Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine

The file in the state archives contains clear evidence that the researchers at the time did not paint the full picture of Israel’s role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem.

Arab refugees from villages near Tulkarm. Photo by Bettmann/CORBIS

The Israeli censor’s observant eye had missed file number GL-18/17028 in the State Archives. Most files relating to the 1948 Palestinian exodus remain sealed in the Israeli archives, despite the fact that their period as classified files − according to Israeli law − expired long ago. Even files that were previously declassified are no longer available to researchers. In the past two decades, following the powerful reverberations triggered by the publication of books written by those dubbed the “New Historians,” the Israeli archives revoked access to much of the explosive material. Archived Israeli documents that reported the expulsion of Palestinians, massacres or rapes perpetrated by Israeli soldiers, along with other events considered embarrassing by the establishment, were reclassified as “top secret.” Researchers who sought to track down the files cited in books by Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim or Tom Segev often hit a dead end. Hence the surprise that file GL-18/17028, titled “The Flight in 1948” is still available today.

The documents in the file, which date from 1960 to 1964, describe the evolution of the Israeli version of the Palestinian Nakba ‏(“The Catastrophe”‏) of 1948. Under the leadership of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, top Middle East scholars in the Civil Service were assigned the task of providing evidence supporting Israel’s position − which was that, rather than being expelled in 1948, the Palestinians had fled of their own volition.

Ben-Gurion probably never heard the word “Nakba,” but early on, at the end of the 1950s, Israel’s first prime minister grasped the importance of the historical narrative. Just as Zionism had forged a new narrative for the Jewish people within a few decades, he understood that the other nation that had resided in the country before the advent of Zionism would also strive to formulate a narrative of its own. For the Palestinians, the national narrative grew to revolve around the Nakba, the calamity that befell them following Israel’s establishment in 1948, when about 700,000 Palestinians became refugees.

By the end of the 1950s, Ben-Gurion had reached the conclusion that the events of 1948 would be at the forefront of Israel’s diplomatic struggle, in particular the struggle against the Palestinian national movement. If the Palestinians had been expelled from their land, as they had maintained already in 1948, the international community would view their claim to return to their homeland as justified. However, Ben-Gurion believed, if it turned out that they had left “by choice,” having been persuaded by their leaders that it was best to depart temporarily and return after the Arab victory, the world community would be less supportive of their claim.

Most historians today − Zionists, post-Zionists and non-Zionists − agree that in at least 120 of 530 villages, the Palestinian inhabitants were expelled by Jewish military forces, and that in half the villages the inhabitants fled because of the battles and were not allowed to return. Only in a handful of cases did villagers leave at the instructions of their leaders or mukhtars ‏(headmen‏).

Ben-Gurion appeared to have known the facts well. Even though much material about the Palestinian refugees in Israeli archives is still classified, what has been uncovered provides enough information to establish that in many cases senior commanders of the Israel Defense Forces ordered Palestinians to be expelled and their homes blown up. The Israeli military not only updated Ben-Gurion about these events but also apparently received his prior authorization, in written or oral form, notably in Lod and Ramle, and in several villages in the north. Documents available for perusal on the Israeli side do not provide an unequivocal answer to the question of whether an orderly plan to expel Palestinians existed. In fact, fierce debate on the issue continues to this day. For example, in an interview with Haaretz the historian Benny Morris argued that Ben-Gurion delineated a plan to transfer the Palestinians forcibly out of Israel, though there is no documentation that proves this incontrovertibly.

Even before the war of 1948 ended, Israeli public diplomacy sought to hide the cases in which Palestinians were expelled from their villages. In his study of the early historiography of the 1948 war, “Memory in a Book” ‏(Hebrew‏), Mordechai Bar-On quotes Aharon Zisling, who would become an MK on behalf of Ahdut Ha’avoda and was the agriculture minister in Ben-Gurion’s provisional government in 1948. At the height of the expulsion of the Arabs from Lod and Ramle, Zisling wrote in the left-wing newspaper Al Hamishmar, “We did not expel Arabs from the Land of Israel … After they remained in our area of control, not one Arab was expelled by us.” In Davar, the newspaper of the ruling Mapai party, the journalist A. Ophir went one step further, explaining, “In vain did we cry out to the Arabs who were streaming across the borders: Stay here with us!”

Contemporaries who had ties to the government or the armed forces obviously knew that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been expelled and their return was blocked already during the war. They understood that this must be kept a closely guarded secret. In 1961, after John F. Kennedy assumed office as president of the United States, calls for the return of some of the Palestinian refugees increased. Under the guidance of the new president, the U.S. State Department tried to force Israel to allow several hundred thousand refugees to return. In 1949, Israel had agreed to consider allowing about 100,000 refugees to return, in exchange for a comprehensive peace agreement with the Arab states, but by the early 1960s that was no longer on the agenda as far as Israel was concerned. Israel was willing to discuss the return of some 20,000-30,000 refugees at most.

Under increasing pressure from Kennedy and amid preparations at the United Nations General Assembly to address the Palestinian refugee issue, Ben-Gurion convened a special meeting on the subject. Held in his office in the Kirya, the defense establishment compound in Tel Aviv, the meeting was attended by the top ranks of Mapai, including Foreign Minister Golda Meir, Agriculture Minister Moshe Dayan and Jewish Agency Chairman Moshe Sharett. Ben-Gurion was convinced that the refugee problem was primarily one of public image ‏(hasbara‏). Israel, he believed, would be able to persuade the international community that the refugees had not been expelled, but had fled. “First of all, we need to tell facts, how they escaped,” he said in the meeting. “As far as I know, most of them fled before the state’s establishment, of their own free will, and contrary to what the Haganah [the pre-independence army of Palestine’s Jews] told them when it defeated them, that they could stay. After the state’s establishment [on May 15, 1948], as far as I know, only the Arabs of Ramle and Lod left their places, or were pressured to leave.”

Ben-Gurion thereby set the frame of reference for the discussion, even though some of the participants knew that his presentation was inaccurate, to say the least. Dayan, who as GOC Southern Command after 1949 ordered the expulsion of the Negev Bedouin, was not in a position to take issue with the prime minister’s statement that the Arabs had left “of their own free will,” despite being well aware of the facts. Ben-Gurion went on to explain what Israel must tell the world: “All of these facts are not known. There is also material which the Foreign Ministry prepared from the documents of the Arab institutions, of the Mufti, Jamal al-Husseini [He probably meant Haj Amin al-Husseini; Jamal al-Husseini was the Palestinians’ unofficial representative at the United Nations − S.H.], concerning the flight, [showing] that this was of their own free will, because they were told the country would soon be conquered and you will return to be its lord and masters and not just return to your homes.”

In 1961, against the backdrop of what Ben-Gurion described as the need for “a serious operation, both in written form and in oral hasbara,” the Shiloah Institute was asked to collect material for the government about “the flight of the Arabs from the Land of Israel in 1948.”

Nakba between the lines

The Shiloah Institute was an odd bird in Israel of the 1950s and 1960s. The idea of establishing a research institute akin to an Israeli version of Britain’s Chatham House was conceived by Reuven Shiloah, a Foreign Ministry official and former Mossad man. Shiloah died shortly after he finished planning the new institute. At the ceremony marking the 30th day after his death, the director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, Teddy Kollek, announced that the institute would bear Shiloah’s name and explained, “The institute’s purpose will be to study current problems at a scientific level … The institute will also make known to the world at large Israel’s views concerning the region.” The institute was established in conjunction with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense and the Israel Oriental Society ‏(the umbrella organization of the Middle East scholars‏). It was managed by Yitzhak Oron, a major in the Intelligence Corps. A study by Prof. Gil Eyal of Columbia University, proved that the institute worked closely with the IDF’s Intelligence Corps, which regularly provided it with intelligence documents. As a result, most of the papers written in the Shiloah Institute’s first years were classified and not accessible to the general public. Researchers who worked in the institute in the 1950s described their activities as largely secret and considered themselves civil servants in every respect. The institute’s studies had a reputation for thoroughness and quasi-academic quality. In 1965, the institute came under the auspices of Tel Aviv University, though its clandestine ties with the intelligence community continued for many years thereafter, ending in recent decades. In 1983, the institute changed its name to the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies.

For Ben-Gurion, the Shiloah Institute was the perfect place to conduct the type of study he wished to arm himself with. Still, his request to the institute to collect material about “the flight of the Arabs” seemed a bit unusual. Since the end of the 1948 War, Israel had dealt with the issue of the Palestinian refugees almost exclusively as part of the diplomatic struggle in the international arena; hardly any attempt had been made to investigate this aspect of the war. But there was at least one person in the Shiloah Institute who knew something about the Palestinian exodus of 1948.

Rony Gabbay immigrated to Israel from Iraq in 1950. After four years in a transit camp he obtained a B.A. and subsequently earned a doctoral degree in political science in Switzerland, completing his dissertation on the Arab refugee issue in 1959. However, on his return to Israel he found himself involved in a fierce controversy with the Ashkenazi academic establishment after he accused a well-known political science professor of racism.

“At that time, many like me, of Mizrahi origin, who were ambitious, saw that the door was almost closed to us, so many left for Canada and America,” he says in an interview from his home in Perth, Australia, where he has lived for more than 40 years. “I ended up here and I do not regret it in the least.” Before leaving Israel, Gabbay spent a few years at the Shiloah Institute as deputy director. He was there at the time Ben-Gurion’s request had arrived.

It is quite unlikely that Ben-Gurion knew the topic of Gabbay’s doctoral dissertation, since it had not gained much publicity in Israel. Had he known, he might have looked for an alternative candidate to write this study, which was to serve as the linchpin of Israeli public diplomacy. A perusal of the book Gabbay published based on his dissertation shows that, three decades before Benny Morris published his groundbreaking book, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” Gabbay’s study confirmed what Palestinian refugees had been claiming since 1948. “In many cases,” Gabbay wrote, “such as during the battle to open the road to Jerusalem, Jewish forces took Arab villages, expelled the inhabitants and blew up places which they did not want to occupy themselves, so that they could not be reoccupied by their enemies and used as strongholds against them.”

Writing in the late 1950s, Gabbay drew on British statistics, UN documents, the Arab press and a number of Israeli documents he was able to obtain. He had no access to official IDF documents or to the minutes of cabinet meetings, of which Morris availed himself in the 1980s. Gabbay became convinced that there had not been a policy of systematic expulsion of Palestinians coming from the top, but rather that Palestinians were evacuated at the direction of local commanders ‏(such as Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin‏), although this occurred in “many cases.”

