Author: admin

Netanyahu’s nation-state bill is profoundly counterproductive

by adminin Palestine, Writing

The National, 29 November 2014

When I left Palestine this summer, I was relieved to leave the Israeli flag behind. No more blue and white ensign snapping at military checkpoints. No more Star of David standing high over army bases. Saying goodbye to the Israeli flag would also mean putting an end to my ambivalence about it.

Upon seeing it, there was always a moment of familiarity. After all, it bears the Star of David and I grew up with this symbol in my home. As a child it dangled from my neck in the form of the Hebrew pendant – passed down from my great-grandmother – that my mother made me wear.

But the same symbol enraged me. How dare these Zionists appropriate my religion, my culture, my family and the Hebrew language? The language is not theirs. It belonged to another one of my great-grandmothers, who lived in Eastern Europe and recorded all of the family’s deaths and births, not in Yiddish but in poetic Hebrew. She marked all these events on a piece of paper that she carried with her to the New World, Hebrew pressed to her bosom as she crossed an ocean. The language belonged to her. It belonged to all of us.

How dare the Zionists put the Star of David on their flag? How dare they, under the false pretence of ensuring the safety of my people, occupy another? How dare they besmirch Judaism in this way? Not only have they occupied Palestine, they’ve occupied Jewish identity.

Shlomo Sand’s latest book, How I Stopped Being a Jew, could be understood as a reaction to both occupations. It also seems like a response to a state that has become open about its preference for an ethnocracy over a democracy, as evinced by the “Jewish nation-state” bill.

If passed, the bill, which received overwhelming support from Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, would result in the equivalent of a constitutional amendment declaring Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people. This is alarming considering that approximately 20 per cent of its citizens are non-Jewish Arabs. It also has implications for migrant workers and African refugees who live in Israel.

Sand, an Israeli professor at Tel Aviv University, is a historian and the author of The Invention of the Jewish People. In How I Stopped Being a Jew, which is not nearly as personal as the title suggests, Sand notes a number of moments that made him question his secular Jewish identity as well as the privilege that comes with that identity. Two particular experiences stand out.

The first was his daughter’s difficult questions about a Jewish holiday that celebrates, among other things, the death of non-Jews and Sand’s struggle to answer her.

The second was witnessing discrimination at Tel Aviv airport. As Sand breezes through security, he sees a Palestinian citizen of Israel detained. As a non-Jew, she is automatically considered suspect.

In the pages that follow this recollection, Sand writes: “What is the meaning, then, of being ‘Jewish’ in the State of Israel? There is no doubt about it: being Jewish in Israel means, first and foremost, being a privileged citizen who enjoys prerogatives refused to those who are not Jews, and particularly those who are Arabs.”

This seems to be the heart of the book and it’s also an apt description of the conflict. But it doesn’t come until too late in the book. Rather than using his personal experiences to tease out the inherent contradiction of the “Jewish and democratic” state – which seems the most powerful way to question the status quo – he spends most of the book engaged in an odd attempt to prove that there is no such thing as a secular Jewish identity.

I get his reasoning. Sand is hitting at the very foundation of the Zionist project. The early Zionists, who had internalised anti-Semitic stereotypes prevalent in Europe at the time, wanted to shake off the yoke of the diaspora Jew.

The diaspora Jew, or the image of one, was that of a frail figure, pale, weak and easily intimidated. In Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), the new Jews would stand strong. And they would be secular.

Sand, however, doesn’t manage to convince that there is no such thing as secular Judaism. In part because, as he acknowledges, secular Jewish identity is hard to define, making it equally hard to disprove.

He runs through a list of things that might be considered secular Judaism, shooting them all down. However, the list is by no means exhaustive and Sand can’t possibly anticipate the many ways individuals construct their secular Jewishness.

And, in some places, Sand resorts to assertions that unintentionally play into the Zionists’ hands. He takes care to say that he is not conflating Judaism with Zionism. But because his rejection of secular Judaism stems, in part, from his reaction to Zionism, he’s acknowledging and tacitly agreeing to the Zionists’ claim on Jewish identity.

The book is at its most confusing and most powerful in its final pages when Sand describes his connection to Tel Aviv and the Hebrew language.

“I inhabit a deep contradiction,” Sand admits. “My deep attachment to the place serves only to fuel the pessimism I feel towards it. And so I often plunge into a melancholy that is despondent about the present and fearful for the future.”

But I’d venture to say that many readers won’t make it to the end of his book, because he’s spent most of it alienating the people who most need to be a part of this conversation: self-defined secular Jews.

Rather than rejecting secular Judaism and engaging in the counterproductive business of attempting to delegitimise others’ identity – which will only make them cling to it more tightly – Jewish identity should be detached from Israel and understood as something that has and can transcend time and place.

The nation-state bill only underlines the importance of doing this.

If Jewishness was understood as something that isn’t dependent on land, Israel would be forced to loosen its grip on Judaism. The state could then instead embrace democracy and all of its citizens – whether they are Jewish, Palestinian, or just Israeli, as Sand defines himself.

Sand would like to see this happen within the context of a two-state solution that would, eventually, lead to an Israeli-Palestinian federation. I’d like to see this happen under the auspices of one democratic state. But, ultimately, we both hope – hope against hope – for the same thing: freedom for all of those who live between the river and the sea.

*Illustrative photo by James Emery, via Flickr

Israel cracks down on anti-war protesters

by adminin Israel, Writing

Al Jazeera English, 5 August 2014

More than 1,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel have been arrested by the Israeli police since the country’s military offensive in Gaza began in early July, according to a lawyer representing a number of the detainees.

While some have been arrested for protesting the Israeli incursion into Gaza, dozens are currently being held without charge. Many say they have been detained based on policemen’s “lies”, while some have been beaten to the point of needing medical care.

Maisa Arshid, an attorney for dozens of the detainees, said that the crackdown on Palestinian citizens is only getting worse, with 20 to 30 Palestinians getting picked up every week in the Nazareth area alone.

“All of them are accused of participating in illegal demonstrations,” Arshid told Al Jazeera, adding that “part of these demos were permitted by the police themselves”.

In many cases, the Israeli authorities have presented no evidence that the accused have participated in a protest other than a police officer’s word. Arshid also said that the police frequently hold people for short periods without registering their detention, likely putting the number of those who have been picked up by the police even higher than 1,000.

When the wave of arrests began earlier in July, Palestinian citizens were detained and quickly released while others were placed under house arrest, or ordered to do community service. But as Israel’s assault on Gaza has gone on, Palestinian citizens have been subject to much longer detainments.

This week, Arshid visited a group of detainees who had been held without charge for nine days. “Each day the court is delaying their hearing,” she said, adding that hearings initially scheduled for Sunday, were pushed back to Tuesday.

