The Dominion - Israeli Occupation

Less Than Animals

hillarybain — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 05:46:24 +0000

Palestinian women imprisoned by Israel speak out

JERUSALEM—“The Russian Compound...” said Jehan Dahadha, before trailing off. Her gaze shifts to the floor and the 23-year-old Palestinian woman sighs before continuing.

“The level of pain that the prisoners suffer inside the Russian Compound, whether it is psychological or on a physical level, made it so that we call it the ‘Butcher Shop.’ It is not suitable for humans to live there. Even animals, it is not healthy for them.”

At age 19, Dahadha was arrested under Israeli suspicion that she belonged to the Islamic Jihad movement, and was taken away from her home and family in Ramallah, West Bank.

She spent several days being interrogated at the Russian Compound prison facility in Jerusalem before being sentenced to 16 months at Ha’Sharon prison in northern Israel.

“We as Palestinians are all subject to becoming prisoners: my sister, me, my mother, my brother. There is not a single Palestinian house that [does] not suffer whether from demolition or arrest,” said Dahadha, sitting in the offices of Addameer Prisoners Support and Human Rights Association in Ramallah.

Dahadha says the real reason she was arrested was because she engaged in non-violent demonstrations against the Israeli occupation, visited the families of Palestinian political prisoners and helped these prisoners get in touch with lawyers.

“What's behind [the Israeli process of arrest and detention] is not to maintain order or to punish people for violations of laws or committing crimes; the idea is to crush the mentality of resistance or the idea of rejecting the occupation in your mind,” explained Ala Jaradat, Programs Director at Addameer.

Approximately 700,000 Palestinians have been arrested or detained under Israeli military orders since 1967. This accounts for about 20 per cent of the total Palestinian population in the occupied territories, and nearly 40 per cent of the male population.

Over the same time period, nearly 10,000 Palestinian women have been detained.

Presently, 7,000 Palestinians—including over 300 children and 34 women—remain in Israeli prisons. According to Jaradat, the small number of Palestinian women in Israeli jails makes it much more difficult for the prisoners to demand better treatment and rights, as compared to their more numerous male counterparts.

“[Male Palestinian prisoners] can organize themselves in such a way and actually negotiate and resist and struggle to have certain rights and to have a certain level of relations because of the larger number,” Jaradat explained. “With Palestinian women, it's harder to be able to organize because of the smaller number. Whenever they try to [negotiate] they are subjected to harsh treatments."

Dahadha says that despite the research and information she gathered before entering prison, she was shocked by what she saw there.

"I used to read in newspapers and on the Internet about prisoners in prison. But no matter how much you read, you will never understand it until you go there,” she said, explaining that poor lighting, unhealthy food, and the constant presence of insects and cockroaches characterized daily life in Ha'Sharon prison.

“They treat you very badly, not as humans. They make committees for animal rights. But humans for them, especially the Palestinians, are less than animals,” said Dahadha.

According to Jaradat, Israeli prisons sorely lack a gender-sensitive approach and issues such as personal hygiene and medical needs are rarely addressed.

Further, sexual harassment and intimidation are widespread and used as a means to coerce confessions out of Palestinian women during the interrogation process, he says.

While Palestinian women may have a unique experience, many of the injustices widespread in Israeli prisons are shared by both men and women—and are forbidden by international law.

Hiba Hamidat is originally from Jalazone refugee camp, seven kilometers north of Ramallah. She spent 32 months in Ha’Sharon prison in Israel for her participation in demonstrations and support of Palestinian prisoners.

Released just over a year ago, Hamidat explains that the hardest part was being separated from her family, especially her mother, who didn’t have an Israeli ID card and therefore could not enter Israel to visit the prison.

“While I was serving my sentence, my mother couldn’t visit me for one year. For one year, only my father visited me. It was very difficult to see that all the other prisoners had their mothers visiting them, while my mother couldn’t visit,” explained the 24-year-old.

According to Israeli human rights lawyer Lea Tsemel, Hamidat should never have been held in an Israeli jail.

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power are prohibited."

Hamidat’s case is yet another example of how Israel blatantly disregards international law, says Tsemel, especially when it comes to arrest, interrogation and detention procedures for Palestinians.

“[Palestinians] are not recognized prisoners of war. They are held in different prisons within Israel which again is contradictory to the international Geneva Conventions, [which state] that people from the occupied territory will not be shifted to the occupier's territory,” explained Tsemel.