Fifty-four years later, Gabbay is astonished to find that he was able to depict the events accurately with so few Israeli documents. “To this day I am still amazed that a researcher who was very methodical and very objective was able to read between the lines of open sources,” he says.

Ben-Gurion’s unusual request to the Shiloah Institute was accompanied by rare authorization to examine Israeli archives that were closed to the public. The institute’s researchers were allowed to peruse captured documents that had been collected by the Intelligence Corps and, more important material compiled on the subject by the Shin Bet security service, some of which had been transferred from the Haganah after 1948. Gabbay: “We were told, ‘We don’t know what to do with all this material, with this crate.’ So I went to Shin Bet headquarters for three or four days and went through all the material. After that they burned it, of course they didn’t give it to us.”

But there was one stack of documents that not even the Shiloah Institute team was allowed to read through. It consisted of the transcripts of the cabinet sessions during the war, in which the ministers discussed the Palestinians’ flight and, in some cases, their expulsion by IDF units.

‘Pure research’

The file in the State Archives contains a letter Gabbay had written on his research project after he completed the work, dated August 26, 1961, and addressed to the director general of the Foreign Ministry. Gabbay writes: “With the exception of isolated cases, the flight of the Arabs was due to the cumulative effect of a number of elements in the political, military, economic, social and psychological realms … Chapters 1-6 present documents, quotations and other material which prove the ‘contribution’ of this or that cause among the causes of the flight and underscore the blame of the Arabs. Thus, for example, there is a clear proof that the Arab states encouraged [Palestine’s] Arabs to flee, that the leaders fled [first], that atrocity stories were made up, and that Arab military leaders pressured to have villages evacuated from their inhabitants etc. The seventh and last chapter cites the documents which prove the efforts of the Jews to stop the flight.” Gabbay concludes the letter by expressing “my hope that this booklet will faithfully serve Israeli foreign policy.”

More than half a century later, Gabbay recalls the conclusions differently. As part of his research, Gabbay read Intelligence Corps transcripts of local radio broadcasts of propaganda aimed at the local population by the Arab armies that operated in Palestine. The broadcasts, Gabbay says, did not support the Israeli claim about the part played by the Arab and Palestinian leaders in the flight. “There was no mention of the local Arab leaders urging the Arabs to flee, that they ‘pushed them,’ as we claimed in our hasbara. I saw nothing like that.” It is noteworthy that Benny Morris, who researched the subject 20 years later, also found no directives by Palestinian leaders or Arab rulers calling on the villagers to leave.

In the conversation from Australia, Gabbay finds it difficult to explain the disparity between his letter of 1961 stating that the Arabs were to blame, and his account today. Only in Haifa, he says, did the local leadership urge the Palestinians to leave, even though the Jewish leaders there urged them to stay. That, though, was a singular case and even there, the calls to stay were undercut by the Haganah’s shelling of the Arab market, in which civilians were killed. Gabbay denies that his work at the Shiloah Institute prompted him to change the opinion he arrived at when he wrote his doctoral dissertation.
He insists that he and the others on the research team ‏(Yitzhak Oron and Aryeh Shmuelevich‏) were asked only to collect and summarize material.

“What we did at the Shiloah Institute was pure research. In other words, what we submitted, what we got our hands on and examined was what we wrote. There was no fear. We didn’t know, we didn’t think about public opinion, we didn’t consider anything like that.”

Prof. Gil Eyal, who has studied the connection between Israeli Middle East experts and the intelligence community, explained in a phone interview from New York that the research study on the refugees could in no way be viewed as an academic text. “Without going into the motives of those who were involved, it is clear to me that this study falls into the general category of public diplomacy ‏(hasbara‏). Public diplomacy, even when academics engage in it and make use of documents according to the research methods of historians, is still very different from academic research or from other forms of objective research. That is because in public diplomacy, what to look for in the files and what to prove is set forth in advance. Naturally, then, if there are other things in the file [that do not concur with the goals], they are simply not inserted into the study, because that is not what the authors wanted to find.”

Second try

Ben-Gurion, though, was not pleased with Gabbay’s report. Immediately after its completion he ordered his Arab affairs adviser, Uri Lubrani, to write a new study. Lubrani assigned the project to Moshe Ma’oz, now a professor of history specializing in Syria, then a student at the Hebrew University and an employee of the adviser’s unit. “I went into Middle East studies with the mind-set of ‘Know the enemy.’ It wasn’t until I did a Ph.D. at Oxford that things changed for me and I started to discover the Arab side, too,” Ma’oz says by telephone.

Ma’oz was assigned a number of researchers to assist him with the study, and received a budget. He started to collect dozens of documents, in Israel and from around the world. He interviewed Israeli and British officers as well as Palestinians who remained in Israel. The 150 documents and interview transcripts were cataloged meticulously and prepared as a file of evidence. Ma’oz notes that his findings were very similar to those of Benny Morris and pointed clearly to cases of expulsion, particularly in Lod and Ramle. “I don’t think I was biased or influenced by the boss,” he says, “but it is possible that I over-emphasized the issue of the flight. The dosage was different, because I was still under the influence of the nationalist conception in which we were educated at school and in the army.”

In fact, the documents in the file of the State Archives demonstrate the exact opposite. According to Ma’oz’s own telling of the documents, they ostensibly prove, without exception, that the Arabs fled of their own volition at their leaders’ orders. In December 1961, before embarking on the project, Ma’oz wrote to David Kimche, a senior Mossad official ‏(and years later director general of the Foreign Ministry‏), to ask for help in compiling the documents. “Our intention is to prove that the flight was caused at the encouragement of the local Arab leaders and the Arab governments and was abetted by the British and by the pressure of the Arab armies ‏(the Iraqi army and the Arab Liberation Army‏) on the local Arab population.”

In a letter of summation dated September 1962, which Ma’oz wrote to Lubrani after he had completed the task of collecting the documents, he noted that he had fulfilled the assignment, and proved what he had been asked to prove: “You assigned me to gather material on the flight of Palestine’s Arabs in 1948 which attests to and proves that: “A. Arab leaders and institutions in Palestine and elsewhere encouraged Palestine’s Arabs to flee, and the local notables, by being the first to flee, prompted the people to flee.

“B. The foreign Arab armies and the ‘volunteers’ abetted the flight both by evacuating villages and by their harsh attitude toward the local population.

“C. In a number of places, the British Army assisted the Arabs to flee.

“D. Jewish institutions and organizations made an effort to prevent the flight.”

Immediately after submitting the summary report, Ma’oz left the office of the Arab affairs adviser and went to Oxford to begin his Ph.D. studies. He was replaced by another M.A. student, Ori Stendel, who continued to write the study of the Palestinian exodus. Shortly after taking over from Ma’oz, Stendel met with Ben-Gurion, who described the project as a “White Paper,” referring to the reports by British commissions of inquiry in Palestine and elsewhere in the empire. “I remember Ben-Gurion saying something like, ‘We need this White Paper, because people are saying that the Arabs were expelled and did not flee,” Stendel recalls. “As far as I remember, Ben-Gurion said, ‘They did flee, but the truth has to be told. Write the truth.’ That’s what he said.”

Stendel continued to collect material for a short time. He is convinced that the study he and Ma’oz wrote is a scientific work that proves Arab leaders called on the Palestinians to leave, though it does not avoid uncovering the cases in which expulsion occurred. After all the material had been collected, Stendel was again summoned to a meeting with Ben-Gurion, who wanted a summary of the findings. “I told him that it is impossible to speak in terms of uniformity. There was no [organized] expulsion activity, on the one hand, but on the other hand it is impossible to say that we tried to prevent the Arabs from fleeing in all parts of the country. I told him that I had no doubt, for example, that there was an expulsion in Lod and Ramle, pure and simple. He asked me, and I remember being surprised by this, ‘Are you sure?’ I replied, ‘I wasn’t there, I can’t tell you, but according to everything we read and collected, an expulsion took place there.”

As we saw, the documents in the archive make no mention of Stendel’s assertion that the research project included documents attesting to expulsion. Stendel does not rule out the possibility that an attempt was made to play down such documents, but rejects the possibility that they were deliberately hidden. “There was no guideline to the effect that this would be a propaganda study, that things would be filtered in order to help with hasbara. In practice, that might be what happened … Obviously, we worked in the Prime Minister’s Office and we wanted to help Israel in its struggle, so it was natural that we would look for the truth to prove that we did not expel people. It’s definitely possible that that was the motive, but I don’t remember that Ben-Gurion or Lubrani said, ‘You should do this and that.’”

Stendel remains convinced that Ben-Gurion really did not know how the refugee problem of 1948 was caused, because he was busy with strategic affairs and did not take the time to deal with the refugees. The proof of this, he says, is that he asked a number of organizations to research the subject, so he would get a full picture. “If Ben-Gurion had decided on a policy, then there would have been a policy, and then also, let’s put it like this: I think the Arab minority in Israel today would be a lot smaller. That is why I think that Ben-Gurion did not exactly know. It’s possible that he authorized an expulsion in one case or another, when he was told it was important for security reasons; but my conclusion is that Ben-Gurion did not authorize a policy of expulsion, and so he wanted to know exactly what had happened.”

Most historians who have researched the subject paint a radically different picture. They present evidence that Ben-Gurion knew in real time about the expulsion of Palestinians and apparently authorized expulsions in a number of cases. In the absence of reliable information from the period, it is difficult to determine with certainty whether Ben-Gurion had actually persuaded himself that the majority of Palestine’s Arabs had left of their own volition, or did not even believe this himself but wanted history to believe it.

In the meeting about the refugees at the end of 1961, Moshe Sharett, then the chairman of the Jewish Agency, suggested a modern spin: to leak the material that would be collected to foreign correspondents so that they would publish it as “objective” investigative reports without revealing their sources. “We need to see to it that articles appear in the major newspapers,” Sharett said. “That means we need to draw up a plan for each [foreign] capital, decide on a ‘victim,’ who the man will be, provide him with all the required information and all the arguments, and ensure that extensive articles appear ahead of the General Assembly session, because this issue is again becoming one of the more urgent ones.”

Ben-Gurion apparently adopted this idea. In the office of the Arab affairs adviser, Stendel did as he was asked and approached Aviad Yafeh, who headed the Foreign Ministry’s information ‏(hasbara‏) unit. According to a letter from May 1964, the two agreed to make available the material that had been collected to a correspondent of one of the major foreign magazines, so he could write a series of articles about the “flight.” According to Stendel, the plan was never implemented.

