Category: Palestine 2006

President Bush today made a speech in the White House with the clear intention of assuring an ever-skeptical world that he is concerned about the Palestinian question, and that he’s confident that PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Abbas’s illegitimately installed Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, can “deliver” something worthwhile to the Palestinian people.
In order to do this, Bush had to airbrush out a whole lot of extremely unsavory facts about the circumstances in which the Fayyad administration came into being. For example, he said,

The alternatives before the Palestinian people are stark. There is the vision of Hamas, which the world saw in Gaza — with murderers in black masks, and summary executions, and men thrown to their death from rooftops…
There’s another option, and that’s a hopeful option. It is the vision of President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad; it’s the vision of their government; it’s the vision of a peaceful state called Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people. To realize this vision, these leaders are striving to build the institutions of a modern democracy. (Ahem, what about the parliament that the Palestinians democratically elected back in January 2006, which the US government systematically tried to undermine from the day it was elected, and which has now been rendered inoperative through Israel’s broad arrests of legislators and through Abbas’s unconstitutional appointment of Fayyad?? ~ HC) They’re working to strengthen the Palestinian security services, so they can confront the terrorists and protect the innocent. (!) They’re acting to set up competent ministries that deliver services without corruption. (!) They’re taking steps to improve the economy and unleash the natural enterprise of the Palestinian people. And they’re ensuring that Palestinian society operates under the rule of law. (!) By following this path, Palestinians can reclaim their dignity and their future — and establish a state of their own…

So the way he presents it, Hamas is only a “terrorist” organization that uses unconscionable violence against Palestinians (as well as Israelis). He makes zero mention at all of Hamas’s victory in the 2006 elections– or, of Israel’s quite unforgivable detention of more than half of the duly elected Hamas legislators. All that is airbrushed out of Bush’s view of “history.”
Luckily, yesterday US readers were able to read this sterling piece of reporting by the NYT’s Steve Erlanger, who used his extensive understanding of the realities in the occupied Palestinian territories to write at length about the deep corruption into which Fateh has fallen, the horribly corrosive effects Israel’s stonewalling on the peace “process” has had on the lives of Palestinians, the commission by some Fateh bodies of torture and other forms of gross abuse against other Palestinians over the years, the US- and Israel-orchestrated campaign against the Parliamentary leadership elected by the Palestinians last year, and so on…
And nor does he spare Hamas from his scrutiny (though he gives a far more informed description of the political realities within which it operates, and in which it has grown so strong in recent years than anything G.W. Bush could even dream of producing). Erlanger led his piece thus:

Palestinians never used to do these things to one another. Putting bullets in the back of the heads of men on their knees. Shooting up hospitals. Killing patients. Knee-capping doctors. Executing clerics. Throwing handcuffed prisoners to their deaths from Gaza’s highest (and most expensive) apartment buildings. There is a madness in Gaza now. Hamas — a religious political-military organization that dominated the last Palestinian elections — claimed it was fighting infidels, with a holy sanction to kill. Fatah — the largest group in the Palestine Liberation Organization — was nearly as brutal as Hamas and claimed it was fighting the Nazis. Poor young men from the squalid, stinking refugee camps of Gaza, their heads filled with religious slogans and revolutionary cant, took off their knitted black masks to pose in front of the gilded bathrooms of the once-powerful and rich men of Fatah. Then they stole the sinks, toilets, tiles and pipes, leaving the wiring and the metal scraps for the ordinary, unarmed poor.

Not quite the image of Fateh as the nonviolent “peace-lovers” that George Bush was trying to convey, it seems?
(Do read the rest of Erlanger’s piece, if you can.)
So, back to Bush…
He describes a few fairly rapid steps he wants the US and its allies in the so-called “Quartet” to take. Then, he says this:

With the proper foundation, we can soon begin serious negotiations toward the creation of a Palestinian state.
These negotiations must resolve difficult questions and uphold clear principles. They must ensure that Israel is secure. They must guarantee that a Palestinian state is viable and contiguous. And they must lead to a territorial settlement, with mutually agreed borders reflecting previous lines and current realities, and mutually agreed adjustments. America is prepared to lead discussions to address these issues, but they must be resolved by Palestinians and Israelis, themselves.

