas and sound bombs by military
jeeps circling the streets ~ imagine much of the control over your life
being in the hands of occupying soldiers who will decide for you
whether you can get to work or the regional hospital on any given day ~
imagine the land held for generations by your family suddenly being
uprooted for settlements and military bases by the occupying force to
establish themselves.
This is happening to millions of Palestinians, day in, day out.
Rodney Vlais is an independent writer currently volunteering in
Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement. To learn more
about the situation and what you can do to help, see
www.palsolidarity.org and
www.palestinemonitor.org