Rose-tinted history

Even though the Ma’oz-Stendel report on “the flight of the Arabs” appears to be lost for all time, the file in the State Archives contains clear evidence that the researchers at the time did not paint a full picture of Israel’s role in creating the refugee problem. The story of how the study came to be written, juxtaposed to the way the authors see it today, reflects the evolution of Israeli society’s relationship with the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba. In the 1960s, no one dared to admit publicly that Israel had expelled Palestinians, whereas today, in the post-Oslo period and following the research by the “new historians,” the subject of Israel’s culpability is no longer taboo.

After rereading the file in the State Archives, containing summaries he himself wrote in the 1960s, Moshe Ma’oz sent me the following email: “At that juncture I basically shared the views of most Israeli Jews, and that of the establishment, that most Arabs fled because their leaders escaped first and that other Arab leaders instructed them to do so. On the other hand, I did mention that Jewish organizations requested Arabs to stay and not to leave, but I did not mention that many Arabs fled for [reasons of] panic, war, massacres, etc. and that in certain places they were deported by the army. Perhaps these facts did not appear in the materials or were not known or appreciated.”

Ma’oz, then, underwent a conceptual shift at Oxford. After returning to Israel he worked for the military government in the occupied territories, but says he identified more closely with the Palestinians than with the Israeli government. Finally, he was booted out of the military government by the chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, after stating in a television interview in the early 1980s that Israel should hold talks with West Bank leaders affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Most historians in Israel and abroad no longer dispute the fact that IDF soldiers expelled large numbers of Palestinians from their homes during the 1948 war, and banned their return after the war. However, the debate over whether this was a preconceived plan authorized by Ben-Gurion continues. File GL-18/17028 shows that throughout Israel’s 65 years of existence, the answer to the question of “What really happened?” varied according to who was responding. Still, it is unlikely that Gabbay, Ma’oz, Stendel and Lubrani lied knowingly. More likely, they wanted to deceive themselves and create a slightly rosier picture of 1948, a formative year that changed the history of both the Jewish people and of the Arab Middle East for all time.

Shai Hazkani, http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/catastrophic-thinking-did-ben-gurion-try-to-rewrite-history.premium-1.524308# , 16th May 2013

Shay Hazkani is a doctoral student in history at the Taub Center for Israel Studies at New York University.

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Dear Members

Many of you will have been disappointed when the programme, ‘Jerusalem: an Archaeological Mystery Story’ was pulled last week. Lord Tony Hall, Director-General of the BBC, has questions to answer – I emailed him tony.hall@bbc.co.uk as below:

Please could you offer an explanation for your decision to pull at the last minute, when the programme had been advertised in the daily paper, the programme ‘Jerusalem: An Archaeological Mystery Story’ which claimed, as indeed Shlomo Sand also claims (The invention of the Jewish People) that the exile of the Jews from Judea never actually happened.

Can you really uphold your claim that the BBC has no pro-Israeli bias?
If this is truly the case we are all greatly looking forward to a re-scheduling of the programme. Perhaps you could examine national myths in a series called ‘Digging for Truth?

The more of us who complain the better. Electronic Intifada has a good, if depressing piece on new appointments at the top of the BBC.

http://electronicintifada.net/content/apologists-israel-take-top-posts-bbc/12395

But other heads are appearing above the parapet: in a hugely significant letter to Baroness Catherine Ashton, 23 MEPs have called for the suspension of the EU – Israel Trade Agreement.
http://www.eccpalestine.org/23-meps-call-for-suspention-of-eu-israel-association-agreement/

and the ‘European Eminent Persons Group’, among them, former UK ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock has also issued a strong protest saying that Europe must initiate a change of policy and not wait for the US to lead.
Letter in full from Friends of Al-Aqsa:
http://www.foa.org.uk/news/occupation-being-entrenched-by-the-present-western-policy

And Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan is sticking with his plans to visit Gaza, despite John Kerry’s pleas to postpone his visit, which ‘‘will harm the peace process.’’
Another blow to US authority?
http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/5825-haniyeh-erdogans-visit-to-gaza-indicates-the-end-of-american-hegemony-?

Still in Gaza: there is a moving new release of a Youtube video about 13 year old Hamid Abu Dagga, shot while playing football outside his home, 5 days before the Pillar of Defense attack in November.

Killing Hamid: Starting the Gaza War

Why does Israel have a monopoly on the word ‘‘security’’? This film makes plain that living in Gaza is very dangerous indeed. It is very, very important
that we make repeated calls for the security of Palestinian children and adult civilians. Does our government believe that Palestinians have a right to security? Will they speak up for this right? seem to me to be questions worth asking.

In the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas has accepted the resignation of PM Salam Fayyad, the economist beloved of the US and western governments for his close co-operation with Israel. While many report the hope that this will lead to renewed reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, the Gaza street sees things differently.
Hazem Balousha, former BBC World Service correspondent, covers the views of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others, who primarily want a ‘redrafting of the national programme’ and a government free of any foreign intervention:
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/04/fayyad-resignation-palestine-reconciliation.html#ixzz2S29nTehG

and a more cautious and western analysis from the International Crisis Group, ( ICG) which discusses the shortcomings of the ‘straddling the fence’ policy in the West Bank:

Faced with two unappealing options, Palestinian leaders have tried to stand on a less perilous middle ground, threatening to inch slowly toward confrontation through steps that are not large enough to risk substantial costs but are too small to win much domestic favor.
http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/middle-east-north-africa/israel-palestine/op-eds/nathan-thrall-palestine-after-fayyad.aspx

And finally, to hunger-striker Samer Al- Issawi the victory: he has won the right to return to his home in Al Issawiyeh village, in the district of Jerusalem, after 8 more months in prison, and so has been able to end his hunger strike. Palestinian News reports the importance of this deal is that it includes an Israeli presidential amnesty that Issawi cannot be re-arrested and forced to serve the remaining 20 years of his former sentence.
http://mondoweiss.net/2013/04/refusing-palestinian-prisoner.html

Sally FitzHarris,
Secretary, Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine

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For the purpose of linking to the letter, the statement has been posted on the website of the European Council on Foreign Relations and can be accessed via the following link: http://www.ecfr.eu/blog/entry/time_is_running_out_for_a_two_state_solution

Sir Jeremy Greenstock can be reached for further comment at the following address: jqg@gatehouseadvisorypartners.com

Dear High Representative

We, the under-signed members of the European Eminent Persons Group on the Middle East Peace Process, are writing to you to express our strong concern about the dying chances of a settlement based on two separate, sovereign and peaceful states of Israel and Palestine.

The Eminent Persons Group is composed of a number of former Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ministers and senior officials of EU Member States who have decided to concert their efforts to encourage a lasting settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

We have watched with increasing disappointment over the past five years the failure of the parties to start any kind of productive discussion, and of the international community under American and/or European leadership to promote such discussion. We have also noted with frustration and deep concern the deteriorating standards of humanitarian and human rights care of the population in the Occupied Territories. The security and long-term stability of Israel, an essential objective in any process, cannot be assured in such conditions, any more than the legitimate rights and interests of the Palestinian people.

President Obama made some of these points during his March 2013 visit to the region, particularly in his address to the people of Israel, but he gave no indication of action to break the deep stagnation, nor any sign that he sought something other than the re-start of talks between West Bank and Israeli leaders under the Oslo Process, which lost its momentum long ago.

We are therefore appealing to you, and through you to the members of the Council of Ministers, to recognise that the Peace Process as conceived in the Oslo Agreements has nothing more to offer. Yet the present political stalemate, while the situation deteriorates on the ground, is unsustainable, given the disturbed politics of the region and the bitterness generated by the harsh conditions of life under the Occupation.

The concern of the European Union at this deterioration, clearly expressed in a series of statements, not least the European Council Conclusions of 14 May 2012, has not been matched by any action likely to improve the situation. The aspirations of Palestinians and Israelis and the interests of the European Union, prominently referred to in those Conclusions and in other relevant EU documents, cannot be met by the current stagnation.

It is time to give a stark warning that the Occupation is actually being entrenched by the present Western policy. The Palestinian Authority cannot survive without leaning on Israeli security assistance and Western funding and, since the PA offers little hope of progress towards self-determination for the Palestinian people, it is fast losing respect and support from its domestic constituency. The steady increase in the extent and population of Israeli settlements, including in East Jerusalem, and the entrenchment of Israeli control over the OT in defiance of international law, indicate a permanent trend towards a complete dislocation of Palestinian territorial rights.

We have reached the conclusion that there must be a new approach. Letting the situation lie unaddressed is highly dangerous when such an explosive issue sits in such a turbulent environment.

A realistic but active policy, set in the context of current regional events, needs to be composed of the following elements:

- a sharper focus on the essential need for a two-state solution, as the most likely outcome to offer lasting peace and security for the parties and their neighbourhood and the only one recognised by UN resolutions as just and equitable;

- an explicit recognition that the current status of the Palestinian Territories is one of occupation, with responsibility for their condition falling under international law on the occupying state;

- an insistence that Israeli settlements beyond the 1967 lines are illegal, must cease being expanded and will not be recognised as one of the starting points in any new negotiations;

- a stipulation that any representative political organisation with a valid claim to participate in negotiations must renounce the use of violence outside established UN norms;

- the renewal of efforts to establish a unified Palestinian representation of both the West Bank and Gaza, without which a comprehensive peace cannot be successfully negotiated and the absence of which serves as an excuse for inaction;

- the encouragement of reform of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, including representation of all the main Palestinian parties committed to non-violence and reflecting the expressed wishes of the resident

Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza;

- a vigorous international drive for the implementation of much improved humanitarian and human rights conditions in both the West Bank and Gaza, monitored by the United Nations, whatever the state of peace negotiations might be at any time;

- a reconsideration of the funding arrangements for Palestine, in order to avoid the Palestinian Authority’s present dependence on sources of funding which serve to freeze rather than promote the peace process;

- a clear and concerted effort to counter the erasing of the 1967 lines as the basis for a two-state outline. This should include a clear distinction in EU dealings with Israel between what is legitimate – within the 1967 lines – and what violates international law in the Occupied Territories;

- a clearer willingness within the EU to play a political and not just a funding role and to resume a more strategic dialogue with the Palestinians.

For all the good sense of EU statements on this issue over the years, the EU’s inactivity in the face of an increasingly dangerous stagnation is both unprincipled and unwise. European leaders cannot wait for ever for action from the United States when the evidence accumulates of American failure to recognise and promote the equal status of Israelis and Palestinians in the search for a settlement, as accepted in United Nations resolutions.

Later generations will see it as unforgivable that we Europeans not only allowed the situation to develop to this point of acute tension, but took no action now to remedy the continuing destruction of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. We regard it as essential for EU interests that the Council of Ministers and you take rapid action to correct this unacceptable state of affairs.

We are sending copies of this letter to Members of the Council of Ministers and to the US Secretary of State.