Jaradat, who does prisoner support with Adameer, says that a prisoner’s plight does not end with his or her release from prison. "Once a Palestinian has been to prison, their life will change. The punishments or violations of their rights and restrictions on their lives continue forever by the Israeli occupation," said Jaradat. "It’s never over."

Dahadha can speak to this reality first-hand.

"My life changed," she said. "I was engaged to someone in Jordan, but after I was released they prohibited me from leaving the country. Every time I try to cross the border they turn me back and give me an invitation for interrogation."

Newly engaged and planning her wedding for the fall, Dahada says her new fiance has been threatened with imprisonment by Israeli authorities for his connection to her.

"Even after a prisoner is out of prison," she said with a soft smile, "the torture and sentence does not stop there."

Originally from Montreal, Jillian Kestler-D'Amours is a human rights activist and multimedia journalist presently based in occupied East Jerusalem.

Jehan Dahadha

Central Prison

Frustration, Suffocation and Crisis

Moira Peters — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:03:08 +0000

Strife, siege on Gaza continue one year after Israeli bombardment

GAZA—The Gaza Strip was already spiraling under years of siege long before the F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tanks, warships, unmanned aerial vehicles and armed soldiers waged a 23-day war on the Strip in winter 2008-2009.

The agricultural sector, which used to provide 50 per cent of Gaza’s food needs, had been steadily failing as a result of the siege and Israel’s policy of aggression in border regions. The Israeli-led, internationally-complicit siege bans all but roughly 40 items from entering Gaza.

In 2008 the Agricultural Development Association (PARC) reported a desperate need for nylon used in hothouses, irrigation piping, fertilizers, seeds, seedlings and pesticides. In March 2009, the United Nations’ Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reiterated the call, adding animal feed, livestock, olive and fruit tree saplings, saying the need was "urgent" and "very urgent."

The Israeli war on Gaza destroyed between 35 and 60 per cent of agricultural sector, tearing up irrigation networks, destroying hundreds of wells, water pumps, and cisterns, farm buildings and machinery, and killing over 35,000 cattle and sheep, and over 1 million chickens and birds.

The most fertile areas of the impossibly small Strip lie in Gaza’s border regions—inhabited but largely undeveloped. Of the 175,000 dunams of cultivable land, 60-75,000 dunams have been destroyed by Israeli invasions and operations.

The Israeli-imposed “buffer zone” in theory renders 300 metres flanking the borders off-limits. Israeli authorities say anyone within that zone risks being shot by Israeli soldiers. In reality, Israeli soldiers shoot and shell up to two kilometres from the border, rendering more than one-third of Gaza’s farmland inaccessible.

Since the end of Israel’s war on Gaza on January 18, 2009, at least 13 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 39 injured in and outside of the “buffer zone” by Israeli soldiers’ shooting and shelling. Children are among the casualites.

Despite the danger, farmers continue planting and farming. The inability to regularly access their land has meant many farmers sow low-maintenance crops instead of the diverse array of vegetables, grains and fruits that once flourished in Gaza.

Before Israeli bulldozers razed the fruit and olive trees that abounded along Gaza’s borders, bee-keepers were able to produce high-quality honey two or three times per year. Many bees have died out from Israeli bulldozing and during the last Israeli war on Gaza. In the absence of trees, most of the remaining bee-keepers substitute sugar-water for flowers.

The Palestinian fishing industry, employing more than 3,500, has been devastated by Israeli attacks on fishing boats, confiscation of boats and equipment, and the abduction of Palestinian fishermen.

Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, Palestinian fishermen have the right to fish 20 nautical miles off Gaza’s coast. Israeli authorities have steadily down-sized fishing zone limits. In 2008, fishermen were warned not to go beyond six miles. Currently, Israeli gunboats prevent fishermen from passing three miles.

Fishermen report being attacked by machine gun shooting, water cannons and shelling from Israeli gunboats within three miles of the coast. Israeli naval soldiers routinely force Palestinian fishermen in large vessels, or small hassakas just 2-300 metres off the coast, to motor or row out beyond the Israeli-imposed limit, whereupon the fishermen are abducted and arrested.

Abducted fishermen report being forced at gunpoint to strip, jump into the water (frigid in winter) and swim tens of metres to a retreating Israeli gunboat where they are hauled aboard, blindfolded and handcuffed, sometimes beaten, interrogated and taken to Israeli detention for one or more days.

The interrogations often include coercion, via threat and financial enticement, to work with Israeli intelligence.

Their fishing boats are frequently confiscated for months, often returned damaged or with equipment and parts missing.