I really don’t see how anyone can take seriously any more the notion that America has any remaining legitimacy to continue “leading” the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. For 34 years now– ever since the brief convening of an international Middle East peace conference in Geneva in December 1973– the US arrogated to itself the claimed “right” to dominate all aspects of Israeli-Arab peacemaking. And for a while, the rest of the world was, for a broad variety of reasons, prepared to go along with that.
Twenty years later, in 1993, the Norwegians handed to the Americans on a plate a unique opportunity to build on the relationships of trust that Norwegian negotiators had built up between the PLO and Israeli leaders, including a commitment the Israelis and Palestinians had both signed on to, that by 1999 they would have concluded a permanent peace agreement between them– and the Americans completely squandered that opportunity… Through first and foremost their continued pursuit of blatantly one-sided pro-Israeli partisanship, but also through their recourse to all sorts of silly, time-wasting ruses under the rubric of “confidence-building”, peace-“processing” etc, etc, and through President Clinton’s deep failure to engage with the need to work seriously on the all-important negotiations for a final peace agreement (as opposed to all those time-wasting little side-talks about this or that situation under the endlessly prolonged ‘interim’ situation.)
Well, 34 years of failed American “leadership” in the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy notwithstanding, here is President Bush breezily telling us that once again, “America is prepared to lead discussions to address these issues, but they must be resolved by Palestinians and Israelis, themselves.”
No mention there, you will note, of such things as “the principles of international law”. No. Under this so-called American “leadership”, these two parties– the one a state with the world’s third- or fourth-largest army, a GNP in the mega-billions, nuclear weapons, a massive prison system, and many other means of violent coercion at its disposal, and the other a ragtag collection of sad and corrupt little US-financed “ministries” under Abbas’s and Fayyad’s control, deploying a few little pop-guns (but oh, not against Israel)– are going to be able to sit down together and negotiate a fair, sustainable outcome?
I don’t think so.
That’s why getting a firm grounding of “the principles of international law” into the process is so important. Without that, the Palestinians can’t “negotiate” anything worthwhile or lasting.
Bush goes on, embedding some fairly racist assumptions about the nature of Palestinians into his discourse:

To make this prospect a reality, the Palestinian people must decide that they want a future of decency and hope — not a future of terror and death. They must match their words denouncing terror with action to combat terror. The Palestinian government must arrest terrorists, dismantle their infrastructure, and confiscate illegal weapons — as the road map requires. They must work to stop attacks on Israel, and to free the Israeli soldier held hostage by extremists. And they must enforce the law without corruption, so they can earn the trust of their people, and of the world. Taking these steps will enable the Palestinians to have a state of their own. And there’s only way to end the conflict, and nothing less is acceptable. (I’m not sure what the first half of the preceding sentence means. But maybe it doesn’t matter? ~HC)
Israel has a clear path. Prime Minister Olmert must continue to release Palestinian tax revenues to the government of Prime Minster Fayyad. Prime Minister Olmert has also made clear that Israel’s future lies in developing areas like the Negev and Galilee — not in continuing occupation of the West Bank. This is a reality that Prime Minister Sharon recognized, as well. So unauthorized outposts should be removed and settlement expansion ended. At the same time, Israelis should find other practical ways to reduce their footprint without reducing their security — so they can help President Abbas improve economic and humanitarian conditions. They should be confident that the United States will never abandon its commitment to the security of Israel as a Jewish state and homeland for the Jewish people.