Members of the EEPG send you their respectful greetings.

Signed

Guiliano Amato, Former Prime Minister of Italy

Frans Andriessen, Former Vice-President of the European Commission

Laurens Jan Brinkhorst, Former Vice-Prime Minister of the Netherlands

John Bruton, Former Prime Minister of Ireland

Benita Ferrero-Waldner, Former European Commissioner and Former Foreign Minister of Austria

Teresa Patricio Gouveia, Former Foreign Minister of Portugal

Jeremy Greenstock, Former UK Ambassador to the UN and Co-Chair of the EEPG

Lena Hjelm-Wallén, Former Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden

Wolfgang Ischinger, Former State Secretary of the German Foreign Ministry and Co-Chair of the EEPG

Lionel Jospin, Former Prime Minister of France

Miguel Moratinos, Former Foreign Minister of Spain

Ruprecht Polenz, Former Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag

Pierre Schori, Former Deputy Foreign Minister of Sweden

Javier Solana, Former High Representative and Former NATO Secretary-General

Peter Sutherland, Former EU Commissioner and Director General of the WTO

Andreas van Agt, Former Prime Minister of the Netherlands

Hans van den Broek, Former Netherlands Foreign Minister and Former EU Commissioner for External Relations

Hubert Védrine, Former Foreign Minister of France and Co-Chair of the EEPG

Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Former President of Latvia

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Israeli settlers use six times more water than Palestinians — new report

While Israeli settlers in the West Bank enjoy abundant access to water, these young Palestinians have to carry bottles of water on a donkey.
(Issam Rimawi / APA images)

Israeli settlers in the West Bank consume six times as much water as Palestinians living nearby, the human rights organization Al-Haq has found.

In a new report released today, the organization exposes how Israel operates a system of water apartheid. Palestinian communities are strangled by Israel’s water policies through unlawful exploitation and appropriation of water resources, confiscation and destruction of water infrastructure and restriction of water supply, it says.

Al-Haq concludes that Israel’s water apartheid policies are based on three pillars. The first pillar concerns the distinction between two racial groups. The second pillar consists of the policies and practices that facilitate the segregation of the population into different geographical areas. The third pillar rests upon the use of “security” laws to “justify” inhuman acts against Palestinians.

It is important underscore that Israel’s water policies are part of an institutionalized system of domination and oppression.

Two distinct groups

The first pillar of water apartheid requires the distinction of two groups, which is a core element of the crime of apartheid. The first group are the Palestinians who over the years have been unwillingly sub-divided into Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and Palestinian refugees living in exile. All are Palestinian, because of their identity as the indigenous people of historic Palestine. In addition, their right to self-determination is internationally recognized.

The second group is composed of Jewish-Israelis, meaning “Israelis with Jewish identity,” an official category imposed and monitored by the State of Israel. It recognizes a person as a member of the global Jewish community, thereby granting certain rights, such as residency. The Basic Laws — the closest thing that Israel has to a written constitution — distinguishes the group as “Jewish nationals.” While Palestinians living in Israel can be citizens, nationality of Israel is reserved for Jews.

Segregation

Israel has used the distinction between the Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli groups to segregate the population into different geographical areas — the second pillar of water apartheid. Inside Israel, the distinction is used to grant citizenship to only those Palestinians who remained inside Israel after 1948. At the same time, Israeli citizenship is granted beyond its territory to all Jews, regardless of their geographical location, personal history or affiliation to the territory.

In the West Bank, the segregation policies have resulted in two parallel and unequal societies. A privileged Jewish-Israeli settler society lives in illegal colonies with good conditions, including an uninterrupted, abundant supply of water. By contrast, the indigenous Palestinian society is denied most of its basic rights, including sovereignty over its own water resources.

Palestinians are forcibly confined to land-locked enclaves with minimum water resources available. As a result, Palestinian communities are strangled and cannot fully develop as a group: denying such development is considered an inhuman act under the UN’s 1973 Apartheid Convention. The commission of inhuman acts against the subordinate group is the second core element of the definition of apartheid.

Strangulation

In its report, Al-Haq provides extensive information about how Israel’s discriminatory water policies lead to the strangulation of Palestinian communities. For example, water apartheid policies result in huge differences in water consumption. For example, the consumption of more than 500,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank is about six times higher than that of 2.6 million Palestinians in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem).

Moreover, the Palestinian average water consumption of 73 liter per capita per day does not reach the minimum consumption level of 100 liters recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). Israelis living inside Israel use about 300 liters and Israeli settlers in the West Bank use 369 liters each per day.

By September 2011, around 313,000 Palestinians were not connected to a water network. And about 50,000 Palestinians from 151 communities had to live on less than 20 liters each per day, an amount WHO recommends for “short-term survival” in emergency and disaster situations.

In occupied East Jerusalem, more than 50 percent of the Palestinians living there — around 160,000 people — do not have legal water connections because Israeli law does not allow it, mainly because the required housing permits are not issued. Furthermore, some Palestinian areas on the eastern side of the Israel’s wall in East Jerusalem have been excluded from the boundaries of the city. This has left the residents of Beit Iksa, Kufr Aqab and Shuafat refugee camp with no access to municipal services, including water and sanitation.

In the Jordan Valley, water apartheid policies have resulted in extreme differences in water consumption between settlers and Palestinians, ranging from 700 liters per day in the settlements of Mitzpe Shalem and Qalya to a meager 22 liters for Palestinians in the village of al-Hadidiya.

Household consumption Palestinian villages vs Israeli settlements. (Al Haq)

The 1.6 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip depend for their natural water supply solely on the Coastal Aquifer next to the Strip. But as a transboundary water resource, Gaza has to share it with Israel, which has access to other water resources. However, the Gaza Strip can use only one quarter of total extractions from the Coastal Aquifer.

A responsible use of shared transboundary water resources requires coordination, something which Israel refuses. As a result, the water quality in the Gaza Strip has progressively deteriorated due to over-extraction and pollution of the Coastal Aquifer. The deterioration is also partly due to Israel’s policy of denying construction materials for wastewater treatment plants and other water-related infrastructure into the Gaza Strip. Therefore, about 90 to 95 percent of the water it supplies is unfit for human consumption. It is estimated that the quality of water in the Coastal Aquifer will continue to deteriorate and may become unusable by 2016, when, in the absence of any alternatives, the Gaza Strip could become unfit for human habitation.

Institutionalized oppression

The third pillar of Israel’s water apartheid rests upon its “security” laws, policies and practices. The water policies and practices are integrated in an institutionalized system of Jewish-Israeli domination and oppression of the Palestinians as a group — thus amounting to a system of “water apartheid.”

For example, by occupying the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 War, Israel increased its direct control over water resources in the region with nearly 50 percent. Immediately after the war, the water system for the West Bank and Gaza was integrated into the Israeli system through a series of military orders which are still in force today. Israel declared the banks of the lower Jordan River a closed military zone, denying access to Palestinians.

Furthermore, the construction of Israel’s wall in the West Bank has given Israel control over 28 agricultural wells.

Demolitions

Israel has caused extensive damage to Palestinian water infrastructure during military attacks on the Gaza strip. For example, during Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009, about 919 water wells, 229 irrigation pools and 243 water pumps were destroyed. Since 2005, more than 300 water wells have been destroyed in the so-called buffer zone.

In 2011, Israel demolished over 20 water wells, around 35 cisterns, and around 10 water tanks and springs in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem). At the same time, Israel confiscated 45 water, sanitation and hygiene structures in the same area. The water infrastructure was indispensable Palestinian rural and herder communities. In 2012, Israeli forces demolished at least 32 water structures took place between January and October.

Adri Nieuwhof, http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/adri-nieuwhof/israeli-settlers-use-six-times-more-water-palestinians-new-report 04/08/2013

The full report can be found via the following links:

http://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/topics/housing-land-and-natural-resources/695-water-for-one-people-only-discriminatory-access-and-water-apartheid-in-the-occupied-palestinian-territory

http://www.alhaq.org/publications/Water-For-One-People-Only.pdf

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In the aftermath of Khaled Meshaal’s emotional visit to Gaza in celebration of Hamas’ 25th anniversary, commentary in Israel and the West has focused on his remarks at a rally as “defiant” and confirming “the true face” of Hamas. Emphasis was particularly placed on his dramatic pledge to recover the whole of historic Palestine, from the Mediterranean to Jordan, “inch by inch”, no matter how long such a process might take. Meshaal also challenged the legitimacy of the Zionist project, and justified Palestinian resistance in whatever form it might assume, although disavowing the intention to attack civilians as such, and denying any complicity by Hamas in the recent November 21, 2012 incident in Israel when a bomb exploded in a Jerusalem bus.

These remarks certainly raise concerns for moderate Israelis who continue to advocate a two-state solution in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 242, but at the same time, it is important to listen to Hamas fully before reaching firm conclusions about their “true intentions”.

The thrice born ‘world leader’

What Meshaal said in Gaza was at a rally dedicated to reaffirming its fundamental struggle in the immediate aftermath of the recent eight day Israeli attack (code-named “Pillar of Defence”), and by a leader who for the first time in 45 years had openly dared to set foot in his occupied and oppressed homeland. Meshaal is a leader who has lived in exile in several countries throughout the region since he was eleven years old, having been born in the Selwad neighbourhood of Ramallah, then under Jordanian control. He is someone who in 1997 Israel had tried to murder in a notorious incident in Jordan in which only the immediate capture of the Mossad perpetrators induced Israel to supply a life-saving antidote for the poison that had been sprayed into Meshaal’s ear so as to secure the release of these agents from Jordanian captivity and the avoidance of likely criminal charges.

In Meshaal’s imagery, this return to Gaza was his “third birth”, the first being in 1956 when he was born, the second when he survived the Israeli assassination attempt, and the third when he was able to kiss the ground upon entering Gaza. These biographical details seem relevant for an assessment of his public remarks.

The context was also given a heightened reality by the Hamas/Gaza success in enduring the latest Israeli military onslaught that produced a ceasefire that contained some conditions favoring Gaza, including an Israeli commitment to refrain from targeted assassinations in the future. It also was a context shaped by a sequence of painful memories that included the main trigger of the upsurge of violence, which seemed to be the Hamas reaction to the assassination of its military leader and diplomat, Ahmed Jabari. Also, Meshaal made a point of visiting the surviving family member of the disabled spiritual founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinate on May 22, 2003. It was as a direct consequence of Sheikh Yassin’s death that Meshaal was declared “world leader” of Hamas.