This way of prolonging their detentions has a chilling effect on demonstrations against the war in Gaza and “terrorise the population” into silence, Arshid argued. “If people in the street know that people have been arrested for nine days, it will prevent protest.”

Israeli police provide a security presence when Jewish-Israeli leftists protest against the war. But these activists are facing increasingly violent attacks from their countrymen.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher attended Tel Aviv’s most recent demonstration against the ongoing Israeli operation in Gaza, which drew approximately 5,000 protesters. There were only a few hundred right-wing counter-demonstrators, Rothman-Zecher told Al Jazeera, “but they were really, really energetic”.

Israeli police stood between the two groups, preventing any potential clashes, but when the protest ended, right-wingers confronted the anti-war protesters on the street. They shouted at the demonstrators, calling them “smelly traitors”. A counter-protester who was carrying an Israeli flag began to beat someone with the flagstick, while another started hitting an anti-war protester on the head with a crutch.

Rothman-Zecher said that the right wing “desire for violence” is not new. “But there’s a new level of acceptability,” he said.

He used the Jerusalem Day protests – when right wing Israelis march to mark the “reunification” of the city – as an example. In the past, it “was nationalistic and aggressive” but leftists would be shocked to hear right wingers openly chant “Death to the Arabs”, Rothman-Zecher said. “It was under the surface but it was still surprising. Now it’s become the baseline.”

Although no one is organising the counter-demonstrations – and Rothman-Zecher pointed out that they tend to come from poor, marginalised communities – he argued that Israeli leaders are responsible for right wing violence.

“When the leaders of the country call openly for revenge and violence, of course it becomes kosher,” he said. He added: “You have members of Knesset calling for population transfer, [a former] member of Knesset [boasting] that [he] killed Arabs… I believe very strongly that discourse shapes reality.”

Palestinian citizens have recently also been arrested for “incitement” for calling for demonstrations against the ongoing Israeli offensive. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, points out thatthese citizens “were arrested even before any demonstrations began”.

Among them was Rafaat Awaishi, who Israeli police placed under house arrest without a hearing, after he posted a call on Facebook for people to join protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Noting that Awaishi’s hearing was scheduled for July 13, “the same day that the police-imposed house arrest is to end”, Adalah called the police-imposed detention a “denial of due process”.

The conditions detainees face also seem intended to deter protests. According to Arshid, several of her clients have been beaten while in custody and needed medical treatment for their injuries. During an interrogation, police allegedly removed a detainee’s kuffiyeh [traditional Palestinian scarf], urinated on it, and then put it back on the man’s neck, Arshid said.

The arrests and detentions seem to be part of a broader crackdown on dissent and freedom of expression. On Wednesday, the Israeli Knesset heard a bill that proposes to outlaw “discrimination against soldiers in uniform” the Jerusalem Post reported.

Pnina Tamnu-Shata, the Knesset Member who presented the bill, pointed to protests against Israel’s Operation Protective Edge as proof that Israel “must set limits for words of incitement against soldiers. Not everything is allowed in the name of democracy”.

Palestinian citizens who attend Israeli universities have already been subject to disciplinary hearings and expulsion due to remarks made on Facebook against Israeli soldiers. In a letter to the Council of Higher Education in Israel, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) likened the universities’ monitoring of Palestinian students’ social media accounts to a “witch hunt”.

In a press release, ACRI stated that “only Arab students have been punished, even though the social forums are simmering with racist comments by Jewish students, which raises a concern that the heads of the institutions are acting according to patriotic and emotional motives that do not align with their professional obligations”.

Saher Jeries is a 22-year-old marketing and advertising student who lives in Haifa. He said he was at a protest there, standing in the back, when police officers began to beat him. He and other protesters were put on a bus where they were held for six hours before they were driven to the police station for interrogation.

During questioning, Jeries found that the Israeli police were not only trying to control the discourse about Gaza, but also seemed intent on reshaping his identity. “They said to me, ‘You’re Christian, why are you doing things like this?’ As though I’m not part of the [Palestinian] people,” Jeries said.

*Illustrative photo by tola via Flickr

Palestinians will not ‘raise a white flag’

by adminin Palestine, Writing

Al Jazeera English, 26 July 2014

In the West Bank’s largest demonstration in years, some 10,000 Palestinians marched on Thursday night from Ramallah to the Qalandia checkpoint, protesting Israel’s military assault on the Gaza Strip and hoping to reach Jerusalem. One man was killed and dozens were injured in clashes with Israeli soldiers.

While protesters and observers alike speculated that this was the beginning of a third Intifada, the mood in Beit Sahour – the small, predominately Christian town at the heart of the first Intifada – was decidedly more pessimistic.

“We lack any political movement that’s capable of moving the masses – neither Hamas, nor Fatah, nor any other group,” Beit Sahour resident Nasser, who used a pseudonym for fear of repercussions, told Al Jazeera. A veteran of the first Intifada, Nasser was arrested nearly a dozen times for his political activities.

Massive protests erupted in several cities and towns across the West Bank over the weekend, including Jenin, Beit Ommar, and Nablus, and at least nine Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank in a 24-hour period ending early on Saturday.

While the first Intifada was “based on hope”, allowing people to restrain themselves and strategise, recent protests in the West Bank have been “emotional”, Nasser said. “[People are] moving out of emotions now and that becomes violent,” he said, pointing to the second Intifada, which many Palestinians feel accomplished very little.

Nasser’s sentiments were echoed at a small demonstration in Beit Sahour on Monday, as the West Bank observed a general strike to protest Israel’s Operation Protective Edge and the recent massacre in Shujayea. A few dozen protesters attempted to march towards an Israeli army base perched on a hill outside the village, but were quickly deterred by tear gas.

“This is all about Gaza right now,” one young woman told Al Jazeera, speaking on condition of anonymity. “When there’s a ceasefire, the people [in the West Bank] will go back to sleep.”

For years, many Palestinians have characterised demonstrations in the West Bank as reactionary and failing to reflect clear goals, vision or a long-term strategy. Protests and strikes spurred by Israel’s last two operations in Gaza – Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012 and Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09 – did not evolve into a larger Palestinian uprising. Critics blame a lack of leadership, with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas widely viewed as a puppet who is preoccupied with placating Israel. West Bank protests are often derided by PA security forces.

George, a professional in his mid-30s who also used a pseudonym, told Al Jazeera he was disappointed by the small turnout at Monday’s demonstration.

“There’s no one supporting the protesters,” said George, who was born and raised in Beit Sahour and whose father was arrested three times during the first Intifada. “When you have an authority that supposedly works for your benefit and you see the [Palestinian] security personnel … acting just like Israeli soldiers, there will be no motivation to do anything.”

