Posts Tagged occupation
An Unshakable Status Quo With the Occupation?
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel, Jerusalem, West Bank on August 1st, 2009
Aluf Benn, senior Editor at Ha’aretz, had an op-ed piece in the New York Times last week. Without knowing it, he touched on a disturbing and difficult issue in the settlement debate, Israeli indifference. Detailing how Obama’s understanding of the Israeli public is wrong, Benn writes:
“As far as most Israelis are concerned, Mr. Obama has made a mistake in focusing on a settlement freeze. For starters, mainstream Israelis rarely have anything to do with the settlements; many have no idea where they are, even when they’re a half-hour’s drive from Tel Aviv.”
By stating that Israelis are ignorant of the settlements as reason for their rejection of Obama, Benn is showing the deep Israeli misunderstanding of how detrimental the occupation is. Even within the so-called left there is a palpable lack of awareness to the depths of the occupation. The lack of confrontation with the reality of the occupation is the main problem that Benn has accidental touched upon. Israel has created a status quo with the occupation that seems unshakable.
For more analysis on the topic, please see Dana Goldstein’s excellent piece at the American Prospect.
The Real Life Cellcom Advert
Posted by Joseph Dana in Jerusalem on July 21st, 2009
From Bil’in last Friday
Judaizing East Jerusalem
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel, Jerusalem on July 19th, 2009
Co-written with Antony Loewenstein
Today roughly one hundred people gathered to protest the eviction of the Palestinian Hanoun family from their home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. They are the latest target of the increasing push to populate the area with Jewish settlers, hindering any possibility for a future Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem.
According to their website, the Hanoun’s are one of 27 families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood that are facing home eviction as part of a plan to establish a new Jewish settlement in the area. The Hanoun family was displaced from their home in Haifa after the Naqba of 1948 and currently consists of 18 people, including six children. They have lived in Sheikh Jarrah since 1956, when the Jordanian Government and UNRWA gave them houses as part of a project to help Palestinians forced to flee their properties.
International press and every major Israeli news outlet including the Jerusalem Post were on hand to hear the press conference held inside the Hanoun family home. This is not surprising given news today of the US state department informing the current Israeli envoy that Israel must halt all settlement construction in East Jerusalem. Prime Minister Netanyahu responded that Jerusalem will always be the united capital of Israel.
Later on, Hagit Ofran of Peace Now gave protestors and the media a brief history of another sign of Israel’s takeover in Sheikh Jarrah, the Shepherd Hotel. The hotel was bought by millionaire and close friend of Ehud Olmert, Irving Moskowitz, in the 1980s, with a plan to create a massive apartment complex for Jewish settlers. The city of Jerusalem has until recently denied permission to build such a complex.
Last month, permission was granted by newly instated mayor Nir Barkat to continue construction at the Shepherd Hotel, placing yet another portion of disputed land in Jewish hands and sending a message to Palestinians and the world that Israel is not a genuine partner in any bilateral, peace process.
What is so perplexing and enraging is that by continually implanting Jewish neighborhoods in the midst of Palestinian communities, Israel is sabotaging its own determination to be a permanent, Jewish-majority, internationally accepted, democratic state with defined borders.
cross posted at Mondoweiss
Zizek on Love
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel, Jerusalem on July 16th, 2009
The philosopher rock star Slavoj Zizek on Love. Is love going to end the occupation? Is it going to heal the settler insanity? Perhaps not…
Picnic at an Illegal Outpost
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel, West Bank on July 12th, 2009
Yesterday, members of Ta’ayush set out to have a picnic at an illegal outpost built on Palestinian land next to the settlement of Susya in the southern West Bank. Susya is divided into three places; Palestinian Susya, Jewish settlement Susya and archeological site Susya. Often, the first construction of an illegal outpost is a synagogue which the IDF is less willing to destroy. About one year ago settlers from Susya built a synagogue on the privately owned land of a local Palestinian. The area is known as Flag Hill (Givat HaDegal). Within weeks, the settlers had laid a foundation for one house and sure enough today a house now stands on Flag Hill. The IDF actively protects the house despite there being no full time inhabitants.