Talk to Al Jazeera
Khaled Meshaal
An evolving narrative

The most important element of context that needs to be taken into account is the seeming inconsistency between the fiery language used by Meshaal in Gaza and his far more moderate tone in the course of several interviews with Western journalists in recent weeks. In those interviews, Meshaal had clearly indicated a readiness for a long-term hudna (truce), provided that Israel ended its occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and agreed to uphold Palestinian rights under international law. He made clear that these rights included the right of return belonging to the 4-5 million Palestinians living in refugee camps or exile, and contended that such a right was more deserving of recognition than is the Israeli grant of such a right of return to every Jew worldwide, including those without any prior connection to historic Palestine whatsoever.

Of course, this right asserted on behalf of Palestinian refugees is in its potentiality a threatening claim to Israel, and to Zionism, as it could, at least in theory, threaten the Jewish majority presence in Israel. Whether many Palestinians if given the choice would wish to return to live in Israel so as to reinhabit their ancestral homes seems highly questionable, but the right to do so unquestionably belongs to Palestinians under international law, at least to those who had previously resided in present Israel, and possibly to their direct descendants.

In these interviews, Meshaal consistently affirmed the readiness of Hamas to pursue these national goals nonviolently, without “weapons and blood” if Israel were to accept such a framework for peace. His words to CNN in a November 22 interview are notable in this respect: “We are ready to resort to a peaceful way, purely peaceful way without blood and weapons, as long as we obtain our Palestinian demands.” The extent of “Palestinian demands” was left unspecified, which does create an ambiguity as to whether this meant accommodation or some kind of rearticulation of a unified Palestinian entity. Also unclear as to whether the peaceful path could precede the end of occupation, or must be a sequel to the existence of a sovereign Palestinian state. In the other direction, Meshaal indicated that once Palestinian statehood was fully realised, then the issue of the acceptance of Israeli legitimacy could be placed on the political agenda.

Meshaal’s deputy, Mousa Abu Marzook, in a conversation in Cairo told me in a similar vein that the Hamas Charter pledge to destroy the Zionist state had become “a false issue”. This PhD from Louisiana Tech, an intelligent exponent of current Hamas thinking, echoed Meshaal’s moderate approach, and indicated that as with the US Constitution’s treatment of slavery, the Hamas Charter has evolved with changing circumstances, and its clauses were subject to modification by reinterpretation. Mr Marzook also gave me the impression that Hamas was ready to pursue a diplomatic approach to conflict resolution provided that Israel would send signals of its willingness to do the same, starting with a lifting of the blockade, an end to violent incursions, and an acceptance of Hamas as a political actor with governmental authority.

A wider context

Along similar lines, Meshaal has spoken about Hamas as “realistic” with respect to an appreciation of the balance of forces relative to the conflict, and referred to Arafat’s response of twenty years ago to those who insisted that Israel would be at mortal risk if a Palestinian state were to be established on the West Bank. The former PLO leader had pointed out that any Palestinian move to threaten Israel militarily in such circumstances was unthinkable. It would be sure to produce a devastating attack that would crush Palestinian hopes forever.

Hamas’ Meshaal vows to ‘continue resistance’
There is posed a fundamental question: Is the true voice of Hamas discernable at this point? There seems to be a sharp contrast between the sweeping language of Meshaal’s words spoken at the anniversary demonstration in Gaza and his far calmer, focused, and accommodating tone in interviews and other statements during the last several years.

The more hopeful understanding of the Hamas position would call attention to the gap between the emotional occasion of the speech and the more rational views consistently expressed elsewhere. Such an explanation is the opposite of the Western insistence that only the rally speech gave expression to the authentic outlook of Hama.

In contrast, I would accord greater weight being given to the moderate formulations, at least provisionally, for exploratory purposes. Put differently, in Gaza Meshaal was likely expressing a maximalist version of the Palestinian narrative relating to unchanging sense of the legitimacy of its challenge to the existence of a Zionist state in Palestine, while in more reflective arenas, ever since the entry of Hamas into electoral politics back in 2006, the dominant emphasis has been pragmatic, pursuing a political track that envisioned long-term peaceful co-existence with Israel, a sidestepping of legitimacy claim, at least once the occupation was definitively ended and the rights of Palestinian refugees were recognised in accordance with international law.

It can be asked, “How can Hamas dare to put forward such a claim in view of the steady rain of rockets that has made life treacherous and miserable for the more than a million Israelis living in the southern part of Israel ever since Israel ‘disengaged’ in 2005″? Such a rhetorical question repeated over and over again without reference to the siege or Israeli violence has distorted the Western image of the interaction, suggesting that when Israel massively attacks helpless Gaza it is only exercising its defensive rights, which is the most fundamental entitlement of every sovereign state.

Again the more accurate interpretation depends on a fuller appreciation of the wider context, which would include the revealed American plot to reverse the outcome of the 2006 electoral victory of Hamas by arming Fatah with heavy weapons, the Israeli punitive blockade since mid-2007, and many instances of provocative Israeli violence, including a steady stream of targeted assassinations, deliberate reliance on disproportionate and excessive force, and lethal over-reactions at the Gaza border.

Although not the whole story, the one-sided ratio of deaths as between Israel and Palestine is a good first approximation of comparative responsibility over the period of Hamas ascendancy in Gaza, and it is striking. For instance, between the ceasefire in 2009 and the Israeli attack in November 2012, 271 Palestinians were killed and not a single Israeli. The respected Ha’aretz columnist, Gideon Levy, has pointed out that since the first rockets were launched against Israel in 2001, 59 Israelis have died as compared to 4,717 Palestinians.

The Western media is stunningly oblivious to these complications of perception, almost never disclosing Israeli provocations in reporting on the timelines of the violence of the parties, and fails to acknowledge that it has been the Israelis, not the Palestinians, that have been most often responsible for ending periods of prolonged truce.

There are further confusing elements in the picture, including the presence of some extremist Palestinian militias that launch rockets in defiance of Hamas policy, which in recent years generally has confined rocket launches to retaliatory roles. Among the ironies of the Jabari assassination was that it was evidently his role to restrain these militias on behalf of Hamas, including disciplining those extremists who refused to abide by policies of restricting rocket attacks to retaliatory situations.

Fighting for freedom?

There is no doubt that Hamas’ reliance on rockets fired in the direction of Israeli civilian population centres are violations of international humanitarian law, and should be condemned as such, but even this condemnation is not without its problematic aspects. The Goldstone Report did condemn the reliance of these rockets in a typically decontextualised manner, that is, without reference to the unlawfulness of the occupation, including its pronounced reliance on collective punishment in the form of the blockade as well as frequent and arbitrary violent incursions, routine military overflights, and a terrifying regime of subjugation that imparts on Palestinians a sense of total vulnerability and helplessness.

Stonewalling the Goldstone Report
The Goldstone Report also was silent as to the nature and extent of a Palestinian right of resistance. Such unconditional condemnations of Hamas as “a terrorist organisation” are unreasonably one-sided to the extent that Palestinian moral, political, and legal rights of resistance are ignored and Israel’s unlawful policies are not considered. This issue also reveals a serious deficiency in international humanitarian law, especially, as here, in the context of a prolonged occupation that includes many violations of the most fundamental and inalienable rights of an occupied people. The prerogatives of states are upheld, while those of peoples are overlooked or treated as non-existent.

It is also relevant to take note of the absence of alternative means available to the Palestinians to uphold their rights under international law and to challenge the abuses embedded in Israeli occupation policies. Israel with its drones, Apache helicopters, F-16 fighter aircraft, Iron Dome, and so forth enjoys the luxury of choosing its targets and determining the level of violence at will, but Palestinians have no such option. For them it is either using the primitive and indiscriminate weaponry at their disposal or essentially giving in to an intolerable status quo.

To repeat, this does not make Hamas rockets lawful, but does it make such reliance wrong, given the overall context of violence that includes the absolute impunity of Israel for a pattern of flagrant violations of international criminal law? What are we to do with international law when it is invoked only to control the behaviour of the weaker party?

It gives perspective to imagine the situation being reversed as it was during the Nazi occupation of France or the Netherlands during World War II. Resistance fighters were uniformly perceived in the liberal West as unconditional heroes, and no critical attention was given as to whether the tactics used unduly imperiled innocent civilian lives. Those who lost their lives in such a resistance were honoured as martyrs. Meshaal and other Hamas leaders have made similar arguments on several occasions, in effect asking what are Palestinians supposed to do in the exercise of resistance given their circumstances, which have persisted for so long, given the failures of traditional diplomacy and the UN to secure their rights under international law.

The way forward

In effect, a sensitive appreciation of context is crucial for a proper understanding, which makes self-satisfied condemnations of the views and tactics of Hamas and Khaled Meshaal misleading and, if heeded, condemns the parties to a destiny of perpetual conflict. The Western mainstream media doesn’t help by presenting the rocket attacks as if taking place in a vacuum, and without relevant Israeli provocations. Of course, Israeli supporters will retort that it is easy to make such assessments from a safe distance, but what is a safe distance? “The risks are ours alone,” they will say with a somewhat understandable hostility. But what about the horrible Palestinian anxieties and outstanding grievances, are these not also entitled to redress?

Is there a way out of such tragic dilemmas? In my view, only when the stronger side militarily treats “the other” as having grievances and rights, and recognises that the security of ‘the self’ must be based on mutuality. Only then will sustainable peace have a chance.

In this conflict, the Israelis missed a huge opportunity to move in this direction when the weaker Palestinian side made a historic concession by authoritiatively limiting its political ambition to Occupied Palestine (22 percent of historic Palestine, less than half of what the UN partition plan proposed in 1947) in accordance with the consensus image of a solution embodied in Security Council Resolution 242. Instead of reciprocating, or at least welcoming such Palestinian minimalism, Israel has sought to encroach further and further on the Palestinian remnant of 22 percent by way of its settlements, separation wall, apartheid roads, and annexationist moves, offering the Palestinians no alternative to oppression than resistance.

It is no wonder that even the accommodationist Palestinian Authority supported the recent Hamas anniversary celebrations, and joined in proclaiming an intention to reconcile, reuniting Hamas and Fatah under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

It is tempting for Israeli supporters to treat the Gaza speech of Khaled Meshaal as the definitive expression of the Hamas creed, but it seems premature and unwise to do so. Instead, it is time to give a balanced diplomacy a belated chance if indeed there is any political space left for the implementation of the two-state consensus, and if there isn’t, then it is time to explore alternatives, including a return to a unified and secular Palestine that is governed in accordance with human rights standards and the rule of law, with respect accorded to international law.

If the two state solution is acknowledged to be a diplomatic dead end as of 2012, then it must be concluded that the overreaching by the Zionist leadership in Israel, especially its insistence on viewing the West Bank and East Jerusalem as integral to biblical Israel, referencing the former as “Judea and Samaria” and the latter as the eternal Jewish capital, has itself irreversibly undermined the political, moral, and legal viability of the Zionist Project.