Mazin Qumsiyeh, a professor at Bethlehem University and author of the book Popular Resistance in Palestine, said concerns about the Palestinian leadership “assume that colonised, occupied people sit down together to come up with a strategy. If you’re looking for organisation, it doesn’t happen this way. Sometimes at the peak of a revolution, leaders emerge – revolution makes leaders, leaders don’t make revolutions.”

Suggestions that leaders or political parties are necessary for an Intifada indicate that Palestinians are “still thinking paternalistically, that a father figure has to tell them what to do”, Qumsiyeh told Al Jazeera.

Many argue that the strength of the first Intifada was its all-encompassing nature: It engaged men, women, children, and families from across the economic spectrum. While the urban protests against Operation Protective Edge have been male-dominated, sustained protests in other Palestinian villages are more diverse. Since 2009, men, women, and children have been marching weekly to a spring in the village of Nabi that was expropriated by Israel.

At the same time, however, neoliberal policies have been blamed for having a sedating effect on the West Bank. Critics point to a number of factors, including former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s focus on economic development; banks that give loans to Palestinians, encouraging them to live beyond their means and accumulate debt; and a society increasingly driven by consumerism.

With so much focus on paying down debt, “there’s no time to think of the occupation”, George said, noting the financial system was much different at the start of the first Intifada in 1987.

Also problematic, Nasser said, is that Palestinians have adapted to the occupation. “We got used to not going to Jerusalem; we got used to checkpoints,” he said. “We’ve lost a major part of our self-respect. We cannot have a massive Intifada without a mental shift.”

Despite this reality, Qumsiyeh believes circumstances are ripe for a revolution and a third Intifada is inevitable.

“[Previous Intifadas] started because of pent-up frustration,” he said, noting other conditions included a paralysed peace process, lack of trust in the Palestinian leadership and Israeli arrogance.

“There’s one thing I’m sure of,” Nasser added. “Palestinians are not going to raise a white flag.”

*Illustrative photo of protesters in Bethlehem by Clare Jim, via Flickr

A housing crisis yet demolitions in East Jerusalem

by adminin Palestine, Writing

IRIN United Nations Humanitarian News Agency, 31 January 2014

The threatened demolition of apartment blocks in East Jerusalem is adding new pressure to the city’s housing crisis, with hundreds facing the prospect of losing their homes and Palestinian residents saying they face discrimination in city planning.

Since the start of construction of the separation barrier a decade ago, poorer Palestinian East Jerusalemites have often chosen to move to the West Bank side of the wall.

In late 2013, Israeli authorities issued court orders announcing that a number of buildings in Ras Shehada and Ras Khamis – Palestinian neighbourhoods inside Jerusalem’s municipal boundary but cut off by the separation barrier – are slated for demolition because they were built without permits.

“With everything that’s going on here, I’m trying to sell the house,” said Shadi, 26, who owns an apartment in Ras Khamis threatened with demolition. “If someone comes now with, say, 150,000 NIS (US$43,000) cash, I’m out of here.”

Because many Palestinian East Jerusalemites prefer to live on the Israeli side of the wall – mostly for access to education, healthcare and jobs – demand for housing there is high. But severe building restrictions on Palestinian neighbourhoods inside the wall, imposed by the Jerusalem municipality, have created a housing shortage, causing prices to skyrocket in East Jerusalem.

For a long time, the Israeli authorities turned a blind eye to building in the Palestinian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem that lie beyond the separation barrier. These areas are unplanned and suffer from a lack of infrastructure, lack of services, inadequate garbage collection, and water and electricity shortages.

But they have one major advantage that attracts residents: homes are cheaper than those on the Israeli side of the wall. And because they are still within the city’s border, these Jerusalem residents can also hold on to their Israeli IDs, without which they would be stateless.

Shadi explains that while homes cost about 500,000 to 600,000 NIS ($143,000 to 172,000) in Shuafat and Beit Hanina, two of the most desirable neighbourhoods of Palestinian East Jerusalem on the western side of the barrier, his apartment in Ras Khamis cost only 120,000 NIS ($34,000).

Towers of inexpensive apartments have mushroomed in all of the Palestinian East Jerusalem neighbourhoods outside of the wall.

“Here, you’ll pay 50,000 [NIS] cash and then 2,000 [NIS] each month for four years, not like there [on the Israeli side of the wall], where someone might pay 6,000, 7,000 [NIS] a month [rent].” Shadi, who is currently unemployed, says that when he is working he brings home about 5,000 NIS a month, just over Israel’s minimum wage.

Speaking to the Palestinian news agency Maan, a local activist said as many as 15,000 people could lose their homes if Israel follows through with its planned demolitions in Ras Khamis and Ras Shehada. Most NGOs put the number much lower; Sari Kronish of the Israeli NGO Bimkom-Planners for Planning Rights estimates that anywhere from hundreds to 1,500 face displacement.

However, Kronish says, “There are many more units without permits than [those that] received demolition orders so far,” making it difficult to know how many could eventually be effected.

The demolition orders – as well as the policies that prevent Palestinians from obtaining permits in the first place – stem from Israeli attempts to maintain particular demographics in Jerusalem, say activists. Kronish says that after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, it redrew the municipal boundaries. The guiding principle of the new borders, she says, was “to add as much land and as few [Palestinians]”; leaving the new ratio of Jewish Israelis to Palestinians in Jerusalem at 70:30.

“Ever since then, the various governments of Israel have made decisions that planning needs to maintain that balance,” said Kronish. That translates into policies that encourage the expansion of Jewish neighbourhoods but stunt growth in Palestinian areas.

“With everything that’s going on here, I’m trying to sell the house,” Shadi remarks.

Kronish explains, “It’s like passive displacement. The Palestinian neighbourhoods have never been planned adequately. Some of them have been planned, but it’s restrictive planning.” For example, Israeli plans for Palestinian neighbourhoods often designate for housing land that already has homes and other buildings. Kronish adds that, paradoxically, “sometimes even existing homes are left outside the plan for designation for housing.”

Israeli plans often emphasize green spaces in Palestinian areas, regardless of residents’ needs or how they are using the land.

The Israelis also treat the Palestinian neighbourhoods as “rural” although the areas are increasingly urban. Building rights for rural areas are limited and include restrictions on both the width and height of structures. Plans for these areas do not keep pace with Palestinian population growth.

Combined, these policies keep the number of building permits very low for Palestinian neighbourhoods. The few who do manage to obtain permission to build find enormous taxes and municipal fees associated with those permits – expenses that are far beyond what most East Jerusalemites can afford – contributing to the steady stream of people to the areas outside the wall.

