The Palestinians of Israel are poised to take centre stage
- Details
- Written by Seumas Milne Seumas Milne
- Published: 10 November 2010 10 November 2010
- Hits: 3559 3559
With the peace process going nowhere, common experience on both sides of the Green Line is creating a new reality
In a quiet street in the Sheikh Jarrah district of occupied East Jerusalem 88-year-old Rifka al-Kurd is explaining how she came to live in the house she and her husband built as Palestinian refugees in the 1950s. As she speaks, three young ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers swagger in to stake their claim to the front part of the building, shouting abuse in Hebrew and broken Arabic: "Arab animals", "shut up, whore".
There is a brief physical confrontation with Rifka's daughter as the settlers barricade themselves in to the rooms they have occupied since last winter. That was when they finally won a court order to take over the Kurd family's extension on the grounds that it was built without permission – which Palestinians in Jerusalem are almost never granted. It is an ugly scene, the settlers' chilling arrogance underpinned by the certain knowledge that they can call in the police and army at will.
But such takeovers of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah have become commonplace, and the focus of continual protest. The same is true in nearby Silwan, home to upwards of 30,000 Palestinians next to the Old City, where 88 homes to 1,500 Palestinians have been lined up for demolition to make way for a King David theme park and hundreds of settlers are protected round the clock by trigger-happy security guards.
Throughout the Arab areas of Jerusalem, as in the West Bank, the government is pressing ahead with land expropriations, demolitions and settlement building, making the prospects of a Palestinian state ever more improbable. More than a third of the land in East Jerusalem has been expropriated since it was occupied in 1967 to make way for Israeli colonists, in flagrant violation of international law.
Israel's latest settlement plans were not "helpful", Barack Obama ventured on Tuesday. But while US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian negotiations go nowhere and attention has been focused on the brutal siege of Gaza, the colonisation goes on. It is also proceeding apace in Israel proper, where the demolition of Palestinian Bedouin villages around the Negev desert has accelerated under Binyamin Netanyahu.
About 87,000 Bedouin live in 45 "unrecognised" villages, without rights or basic public services, because the Israeli authorities refuse to recognise their claim to the land. All have demolition orders hanging over them, while hundreds of Jewish settlements have been established throughout the area.
The Israeli writer Amos Oz calls the Negev a "ticking time bomb". The village of Araqeeb has been destroyed six times in recent months and each time it has been reconstructed by its inhabitants. The government wants to clear the land and move the Bedouin into designated townships. But even there, demolitions are carried out on a routine basis.
At the weekend, a mosque in the Bedouin town of Rahat was torn down by the army in the night. By Sunday afternoon, local people were already at work on rebuilding it, as patriotic songs blared out from the PA system and activists addressed an angry crowd.
The awakening of the Negev Bedouin, many of whom used to send their sons to fight in the Israeli army, reflects a wider politicisation of the Arab citizens of Israel. Cut off from the majority of Palestinians after 1948, they tried to find an accommodation with the state whose discrimination against them was, in the words of former prime minister Ehud Olmert, "deep-seated and intolerable" from the first.
That effort has as good as been abandoned. The Arab parties in the Israeli Knesset now reject any idea of Israel as an ethnically defined state, demanding instead a "state of all its people". The influential Islamic Movement refuses to take part in the Israeli political system at all. The Palestinians of '48, who now make up getting on for 20% of the population, are increasingly organising themselves on an independent basis – and in common cause with their fellow Palestinians across the Green Line.
Palestinian experience inside Israel, from land confiscations to settlement building and privileged ethnic segregation, is not after all so different from what has taken place in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. After 1948, the Palestinians of Jaffa who survived ethnic cleansing were forced to share their houses with Jewish settlers – just as Rifka al-Kurd is in Jerusalem today. The sense of being one people is deepening.
That has been intensified by ever more aggressive attempts under the Netanyahu government to bring Israel's Arab citizens to heel, along with growing demands to transfer hundreds of thousands of them to a future West Bank administration. A string of new laws targeting the Palestinian minority are in the pipeline, including the bill agreed by the Israeli cabinet last month requiring all new non-Jewish citizens to swear an oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state.