These alternative options should long ago have been clarified, and now, by taking to heart “the peaceful alternative” depicted by Meshaal, especially in the aftermath of the November 29 General Assembly endorsement of Palestinian statehood and signs of an incipient Palestinian unity, there is one last opportunity to do so. By so doing peace-oriented perspectives on the conflict will be at last taken seriously, and despite prospect of a negotiated solution being now remote, and serve as a guide for our thinking, feelings, and actions.

Richard Falk is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

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The real test of any new peace talks

One of Israel’s most respected political scientists recently dismissed the idea “that simply engaging in negotiations will automatically foster a peace agreement” between Israel and the Palestinians. Writing in Haaretz, Shlomo Avineri, a former director-general of Israel’s foreign ministry, called it “a fantasy proven baseless by the experience of the past 20 years.”

In this he is unquestionably correct. He is off base, however, when he maintains that previous peace initiatives have failed because they tried to resolve questions about the terms of a “permanent status” deal. He argues that even the two sides’ most moderate positions on these core issues are too far apart, making agreement impossible. He therefore proposes that the peace process shift from discussions of the endgame and Palestinian statehood to incremental improvements—“interim agreements, trust-building exercises, unilateral steps and other mechanisms,” that would serve as building blocks for broader future agreements. But this is the most deceptive illusion of all. For what the 20 years of failure to which Avineri refers prove above all is the bankruptcy of incrementalism and confidence-building measures. They were the hallmark of the stewardship of Dennis Ross, special Middle East coordinator for President Bill Clinton, and discredited the peace process.

That illusion should be resisted particularly by those now considering a new attempt at peace talks. European Union countries, led by Britain, France and Germany, are reportedly preparing to present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his new government with a new initiative for negotiations with the Palestinians. The initiative is prompted by the anger of European governments at his announcement in November of plans for new construction (see map, left) in East Jerusalem’s E-1 corridor and other sites around Jerusalem that would effectively exclude the prospective Palestinian state’s capital from East Jerusalem and would also destroy the territorial contiguity of such a state.

The closing off of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians is a deal breaker that forecloses a two-state solution: the creation of a separate Palestinian state alongside Israel. It would also pre-empt any new initiatives President Barack Obama may be considering in his second term with a new team that is likely to be more resolute in its determination to preserve the two-state option.

It is untrue that negotiations that focused on the endgame drove the parties further apart. There were only three such negotiations: the Camp David Summit between prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 2000, the Taba talks that followed, and the negotiations between prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas at the time of the Annapolis Conference in 2007. Despite their failure, each one advanced the process beyond where it had been.

At Camp David, Palestinians accepted the annexation of the settlement blocs—new towns that Israel has built in the West Bank—and Ehud Barak agreed to the sharing of Jerusalem. The Taba talks that followed narrowed the differences even more. The Olmert-Abbas negotiations of 2007/8 brought the parties even closer together, and according to the principals would have led to an accord had their negotiations not been interrupted by Operation Cast Lead in December, Israel’s military offensive against Gaza, and by Olmert’s resignation.

The peace process was brought to a complete halt only by Netanyahu’s government. Not only did he refuse to address the endgame, but he would not even agree to recognise the pre-1967 border (before the Six-Day War when Israel captured land from Syria, Jordan and Egypt) as the starting point for territorial negotiations. He reacted hysterically when President Obama was about to propose in his address to the State Department on May 19, 2011 that negotiations must begin from that point. Netanyahu called the president and demanded that he remove that proposal from his address. The president did not comply, but he also did not follow up and translate his speech into policy.

The requirement that Israeli-Palestinian talks begin from the 1967 line was so upsetting to Netanyahu and his government because they are unalterably opposed to Palestinian statehood anywhere in Palestine. Obliterating the memory of such a border (going so far as to remove that border from Israeli governmental maps) is therefore seen by Netanyahu as an essential step towards that goal.

To be sure, Netanyahu committed himself to a two-state solution in his landmark speech at Bar-Ilan university in June 2009. Some naively invoke that commitment as evidence that a resumption of the peace process is justified. Tzipi Hotovely, a leading member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, recently explained to these naïfs that the Bar-Ilan speech notwithstanding, Netanyahu has no intention of ever carrying out the evacuation of West Bank settlements. His commitment to the two-state solution was “tactical,” she said, “intended for the world,” but “the Likud will not evacuate settlements.”

The Palestinian people have known all along how utterly disingenuous was Netanyahu’s Bar-Ilan speech. Not only was this self-evident from the facts Netanyahu and his government were creating on the ground, in the form of the West Bank settlements and building in largely Arab East Jerusalem. Senior Likud officials were also the founders and leaders of the “Land of Israel” Knesset Caucus that was established for only one purpose: preventing a Palestinian state in any part of Palestine. At no point did that caucus provoke a murmur of protest from the US or from the Quartet (the joint attempt by the US, UN, EU and Russia to mediate the Israel-Palestinian peace process). Imagine their reaction—or the reaction of the US Congress, for that matter—if President Abbas’s cabinet members had established a “Land of Palestine” Caucus within the Palestinian Authority.

Indeed, even when Netanyahu announced plans to build extensively in the E-1 corridor, the best that the US and the EU were able to say is that such a plan would be an obstacle to peace and to a two-state solution. There were no intimations that such a plan, if implemented, might trigger sanctions against Israel or end the American and European insistence that Palestinians can achieve statehood only in negotiations with the man who has been systematically dismantling what chances for such an accord might still exist.

What Middle Eastern experts, not to speak of the US and European governments that are calling for a return to negotiations, cannot get themselves to acknowledge is that Netanyahu does not accept Palestinian statehood anywhere in Palestine, and will do everything in his power to prevent it because he and his government want the West Bank for themselves. It is that simple. They are convinced that with their vast military superiority over the Palestinians, they can have it all. That is an obstacle to the achievement of a two-state solution that neither incrementalism nor reconfiguration of parameters for resumed negotiations (a subject to which leading US Middle East experts last year devoted an entire book) can overcome. Anyone who still does not understand this simple reality, or who refuses to address it, has little to contribute to a discussion of this subject.

To be sure, Israelis remain concerned about retaining the financial, military and diplomatic support of the US, but Netanyahu is convinced this is not a problem. He believes he exercises greater control over the US Congress than does President Barack Obama.

As ridiculous as this may sound, there are good reasons for that belief. The main TV commercial in Netanyahu’s campaign for reelection in January to his third premiership of the country featured his last address to the combined US Senate and House of Representatives, whose members jumped up from their seats to applaud wildly every second sentence in his speech. The speech included the suggestion that the West Bank is “disputed” territory, not occupied territory, to which Israel has as much a claim as do the Palestinians, a claim rejected by the whole world, the only exceptions being residents of the Capitol building in Washington.

But it is not only the behaviour of the US Congress that gives Netanyahu and his supporters the confidence that the US will always have their back. It is a notion reinforced by President Obama as well. In his speech to the UN General Assembly in September of 2011, he admonished Palestinians, saying that they could achieve statehood only through negotiations with Israel. He thus removed the issue from the realm of international legality and turned it over to the man he knew, from the experience of his first two years in office, will never allow that to happen.

Both formally and politically, what the president said is untrue. Formally, the right to self-determination by a majority population in previously mandated territories is a “peremptory norm” in international law. The implementation of that right was one of the primary purposes of the UN’s establishment, and international courts have confirmed it is a right that even overrides conflicting treaties or agreements. The only reason the Security Council has failed in its clear responsibility to implement the Palestinians’ right to self-determination is Obama’s threatened veto.

Practically, it is true that given its overwhelming military power, and the virtually uncritical support it receives from the US in the exercise of that power, Israel’s government can and will continue to block Palestinian statehood. But that is a reason not to subject the Palestinians’ peremptory right to self-determination to an Israeli veto. Instead it is a reason to demand that the UN exercise the role assigned to it by its charter. Israel’s engagement with the Palestinians will cease to be the historic fraud it has been only when its government comes to believe that its continued stonewalling will lead to America’s support for intervention by the Security Council. That is yet to happen.

The problem is that too often the policy proposals of experts and diplomats are shaped in response to the claims made by the protagonists, but not by realities on the ground. Israel’s government insists it has no choice but to continue its occupation because it has made many painful concessions, and promised more, only to run up against Palestinian refusals to consider reciprocal concessions. It will put to you that in return for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s magnanimous unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, President George W. Bush agreed to allow Israel to take in the main settlement blocs.

However, Israel has not offered a single concession on any of the issues in dispute. On every one, whether borders, territory, Jerusalem, refugees, water or security, it wants the concessions to be made by Palestinians. Not a single concession has been offered by Netanyahu on Israel’s side of the 1967 border.

As to the alleged “gift” of the settlement blocs to Sharon, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said this at a joint press conference with Israel’s then-foreign minister Tzipi Livni in February 2006:

“The United States position on [unilateral changes in the border] is very clear and remains the same. No one should try and unilaterally predetermine the outcome of a final status agreement. That’s to be done at final status. The President did say that at the time of final status, it will be necessary to take into account new realities on the ground that have changed since 1967, but under no circumstances should… anyone try and do that in a preemptive or predetermined way, because these are issues for negotiation at final status.”

Netanyahu has famously accused Palestinians of demanding that Israel “give and give, while they only take and take.” This comes from the head of a government that has already helped itself to more than 60 per cent of the West Bank. Here is what Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, had to say on the subject. When challenged to defend his claims for the importance of the 1993 Oslo Accords (and for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize), Peres said, “Before Oslo, the Palestinian state’s size should have been according to the 1947… UN map. In Oslo, Arafat moved from the 1947 map to the 1967 one. He gave up on 22 per cent of the West Bank. I don’t know any Arab leader who would give up 2 or 3 per cent. He gave up 22 per cent.” (But instead of acknowledging that this concession was a gut-wrenching one-sided Palestinian contribution to peace, Peres described it as “our greatest achievement.”)

* * *

If Netanyahu and his new government are not to continue on their certain road to apartheid, President Obama would have to leave no doubt in their minds that the “special relationship” between the US and Israel has its roots in shared values, and an Israeli government that acts in egregious violation of those values undermines that special relationship. International law grants native populations of former colonies the right to national self-determination. An Israel that denies Palestinians that right—in this case, in the territories beyond the pre-1967 border—while at the same time denying them full and equal Israeli citizenship is not a democracy but an apartheid state.