The Jerusalem municipality told IRIN that Palestinian areas of the city had historically been neglected, but said that it had invested 3 million NIS in the re-zoning of East Jerusalem neighbourhoods in 2011 alone.

“Under Mayor Nir Barkat, the Municipality of Jerusalem has focused considerable effort in upgrading the quality of life for the city’s Arab residents. Mayor Barkat’s objective is to close the gap that has deepened due to the decades of neglect in parts of the city,” a spokesperson said in a written statement.

Although Israeli policies are pushing Palestinians to the West Bank side of the separation barrier, the movement does not change the overall demographic balance of the city. But some residents of Ras Khamis believe that the areas of Jerusalem that lie beyond the wall will eventually be handed over to the Palestinian Authority.

Jerusalem’s housing crisis and Israeli threats to demolish buildings in Ras Khamis are “politics”, according to Riad Julani, 40, another resident facing the prospect of demolition.

“[The Israelis] have turned this place into a jungle. There is no security here,” said Julani. He and other residents say that drug dealing and use is rampant in the neighbourhood and that the Israeli authorities choose not to intervene.

“We have kids here, 14, 15, using drugs, and it’s really right in front of the police… We could do an experiment. We could put something that looks like drugs in bags and go to [the Shuafat] checkpoint, and you could take money out in front of the soldiers, and will they come to me or you? No. They don’t care. They don’t care about Arabs.”

Residents also report that houses and business are frequently robbed but say that the Israeli police do not come to help.

Saed Abu Asab, 58, lives in the same building as Julani. He says he prefers Ras Khamis to the apartment that he used to rent in Jerusalem’s Old City, where he, his wife and their five children crowded into one room.

“It would be like, ‘Do me a favour, I want to come in, move a little, I have to go to the bathroom,’” he recalls. Reflecting on his current situation, he adds, “Now, [the Israelis] are talking about making a demolition here, but why do they let [Jewish Israelis] build in Pisgaat Zeev [an Israeli settlement] and not [us] here?”

Still, even under the looming threat of demolition, the housing boom outside the separation barrier continues.

*Illustrative photo by Benjamin Chun, via Flickr

Analysis: UN status no panacea for Palestine

by adminin Palestine, Writing

Al Jazeera English, 8 October 2013

A year has passed since the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s upgrade to an observer state in the United Nations. But the anniversary of the upgrade came and went without fanfare. And Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ speech in the United Nations General Assembly – an event that generated much interest in the previous two years – went largely unnoticed last month.

Now the internationally recognised State of Palestine sits across from Israel at the negotiating table. While this might seem to bode well for peace talks, observers point out that the PLO’s upgrade has not translated into meaningful changes in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, or the Gaza Strip. And critics warn that the current round of negotiations could end in another interim agreement similar to the Oslo Accords, which is widely understood to have deepened the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

Last month, Israel announced its plans to build yet another road in the West Bank, connecting Israeli settlements in the Bethlehem area to the Dead Sea. Palestinian agricultural land will be confiscated for the project and the new highway will further fracture the West Bank, undermining the chance of a contiguous Palestinian state.

While a small number of Palestinian political prisoners have been released in the wake of the UN upgrade and since peace talks began, arrests and administrative detentions continue and there has been no net change in the total number of those detained. Currently, about 5,000 Palestinians are in Israeli prisons. In September, Israeli forces arrested prominent activist and human rights attorney Anas Barghouti at a military checkpoint in the West Bank. Barghouti is currently being held without charge in an Israeli jail.

Sahar Francis is the director of Addameer, a Ramallah-based, non-governmental organisation that advocates for Palestinian prisoners. “Nothing at all” has changed for prisoners since the UN upgrade, Francis told Al Jazeera. “We don’t feel it.”

With approximately 700,000 Palestinians detained since the Israeli occupation began in 1967, political imprisonments have touched nearly every home here. But this issue, so close to Palestinian hearts, does not seem to be on the negotiating table. Francis points out that, during peace talks, only the 104 prisoners who were arrested before the Oslo Accords were discussed.

Francis adds that securing the release of these 100-plus detainees came “at a high price” of the PA agreeing not to sign any international treaties during the next nine months.

This concession undermines, temporarily at least, what little leverage the PA might have gained from the UN upgrade. The change in the PLO’s status would allow the Palestinians to join various UN agencies and to ratify various conventions that would allow the PA to hold Israel accountable for its actions in the occupied territories.

Francis offers the Convention against Torture as an example. The treaty has “protections and procedures for how to protect rights of prisoners”. Becoming party to such agreements would help enforce them.

While various Palestinian NGOs continue to push for Israeli accountability, Francis says, “When you are a state and you are requesting investigation, it’s different than relying on civil society.”

“This is why Israel insisted that the PA would agree to cancel any signatures to international treaties,” she adds. The Israelis want to “protect themselves for the next nine months”.

Mustafa Barghouti is a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, the PLO, and was on the committee that planned how the PLO would use the change to an observer state. Barghouti says that by returning to negotiations, the PA lost the momentum that came with the UN upgrade. He points to the lack of public interest in Abbas’ UNGA speech this year as proof.

“People don’t believe in negotiations,” Barghouti adds. “They don’t like what’s happening with negotiations, they don’t understand why the same thing [is] repeated again and again and again.”

While the swell of hope that surrounded last year’s UN bid made Palestinians feel like unity was possible, the current peace talks have deepened divisions, Barghouti continues. He says that Fatah was the only party in the PLO that supported returning to negotiations.

Barghouti feels that the PLO should have combined “strategic” use of the UN upgrade with a grassroots movement to create “facts on the ground” and meaningful change in the occupied Palestinian territories.

He points to Bab al Shams as an example. The Palestinian village was established on privately-owned Palestinian land in the West Bank. Two days later, it was demolished by Israeli forces, reminding the world that, despite the UN upgrade and international recognition, the occupying power still refuses to acknowledge Palestinian sovereignty.

Barghouti also cites smaller, frequent acts of resistance, like going to Jerusalem without an Israeli-issued permit. “East Jerusalem is part of the Palestinian state,” he says. “I was born there, I have every right to be there, [the Israelis] have no right to prevent us from being there.”

“They [the PA] are negotiating, but we are proceeding. So there are some kinds of diversions between the official PA actions and us, the popular grassroots movements including popular resistance and BDS [Boycott Divestment Sanctions].”

Many Palestinians express frustration with how little has changed since the UN upgrade. Some, including Barghouti, point out that paperwork that used to bear the insignia of the Palestinian Authority now reads “State of Palestine”. But, otherwise, becoming an observer state has been meaningless.