We encountered problems before we even arrived at the outpost. A minibus of Ta’ayush activists was stopped at the main checkpoint separating Jerusalem and the southern West Bank. Soldiers asked for our ID cards and without a stated reason held us at the checkpoint for over an hour. Presumably, they were requesting an order from a high commander that would bar us entry to the West Bank, efficiently denying us freedom of movement because we were engaged in left wing actions. This order never came. The commander at the checkpoint wrote down our names and ID numbers while informing us that we were not allowed to enter the south West Bank and if we were found to be in a “military area” we would be detained for 48 hours. This, of course, was a lie as he had no authority to issue such a statement and it was not put in writing. He was trying to frighten us which he failed to achieve. We entered through another checkpoint and eventually made our way to the picnic.
Ta’ayush has been monitoring the expansion of Flag Hill and yesterday decided to have a peaceful picnic in protest of the Army’s active participation in maintaining this outpost. We were a group of Jewish Israelis invited by the Palestinian land owner to have a picnic on his land. We thought, by all accounts, we had every right to be there. As we walked up the hill to the outpost, five or six IDF soldiers came to greet us. Without an order from a commander, they could do nothing so we continued and set up our picnic complete with hummus, watermelon and homemade pita from the land owner. A commander arrived within minutes and pronounced the area a closed military zone ordering us to leave within five minutes or face arrest. We continued to enjoy the picnic as the Army began arresting people, going after Ezra Nawi first.
The IDF arrested three people and removed the rest of us, over 20 people, from the hilltop. We returned to the land owner’s home and waited for word from those arrested. They were driven to a checkpoint about 15 minutes away from Susya and simply dropped off. One of those arrested told me that he was saying to the soldiers, “you are showing me that you broke the law and not me. If I did something wrong arrest me! Take me to a judge. But you are unwilling because I did nothing wrong and you did”
New Pawns in the Game of Settlement Growth
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel, West Bank on July 8th, 2009
Cross posted at Mondoweiss
Yesterday morning, Nefesh B’Nefesh had the first in a series of summer 2009 celebrations greeting its charter flights packed with new immigrants from North America. Nefesh B’Nefesh is a non-profit organization that encourages and facilitates Jewish immigration to Israel from North America and the United Kingdom. They expect to bring over 3,000 immigrants to Israel over the course of the summer, in addition to the 20,000 they have brought since 2002. Attending the ceremony were the Israeli Minister of Transportation, Israeli Minister of Immigrant Absorption, the Chairman of the Jewish Agency, the CEO of EL Al Israel Airlines and the two American Jewish founders of Nefesh B’Nefesh.
Nefesh B’Nefesh, along with the Jewish Agency and the Israeli government, is intentionally encouraging new immigrants to move to illegal settlements. Of the 232 immigrants who arrived in Israel yesterday, seven families were going to settle in Ma’aleh Adumim, along with a handful of people moving to Efrat inside the Gush Etzion settlement block. Both of these areas are considered to be illegal Israeli settlements according to international law. President Obama has recently called on Israel to cease all settlement growth and activity. The Israeli government has, in turn, argued that it must be able to continue what it calls “natural growth,” or building within existing settlements for the children of residents. But even using their own logic, “natural growth” certainly can’t include new immigrants from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Nefesh B’Nefesh will succeed in bringing family after family to the settlements in effect having an American based nonprofit organization directly contributing to Israeli settlement growth (click here to see upcoming Nefesh B’Nefesh events in the US). Furthermore, important staff members of the Nefesh B’Nefesh organization are settlers by their own admission.
In addition to Israel’s stalling of evacuating outposts it has itself slated for dismantlement, the Obama administration faces another crucial obstacle in its efforts to implement a freeze on Israeli settlement growth: American citizens moving there.