The “reduce their footprint without reducing their security” line is quite cute… But it falls far short of calling for an unequivocal withdrawal of Israel from the areas its army occupied during the war of 1967. Whatever happened to that fine clause embedded in Resolution 242 about “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force”? Has George Bush, the Emperor of the Whole World, now decided that acquiring territory by force has become quite acceptable?
Bush again:

The international community must rise to the moment, and provide decisive support to responsible Palestinian leaders working for peace. One forum to deliver that support is the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee — a group chaired by Norway that includes the United States and Japan, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan. (This ‘Ad-Hoc Liaison Committee’ completely follows the model the Bushites love to use for addressing thorny international issues. Rather than using the existing and far more legitimate channels for multilateral action– primarily, the UN– they like to pull together ‘ad-hoc committees’ of their own choosing, and under their own leadership, to address this or that problem– and quite free from the constraints of anything called ‘international law’. I really don’t don’t see why other countries continue to go along with this norm-corroding, self-serving approach. Unfortunately, regarding the ‘Quartet’, even the UN itself went along. ~HC) Today I call for a session of this committee to gather soon, so that the world can back its words in real support for the new Palestinian government.
The world can do more to build the conditions for peace. So I will call together (He honestly thinks he’s been elected ‘leader of the whole world’? What madness is this?) an international meeting this fall of representatives from nations that support a two-state solution, reject violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and commit to all previous agreements between the parties. The key participants in this meeting will be the Israelis, the Palestinians, and their neighbors in the region. Secretary Rice will chair the meeting. (Take that, Tony Blair!) She and her counterparts will review the progress that has been made toward building Palestinian institutions. They will look for innovative and effective ways to support further reform. And they will provide diplomatic support for the parties in their bilateral discussions and negotiations, so that we can move forward on a successful path to a Palestinian state.

And then we have this… I knew it had to come into the speech somewhere!

The conflict in Gaza and the West Bank today is a struggle between extremists and moderates. And these are not the only places where the forces of radicalism and violence threaten freedom and peace. The struggle between extremists and moderates is also playing out in Lebanon — where Hezbollah and Syria and Iran are trying to destabilize the popularly elected government. The struggle is playing out in Afghanistan — where the Taliban and al Qaeda are trying to roll back democratic gains. And the struggle is playing out in Iraq — where al Qaeda, insurgents, and militia are trying to defy the will of nearly 12 million Iraqis who voted for a free future.
Ceding any of these struggles to extremists would have deadly consequences for the region and the world. So in Gaza and the West Bank and beyond, the international community must stand with the brave men and women who are working for peace.

So let’s see what this sudden burst of (claimed) Bushist enthusiasm for Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy leads to… Will we see a serious attempt by the US government to curb Israel’s settlement-building project? Will we see a serious attempt by them to push Israel into lifting the debilitating shackles it has placed on the ability of the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza to maintain anything like a “normal” economic, social, and political life?
I wait to be pleasantly surprised. But I am not holding my breath. Quite honestly, I think humanity could devise a better mode of global “leadership” than this one.

HC: I’ve just been back in touch with the smart, well-informed Palestinian political analyst Mouin Rabbani. I told him I thought the observation he made to me back in April that the west then looked set to make Fateh into the Palestinians’ Contras looked more prescient now than ever… I suggested to him that the role was either of Nicaraguan-style Contras or South African-style Inkatha Freedom Party, and asked how he saw things now. This is how he replied (posted here by permission):

I think comparisons can only be taken so far, but if an early Palestinian election materialises – which I tend to doubt – it will indeed have something in common with that in Nicaragua in 1988 (or was it 1990?) when the people were basically told by Washington, “vote for our Chamorro o or else”. This time the message will be “Do you want to eat”? Before [western government] people start celebrating the result they think will be obtained, they would do well to consider why the government hasn’t collapsed despite the sanctions that were imposed in March.
My own view is that no major decisions can be taken without a consensus including at least Fatah and Hamas. Early elections are a clear-cut case. Abbas doesn’t have a constitutional leg to stand on, and Hamas can respond to accusations that it is refusing to allow the will of the people to be expressed by pointing out this was done less than a year ago, pointing out that no one would accept if Hamas were to challenge a Fatah mandate 11 months after an election, and so on.
Judging by Abbas’s speech today he seems to genuinely believe the Palestinian people can be mobilised around the demand that Hamas capitulate to the Quartet conditions. Unlikely, even without taking into account that Fatah is in even worse shape today than it was in January.
My impression is that Hamas is determined to foil any attempt to conduct elections. This means things could get significantly worse unless serious negotiations for a new government are resumed.
—
HC again… AP reports on Abu Mazen calling for early elections, and the implications of this. Meanwhile, let’s hope and pray both sides there step back from the brink of confrontation on which they are now perched.