Similarly, Barghouti is concerned that negotiations will lead to an empty agreement that will just help Israel consolidate control of the West Bank, leaving Palestinians confined to isolated urban centres.

“What is the value of a state that is becoming a cluster of Bantustans? What we need is not just the name. What we need is a reality and that’s why the issue is not just about getting recognition but building a real and true state.”

Some believe that the Quartet’s Economic Initiative for Palestine, which is being spearheaded by Tony Blair, might provide support for a fledgling state. The proposal seeks to slash unemployment and bolster the private sector, with an emphasis on tourism. But Barghouti is critical of the plan.

“Why concentrate on tourism and not on education and not on healthcare?” Barghouti asks. “And for the benefit of whom? For the people who have monopolies in the private sector.”

When asked if the PA has taken full advantage of the UN upgrade, Nabil Amr, the PA’s former Minister of Information, responds, “It’s not easy to use it against the Americans’ policy.” His comment points to a widely held sentiment here, that the United States throws its weight behind Israel.

However, Amr also points out that peace talks cannot happen without US patronage. But he’s quick to add that negotiations are unlikely to bring a solution. They, like the upgrade, are just one of many possible avenues the Palestinians are forced to explore. Amr explains, “As Palestinians [we] must go in every direction at least to put our goals on the agenda.”

*Illustrative photo by Norway UN, via Flickr

Israel makes no distinctions in its endless persecutions of the ‘other’

by adminin African refugees, Writing

The National, 17 August 2013

A little more than a year has passed since a violent race riot rocked south Tel Aviv, the heart of Israel’s African refugee community. The neighbourhood has not made international headlines since the incident in May last year, when Jewish Israelis attacked Africans on the streets, smashed windows of African-owned businesses and looted the stores. But the area is still simmering and the state is putting asylum seekers under increasing pressure.

Amine Zegata, an asylum seeker from Eritrea, owns a bar in the HaTikva neighbourhood in south Tel Aviv. The front window was shattered during that night of violence, as were the bottles of alcohol inside. Later, as he repaired the damage, Jewish Israelis came and cracked the new storefront. They also threatened to hurt him again. That was not the beginning. Several months before the riot, Mr Zegata was beaten to the point of hospitalisation in what he says was a racially motivated attack.

On a sunny summer afternoon in Shchuna HaTikva, which ironically translates to Hope neighbourhood, Mr Zegata explained to me in fluent Hebrew that locals still enter the bar on a regular basis and harass him. For that reason, he was initially hesitant to be interviewed for this story. “Every time a new article comes out, it creates more problems,” he says, adding that he fears for his safety.

Mr Zegata isn’t alone in this feeling. In the wake of the riot and continuing harassment, the African asylum seekers who were once Mr Zegata’s clients have stopped coming to the bar. “I don’t have enough business,” he says. “I’m in the red now.”

His slide into debt began when his business was vandalised last year. Not long after he’d repaired the bar, city inspectors came and told Mr Zegata that he needed to make further changes in order to bring his place in line with municipal ordinances and to get a business licence. He hired an engineer to make sure the renovations met the city’s requirements.

Despite his efforts, the municipality refused to issue him a licence. Their reasoning? Mr Zegata, like most of the 60,000 African asylum seekers who live in Israel, does not have a work visa.

For the most part, Israel does not process asylum seekers’ requests for refuge. Eritrean and Sudanese nationals do, however, currently get group protection from deportation – de facto acknowledgement of their refugee status. But a majority of asylum seekers receive visas that explicitly state that they are not allowed to work, forcing them to take whatever low-wage, off-the-books jobs they can find. Opening a business has provided a lifeline for a small number of refugees.

But not for Mr Zegata. When his request for a licence was refused, he “asked [officials at the municipality], ‘Who is responsible for all this debt?’ They replied, ‘We don’t care.'”

And Mr Zegata might not have the chance to get back on his feet. This week Israeli authorities began shutting down African-owned businesses in south Tel Aviv, according to the local newspaper Haaretz. While Israelis also run businesses without the appropriate licensing, officials emphasised that the operation targets Africans.

The state is making other moves to drive asylum seekers out of the country. In recent months, Israeli officials have pressured jailed Sudanese and Eritreans into deportation by presenting them with the “option” of staying in jail or “voluntarily” returning to their home countries. Last year’s amendments to the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law – which was originally created to stop Palestinian refugees from entering the young state of Israel – mean that African refugees can be held for lengthy periods without trial.

Changes to the Prevention of Infiltration Law remind that, in the “Jewish and democratic” state, anyone who is a not Jewish is subject to discrimination and persecution. One cannot separate the experience of African refugees from the gross human-rights violations Israel visits upon Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line.

But it’s not just the government. From open violence on the streets of south Tel Aviv – where teenage African girls have been attacked at knifepoint by Jewish youths – to the 2010 religious edict forbidding Israelis from renting homes to asylum seekers, to anti-African marches through south Tel Aviv, citizens have taken part in the discrimination. According to the +972 website, “real-estate agencies in south Tel Aviv are advertising ‘clean apartments'” – that is, African-free buildings. One Ethiopian-Israeli told me that an Israeli Jewrecently mistook him for a refugee rather than a citizen and threw an empty beer bottle at him.

“I did army service like all Israelis,” the man, who asked to remain anonymous, reflects, “and I can’t go out to enjoy myself.”

Rather than creating sympathy for the asylum seekers, the incident hardened his view that the small community of Africans is trouble for the Jewish state. Like other Israeli residents, he complains that at night it’s impossible to wander around the neighbourhood because the Sudanese drink too much.

Some commentators, myself included, have said that area tensions are the result of deep-seated racism and that xenophobia is unsurprising in a country that defines itself along ethnic and religious lines.

While this explanation is true, it is also overly simplistic and whitewashes the Jewish-on-Jewish discrimination that characterises Israeli society. The Ethiopian man mentioned his time in the military because it is supposed to be his entry card to Israeli society. But Ethiopians continue to find themselves shut out of the mainstream. Last year the community held a number of protests against the racism they face in Israel; that same year the media reported that government doctors were giving Ethiopian women birth-control shots without their consent, sometimes without their knowledge.

Locals’ resentment of African asylum seekers also stems, in part, from decades of neglect. South Tel Aviv’s schools are poor and the area gets few services from the state. For example, residents’ requests for a library have been refused. And while the wealthy, predominately-Ashkenazi north of the city has plenty of sports facilities, a mostly Mizrachi south Tel Aviv neighbourhood that has 45,000 residents has only one gym and swimming pool – and the latter is open only in summer.