Pressure on Palestinian leaders and communities is becoming harsher. A fortnight ago more than a thousand soldiers and police were on hand to protect a violent march by a far-right racist Israeli group through the Palestinian town of Umm al-Fahm. The leader of the Islamic Movement, Ra'ed Salah, is in prison for spitting at a policeman; the Palestinian MP Haneen Zoabi has been stripped of her parliamentary privileges for joining the Gaza flotilla; and leading civil rights campaigner Ameer Makhoul faces up to 10 years in jail after being convicted of the improbable charge of spying for Hezbollah.
Meanwhile Israel is also demanding that the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah recognise Israel as a Jewish state as part of any agreement. Few outside the Palestinian Authority – or even inside it – seem to believe that the "peace process" will lead to any kind of settlement. Even Fatah leaders such as Nabil Sha'ath now argue that the Palestinians need to consider a return to armed resistance, or a shift to the South African model of mass popular resistance, also favoured by prominent Palestinians in Israel.
As for the people who actually won the last elections, Mahmoud Ramahi, the Hamas secretary general of the Palestinian parliament, reminded me on Monday that the US continues to veto any reconciliation with Fatah. He was arrested by the Israelis barely 24 hours later, just as talks between the two parties were getting going in Damascus.
The focus of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle has shifted over the last 40 years from Jordan to Lebanon to the occupied territories. With the two-state solution close to collapse, it may be that the Palestinians of Israel are at last about to move centre stage. If so, the conflict that more than any other has taken on a global dimension will have finally come full circle.
Injustice anywhere . . .
- Details
- Written by Martin Luther King Jr., Martin Luther King Jr.,
- Published: 10 November 2010 10 November 2010
- Hits: 2419 2419
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Moral Implications of Doing Business With Israel
- Details
- Written by Peter Miller, AUPHR Peter Miller, AUPHR
- Published: 10 November 2010 10 November 2010
- Hits: 6049 6049
Recently, Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski signed of a Memorandum of Cooperation for business development between the State of Oregon and the State of Israel.[i]This despite the fact that Israel is widely know around the world to be committing serious human rights violations and racial discrimination against the Palestinian civilian population, both inside Israel and inside the occupied territories. Unfortunately, these facts are less well known in the United States. The decision to do business with Israel is fraught with the moral implications and simply ignoring them is itself an immoral choice. Doing business with Israel makes the State of Oregon complicit in helping to sustain and normalize Israel's occupation and discriminatory practices. In addition to violations of various U.N. resolutions and International laws, the State of Oregon may find that the government of Israel and businesses within Israel do not comply with important state or federal equal employment opportunity laws and laws against racial discrimination. Finally, situations of injustice are inherently unstable and not only carry serious moral risk but make for serious business risk.
Wyden third highest recipient of pro-Israel PAC money this election cycle.
- Details
- Written by AUPHR AUPHR
- Published: 10 November 2010 10 November 2010
- Hits: 3437 3437
Our hats off to newly re-elected Senator Ron Wyden who was the third highest recipient of pro-Israel PAC money this election cycle.
According to OpenSecrets.org, Wyden received $192,531 pro-Israel pac money.
The top five are:
| Kirk, Mark (R-IL) | House |  $477,698 |
| Reid, Harry (D-NV) | Senate |  $195,555 |
| Wyden, Ron (D-OR) | Senate | $192,531 |
| Inouye, Daniel K (D-HI) | Senate | $186,100 |
| Cantor, Eric (R-VA) | House | $176,000 |
Wyden is a rather quiet supporter of Israel's policies. However, he is on the board of advisors of the Israel Project, an organization that attempts to spin information to support Israel's policies, make excuses for Israel's actions, and support a hard-line against Iran. But if you ever hear Wyden speak about Palestinians, there is no doubt that he is dismissive of their human rights and considers their occupied lands to simply be "disputed" territory.