(which I’m not)… I would not have written a book with an attention-grabbing title like Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid without using even just a little portion of the text to make the case why this title is appropriate.
If I were Jimmy Carter, which I’m not, I would have noted that there are indeed many many things that Israel’s projects in the occupied West Bank and Golan have in common with South African apartheid, and very few if any of them have to do with skin color. (US citizens have this hang-up about skin color issues, which goes back deep in their collective past, obviously. Their common understanding of the word ‘racism’, for example, completely limits it to discrimination based on skin color, unlike just about everywhere else in the world where ‘racism’ has a far broader meaning.)
If I were Jimmy Carter I’d have noted that in both South Africa and the Israeli-occupied territories, the central project of a ruling government constituted by the settler immigrant community is the expropriation of the land and other natural resources of the indigenous people, involving the systematic expulsion of the indigenes from their ancestral lands and their relocation into economically quite unsustainable territorial holding pens.
The term “Bantustans” is generally appropriate in both cases.
If I were Jimmy Carter I’d have noted that this completely antidemocratic system of rule is sustained only through the power of armaments and lethal violence, backed up by whole enormous aparatuses of administrative violence and control.
I’d note that, yes, there are many clear instances of outright discrimination– based not on skin color as such (ever since the Israelis a while ago imported a bunch of black-complected Jews from Ethiopia to defuse that accusation), but Jewishness, pure and simple.
Whole road systems, housing developments, systems of social services, schools, and hospitals exist in the occupied West Bank– for Jews alone. Palestinians have to make do with horrible, constrained lives as untermenschen.
It’s all “justified” of course, on the basis of “security”– the security of just one of those groups, that is… Just as in apartheid South Africa.
And we can’t talk to the “terrorists” can we…
Just as in apartheid South Africa.
So I guess I wish Jimmy Carter had been a bit more forthright about some of these comparisons– in the text of his book. Which sadly, he wasn’t. The title of the book seems more like an afterthought, really.
Apart from that, it’s a sweet and haunting book, in which he gives an intimate portrait of how he came to learn about many aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli issue, and much well-presented information about the nitty-gritty of the Israeli-Palestinian encounter in the occupied territories. But really, I wish he’d done a bit more with that title of his.

A good post on the blog of Conflicts Forum… It’s the contribution that CF co-head Mark Perry made to a debate held in NYC recently on the motion of whether ““A democratically elected Hamas is still a terrorist organization.”
Perry, Mahmoud Mohamedou of Harvard, and defense lawyer Stanley Cohen all spoke against the motion. Israeli Ambassador to the US Daniel Ayalon and two other guys spoke in favor of it.
(Need I note: an all-male line-up there… )
Perry was speaking more to the question of whether the US and Israel should talk to Hamas, rather than whether it is or is not still a “terrorist” organization. Of course, the whole discourse of terrorism is usually invoked– in many current cases in the Middle East, as in the case of the ANC in its day– to claim that on that basis no-one should even talk to the organization(s) in question. But still, it is a slightly different issue.
Anyway, Perry makes an excellent case.

Laila el-Haddad has a searing account on her blog of what it has been like– yet again– to have to wait for many days at the Rafah crossing point as she tries to return to her own hometown and birth-place, Gaza.
She, her two-year-old, Yousuf, and her parents still haven’t gotten in.
Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) reads as follows:

Art. 13:
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Every single portion of this article is extremely important– for Palestinians as for all others of God’s children. In the US, pro-Zionist activists in the 1980s made a big campaign– with respect to the Soviet Jews– around just the”right to leave any country, including his own” portion of the text. And on the basis of their campaign to “Let my people go”, as they said, they affected the whole of the global balance during the Cold War.
Many of these same activists (and their beneficiaries, like Anatoly/Natan Scharansky) now don’t seem to care at all about the broad principles involved in Article 13, and the fact that it is applicable to all the peoples of the world, not just their own.
“Movement controls” is the technical term for all the many people-control mechanisms that the IOF have insisted on maintaining at all the borders around Gaza, as well as for the extensive people-corralling systems they maintain around each of the towns and cities inside the West Bank and the hundreds of checkpoints they maintain on roads and tracks deep in the heart of the West Bank.
The Israelis claim that these “movement controls” are needed to prevent the bombers and terrorists among the Palestinian population from harming Israelis. I can certainly understand that concern, and also want Israeli citizens to be protected from harm. But imposing real and continuing harm on the entirety of the Palestinian population, as these highly restrictive and always unpredictable movement control systems do, is not the best way– indeed, not even an effective way– of achieving this. Building reciprocal relationships of respect and human equality is by far the best way, over the long haul, to assure the security of Israelis, and of Palestinians.
(Who are every bit as human as Israelis. Do I need to say this?)
That’s why that whole, anti-humane system of governance the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan that is known as “rule through foreign military occupation” has to end. It is the occupation that has led to Israel erecting and mantaining this very damaging system of corrals, real large prisons, and “movement controls” throughout the occupied territories. This system obliterates the ability of Palestinians to pursue a normal human life. (You can read about some of the effects of this system in the big Quaker book on Israel and Palestine I worked on, that came out in 2004.)
The people who wrote the UDHR back in 1948 had a very vivid picture in mind, at the time, of the kinds of conditions of life that authoritarian governments like those in pre-1945 Germany or Japan had imposed on all the peoples who came under their rule. The kinds of freedom specified in Article 13 are crucial to human dignity and the possibility of living a hope-filled, predictable, and peaceable human life.
The Israelis occupation(s) and all the systems of movement control that have stemmed from them must end. Speedily. Let the negotiations over ending the occupations begin!
(Meantime, I haven’t said too much about Laila’s blog post there. Y’all should go and read it for yourselves.)

Last night, Israel and the Palestinian Authority both committed themselves to a ceasefire between Gaza and Israel, that would also include the complete withdrawal of the IOF troops from Gaza. It has gotten off to a rocky start. According to this account by AP’s Amy Teibel and Ibrahim Barzak:

Ahead of the new agreement, which took effect 6 a.m. Sunday, Israel pulled all its forces out of Gaza, the army said. Dozens of tanks and armored vehicles were parked just over the border in a military staging ground in southern Israel early Sunday.
But Palestinian militants continued firing rockets into Israel throughout the morning. Israeli police reported at least four rockets fired at the Israeli town of Sderot and an Associated Press photographer in the border town heard at least two more strikes. Another AP photographer in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun heard several rockets fired throughout the morning.

There are serious issues of control on the Palestinian side, where any attempt to exercise real control over frontline forces has always been extremely difficult because of Israel’s continual and often lethal interdiction operations.
The AP reporters wrote:

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas said he had contacted the leaders of all the Palestinian factions Sunday and they reassured him they were committed to the truce.
“There is a 100 percent effort to make this work, but there is no guarantee of 100 percent results,” said Ghazi Hamad, a spokesman for the Hamas-led government.
Hamas’ own militants claimed responsibility for firing rockets into Israel after 6 a.m., clouding prospects for the truce’s longevity.
“(We) reiterate that our attacks against the enemy continue,” the group said in a statement posted on its Web site.
The Hamas militants said they continued their attacks because some Israeli troops remained inside Gaza, an accusation Israel denied.
Islamic Jihad also claimed responsibility for firing rockets into Israel after the truce, and a spokesman, Abu Hamza, denied his group had signed on to truce. However, top Islamic Jihad leaders had said they were part of the deal, and the new rocket fire suggested they were not in complete control of their fighters…

Luckily, PM Olmert thus far seems to be showing a slightly flexible attitude that might allow the Palestinians a little time to bring their front-line militants under control. His spokesperson Miri Eisin is quoted there as saying about the rockets that were fired after 6 a.m.:

“Let’s hope that’s just the problems of the beginning… But if Israel is attacked, we will respond. If there are Palestinian factions that are not part of the cease-fire, it’s hard to see how the cease-fire will hold.”