None of this is an excuse for Jewish-Israeli racism. It does, however, point to another issue that must be reckoned with – the country’s shabby treatment of the Jews it has deemed as “others”, namely those who are not part of the Ashkenazi elite. The Jews who were brought to Israel for demographic war and who then were tossed into the country’s periphery to secure the border. This is true of south Tel Aviv as well, which was actually Palestinian Jaffa before Israel was created in 1948. Mizrachim were thrown into these far-flung neighbourhoods as a way to prevent Palestinians returning.

By the 1970s, the state had begun evicting these same people from their homes to make way for development. Approximately 800 impoverished families currently face eviction from public housing. Many of these people are Mizrachim who live in south Tel Aviv. So, yes, the area is tense and the problems often express as racism. But the issues are deeper than that.

The impossible situation of Mr Zegata and other asylum seekers – as well as the residents of south Tel Aviv – serves as a reminder that the Israeli government continues to be remiss in its duties to respect the human rights of all who reside inside its borders. Can a country maintain a preferred religious and ethnic character and neoliberal economics without trampling on the rights of all “others” – whether those “others” are Palestinian, African, or impoverished Jews?

*Illustrative photo by Sasha Kimel, via Flickr

Unruly building engulfs East Jerusalem life

by adminin Palestine, Writing

Al Jazeera English, May 4, 2013

Every day, investors knock on the door of a small home in Kufr Aqab, a village on the Palestinian side of the separation wall but inside Jerusalem municipal borders. The tidy, one-storey, two-room house is surrounded by new apartment buildings, some reaching nine stories high. Contractors are currently finishing more than 1,000 units in the area; billboard advertisements suggest many more are to come.

The same phenomenon is occurring in other Palestinian neighbourhoods that are technically part of Jerusalem, but separated from the ancient city sites by the huge concrete wall.

Apartment buildings are popping up like mushrooms in these areas. The sound of construction fills the air.

Kufr Aqab – once full of open, green spaces – is now “crowded” and “dirty”, says Amira, an 18-year-old Palestinian woman who lives here. She asked not to be identified by her real name out of fear of endangering her Israeli-issued Jerusalem residency permit.

Residents pay taxes to the state of Israel but receive far fewer services than the neighbouring Jewish districts of Jerusalem. While Palestinians constitute approximately 35 percent of the city’s population, only eight to ten percent of the municipal budget is allocated to their communities. “We have to hire someone to come and take [the garbage] because the city won’t come,” Amira says. “They will pick up everything on the main street but not behind it.”

Refuse collection is a long-standing issue for Palestinian East Jerusalemites; even Israeli officials have raised concerns about the issue, and the influx of new residents means things will only get worse.

Numerous requests for comment from the Jerusalem municipality for this article have been unsuccessful.

Unplanned growth has already stretched Kufr Aqab’s infrastructure to the point of breaking, Amira and other residents say. “What once was a spacious entrance into the neighbourhood is now a small, rough, tight road that does not allow cars to pass through it. The entrance [has been narrowed] by two new buildings on each side that have taken space from the road to enlarge their buildings,” Amira explains.

Residents say contractors are left to their own devices. And the investors who knock on Amira’s door everyday – asking the family to sell their home so they can tear it down to make way for even more apartment buildings in the already stressed area – are said to be more concerned with turning a profit than making sure that the neighbourhood is livable.

Munir Zughayer, chairman of the local neighbourhood committee, says the building damages infrastructure. “In too many places, [contractors] have built over [water] drains. [The buildings] are pushing [on the sewage system] and it’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller,” he said. “It’s a mistake to build on it but we don’t have the power to tell people not to build.”

With nowhere to go, runoff pools in the streets, damaging the roads. After heavy snowfall in January, dozens of potholes opened up in the streets. Because the drainage systems are no longer functioning properly, the melted snow ran into a number of houses – Zughayer estimates that more than 40 homes incurred water damage.

Mohammed Reith, a contractor, agrees with Zughayer’s claim that the area’s sewage system can’t handle the influx of residents. Reith estimates that the area’s population has doubled since 2005 and that there remains a huge demand for land and apartments in the neighborhood. “At the moment, the area is not prepared for this number of people.”

It’s not just the streets, garbage, and sewage system. Kufr Aqab, like all of East Jerusalem on both sides of the wall, does not have enough schools. And on this side of the wall, there are no police. Emergency services are also lacking, as Israeli ambulances and fire trucks cannot pass Qalandia checkpoint, which is just outside Kufr Aqab.

“No-one is responsible for security [here] – not the Israelis or the Palestinian Authority,” Reith says. “If there is a problem, no-one will come. The PA needs permission from the Israelis to enter and the Israelis are interested in making chaos [in Palestinian areas].”

But, as Reith and Zughayer correctly point out, the areas on the Palestinian side of the separation wall, such as Kufr Aqab, are the only places in the city that East Jerusalemites can build.

Israel rejects more than 90 percent of Palestinian requests for building permits; structures built without permission in the Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem on the Israeli side of the wall are threatened with demolition and steep fines. These restrictions have created a housing shortage that critics say is intended to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem and into the West Bank. Critics call this “quiet transfer.”

But the separation wall has actually had the opposite effect. It has fuelled demand for homes on the Israeli side of the wall as Palestinian East Jerusalemites fear losing their residency and access to health care, schools, jobs, and their families. The wall and checkpoints have also made commuting more difficult and time consuming, so many Palestinians prefer to live inside the enclave created by the wall, in order to shorten their travel time.

As the wall has pushed Jerusalem ID holders into a confined space, prices have skyrocketed. But most Palestinian East Jerusalemites cannot keep up with the rising rents, nor can they afford to buy homes in this increasingly expensive market. So they move to areas such as Kufr Aqab, where apartments cost a third of the asking price on the other side of the wall. Because these areas remain a part of Jerusalem, the Palestinians who live there can keep their residency.

However, Israel says it has no development plans for the area. And many residents are concerned that Israel will redraw the municipal lines of the city, excluding Palestinian areas beyond the wall and revoking residents’ Jerusalem IDs. This fear isn’t unfounded – Israel unilaterally redrew Jerusalem’s lines following 1967’s Six Day War.

In the meantime, Zughayer and other members of the neighbourhood committee are trying to force the city to take responsibility for the municipal areas on the Palestinian side of the wall. They have sued for better garbage services. And because there are not enough traffic lights in the area, locals have pooled their money to build roundabouts. Zughayer intends to pass the bill along to the Jerusalem municipality.

Zughayer says their work is “an example of regular people who aren’t battling with weapons but are battling with their words for our rights. We’re not working for ourselves – we’re working for our people, the residents, to help the person who has water entering his house.