Is President Obama up to that challenge? Nothing in his performance during his first term in office would indicate that he is. However, two recent developments hold out some hope. The first, as indicated above, is his nomination of Senator John Kerry as Secretary of State and Senator Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defence—two men who have few illusions about the reason for the failure of the peace process and the courage to speak the truth.

The second are intimations of a new European initiative to present to Israel’s new government a set of clear parameters that establish the pre-1967 border (with provision for equal land swaps to compensate Palestinians for Israel’s retention of the large settlement blocs) as the starting point for resumed peace talks. It is a parameter that by definition precludes Israel’s unilateral annexation of all of East Jerusalem. Another parameter would preclude a large scale return of Palestinian refugees to their previous homes in Israel.

Because the UK, France and Germany are reportedly all on board, it is likely this initiative will also receive the backing of most—perhaps all—EU countries. More important, its sponsors are likely to have received assurances that even if Washington will not lead the effort, it will not block it. If so, that would indeed be a significant change of direction. Ironically, the chances of this initiative’s success will only be strengthened if the new Israeli government proves even more rigidly opposed to Palestinian statehood.

But no one should be deceived about the chances of such an initiative if it does not contain the one condition that is the litmus test of its seriousness. That is that if the parties do not accept the parameters or are not able to reach an accord by a certain date, the terms for an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank will be determined by the UN Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the Charter. If it lacks that provision, or the provision faces the threat of an American veto, the initiative will be as phony as Netanyahu’s commitment to a two-state solution in his Bar-Ilan speech.

For nothing short of the threat of being turned into a pariah by the entire international community because of its apartheid regime will persuade Israel’s electorate to bring back a government that will safeguard the country’s democratic character and accept a viable and sovereign Palestinian state along its border.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/israel-palestine-conflict-settlements-henry-siegman/

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The soldiers arrive in the dead of night. They kick, they smash, they destroy. They break in, rudely awakening an entire house and its inhabitants, including children and babies. One officer pulls out a detailed document and declares: “This house is declared a ‘closed military zone.’” He reads the order – in Hebrew and in a loud voice – to the sleep-dazed, pajama-clad family.

This young man successfully completed his officers’ training course. Perhaps he even believes, deep down, that someone has to do this dirty work. And he reads out the order solely to justify why the father of the household, Emad Burnat, is forbidden to film the event on his own video camera.

There are no moments of respite or reprieve in the probing documentary by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, “5 Broken Cameras,” which was screened, among other places, at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque last weekend after collecting a number of international prizes and having been shown on Channel 8.

This documentary should make every decent Israeli ashamed of being an Israeli. It should be shown in civics classes and heritage classes. The Israelis should know, at long last, what is being done in their name every day and every night in this ostensible time of no terror. Even in a West Bank village like Bil’in, which has made nonviolence its motto.

The soldiers – the friends of our sons and the sons of our friends – break into homes in order to abduct small children, who may be suspected of throwing stones. There is no other way to describe this. They also arrest dozens of the organizers of the popular weekly protest at Bil’in. And this happens every night.

I have often been to this village, to its protests and to its funerals. Once or twice I joined the Friday demonstrations against the separation fence that was built on its land to enable Modi’in Ilit and Kiryat Sefer to rise on its olive groves. I have breathed the tear gas and the stinking “skunk” gas. I have seen the rubber bullets that wound and sometimes kill, and the violent behavior of the soldiers and the police toward the demonstrating inhabitants.

Yet nevertheless, what I saw in this film shocked me more than all those hasty visits. The apartment buildings of Modi’in Ilit are swallowing up the village, just like the wall that was built here on their land. The inhabitants decided to embark on a struggle for their property and their existence. With a mixture of naivete, determination and courage – and, now and then, some exaggerated theatricality – the residents undertake various gimmicks, with the help of a handful of Israeli and international volunteers.

This struggle has even won a partial victory: Only in its wake did the High Court of Justice order the dismantling of the wall and its relocation to a different place. Even the High Court, which usually automatically accepts the positions of the security establishment, understood that a crime was being committed here. Together with Bil’in and, to a large extent, inspired by it, more villages began to conduct a determined popular struggle every Friday – which continues to this day – against the wall, half an hour’s drive from our homes.

This documentary proves that, for the locals, the reality of the occupation is that there is no such thing as nonviolent struggle. For the information of those who preach nonviolence (from the Palestinians ): The Israel Defense Forces soldiers and the Border Police will ensure that it becomes violent. Just one thrown stone, despite the pleas of the demonstration organizers, will suffice; just one verbal altercation will also suffice to open the most advanced weapons arsenal in the world – to pull the pin, to release the gas, the rubber bullet and the skunk gas, and sometimes the live fire, and to cut off the impossible dream of a nonviolent struggle.

Anyone who watches this film understands that it is very difficult to face the wall, the settlement project and the soldiers – all of which scream “violence” – and remain nonviolent. Nearly impossible.

Five times Burnat’s cameras were destroyed. Three times by the soldiers, once in a traffic accident opposite the separation wall, and once by the ultra-Orthodox and violent settlers – the “hilltop youth,” who break into homes even when the court prohibits this. “You are not allowed to be here,” says an ultra-Orthodox settler to a villager trying to get to his stolen land.

The truth is that Burnat’s cameras were damaged many more times; the film depicts only those incidents in which the equipment was rendered totally unusable. The cameras’ ruined parts are displayed as evidence.

But something much deeper has been broken here. A reality has been broken by broken cameras. These cameras documented a reality unfamiliar to most Israelis. They documented a slice of life, about which most Israelis prefer to be oblivious. In so doing, they have also proved that, in a place where hardly any courageous journalism remains, there are at least courageous and impressive documentaries. In a place where hardly any journalists remain, there are important documentary filmmakers like Burnat and Davidi.

After the vast majority of the local media decided not to report on the occupation any more, films like “5 Broken Cameras,” Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s “The Law in These Parts,” and Mir Laufer and Erez Laufer’s “One Day After Peace” – all the harvest of just the past few months – are filling the role intended for the media, and excellently.

Anyone who some day wants to learn what was happening here during these cursed decades will hardly find what he is looking for in the newspaper and television archives. He will find it in the documentary movie archive, which is rescuing Israel’s honor.

“5 Broken Cameras” has already been shown in many countries, at festivals and commercial screenings. Davidi and Burnat documented the routine of the occupation. The IDF and Border Police come out looking bad. Even understatement and restraint cannot but describe them except as storm troopers.

Burnat’s voice, which accompanies the film, is one of the most restrained voices you have heard concerning the occupation, without rabble-rousing and without hatred. This is how they look in reality. Go see this film and form your own impressions.

There have been other films about Bil’in and while this one is relatively small scale, it is extremely personal. Burnat’s wife, who wants to keep him away from the camera and danger, and his young son, who has grown up in this reality, star in it along with the leaders of the struggle. There is only one person killed here: Bassem Abu-Rahma, a charming young man, loved by the children, who called him the Elephant – the needless victim of an alleged murder by a soldier in April 2009.

However, it is the non-deadly routine depicted in the movie that is so appalling. The camera breakers in it are breakers of the rule of law and of democracy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has boasted to the world about how enlightened Israel is, apparently has not seen this film. Otherwise, he would not be able to talk about enlightenment.

Anyone who behaves this way in his dark backyard cannot boast about what happens in his enlightened show window, with all that high tech and democracy. Anyone who knows what is happening in Bil’in and the other villages understands that a state that behaves in this way cannot be considered democratic or enlightened. Someone has to make Netanyahu watch this film, just so he will understand. .

This week I drove to Bil’in with one of the two directors, Guy Davidi (Burnat was away on another trip overseas ). Davidi once lived in the village for several months, but prior to our trip hadn’t visited for over a year.

Ostensibly, nothing had changed. A Palestinian village drowsing in the afternoon. However, one thing was different: A large hill planted with olive trees has been liberated. In the place where the security fence had been, there is now only a dirt track. The barrier was removed and the hill was returned to its owners. The olive trees are dying after years of neglect, and the soil is scarred by all the earthworks carried out there. But still, some of the territory has been liberated.

The security fence has been replaced by a high concrete wall, but this has been moved several hundred meters to the west. Behind it, cranes continue to build Kiryat Sefer (aka Dvir ). In the liberated territory, they are already building a tiny playground for the village children. Only remnants of the burned tires and dozens of IDF gas-canister shells lying on the ground from the ongoing weekly demonstrations here testify that the struggle has not ended. It has not been completely successful. But if there were any justice, it would have been.

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/twilight-zone/the-documentary-that-should-make-every-decent-israeli-ashamed.premium-1.468409

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GAZA CITY (IPS) – “From the coast to eight miles out, the sea is like a desert: it’s sandy and there are no fish,” said Mohammed al-Bakri, tracing a thick line on the wall map before him.

As the general manager of Gaza’s Union of Agricultural Work Committees, al-Bakri is well-versed in the woes of Gaza’s fishermen and farmers. “The Israeli navy attacks the fishermen, arrests them and takes their boats, even within three miles,” he said, referring to the limit the Israeli authorities have unilaterally imposed on Palestinian fishermen.

Under the Oslo accords, Palestinian fishermen are authorized to fish 20 nautical miles into Gaza’s sea. The Israeli authorities have illegally downsized Palestinian fishing waters, using lethal violence to enforce new restrictions on fishing. Palestinian fishermen are routinely attacked by the Israeli navy, using machine guns, water cannons and shells. Abductions of fishermen also occur.

“When the fishermen are arrested, they just have a boat and a net,” al-Bakri said. “No weapons; they are just trying to catch to sell at the market, to earn money for their families.”

“More than 500 fishermen have been arrested and at least 12 killed by the Israeli navy,” he added.

With more than 3,600 fishermen and 70,000 persons dependent on income from the sea, Gaza’s fishing industry has been devastated by such Israeli tactics and policies. “When there is no income, fishermen must depend on food aid from the United Nations,” said al-Bakri. “But there are a lot of other needs, like housing, clothing, medical care, education.

“If the situation continues like this, we won’t see any fishermen on the sea in the future.”

Farmers targeted

Farmers in Gaza face many problems, too.

Al-Bakri referred back to the red line on the UN map of Gaza marked “areas restricted for Palestinian access.” Imposed unilaterally by the Israeli authorities, the “buffer zone” bans Palestinian farmers and civilians from the 300 meters of land flanking the boundaries between Gaza and Israel.

In reality, the UN, international observers and Palestinian organizations have documented Israeli soldiers’ targeting of Palestinians even as far as nearly two kilometers from the boundary lines.

“Shooting at people accessing restricted areas is often carried out from remotely-controlled weapon stations … every several hundred meters along the fence, each containing machine guns protected by retractable armoured covers, whose fire can reach targets up to 1.5 km,” a UN report has stated.