Fishermen say the bounty of fish lie beyond the six mile limit. Reduced to fishing along the coast, the sparse catch comes from waters contaminated by 80 million litres of raw or partially-treated sewage pumped daily into the sea for want of proper sewage maintenance plants.

While Egypt is building a steel wall intended to cut off the hundreds of tunnels running between Gaza and Egypt, tunnelers say they will dig deeper. Palestinians in Gaza say they need the tunnels: they are a lifeline, bringing the imaginable—chocolates, cigarettes, medicines, appliances—to the unimaginable—livestock, cars, people.

Unemployment remains rife at near 50 per cent, with food aid dependence and poverty at over 80 per cent. Educated youths with university degrees languish without work, or take jobs driving taxis for a paltry salary. Students craving higher education, and with scholarships abroad, remain imprisoned by Gaza’s siege-closed borders, losing study and scholarship opportunities.

One year later, virtually nothing has changed, except the frustration, suffocation, and manufactured crises have worsened.

A complete schedule of Israeli Apartheid Week with speaker biographies is available on the website.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer living in Gaza.

Trauma

Fishing Group

Beit Hanoun

Gravel & Sand Dad & Kid

Buffer Zone

Fishing Steam

Sheep

Opposition MPs in the West Bank

Moira Peters — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:41:10 +0000

Liberal, NDP and Bloc MPs visit Palestinian evictees, call on Canada to respond

JERUSALEM—Following a trip to Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza in August, members of parliament from Canada's three opposition parties say they are committed to pushing their parties, and the government, on Canada’s role in the region.

Responding to Israel's seige on Gaza, Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Friendship Association (CPFA) representatives Borys Wrzesnewskyj (Liberal), Libby Davies (New Democratic Party) and Richard Nadeau (Bloc Québecois) flew to the Middle East to assess the humanitarian situation.

Reached by phone after returning to Canada, Davies (Vancouver East) said the Canadian government is silent when it should join in international condemnation of Israel's human rights abuses. The pressure on the Israeli state that is coming from Canadian civil society, including the Jewish community, is “not happening at the political level,” according to Davies.

The delegation entered and exited Gaza at the Rafah crossing, except for Wrzesnewskyj, who parted ways with the group in Egypt.

Wrzesnewskyj, MP for Etobicoke Centre and founder of the CPFA, was more optimistic than Davies. (Wrzesnewskyj resigned as Liberal foreign affairs critic after coming under fire for calling on Canada to dialogue with Hezbollah during the Lebanon War.)

“One day in the not too distant future, I hope that everyone there, regardless of who they are, could have the same hopes and dreams as the children living here in Canada,” he told me after his visit.

Turning his attention to the heart of the Palestinian struggle, Wrzesnewskyj remarked that “obviously East Jerusalem is going to be key for negotiations.”

Both Palestinians and Israelis lay claim to Jerusalem as their eternal capital. But Palestinian residents of the city are being forced out of their homes by Israeli soldiers.

Fifty-three Palestinians were evicted from their homes in East Jerusalem last month. Wrzesnewskyj argued that Israel's actions present a call for President Obama to act. However Wrzesnewskyj mentioned nothing about a similar response from Ottawa.

When, on August 8, Liberal, NDP and Bloc members stepped out of the Ambassador Hotel and into the East Jerusalem Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, they glimpsed a crucial instance of what is impeding Israeli-Palestinian peace. A few minutes away, Palestinians were camping on the sidewalk after being violently evacuated from their homes by hundreds of police six days before.

Settlement companies plan to increase Jewish residence in Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian refugees were given housing by Jordan and UN Relief and Works Agency in 1956. An hour after the Gawi and Hannoun families were evicted on August 2, Jewish settlers seized their houses. Israeli police and private security have since been guarding the properties.

The evictions and occupations of Palestinian homes began after Israeli courts allowed a Jewish association to claim ownership over land in Sheikh Jarrah from deeds dating back to the 1800s. But Palestinian refugees, like the Hannouns who were forced to flee their home in Haifa—now northern Israel—in the 1948 war, cannot return to homes they lost 61 years ago.

****

Since Canada would not fund or facilitate the CPFA reps' visit to Gaza, the officials' travel was facilitated by the North American feminist and peace organization, Codepink. Strolling to the Old City to grab dinner, the delegation of three MPs and members of Codepink were confronted instead by flashing blue lights from three police cars and Israeli border police in military wear with M16’s dangling from their shoulders.

Outside the Gawis’ house stood a blue three-by-three-metre tent, and about 50 people milling about underneath.

A religious Jewish man walked by, blood dripping from his forehead. More police arrived. Palestinians said a settler attacked their relative and the police then arrested a Palestinian man.