“As long as the municipality is taking the taxes, we have to get our rights as human beings, to have everything like we are in Israel – streets, garbage, schools. We live like we’re in the middle of Africa, not in a democracy. Where is democracy? Where is it?”

 

Don’t expect much, if anything, from John Kerry’s visit

by adminin Politics, Writing

New York Times Room for Debate, March 27, 2013

The previous secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, thought that making efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were, as one Israeli news media outlet put it, “a waste of time.” Clinton delegated the task to George Mitchell — a sure sign that she did not expect to leave a legacy in the Middle East. Mitchell failed.

So why should current Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts yield fruit?

Because Obama came and gave an ego-stroking speech to the Israelis, peppered with Hebrew — confirming, yet again, Palestinians’ suspicions that the United States is not an impartial broker in the peace process? Or should we expect Kerry to make headway with the most right-wing government Israel has ever seen? With a government that includes Naftali Bennett, who openly rejects the idea of a Palestinian state and calls for annexation of Area C? With a government that has approved construction in Givat HaMatos — severing East Jerusalem, the future capital of a Palestinian state, from the West Bank? What headway will Kerry make in a country that refused to cooperate with the United Nations’ fact-finding mission on the illegal settlements that pose a threat to the two-state solution that he will try to broker?

Israel is calling for talks with no preconditions, which is itself a precondition. The Palestinians have already balked at the idea of negotiating while Israel continues building the settlements that eat up Palestinian land. What will Kerry do?

Let’s pretend that Kerry, miraculously, gets Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on board. Peace accords will still have to be approved by the Israeli Knesset. And, barring a miracle, this pro-settler, pro-expansion Knesset makes that unlikely.

Last week, students at the Palestinian university where I teach were abuzz about Obama’s visit. Even if most of that buzz was in opposition to the president’s trip. But Kerry’s visit, and his attempts to restart a doomed peace process? Talks that simply buy Israel more time to do as it pleases with Palestinian land, that let Israel continue to impose a cruel and inhumane blockade on the people of Gaza, that allow Israel to go on arresting children, to continue detaining Palestinians without charge, to keep on depriving the Palestinian people of their human rights — inalienable rights that no human should have to negotiate for? It’s barely on the radar.

Briefing: Beyond the E-1 Israeli settlement

by adminin Palestine, Writing

United Nations’ News Agency IRIN, March 18, 2013

Last month, an international fact-finding mission on Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council found that settlements constituted a violation of international human rights and humanitarian law and called on Israel to stop all expansions immediately and withdraw from settlements.

A controversial Israeli plan, known as E-1, to build thousands of housing units and hotel rooms near the Ma’ale Adummim settlement, has garnered much attention in the media because it would sever Palestinian East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. (See IRIN’s briefing on E-1 here.)

But at the same time, Israel has been moving forward with equally controversial settlement plans under less scrutiny and with unusual speed.

As US President Barack Obama prepares to visit the region this week, IRIN takes a look at some of the details that have been overlooked in the discussion.

What’s the Giv’at HaMatos plan?

According to Israeli NGO Ir Amim (“City of Nations”), which works to preserve Jerusalem as a home for both Jews and Palestinians, one settlement plan of “critical importance” is Giv’at HaMatos.

In a sense, Giv’at HaMatos does in the south what E-1 does in the east. The planned large housing and hotel complex at the southern perimeter of Jerusalem would further disrupt the contiguity of land between East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank required for a future Palestinian state, seriously impeding a two-state solution, research and rights groups say. It would also mark the first new settlement construction in Jerusalem since 1997.

“All construction is problematic but there are several plans that are, in our view, more dangerous if implemented,” Hagit Ofran, director of the Settlement Watch project at the Israeli NGO Peace Now, told IRIN. “Giv’at HaMatos is the most dangerous plan that is now approved.”

Part of the plan – to build 2,612 units – was approved by the Jerusalem Regional Planning Committee on 19 December.

Most of Giv’at HaMatos is currently uninhabited, but according to the International Crisis Group (ICG), which recently released a two-part report on the future of East Jerusalem, its build-up would cut off Arab neighbourhoods in southern Jerusalem, like Beit Safafa and Sharafat, rendering them “Palestinian enclaves”.

Giv’at HaMatos would connect the dots of several other planned or expanding settlements along southern Jerusalem – including Giv’at Yael in the southwest; and Har Homa and East Talpiyot in the southeast – forming “a long Jewish continuum severing Bethlehem’s urban continuum from Palestinian Jerusalem”, ICG said. Last year, the Israeli government also approved more than 2,000 new units in neighbouring Gilo.

This kind of attachment to Jewish expansions could make peace negotiations even harder.

“From an Israeli public opinion perspective, Giv’at HaMatos is in the municipal border of Jerusalem,” Ofran said. “It’s considered a legitimate part of Israel.”

Barak Cohen, the Jerusalem Municipality’s adviser for foreign affairs and media, told IRIN Giv’at HaMatos is part of Jerusalem’s “natural and much-needed growth”, allowing both Arab and Jewish landowners to develop their properties.

Indeed, part of the Giv’at HaMatos plan, approved on 18 December, allows for the building of 549 units for Palestinians – though Betty Herschman, director of international relations and advocacy at Ir Amim, points out much of it retroactively legalizes building that has already been completed. The figures, she added, amount to just over one-fifth of the Jewish expansion.

Still, Cohen insisted, the development would benefit Jerusalem as a whole: “Not planning and developing Jerusalem neighbourhoods ultimately harms all residents and landowners – Arabs and Jews alike.”

Last year, Israel also issued tenders for the construction of 606 new housing units north of East Jerusalem, in the Ramot settlement, just north of the Green Line marking the border between Israel and the West Bank, and approved another 1,500 units in the neighbouring settlement of Ramot Shlomo, according to Ir Amim.

What other settlements are planned?

Beyond Jerusalem, there was movement on a number of other settlements projects in disputed areas, according to Settlement Watch.

In June 2012, the Israeli government announced it would build 851 new units in the West Bank, including more than 230 in the controversial settlements of Ariel and Efrat. Like Giv’at HaMatos, these two settlements make a contiguous Palestinian territory impossible, Settlement Watch says.

Overall, settlements expanded much faster than usual last year.

In 2012 the Israeli government approved the construction of 6,676 settler housing units in the West Bank, compared with 1,607 in 2011 and several hundred in 2010, according to Peace Now.

For plans that were already approved, it issued more than 3,000 tenders to construction contractors – more than any other year in the last decade, Peace Now said. Construction has actually begun on 1,747 homes.

