The Israeli government’s assault on the rights and the physical security of the 3.2 million Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza continues.
Today, the NYT made a good big splash with an article by Steve Erlanger about the report issued by the Israeli “Peace Now” organization that calculated that some 40% of the land on which Israeli settlements have been (and still are being) built in the West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians.
Actually, Erlanger is clearer in his language on this– using the term “privately owned” prominently in the lead to his piece, unlike the title of the Peace Now web-page linked to there, which says merely “owned by Palestinians.” This is an important distinction. Nearly all the land which is not identified as “privately owned by Palestinians” is in fact Palestinian state land. Israeli settlement builders have claimed that the fact that that land is not privately owned by identified individuals or families, somehow makes it “okay” for Israel to build settlements there. The 4th Geneva Convention, of course, makes no distinction between privately owned land and land held under communal mechanisms: It says simply that all land that comes under foreign occupation rule is deemed completely off-limits for the implantation of settlers from the occupying power.
Still, when the land settled on is also privately owned, in a sense that makes the infraction of the Israeli settlement builders a double infraction: it is a grave breach of the 4th Geneva Convention and also a violation of that family’s personal property rights…
And where is the US congress and government– staunch defenders of private property rights– in all this?
Nowhere. Silent. (As usual.) Content just to continue shoveling over huge wads of my tax dollars to Israel every year that end up bolstering the settlement-building project…
The settlements are, as we know, just one of the many ways in which the Israeli occupation regime maintains a constant assault on the rights of the Palestinians. Another (linked) policy is the continued demolition– under a variety of pretextst– of the homes of the occupied areas’ Palestinians.
This information page from the Israeli rights organization B’tselem tells us that since July 2006 there has been a sharp increase in the numbers of Palestinian homes demolished in the Gaza Strip “for alleged military purposes.”
This is very serious indeed.
Remember that Israel claimed to have “left” Gaza back in September 2005? So between October 2005 and June 2006, it undertook zero home demolitions there “for alleged military purposes.” In July, there were 64; in August, 71; and in September 2006 there were 21 demolitions. (No figures on that B’Tselem page yet for October 2006.) That is a total of 156 homes demolished in Gaza in those three months– homes that housed around 900 people.
You can also see B’tselem’s carefully compiled stats on Palestinian homes demolished by the IDF “as punishment” and for alleged infractions of planning regulations.”
And by the way, you might want to check out the facilities in the settlement of Ariel, in the heart of the West Bank, on the “municipal” website there.
… Is it any wonder, in light of the above, that many Palestinians have decided to dig in their heels and say “no more home demolitions”?
And thus, on Sunday, when the IOF made a public announcement to two members of the “Popular Resistance Committees” in northern Gaza that “had 30 minutes” to evacuate whatever they could out of thier homes which would thereafter be demolished, something very different happened instead. The targeted families and their friends in the local mosque invited their neighbors to come over… The invitation was broadcast from the loudspeakers of the mosque there in Beit Hanoun, and hundreds of people hurried to go and organize a round-the-clock sit-in at the two targeted homes.
This mass civilian action— which was almost completely, as far as I can see, nonviolent– met with a very welcome response, both from the Palestinians of the area who flocked to the two threatened houses, and from the IOF which called off (or perhaps merely postponed) the threatened demolitions.
In that BBC report linked to there, which was by Alan Johnston, Johnston noted that:
- Of course the tactic is dangerous and it takes courage.
Nobody rushing to a threatened home will know whether or not this time the Israelis will strike.
But for Palestinians the new strategy has benefits way beyond protecting the odd target.
The tactic is symbolically important and a propaganda coup.
From militant leaders to schoolgirls, Palestinians can unite in confronting their enemy and the passive resistance of the human shields will be admired from around the world.
The boys on the roofs, armed only with Palestinian flags and facing down war planes, are a David and Goliath image for the modern age…
He is quite right in most of these judgments, I think, including the one about the courage shown by the nonviolent resisters. (Check this photo gallery of the action, also from the BBC.)
He is wrong in two respects, though. I think it’s incorrect to describe the Palestinians’ action as “passive resistance.” It was not just a passive sitting-in-place: it was an active and seemingly fairly well-organized mobilization. Like the precursor action taken at the beginning of the month in and around the Beit Hanoun mosque, as I described here.
Two women died in that earlier action, and a number were wounded. But it did succeed in defusing the extreme tensions around the mosque, and in spiriting to safety the armed men who were being encircled there. So the fact that people responded to these latest mobilizations– in spite of the evident risks– ssays even more for their courage, I think.