Moving away from the scene outside the Gawis’ home, the delegation followed Charihen Hannoun, 20, to the makeshift camp outside their home.

“We need all the world to know about our situation here and to help us back into our house,” she told the delegation.

****

Over the phone Davies said she will share this information with parliament. However, she says, it is “a challenge in and of itself to pressure our own government to be more proactive on upholding human rights and international law, whether it’s in Jerusalem or Gaza.”

Wrzesnewskyj believes that practically, only the US can push Israel on this issue. But there are signs the US is giving in to Israeli demands to leave East Jerusalem out of a settlement freeze.

Davies pointed out that when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian question, Canada’s foreign affairs website mentions UN resolutions, international law, the Green Line and the illegality of the separation barrier. “But what they have on paper, on the website, and what they actually do are two completely different things.”

Following the evictions, the UN, US and EU condemned Israel’s actions. I asked Davies about Canada’s position. “Well, I’m not aware that Canada’s said anything, are you?”

However, according to Foreign Affairs spokesperson Rodney Moore, Canada registered its concerns directly to the Israeli government on this issue.

The delegation has not yet completed their report.

Carmelle Wolfson is an independent journalist from Toronto currently based in Israel/Palestine, and a copy editor for Briarpatch Magazine.

A version of this article originally appeared in NOW Magazine.

MPs in West Bank

Settlers in Sheikh Jarrah

The Boycott Debate

Moira Peters — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 05:39:11 +0000

Klein, Lerer, Baskin on the effects of internal, external pressure on Israel

EAST JERUSALEM—"More than twenty-five people were arrested today in Beit Ummar," says a Canadian member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who sits behind me in a Ramallah auditorium in the West Bank. In front of me in the Friends School Hall, writer Naomi Klein prepares to speak to about 500 internationals, intellectuals, activists, NGO workers and journalists packed into the auditorium meant to seat 350. Spectators stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the back of the hall; a handful crouch in the aisles.

"Last week the same thing happened," explains the ISM activist.

The police had arrested eight activists from Ta'ayush, an Israeli human rights organization, although they had documentation from the Israeli Supreme Court proving the military isn't allowed to shut off agricultural areas. Bat Ayin settlers uprooted over 100 trees near Beit Ummar in late June, reported The Palestine Media Center. The Israeli Army's response was to name the area a closed military zone. Anyone going in and out of the area would be arrested.

The Bat Ayin settlement is within Gush Etzion, one of the largest Israeli settlement blocks. The region, southwest of Bethlehem, is the most agriculturally fertile land in the West Bank. According to the spiritual beliefs of religious Jewish settlers, all of British Mandate Palestine should be returned to the Jews. This includes the West Bank, or what they call by the biblical term Judea and Samaria. The settlement of Bat Ayin is home to the "Bat Ayin Underground," a group that plotted the bombing of a Palestinian girls’ school in East Jerusalem in 2002.

International Palestinian solidarity workers and Israeli human rights activists have been escorting farmers from Beit Ummar to their agricultural lands near Hebron to protect them from violent attacks by nearby Israeli settlers.

Settler attacks, military arrests, and uprooted trees (which are a means of sustenance, livelihood and spirituality) are daily realities for Palestinians since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 and radical religious Jewish settlers began setting up outposts across the West Bank. Concurrently, on the other side of the separation barrier – which will stretch more than 700 km when completed – Jewish Israelis live without such disturbances. The Israeli Security Agency Shin Bet admitted in May that there is no security reason to continue building the wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice five years ago. Nonetheless construction continues.

Klein’s talk in Ramallah (full transcript here) heralds the first coordinated speaking tour in Israel/Palestine promoting the boycott of Israeli cultural and academic institutions. Palestinian civil society first called for a broad boycott, divestments and sanctions against Israel in 2005. The boycott demands Israel honour UN Resolution 194 and end the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands, dismantle the separation barrier, and recognize as equal the rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel and the right of refugees to return to their homes.

Klein blushes as Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian Initiative lauds her as a woman of her word for participating in the weekly nonviolent demonstration against the separation barrier in the border town of Bil'in. The barbed wire fence annexes over 50 per cent of Bil'in's land to Israel. This has allowed two Canadian-registered companies, Green Park and Green Mount, to construct settlements on the annexed land. A Quebec judge is currently deliberating on whether to hear Bil'in's case against the companies, which argues that their actions violate international law by transferring civilians onto occupied territory.