"Where peaceful protest begets jail"
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel, West Bank on June 19th, 2009
Ezra Nawi is going to be sentenced for a crime he did not commit on 1 July 2009. Our friend and fellow member of Ta’ayush David Shulman has an excellent opinion piece in Haaretz today about Ezra. Please visit Support Ezra for more information on his trial.
Where peaceful protest begets jail
By David Shulman
Bad times bring out the best in some people. Most of us remain passive, even willfully blind, in the face of great crimes that we see perpetrated on others, whether they are strangers or our next-door neighbors. But there will always be someone, probably just an ordinary decent person, to whom this rule doesn’t apply – someone who will try to do the right thing at any cost, risking his or her well-being or even, perhaps, life itself. Ezra Nawi is such a man. He’s a plumber by profession, a Jewish Jerusalemite, and he is also the unsung hero of the Israeli peace movement in the south Hebron hills. It’s largely thanks to him that the Palestinian farmers in this area are still living on their land. Unless something happens to change the current prognosis, an Israeli court will sentence Nawi to jail on July 1.
Nawi was convicted on March 19 in the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court of assaulting a police officer. Since I’ve known the man for decades and seen him in action in many extreme situations, I’m certain that the charge is untrue; but let’s look at the circumstances. On February 14, 2007, the Israeli authorities sent army bulldozers to demolish several Palestinian shacks in a tiny place called Umm al-Kheir, 25 kilometers southeast of Hebron. Umm al-Kheir embodies the everyday reality of the Israeli occupation like no place else: The 100 or so impoverished Bedouin who call it their home, eking out a livelihood by grazing goats and sheep on the dry, stony hills, live in rickety structures of canvas, tin and stone. The land is theirs: Originally refugees from Tel Arad in the Negev in 1948, they bought it for good money from its Palestinian owners in the early 1950s. Israel, however, has put up a large settlement called Carmel right next to Umm al-Kheir, and like all settlements, Carmel (founded in 1981) is constantly expanding, encroaching on the lands of its Palestinian neighbors. As documented in detail in police records in Kiryat Arba, settlers also regularly attack these neighbors, whom they would like to remove altogether from this area.
Read the rest here.
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Palestinians out, Jews in
Posted by Joseph Dana in Israel, Jerusalem on August 3rd, 2009
After receiving eviction notices last May, three Palestinian families constituting 53 people, including 20 children, were forcibly removed from their homes under High Court order at dawn on Sunday August 2. The Hanouns, the Rawis and the al-Ghawis, all families who fled their homes in West Jerusalem and became refugees during the 1948 War, have been living in their houses since 1956, when Jordan reached an agreement with UNRWA to resettle them.
They are now living on the streets, homeless. Just a week ago they were living inside their home and now there are Jewish settlers inside, exhibiting not the least bit of remorse for the homeless family just outside. The Hanoun family’s furniture was seized by Israeli forces and they are now responsible for paying the storage and mover fees. Meanwhile, the Jewish settlers are living with round-the-clock security, not allowing anyone near. At one house, the police actually had the nerve to tell us not to film too close, as we should respect the privacy of the new residents.
This is just one of several plans by various real estate groups such as Nahalat Shimon International and American businessmen such as Irving Moskowitz, to populate the areas surrounding the Old City with Jewish strongholds that sever Palestinian territorial contiguity in East Jerusalem. This prejudices any final resolution in which East Jerusalem would be the Palestinian capital. It is also in clear breach of Israel’s commitment under the Road Map. But these operations are backed by the Israel Lands Administration, the Jerusalem Municipality and the Israeli government, who are all working together to undermine any possibility for a two-state solution and are blatantly infringing on the basic human rights of the residents of what they deem to be the “united Jerusalem.”
east jerusalem, occupation, peace process, shiekh jarrah
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