Jonshton is wrong, too, to write that this latest nonviolent action “will be admired from around the world.” It has notably not been admired by my colleagues from Human Rights Watch, who rushed to deliver into my mailbox today an extremely bitter little news release stating,
- Palestinian armed groups must not endanger Palestinian civilians by encouraging them to gather in and around suspected militants’ homes targeted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Human Rights Watch said today.
Calling civilians to a location that the opposing side has identified for attack is at worst human shielding, at best failing to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians from the effects of attack. Both are violations of international humanitarian law.
According to media reports, on Saturday the IDF warned Mohammedweil Baroud, a commander in the Popular Resistance Committees, to leave his home in the Jabaliya refugee camp as they planned to destroy it. Baroud reportedly summoned neighbors and friends to protect his house, and a crowd of hundreds of Palestinians gathered in, around, and on the roof of the house. The IDF said that they called off the attack after they saw the large number of civilians around the house. On Monday, the BBC also reported that the IDF had warned Wael Rajab, an alleged Hamas member in Beit Lahiya, that that they were preparing to attack his home, and that a call was later broadcasted from local mosques for volunteers to protect the home.
“There is no excuse for calling civilians to the scene of a planned attack,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Whether or not the home is a legitimate military target, knowingly asking civilians to stand in harm’s way is unlawful.”
(The news release is not up on their website yet; but it came to me by email.)
So Human Rights Watch’s august leaders sitting in their comfy homes in New York want to tell Gaza’s people who they can and cannot invite to come and visit them (unarmed) in their homes there? (And not, as far as I can see, exerting any coercion on them at all as to whether they should come or not.) HRW’s chutzpah is beyond belief. And this, from an organization that has said nothing at all previously that I can find about the post-July surge in Israeli home demolitions in Gaza.
I’m almost ashamed at this point to still be on the ‘Middle East Advisory Committee’ of HRW, an organization that seems obsessively concerned with appeasing the presumed sentiments of their donor base by criticizing Palestinians at every opportunity. (Actually, I think they under-estimate the donor base that would be out there if they adopted a forthright and fair approach to the way they address the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories.)
… Meanwhile, most human-rights organizations inside Israel are doing a far, far better job of working for the rights of the Palestinians than Human Rights Watch is. On November 16, a coalition of Israeli rights organizations issued a joint statement on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. After sketching out the main dimensions of this crisis, the statement says this:
- Israel cannot shirk its responsibility for this growing crisis. Even after its Disengagement in 2005, Israel continues to hold decisive control over central elements of Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip:
1. Israel continues to maintain complete control over the air space and territorial waters.
2. Israel continues to control the joint Gaza Strip-West Bank population registry , preventing relocation between the West Bank and Gaza , and family unification.
3. Israel controls all movement in and out of Gaza , with exclusive control over all crossing points between Gaza and Israel , and the ability to shut down the Rafah crossing to Egypt .
4. Israeli ground troops conduct frequent military operations inside Gaza.
5. Israel continues to exercise almost complete control over imports and exports from the Gaza Strip.
6. Israel controls most elements of the taxation system of the Gaza Strip, and since February has withheld tax monies legally owed to the PA, and amounting to half of the to tal PA budget.
The broad scope of Israeli control in the Gaza Strip creates a strong case for the claim that Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip continues, along with an obligation to ensure the welfare of the civilian population. Regardless of the legal definition of the Gaza Strip, Israel bears legal obligations regarding those spheres that it continues to control. Israel has the right to defend itself. However, all military measures taken by Israel must respect the provisions of international humanitarian law.
The following Israeli human rights organizations call on the international community to ensure that Israel respects the basic human rights of residents of the Gaza Strip, and that all parties respect international humanitarian law:
* B’Tselem: the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
* Association for Civil Rights in the Israel
* Amnesty International–Israel Section
* Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights
* HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual
* Gisha: Center for the Legal Protection of Freedom of Movement
* Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
* Public Committee Against Torture in Israel
* Rabbis for Human Rights
What an honor roll of fine, principled organizations. (Another great Israeli organization is the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, ICAHD.)
What we need now, of course, is more action at the international level– and especially here in the US– in support of the Israeli groups’ highly principled position. What we absolutely don’t need is one-sided, blame-the-victim statements from an organization like Human Rights Watch that seek to lay “blame” on the Palestinians of Gaza for having turned– at last!– towards smarter and more intentional use of nonviolent mass actions.