"There is a debate among Jews – I’m a Jew by the way," Klein tells the audience in Ramallah. "Whether the lesson of the Holocaust should be 'never again' to anyone, or 'never again to us.'" For Klein the answer is clear. Growing up Jewish in Toronto, she first became active in the social justice movement as a student at the University of Toronto, where she occupied administrative offices to call for divestment from apartheid South Africa. "It is precisely because of what we experienced as Jews that we must denounce racism, denounce systems of segregation wherever they crop up, even and especially when they crop up amongst our own," says Klein.

As Israeli attacks on Palestinians have escalated, Israeli trade relations haven’t suffered, but deepened, says Klein. There's a reason there is no motivation for peace, she explains: People in Israel can live normal lives.

The economy, built on homeland security, is thriving, says Klein. "The Occupied Territories are the laboratory and [...] the Palestinian people are the test market for these technologies." Israeli companies like Elbit Systems, who built the "apartheid wall" in the West Bank, are selling their expertise to the US government. The main subcontract for a network of sensors, guard towers and electrified fences on the Canada-US and US-Mexico borders went to Elbit, Klein reports.

"We are challenging the idea of normalization because when a film that you really want to see isn’t playing in the Jerusalem Film Festival, when a conference you wanted to go to isn’t going to happen in Tel Aviv because people have decided that they are not going to have it there, that challenges such a central part of Israeli identity," explains Klein. This, she believes, will pressure a part of Israeli society to say: "We need peace to have a normal life."

Klein thinks there has been a change within Israeli society after the 2008 massacre in Gaza and the election of the far right Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. "Most progressive Israelis drew the line at calling Israel an apartheid state and calling for a boycott," but now, she says, a group of Israelis have come together to form Boycott from Within.

****

Yael Lerer is the founder of Andalus Publishing and a Boycott from Within member.

The publishing company hasn't turned a profit. It can barely afford to translate The Shock Doctrine into Hebrew. Fortunately, Klein donated Andalus the publication rights. All royalties from Hebrew copies sold in Israel will go towards Andalus for translating Arabic literature into Hebrew. "I think that all our work is a work of resistance," says Lerer. She explains that publishing books in Hebrew by authors like Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Elias Khoury (both donated publishing rights to Andalus) is part of the fight against the cultural hegemony in Israel. Most Israelis "don't really want to be part of the Arab world," says Lerer. "They don't want to read Arabic literature or to be aware of what is going on around them."

From her home office in Tel Aviv, Lerer tells me, "With every book that I publish, I always have some moments that I think 'this is the last book that I publish'; and for what, for whom?

"But on the other hand," she adds, "I think that if there are a thousand Israelis that read Naomi Klein, like some of those that read our Arabic translations, it’s going to make some impact."

Lerer says boycotting Israel doesn't mean you must stop speaking to Israelis. Instead, she wants to end the normalization of the occupation. "I cannot bear this normality that Israelis live," explains Lerer. "Personally, I'm disturbed by all of these Israelis who think of themselves as enlightened people and at the same time don't do anything against the occupation, or do things, but in a very minor way." She hopes intellectuals won't be welcomed to international festivals if they're contributing to the portrayal of a "normal liberal Israel, when Israel is an apartheid state." Lerer thinks more academics who fear the repercussions of speaking against Israel might be motivated to speak out if they’re pressured by the international community.

Lerer has been an activist for nearly 30 years. "No-one could imagine then what is going on now. Nobody could imagine massacres like Gaza," she says. "With the slogans of peace Israel gets all this support and can continue to do what it wants." The Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, the peace agreement with Egypt in 1978. And yet, says Lerer, "So much blood has been shed since then."

Lerer doesn't expect change from inside Israel anymore. "I need this boycott. I need external pressure." When I ask her if she thinks the boycott will further antagonize Israel she reminds me of the Tel Aviv University poll: 94 per cent of Israeli Jews supported the attack on Gaza. "What is more aggressive than this [attack on Gaza]?" she asks. "Concentration camps? Gas chambers?"

****

Some critics of the boycott believe the BDS campaign will only increase Israeli fears that they're being attacked. Very few Israelis, including those calling themselves peace activists, support the boycott.

"What we're going to do by doing that [boycotting Israel] is create greater anxiety amongst Israelis," says Jerusalem Post columnist Gershon Baskin. CEO and founder of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), Baskin believes that if there is still a chance for a two state solution—"the only solution," in his view—then the focus should be on that.

IPCRI is housed in a unique location inside the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, overlooking East Jerusalem. Down the road is the concrete wall and the checkpoint into Bethlehem. Across the street at the foot of the hill, an active construction site builds block houses in the settlement of Har Homa.