Meanwhile, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal is in Cairo and there is the distinct possibility of further agreements that might cover a ceasefire in the West Bank and some large-scale prisoner exchanges…
Let’s all just hope that the existing ceasefire takes hold, the de-escalation process continues, and real negotiations for the ending of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Golan can be held very, very soon.

To understand somethng of how it feels to be a Palestinian, go read Laila el-Haddad’s account of her (so far unsuccessful) attempt to return with her son and her parents to her home-city, Gaza.
The Israelis claim to have withdrawn from Gaza in september 2005. But they still control all its means of contact with the outside world, including the tiny strip of internatinal border that Gaza shares with Egypt.
That’s where Laila– along with, apparently, several thousands of other Gaza Palestinians– is trying to cross.
They got as far as El-Arish, a 30-minute drive from the Rafah crossing point and the closest large Egyptian town to the border:

During times of extended closure, like this summer, and last year, it becomes a Palestinian slum. Thousands of penniless Palestinians, having finished their savings and never anticpating the length of the closure, end up on the streets. The storeowner and taxi drive relay story after story to us from this summer.
In response, and under Israeli pressure, the Egyptian police no longer allows Palestinians driving up from Cairo past the Egyptian port city of al-Qantara if the border is closed and Al-Arish becomes to crowded. “They turn it into a ghetto. That, and the Israelis didn’t want them blowing up holes in the border again to get through.”
We carried false hopes last night, hopes transmitted down the taxi driver’s grapevine, the ones who run the Cairo-Rafah circuit-that the border would open early this morning. So we kept our bags packed, slept early to the crashing of the Mediterranean-the same ones that just a few kilometres down, crashed down on Gaza’s beseiged shores.
But it is 4, then 5, then 6am, and the border does not open. And my heart begins to twinge, recalling the last time I tried to cross Rafah; recalling how I could not, for 55 days; 55 days during which Yousuf learned to lift himself up into the world, during which he took his first fleeting step.
… So, as always, we wait. We wait our entire lives, as Palestinians. If not for a border to open, for a permit to be issued, for an incursion to end, for a time when we do not have to wait any longer.
[What] is so frightening about borders-and particularly Rafah- that it drives chills down my spine? They are after all crossings like any others I tell myself. What divides one metre of sand from the next, beyond that border? It is exactly the same. It is history and occupation and isolation that changes it.
For Palestinians, borders are a reminder-of our vulnerability and non-belonging, of our displacement and dispossession. It is a reminder-a painful one-of homeland lost. And of what could happen if what remains is lost again. When we are lost again, the way we lose a little bit of our Selves everytime we cross and we wait to cross.
So it is here, 50 kilometres from Rafah’s border, that I am reminded once again of displacement. That I have become that ‘displaced stranger’ to quote Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. Displacmenet is meant to be something that happens to someone else, he says. How true. To refugees that the world cares to forget. Who have no right of return. Who return to nowhere and everywhere in their minds a million times. When the border closes, we are one day closer to become that.
Of course, that, is Yassine [her husband; a Palestinian who grew up in lebanon and has a Lebanon-issued ‘Palestinian’ refugee ID] — who cannot even get as far as I– cannot even get as far as Egypt, to feel alone. He feels alone everyday, and is rejected everyday, finding belonging in other, non-static things: family, love, work.
But the Palestinian never forgets his aloneness. He is always, always reminded of it on borders. That, above all, is why I hate Rafah Crossing. That is why I hate borders. They remind me that I, like all Palestinians, belong to everywhre and nowhere at once. The Border of Dispossession .

God help you, dear Laila.

