commentary from Israel & the West Bank
Peacemaker Denied Entry to Israel
Sean O’Neill of the Christian Peacemakers Team in the southern West Bank Village of Tuwani was recently denied entry into the state of Israel. Sean is one of the tireless members of the CPT crew and has been regularly featured in Ibn Ezra videos. Below is the official statement from Christian Peacemakers Team:
CPTnet
28 September 2009
AT-TUWANI: Christian Peacemaker Team members denied entry to Israel
[Note: According to the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and numerous United Nations resolutions, all Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are illegal. Settlement outposts are considered illegal also under Israeli law.]
On Friday 25 September 2009, the Israeli authorities at Ben Gurion airport, Tel Aviv, denied entry to CPTer Seán O’Neill. They told O’Neill, a U.S. citizen, that Israel’s Ministry of Interior had ordered the denial of entry. In response to enquiries from O’Neill’s lawyer, the Israeli authorities stated that the ban was due to a court appearance by O’Neill and Joe Wyse (to whom the Israeli authorities denied entry earlier this month) in March 2009, despite the fact that an Israeli judge had ordered them released without charges.
On 8 March 2009, O’Neill and Wyse were videotaping Israeli settlers who were constructing a road on privately owned Palestinian land near Karmel settlement in the South Hebron Hills. When the Palestinian landowners and CPTers approached the work area, an Israeli settlement security guard began to shout and demand that they leave. The Palestinian landowners remained and requested that the CPTers videotape the work construction on their land. After the police officers arrived, the settlement security guard told them to detain the CPTers. The police did so and held them overnight at Kiryat Arba police station in Hebron. The following day, in a Jerusalem court, the police requested an extension of the CPTers’ detention to allow more time for investigating the claim that the CPTers had obstructed a police officer, but an Israeli judge found no justification for their detention and ordered they be released without charges immediately.
Israeli police frequently, at the request of Israeli settlers, arrest Palestinian shepherds or internationals accompanying them. Palestinians arrested in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are tried in Israeli military courts. A 2007 report, ‘Backyard Proceedings’, published by the Israeli group Yesh Din, found that there were “severe shortcomings and failures in the implementation of due process rights in the military judicial system operating in [the OPT].” As of July 2009, Israel was holding almost 400
Palestinians in administrative detention-detention without charge or trial. At the same time, Israeli settlers frequently commit crimes of violence against Palestinians and internationals with impunity.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Joseph Dana on 12/10/2009 at 02:08, and is filed under Southern Hebron Hills, Unarmed Resistance. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
about 9 months ago
The arrogance of the Israeli settlers is beyond belief. The Palestinians are not simply “Arabs,” they are descended from peasant Semitic Jews that converted to Islam after the Arab conquest of the 7th century! The rabbis and elites chose to leave before then in the Diaspora. If anything then, the Palestinians have a more legitimate claim to the land than the Israelis do, as most Israelis are in fact descended from Gentilic converts to Judaism–this was the main result of the Diaspora. This has all been acknowledged by honest Israeli Jews, by the way.
about 9 months ago
If the Palestinians are really Jews who were forced to become muslim, then why don’t they revert back to Judaism, and renew their covenant with God, which entitles them to the land? This would only apply to the Palestinians who are descendants of Jews, not the Arabian invaders in the 7th century.