"I think it's using ammunition too early," reiterates the peace activist. "It won't get the support of governments around the world at this point. It'll be on the margins."

Baskin thinks the international community should instead employ a concentrated boycott of products coming from the settlements, focusing on Israeli policies in the settlements and the occupied territories. "That would have more support amongst ordinary Israelis and it would not be using a tool that might be important to use at a later stage, and we're not there yet," says Baskin.

"If you check you'll find a direct correlation between those who are using the language of apartheid South Africa and how they see the solution to the conflict. And I disagree with them entirely," says Baskin. "I think it denies Palestinian people the right to self determination. A large majority of Palestinians want an independent state. They don’t want to be part of a bi-national state, neither do Israelis." Furthermore, Baskin believes that one secular democratic state for all Israeli and Palestinian citizens will mean continuing the conflict. According to Baskin, "It means that we're going to be killing each other in much greater numbers with much greater intensity."

****

Nonetheless, Israel's assault on Gaza this winter has turned more people into supporters of the worldwide boycott, especially in Canada. Independent Jewish Voices Canada (including signatory Naomi Klein) became the first national Jewish organization to support the boycott in June.

The University of Toronto held the first Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) in 2005. This year, 40 cities participated in IAW and Hampshire College became the first American school to completely divest from Israel. (The institution has withdrawn its investments in six companies that supply the Israeli military with equipment and services in the occupied territories.)

Citing IAW events in Toronto, Canadian director John Greyson pulled his film from TLVFest in June, the annual LGBT film festival in Tel Aviv. "The Israeli apartheid forum this week, and particularly Naomi Klein's speech, helped clarify my thoughts. Her words took me back to the BDS movement of the Eighties, against South African apartheid, and the first 16mm film I ever made, which was in support of that struggle, clips of which are included in Fig Trees [Greyson's latest film]. The cultural boycott worked in South Africa's case, and lead directly to the sweeping changes and activism that Fig Trees celebrates in song. Therefore, in the spirit of the film, and those activists, I don't feel there's a choice any longer," explains Greyson in his letter to the director of TLVFest.

The Yes Men also chose not to screen their film at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July.

In Jerusalem, according to an Israeli currently organizing a social justice literature festival in the city, there is no place to hold an event where both Israelis and Palestinians will come.

Meanwhile, Ma'an News reports settlers from Bat Ayin set fire to fig, olive and grape trees in Beit Ummar, and ten more Palestinians from Beit Ummar were arrested in July.

Klein’s arguments for BDS are expounded on in her article for The Guardian, "Enough, it's Time for a Boycott.

Carmelle Wolfson is an independent journalist from Toronto currently based in Israel/Palestine, and a copy editor for Briarpatch Magazine.

nidal apartheid colour

Yael at Andulus

People Power in Gaza

dru — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 09:21:36 +0000

Palestinians descend on border, break Israeli blockade

Prior to the US invasion of Iraq, interviewer David Barsamian asked Noam Chomsky what ordinary Americans could do to stop the war. Chomsky answered, "In some parts of the world people never ask, 'what can we do?' They simply do it."

For someone who was born and raised in a refugee camp in Gaza, Chomsky's seemingly oblique response required no further elucidation.

When Gazans recently stormed the strip's sealed border with Egypt, Chomsky's comment returned to mind, along with memories of the still relevant--and haunting--past.

In 1989, the Bureej refugee camp was experiencing a strict military curfew, as punishment for the killing of one Israeli soldier. The soldier's car had broken down in front of the camp while he was on his way home to a Jewish settlement. Bureej had previously lost hundreds of its people to the Israeli army and killing the soldier was an unsurprising act of retaliation.

In the weeks that followed, scores of Palestinians in Bureej were murdered and hundreds of homes were demolished. The killing spree generated little media coverage in Israel.

I lived with my family in an adjacent refugee camp, Nuseirat, at the time. Characterised by extreme poverty, it was a natural home for much of the Palestinian resistance movement. Our house was located a few feet away from what was known as the 'Graveyard of the Martyrs'. It was an area of high elevation that the local children often used to watch the movement of Israeli tanks as they began their daily incursion into the camp. We whistled or yelled every time we spotted the soldiers, and used sign language to communicate as we hid behind the simple graves.

Although watching, yelling and whistling were the only means of response at our disposal, they were far from safe. My friends Ala, Raed, Wael and others were all killed in these daily encounters

During Bureej's most lethal curfew, the sound of explosions coming from the doomed camp reached us at Nuseirat. The people of my camp became engulfed in endless discussions which were neither factional nor theoretical. People were being brutally murdered, injured or impoverished, while the Red Cross was blocked from accessing the camp. Something had to be done.