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… )

Whem I was in Gaza in March, one of the Hamas people I interviewed was newly elected legislator Jamila al-Shanty. In this piece that I subsequently wrote for Salon, I described her in this way:

Jamila Shanty is a robust, good-natured woman with a well-defined, expressive face who bustles into our meeting toting a large, tattered briefcase. Formerly a professor of psychology and philosophy at Gaza Islamic University, she relishes her new role in the parliament where, she tells me, she hopes to sit on the political and legal-affairs committees.
“We need to strengthen our internal front and restore some discipline to Palestinian society,” she says of Hamas’ imminent priorities. “We must not give Israel the chance to come in here and bomb… ”

Well, Hamas stuck for many months to the unilateral ceasefire it had maintained, despite strong and continuing Israeli provocation… But that didn’t stop Israel from bombing Gaza (as we know)… or from blocading and stifling and trying to starve it’s 1.3 million people.
Last week, Shanty was one of the prime organizers of the nonviolent action wherein hundreds of women from the Beit Hamoun area defied the Israeli cirfew and went down to the town’s mosque to rescue their menfolk. A couple of days later the Israeli artillery shelled the house where she lives with her sister-in-law, and the sister-in-law’s children. Her sister-in-law Nahla and two of Jamila’s bodyguards were all reportedly killed, though Jamila herself was not there that night.
Yesterday, Ms. Shanty had this very poignant article in The Guardian. It was published under the title “We Overcame Our fear.”
In it she wrote this:

We still do not know what has become of our sons, husbands and brothers since all males over 15 years old were taken away last Thursday. They were ordered to strip to their underwear, handcuffed and led away.
It is not easy as a mother, sister or wife to watch those you love disappear before your eyes. Perhaps that was what helped me, and 1,500 other women, to overcome our fear and defy the Israeli curfew last Friday – and set about freeing some of our young men who were besieged in a mosque while defending us and our city against the Israeli military machine.
We faced the most powerful army in our region unarmed. The soldiers were loaded up with the latest weaponry, and we had nothing, except each other and our yearning for freedom. As we broke through the first barrier, we grew more confident, more determined to break the suffocating siege. The soldiers of Israel’s so-called defence force did not hesitate to open fire on unarmed women. The sight of my close friends Ibtissam Yusuf abu Nada and Rajaa Ouda taking their last breaths, bathed in blood, will live with me for ever.
Later an Israeli plane shelled a bus taking children to a kindergarten. Two children were killed, along with their teacher. In the last week 30 children have died…
Shortly after announcing his project to democratise the Middle East, President Bush did all he could to strangle our nascent democracy, arresting our ministers and MPs. I have yet to hear western condemnation that I, an elected MP, have had my home demolished and relatives killed by Israel’s bombs. When the bodies of my friends and colleagues were torn apart there was not one word from those who claim to be defenders of women’s rights on Capitol Hill and in 10 Downing Street.
Why should we Palestinians have to accept the theft of our land, the ethnic cleansing of our people, incarcerated in forsaken refugee camps, and the denial of our most basic human rights, without protesting and resisting?
The lesson the world should learn from Beit Hanoun last week is that Palestinians will never relinquish our land, towns and villages. We will not surrender our legitimate rights for a piece of bread or handful of rice. The women of Palestine will resist this monstrous occupation imposed on us at gunpoint, siege and starvation. Our rights and those of future generations are not open for negotiation…

We all need to listen to the pain and the arguments that Ms. Shanty, a very savvy political organizer and community leader, articulates here. We don’t need to agree with everything that she or other women and men from Hamas say in order to recognize and acknowledge that some of what they say has validity. The Palestinian question has to be addressed, and has to be resolved in a fair and sustainable manner; and this will not happen unless the large proportion of Palestinians who share this M.P.’s views are actively included in the peacemaking.
For myself, I want to start by sending Ms. Shanty my heartfelt condolences on the loss of her sister-in-law, her friends, and her family property– and my promise that I will do everything I can to work for a de-escalation of all the violence between Israel and the Palestinians and a fair and sustainable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My country has for far too long given Israel unquestioning support for all the actions it has taken against the Palestinians– including giving Israel huge financial, military, and political support that in recent years has been continued with no linkage made at all between that aid and Israel’s military or diplomatic misbehavior toward the Palestinians (or the Lebanese.) That has to stop. Fair-minded conditionality and accountability has to be established toward both sides in this tragically destructive conflict. And we need to extend equal human respect and concern to people on both sides of the line.
People in the US have in recent months been (re-)learning that we cannot build our nation’s security on an attempt to dominate others by violence and brute force. The same is equally true for Israel.