Israeli plans to build hundreds more homes in West Bank settlement risk US anger
- Details
- Written by Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
- Published: 09 November 2010 09 November 2010
- Hits: 3406 3406
Proposal for new homes in Ariel reported to be at advanced stage, needing only approval of local planning and building committee
[PHOTO: Ariel settlements Preparatory work is carried out on a construction site in the Ariel settlement in September this year. Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images]
Israel today risked provoking fresh US anger when a plan to build 800 new homes in the West Bank settlement of Ariel was revealed hours after the Obama administration expressed "deep disappointment" at the approval of more than 1,300 new Jewish homes in East Jerusalem.
The plan for the new homes, in an area of Ariel close to the Palestinian town of Salfit, was reported to be at an advanced stage, needing only the approval of the local planning and building committee.
The disclosure drew a furious reaction from the Palestinians, who said it was time for the international community to immediately recognise a Palestinian state on the pre-occupation 1967 borders.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians' chief negotiator, said: "Once more, at the moment when we expected Prime Minister Netanyahu to announce a full settlement freeze ... he has sent Palestinians and the US administration a clear message that Israel chooses settlements, not peace."
The Ariel and East Jerusalem proposals came six weeks after the end of a 10-month partial freeze on settlement construction.
Since then, fledgling direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been on hold while the US tries to broker an extension to the freeze.
The Palestinians have said they will end negotiations without a further moratorium – but the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has so far not ceded to US pressure.
Netanyahu, who is currently in the US, will meet the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, on Thursday. She is expected to press further for Israel to agree to extend the freeze to prevent the collapse of the talks.
Following the disclosure of plans to build more than 1,300 new homes in Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, Catherine Ashton, the EU's foreign policy chief, said the plan "contradicts the efforts by the international community to resume direct negotiations, and the decision should be reversed".
Settlements threatened to make a two-state solution impossible, she added today. "The European Union will not recognise any changes to the pre-1967 borders, including Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties," she said.
Speaking in Indonesia, the US president, Barack Obama, said: "This kind of activity is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations."
The US state department spokesman PJ Crowley said yesterday: "We were deeply disappointed by the announcement of advance planning for new housing units in sensitive areas of East Jerusalem. It is counterproductive to our efforts to resume direct negotiations between the parties."
Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, also expressed displeasure over the proposal at a meeting with Netanyahu in New York.
In a statement, Ban said he was concerned at "plans for further settlements and plans to build more Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem", adding that it was "vital to break the current diplomatic stalemate, resume negotiations and produce results".
The East Jerusalem plans cover almost 980 new homes in Har Homa, 320 in Ramot and 32 in Psgat Ze'ev, all situated on the Palestinian side of the Green Line.
"This is a huge provocation by Netanyahu at a very sensitive time in the negotiation process," Hagit Ofran of Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group monitoring settlement activity, said.
"The timing ... is not accidental. Without the intervention of the government, the settlers will take the opportunity to promote every [construction] plan they can."
US frustration at Israeli foot-dragging on a fresh settlement freeze is mounting. Some diplomats fear Israel is stalling for long enough to get a substantial number of construction "starts" under way, which would then be exempt from any new moratorium.
A spokeswoman for Ariel refused to confirm or deny the plan to build new homes in the settlement. However, the settlement's mayor, Ron Nachman, reportedly told the city council last month that the new housing plan was "a very big thing".
He also said construction had resumed in other areas of the city, including the large industrial zone.
Ariel, home to almost 20,000 settlers, juts deep into the West Bank. Israel wants it to remain on its side of any border resulting from peace negotiations with the Palestinians. The Palestinians say it would jeopardise the territorial contiguity of a future state.
The US has given no guarantees to Israel on the future of Ariel under any peace deal, and some senior Israeli politicians admit it is in question.
Earlier this year, Netanyahu visited Ariel to plant trees in the settlement. "We want to strengthen the peace and co-existence with our neighbours – but this will not stop us from continuing with our lives here, where we'll continue to plant trees and to build," he said.
"Ariel ... will be an integral, inseparable part of the state of Israel in any future arrangement."
All settlements on occupied territory are illegal under international law. Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem is not recognised by the international community.