And all of a sudden it was. Not as a result of any polemic endorsed by intellectuals or "action calls" initiated at conferences, but as an unstructured, spur-of-the-moment act undertaken by a few women in my refugee camp. They simply started a march into Bureej, and were soon joined by other women, children and men. Within an hour, thousands of refugees made their way into the besieged neighbouring camp. "What's the worst they could do?" a neighbour asked, trying to collect his courage before joining the march. "The soldiers will not be able to kill more than a hundred before we overpower them."

Israeli soldiers stood dumbfounded before the chanting multitudes. While many marchers were wounded only one was killed. The soldiers eventually retreated to their barricades. UN vehicles and Red Cross ambulances sheltered themselves amidst the crowd and together they broke the siege.

I still remember the scene of Bureej residents first opening the shutters of their windows, then carefully cracking their doors, stepping out of their homes in a state of disbelief breaking into joy. My memory--of the chants, the tears, the dead being rushed to be buried, the wounded hauled on the many hands that came to the rescue, the strangers sharing food and good wishes--reaffirms the event as one of the greatest acts of human solidarity I have witnessed.

The scene was to be repeated time and again, during the first and Second Palestinian Uprising: ordinary people carrying out what seemed like an ordinary act in response to extraordinary injustice.

The father who lost his son to free Bureej told the crowd: "I am happy that my son died so that many more could live."

Later than day, our refugee camp fell under a most strict military curfew, to relive Bureej's recent nightmare. We were neither surprised nor regretful. We had known the right thing to do and "we simply did it."

Now Palestinian women, once more, have led Palestinian civil society in a most meaningful and rewarding way. Just when Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak was being congratulated for successfully starving Palestinians in Gaza to submission, ordinary women led a march to break the tight siege imposed on Gaza.

On Tuesday, January 22, they descended on the Gaza-Egypt border and what followed was a moment of pride and shame: pride for those ever-dignified people refusing to surrender, and shame that the so-called international community allowed the humiliation of an entire people to the extent that forced hungry mothers to brave batons, tear gas and military police in order to perform such basic acts as buying food, medicine and milk.

The next day, the courage of these women inspired the same audacity that the original batch of women in my refugee camp inspired nearly twenty years ago. Nearly half of the Gaza Strip population crossed the border in a collective push for mere survival. And when people march in unison, there is no worldly force, however deadly, that can block their way.

This "largest jailbreak in history", as one commentator described it, will be carved in Palestinian and world memory for years to come. In some circles it will be endlessly analysed, but for Palestinians in Gaza, it is beyond rationalization: it simply had to be done.

Armies can be defeated but human spirit cannot be subdued. Gaza's act of collective courage is one of the greatest acts of civil disobedience of our time, akin to civil rights marches in America during the 1960's, South Africa's anti-Apartheid struggle, and more recently the protests in Burma.

Palestinian people have succeeded where politics and thousands of international appeals have failed. They took matters into their own hands and they prevailed. While this is hardly the end of Gaza's suffering, it is a reminder that people's power to act is just too significant to be overlooked.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London).

Gazans cross into Egypt to buy supplies

Israeli Patrol in Gaza

Placing Curfews on Themselves

dru — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 18:40:56 +0000

Israel and America don't have to worry when Palestinians repress their own protesters

RAMALLAH -- It is a sad day when one observes a Palestinian member of the security force tearing a sign that reads “end the occupation.” This was what took place during the anti-Bush protest in Ramallah. Observing the current situation in Palestine, I admire the will and perseverance of the Palestinian people, who are met with inconveniences and disturbances on a daily basis.

George Bush’s visit to the occupied Palestinian territories on January 10, 2007 illustrated the grim reality on the ground created by Abu Mazen’s takeover of the West Bank. Walking in the streets, many Palestinians remarked that it felt they were under curfew as they were during the days of the intifada.

Most shops and roads were closed and Palestinian residents were cautious to leave their homes. Some could not, even if they wished to. These road closures and curfews were not enforced by the Israeli military, but rather by our very own Palestinian government in cooperation with the United States and Israel. In the main square of Ramallah, known as Al Manara Circle, one needed permission to take pictures. I, along with a young Palestinian student, learned this after our passports and cameras were confiscated.