Alan Johnston, in that piece he put onto the BBC website, also wrote this:
- nobody should imagine that the likes of Hamas are suddenly being won over wholly to the strategies of pacifism.
If they possessed anti-aircraft guns, they would surely blaze away at the circling planes.
Well perhaps, and perhaps not. Perhaps if the Indian nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s had had a bursting arsenal of hi-tech weapons, they would have never have flocked around Gandhi. We will never know– in either case.
As it is, now, however, what we have been seeing in Gaza over the past three weeks– and what we saw in Lebanon in 1996, 2000, and earlier this year– is organizations of nationalist-Islamist resistance to foreign occupation and foreign military intervention that figured out over time the political-strategic advantage that can be won by laying ever greater stress on nonviolent actions undertaken by civilian mass organizations, and less on the actions of small, always threatened, military cells.
It is true that neither Hamas not Hizbullah is, at this point, dominated by what I would call the concept of “principled” nonviolence. But both organizations have moved very far indeed toward incorporating the use of Gene Sharpe-type “strategic” nonviolence into their practice. Which is an excellent development! And certainly, far, far better than continuing along the road only of violence and killing.
This makes the practice of these two organizations similar in many respects to that of South Africa’s ANC in the apartheid years. Too many people in the west today forget that the ANC had a fairly large military apparatus right until the very end of the struggle (at which point it was incorporated into the “new” South African National Defence Force.) But it was precisely for having founded and headed that military apparatus that Nelson Mandela received his lengthy prison sentence in the 1960s.
No-one ever insisted that the ANC had to give up its military option completely, before negotiations could even start. All that was required at that point– from both sides– was commitment to a ceasefire… But it was the strongly networked string of civilian mass organizations that provided the main strategic weight of the ANC from the early 1980s on… and that came to make apartheid South Africa literally ungovernable. And those networks, united in the UDF, carried out their work alongside the continuing (though fairly ineffective) work of the ANC military…
(Okay, I’m getting a little tired here and don’t have the energy to give this post a final, more elegant shape… But I hope you get the drift of my argument here… )
To JWN’s readers, I believe that the webzine called “bitterlemons.org” which is published by a joint team of Israeli and Palestinian analysts should be quoted and referred to more often. Of course both sides are biased, but the result is one of the clearest pictures of the possible solutions to the conflict. It does not suffer the convoluted second thoughts that most people seem to have in the US, be it HRW or anybody’s congressman. Of course, it’s the UE that does the funding.
Human Rights Watch is so wrong on this one. I am glad you are writing about this. Here’s a link to the story of HRW’s condemnation of what basically is non-violent, voluntary protest to protect people’s homes: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/01EC2BA7-88CE-48E6-AA7B-0DBC9A244BDD.htm I read that the house Israel was going to bomb houses 5 families!! As the article just linked says: “According B’tselem, the Israeli human rights information organization, the Israeli forces destroyed 251 homes in Gaza leaving 1,577 people homeless between July and November 15 2006.”
Here is a link to an interesting article on the internal debate among Palestinians on increasing the use of non-violent tactics: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1120/p01s02-wome.html
I read Helena’s article on the women of Hamas. Very interesting. Israel is coming particularly hard on Hamas MP Jameela al-Shanti. AP writes about today’s military incursion in Gaza:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061122/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_palestinians
Troops also took over the home of a Hamas legislator who earlier in the month helped to organize a women’s demonstration that let dozens of militants escape an Israeli siege on a Beit Hanoun mosque, the lawmaker, Jamila Shanti, told The Associated Press. She was not in the house at the time, contrary to Palestinian security officials’ earlier report. A bulldozer chipped away at the walls of the two-story structure so troops could enter, relatives inside the house and neighbors told her, she said. Once inside, they locked about 15 members of her family, including five children, into a single room and threw furniture and clothes out of windows, she said. “They are only making us more stubborn,” she said. “We will resist with our last drop of blood.”
Lisette, thanks so much for those links– especially the one to the CSM article which was informative and added new information (unlike the Jazeera one, imho.)
I thought the quote from the B’tselem spokesperson there was particularly apt:
“In principle, it’s forbidden for militants to draft people to protect them,” says Sarit Michaeli, a spokewoman for the Israeli human rights monitor B’tselem. “The idea of citizens coming to protect a house which is a military target is problematic, to say the least.”
And yet, Ms. Michaeli says that whether or not the human shield protest constitutes a human rights breach depends on whether the protesters participated willingly or were coerced, whether minors were involved, and whether the house was a genuine military target.
I made some of these same points in my latest post, which I am about to put up on the blog here.