As a result of machine gun fire, shelling, flechette (dart) bombs, drone attacks, land razing and setting crops on fire, the Israeli army has rendered one-third of Gaza’s agricultural land deadly and inaccessible.

Palestinian farmers continue to face Israeli attacks as they attempt to work on their land. For most farmers, the land is the sole source of income and food for their families.

“We need political support internationally, to pressure Israel into allowing farmers to work their land and fishermen to access their sea,” says al-Bakri.

Canadians heed call

Heeding his call, and hoping to build “connections of mutual solidarity between Canada and Palestinian farmers and fishers,” a Vancouver-based group aimed to broaden political support via their “Day of Action For the Fishers and Farmers of Gaza, Palestine.” The event was held on 30 September.

“This particular aspect of the siege is quite compelling because when a society is deprived of the ability to fish and to farm, it is deprived of its ability to sustain itself. It’s part of the ongoing Nakba [catastrophe; the systematic ethnic cleansing operations leading to the foundation of Israel], and part of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine,” said Charlotte Kates, a lawyer and one of the Day of Action coordinators.

Kates and a delegation travelled to the Gaza Strip earlier this year, meeting with Palestinian fishermen and farmers.

“We want to make it clear what is happening at the hands of the occupation, and how it is denying people’s right to live, to exist,” Kates said. “One of our translators could not attend our meetings: a cousin, in the ‘buffer zone’ had been murdered the same day by the Israeli military.”

Noting the close alliance of Canada with Israel, Kates said “the government of Stephen Harper has nothing but praise for the Israeli state that enforces this siege on Gaza. On 29 March 2006, Canada became the first country in the world to impose a siege on the Palestinian people living in Gaza and the West Bank, declaring cancellation of aid to Palestine.

“We want to build a movement that can challenge the Canadian government on these policies, policies which predate the Harper government.”

Canada is not alone in endorsing the illegal siege on Gaza — what Desmond Tutu, the retired South African bishop, and UN special rapporteurs on the West Bank and Gaza, John Dugard and Richard Falk, among many others, have called collective punishment.

“The European Union has recently decided to increase their support for Israel,” said Mohammed al-Bakri. He was referring to an agreement reached between the EU and Israel in July, which both sides undertook to increase their cooperation in 60 areas of policy.

The day of solidarity with Palestinian farmers and fishers has the backing of, among others, Independent Jewish Voices, the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group, and former Vancouver city councillor Tim Louis.

“The UN is quite aware of the inhuman conditions that Palestinians are subjected to and yet there is no concrete action, except allowing humanitarian aid,” said Louis, calling for “the Canadian government to stop its indiscriminate support for Israel until such a time when Israel complies with international law.”

http://electronicintifada.net/content/canadians-stand-solidarity-gazas-besieged-farmers-fishermen/11723

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Triggered by gas-price increases, tens of thousands of Palestinian taxi, truck and bus drivers in the West Bank observed a one-day strike, effectively shutting down cities. This, as Al Jazeera reported, was the culmination of several days of protests where thousands of Palestinians, frustrated by the economic crisis in the West Bank, took to the streets. After these protesters forced the closure of government offices, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad decided to decrease fuel prices and cut the salaries of top Palestinian Authority officials in an effort to appease his angry constituents.

Prime Minister Fayyad, a former IMF executive, undoubtedly knows that both his previous decision to increase gas prices as well as his recent decision to decrease them will have no real effect on the looming economic crisis. Report after report has documented the Palestinian economy’s complete dependence on foreign aid, while underscoring the severe poverty and chronic food insecurity plaguing the population. These reports all suggest that Israel’s occupation is to blame for the unfolding economic debacle, raising the crucial question of why the Palestinians” wrath was directed at Fayyad rather than at Israel.

The clue to this enigma can be found in the missing chapter of a World Bank report published barely a week after the protests subsided. Warning that the fiscal crisis in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is deepening, the World Bank blamed the Israeli government for maintaining a tight grip over 60 per cent of the West Bank, denying Palestinians access to the majority of arable land in the area as well as limiting their access to water and other natural resources.

Talk to Al Jazeera – Salam Fayyad
Remarkably, the economists who wrote the report highlight the impact of severe Israeli restrictions to Palestinian land but say nothing about economic policy. They seem to suggest that if only the Oslo process had been allowed to go forward, then the Palestinian economy would not be so badly off. Therefore they fail to mention the detrimental effect of the Paris Protocols, the Palestinian-Israeli Interim Agreement of April 1994 that spells out Oslo’s economic arrangements.

Interestingly, the three foundational documents that Fayyad has published since he began his tenure as Prime Minister – Palestinian Reform and Development Plan from 2008; Ending the Occupation and Establishing a State from 2009; and Homestretch to Freedom from 2010 – also fail to discuss the stifling effect the Paris Protocols have had on Palestinian economy.

Spanning 35 pages – as opposed to NAFTA’s more than 1,000 pages – this economic agreement reproduces Palestinian subjugation to Israel, while undercutting the very possibility of Palestinian sovereignty. The agreement’s major problem, as Israeli economists Arie Arnon and Jimmy Weinblatt pointed out over a decade ago, is that it establishes a customs union with Israel based on Israeli trade regulations, allows Israel to maintain control of all labour flows, and prohibits the Palestinians from introducing their own currency, thus barring their ability to influence interest rates, inflation, etc.

Why, we need to ask ourselves, does Prime Minister Fayyad wish to “improve” the Paris Protocols, and why doesn’t the World Bank even mention the agreement, needless to say the severe limitations that it imposes on the Palestinian Authority’s ability to choose their own economic regime and adopt trade policies according to their perceived interests?

The answer has to do with a shared and ongoing investment in Oslo.

Prime Minister Fayyad, the World Bank and indeed most western leaders perceive the current economic crisis in the Palestinian territories as resulting from the collapse of the 1993 Oslo process. They would like to bring Oslo back on track, develop and expand it. By contrast, most Palestinian analysts currently maintain that the Oslo agreements are to blame for the collapse of the Palestinian economy.

The protesters know that the West Bank’s fragmentation, the Palestinians’ inability to control their own borders and the lack of access to huge swaths of land (which are highlighted in the reports), are intricately tied to the untenable customs union and the absence of a Palestinian currency. These restrictions are all part and parcel of the Oslo Accords and not an aberration from them.

Hence, it would be rash to think that the Palestinian protesters are blaming Prime Minister Fayyad for the economic crisis, since every West Bank resident knows all too well that the crisis is the result of the occupation. It consequently seems reasonable to assume that they are blaming Fayyad for continuing to play the Oslo game.

Palestinians have no sovereignty in the Occupied Territories, and yet they have a president, a prime minister and an array of ministers who for years now have postured as part of a legitimate government in an independent country. The only way to end the occupation is by forsaking Oslo; to force the Palestinian Authority to stop playing this futile game and to deal head on with its disastrous repercussions.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/201292763735378417.html

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The daily dose of terror inflicted on these Semites isn’t noticed by most Jews – even though the incidents resemble stories told by our grandparents.

Here’s a statistic that you won’t see in research on anti-Semitism, no matter how meticulous the study is. In the first six months of the year, 154 anti-Semitic assaults have been recorded, 45 of them around one village alone. Some fear that last year’s record high of 411 attacks – significantly more than the 312 attacks in 2010 and 168 in 2009 – could be broken this year.

Fifty-eight incidents were recorded in June alone, including stone-throwing targeting farmers and shepherds, shattered windows, arson, damaged water pipes and water-storage facilities, uprooted fruit trees and one damaged house of worship. The assailants are sometimes masked, sometimes not; sometimes they attack surreptitiously, sometimes in the light of day.

There were two violent attacks a day, in separate venues, on July 13, 14 and 15. The words “death” and “revenge” have been scrawled in various areas; a more original message promises that “We will yet slaughter.”

It’s no accident that the diligent anti-Semitism researchers have left out this data. That’s because they don’t see it as relevant, since the Semites who were attacked live in villages with names like Jalud, Mughayer and At-Tuwani, Yanun and Beitilu. The daily dose of terrorizing (otherwise known as terrorism ) that is inflicted on these Semites isn’t compiled into a neat statistical report, nor is it noticed by most of the Jewish population in Israel and around the world – even though the incidents resemble the stories told by our grandparents.

The day our grandparents feared was Sunday, the Christian Sabbath; the Semites, who are not of interest to the researchers monitoring anti-Semitism, fear Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Our grandparents knew that the order-enforcement authorities wouldn’t intervene to help a Jewish family under attack; we know that the Israel Defense Forces, the Israel Police, the Civil Administration, the Border Police and the courts all stand on the sidelines, closing their eyes, softballing investigations, ignoring evidence, downplaying the severity of the acts, protecting the attackers, and giving a boost to those progromtchiks.The hands behind these attacks belong to Israeli Jews who violate international law by living in the West Bank. But the aims and goals behind the attacks are the flesh and blood of the Israeli non-occupation. This systemic violence is part of the existing order. It complements and facilitates the violence of the regime, and what the representatives – the brigade commanders, the battalion commanders, the generals and the Civil Administration officers – are doing while “bearing the burden” of military service.

They are grabbing as much land as possible, using pretexts and tricks made kosher by the High Court of Justice; they are confining the natives to densely populated reservations. That is the essence of the tremendous success known as Area C: a deliberate thinning of the Palestinian population in about 62 percent of the West Bank, as preparation for formal annexation.

Day after day, tens of thousands of people live in the shadow of terror. Will there be an attack today on the homes at the edge of the village? Will we be able to get to the well, to the orchard, to the wheat field? Will our children get to school okay, or make it to their cousins’ house unharmed? How many olive trees were damaged overnight?

In exceptional cases, when there is luck to be had, a video camera operated by B’Tselem volunteers documents an incident and pierces the armor of willful ignorance donned by the citizens of the only democracy in the Middle East. When there is no camera, the matter is of negligible importance, because after all, you can’t believe the Palestinians. But this routine of escalating violence is very real, even if it is underreported.

For the human rights organization Al-Haq, the escalation is reminiscent of what happened in 1993-1994, when they warned that the increasing violence, combined with the authorities’ failure to take action, would lead to mass casualties. And then Dr. Baruch Goldstein of Kiryat Arba came along and gunned down 29 Muslim worshipers at the Ibrahim Mosque. The massacre set the stage for a consistent Israeli policy of emptying the Old City of Hebron of its Palestinian residents, with the assistance of Israeli Jewish pogromtchiks. Is there someone among the country’s decision-makers and decision-implementers who is hoping for a second round?

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/the-anti-semitism-that-goes-unreported-1.452594

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