Neither Bush nor Israel have nothing to worry about. Abu Mazen and his gang are doing a phenomenal job in maintaining order and crushing any form of resistance or civil disobedience in the West Bank. Even before Bush’s arrival, the Palestinian Authority (PA) took precautionary steps to ensure that Bush’s visit would be as smooth as possible. Two days before Bush's arrival, two helicopters landed in the Muqataa’, Yasser Arafat's former compound and his current burial ground. The people who guarded the Muqataa’ during Bush’s visit came from outside a day or two before, while Palestinian police guarded the outside. Roads were dug and repaved, and every sewer in Ramallah was checked for security purposes.

Residents living around the Muqataa’ particularity felt the high security alert and curfews as they were told that for their own security not to open the windows of their homes or climb their rooftops. In case of an emergency, residents were given a number to call in which a helicopter would come and take them from their homes. A curfew was imposed in these closed areas from 3am until 4pm and residents were not allowed to move by car or foot. Some residents in this area were even placed in hotels. When the high security alert was at its peak, the stress and anxiety was palpable in the streets of Ramallah.

Bush met Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) in the Muqataa’, and the Palestinian political elite welcomed him as a man of peace and a president that would help create a viable Palestinian state by January 2009. At the same time, at least 1,000 protesters took to the streets for an anti-Bush demonstration, despite a ban on public protests. Protesters were gathered at Ramallah's Orthodox Club, not too far from the presidential compound, and attempted to move towards the Clock Square but were violently pushed back by Palestinian security forces.

In addition 25 protesters were seized by Palestinian security forces, of whom ten were arrested and two injured and taken to the government hospital in Ramallah. Bashir Kahyri, a senior leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) who served 16 years in an Israeli prison, was treated in the hospital for a fractured shoulder. Another demonstrator suffered from a broken nose while others were being treated in the hospital for tear gas suffocation.

I am a Canadian-Palestinian that has attended countless demonstrations in Montreal, and it was the first time I had attend a protest in Palestine. It was disheartening to see the way the Fatah-allied PA is dealing with its Palestinian citizens protesting Bush’s policies in the region. Demonstrators were met by pepper spray and clubs and security forces began tearing posters and banners. Arguments broke out between the security forces and the citizens. The latter decried the shame of Palestinians denying other Palestinians from their right to protest, and taking over the role of the occupation forces.

The demonstrators remained and continued to chant in Arabic slogans such as "CIA out," and "Bush not welcome." For Mahmoud Abbas demonstrators chanted that "Palestine is one nation" and even turned against security forces saying "enough from the police." Later, Palestinian women sat down in defiance of police demands to move and disperse and instead began to sing national songs such as the Palestinian national anthem among others.

Seeing Palestinian people stand against Bush renewed my faith and re-instilled hope for continued resistance against imperial policies in Palestine and a "peace" forced on the Palestinians that in no way would bring justice to the people. Unfortunately for Palestinians citizens in the West Bank, the Palestinian quasi-state that Abu Mazen is attempting to create already seems to mirror other corrupt Arab regimes in the region that ban its people from protesting. To deny one of the few means of fighting for political and social justice is to jeopardize the very essence of the Palestinian cause and its resistance.

Palestinian Women

Anti-Bush Demonstrators in Ramallah

Palestinian Women 2

Police Seize Protester

Hospital

Ripped Placard

Heather Reisman, Gerry Schwartz & Indigo/Chapters Supporting Israeli Military...

Stefan Christoff — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:37:06 +0000

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An excellent article from THIS magazine concerning the growing national campaign to boycott Chapters/Indigo bookstore due to the support for the Israeli military from the company majority shareholders Heather Reisman & Gerry Schwartz...

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Full Article at: This Magazine.

Imagination. Creativity. Inspiration. Three words to stir the soul crown the towering windows of Toronto’s flagship Indigo bookstore. At ground level, shoppers pass in and out of wood-framed glass doors, navigating planters and benches intended to create a friendly, front-porch sort of welcome. They take little notice as, on the sidewalk beyond, two women unfurl an off-white canvas banner. Printed on one side are another three words, less poetic perhaps than the store’s motto, but the intended effect is just as moving: Boycott Chapters/ Indigo.

No, the protest is not a last-ditch attempt by independent booksellers to draw the literate back into their fold. Rather, the activists—11 have turned up on this Friday in April, the first truly warm day of spring—are taking a page from a much larger book. They are members of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA), a network of Palestinian rights, Jewish peace and socialist groups doing their part to promote an international boycott campaign against Israel. They compare themselves to the early voices against South African apartheid, and history, they believe, can repeat itself: If international pressure could help rescue South Africa from apartheid, the same can be true for Israel.