Regardless of the settlements, Palestinians, especially in Area C, are under immense pressure. Recent weeks have seen a considerable upswing in demolitions of Palestinian structures. According to the Displacement Working Group, a grouping of aid agencies helping displaced families, Israeli forces destroyed 139 Palestinian structures, including 59 homes, in January – almost triple 2012’s monthly average. The demolitions occurred in East Jerusalem and the West Bank – with a majority taking place in Area C – and left 251 Palestinians, including over 150 children, displaced.

The office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the (Palestinian) Territories (COGAT) told IRIN there was no connection between the removal of unauthorized buildings and the construction of Israeli settlements. “All construction in the West Bank is subject to building codes and planning laws and unauthorized constructions are dealt with accordingly,” the office said in an email.

What are the knock-on effects?

Settlements are often discussed through the lens of their illegality under international law or as obstacles to a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But everything associated with the settlements – including Israeli-only infrastructure, the separation barrier, military checkpoints, restrictions on Palestinian freedom of movement, suppression of freedom of expression and political life, and control of Palestinian natural resources – causes a ripple effect through Palestinian society, adversely impacting the people.

The UN estimates there are now 520,000 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, with 43 percent of the land there allocated to local and regional settlement councils. According to the UN Secretary-General, Israel has transferred roughly 8 percent of its citizens into OPT since the 1970s, altering the demographic composition of the territory and furthering the Palestinian people from their right to self-determination.

Baker, of the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, said a future Palestinian state should include a Jewish minority. “The assumption behind this… is that Jews have no right to live in the West Bank, an assumption that we reject. In fact we see ourselves as the true indigenous people of this land.”

But Israeli settlements have violated Palestinian rights to equality under the law, to religious freedom and to freedom of movement, according to the UN fact-finding mission. They have also eroded Palestinian access to water and to agricultural assets, and the ability to develop economically, it said.

For example, Bedouins from the Palestinian village of Khan Al Ahmar, northeast of E-1, cannot sell their dairy products at their traditional Souq Al Ahmar market any more. Because of movement restrictions (they hold West Bank IDs and lack the proper permits to enter East Jerusalem), they cannot get there.

The UN secretary-general has said that Palestinians “have virtually no control” over the water resources in the West Bank, with 86 percent of the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea under the de facto jurisdiction of the settlement regional councils.

There is a statistical correlation between Palestinians’ proximity to settlements and their rates of food insecurity, according to a UN and government survey, which found that one quarter of Palestinians who live in Area C, home to the largest number of settlements in the West Bank, are food insecure. In Areas A and B, the average rate of food insecurity is 17 percent.

In addition, “all spheres of Palestinian life are being significantly affected by a minority of settlers who are engaged in violence and intimidation with the aim of forcing Palestinians off their land,” the mission said.

Operation Dove, an international organization working in the Palestinian village of At-Tuwani and the South Hebron Hills, reported that Palestinian children have a very hard time going to school due to settler attacks.

The UN and rights groups say radical settlers use violence against Palestinians with impunity and their illegal outposts are often recognized and retroactively legalized by the government.

Since the occupation began, Israel has detained hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, some of them without charge, and some of them children. Most of the minors are arrested “at friction points, such as a village near a settlement or a road used by the army or settlers”, the fact-finding mission said.

Israel uses what they term “administrative detention” when it considers the detainee a threat to the security of the state.

Ir Amim’s Herschman says Israel is also attempting to create a “greater Jerusalem” through additional means, for example: the Israeli separation barrier, planned national parks, and the construction of highways dividing villages, dispossessing Palestinians of their land and making it harder for them to access services like schools and mosques.

In recent weeks, residents of the Palestinian village of Beit Safafa have been protesting against the planned extension of the Begin Highway that would divide their village in order to connect major Israeli settlement blocks outside the city to Jerusalem.

The planned root of the separation barrier, in addition to a potential national park around the perimeter of the barrier would also close off nearby Palestinian village al-Wallajeh.

The planned route of the barrier extends all the way around and far beyond Maale Adumim and in other areas south and north of Jerusalem. “These lines are a unilateral declaration of a much greater Jerusalem, a unilateral expanding of the boundaries, an exponential increase,” she told IRIN.

Or as the ICG put it, “for many Arab East Jerusalemites, the battle for their city is all but lost.”

Briefing: Inside the E-1 Israeli settlement

by adminin Palestine, Writing

United Nations’ News Agency IRIN, March 14, 2013

Palestine, now upgraded to a non-member observer state at the UN General Assembly, recently threatened to ask the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel if it moves forward with E-1 (Palestine would first have to sign onto the Rome Statute that created the Court).

There was much fanfare over Netanyahu’s announcement last year but what has happened since? How quickly could E-1 become reality? And what of the oft-overlooked humanitarian implications?

What’s the process?

The master plan for E-1 – including 3,500-4,000 housing units, 2,100 hotel rooms, an industrial area and a regional police headquarters west of the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adummim – was first conceived in 1994, expedited in 1999 and approved in 2002 but has been frozen for years due to US resistance.

On 30 November 2012, one day after the UN General Assembly voted to recognize Palestine as an observer state, Netanyahu announced the plans would move ahead.

On 5 December, the West Bank Higher Planning Council of the Israeli Ministry of Defence’s Civil Administration arm approved two specific plans for a total of 3,426 housing units in E-1. But according to Israeli groups that monitor settlement expansion, the plans have not yet been formally deposited for public review.

Once that happens (usually a sign is publication of the plan in a local newspaper), the public will have 60 days to submit objections. The Planning Council would then hear the objections, and decide whether to approve the plan as is, reject it or send it back for amendments.

Once fully approved, there are two further steps. The municipality of Ma’ale Adummim, to which E-1 belongs, must approve building permits. The final step is for the Ministry of Housing to issue tenders for contractors to begin construction.

“No decision has been taken to allow construction in E-1,” David Baker, senior foreign press coordinator for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, told IRIN. “We have allowed so far for preliminary planning and zoning work only.”

To what extent is politics relevant?

So when would bulldozers actually start breaking ground? The whole process could take as little as six months, more likely at least one year, if not two. But it depends on political will. The government can freeze the plans at any point in the process up until the tender stage.

Alternatively, “if there is willingness, it can happen fairly quickly,” said Yehezkel Lein, head of research at the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Jerusalem.

The political will depends on who ends up joining Netanyahu’s governing coalition. The union of his right-wing Likud Party with the centrist Hatnuah Party, led by Tzipi Livni, a long-time advocate of peace negotiations, is likely to slow the process. But to form the rest of his government, Netanyahu is still in negotiations with others, including the far-right Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) Party, led by religious Zionist Naftali Bennett.

Still, to avoid a diplomatic incident, movement is unlikely in the lead-up to or immediately after US President Barack Obama’s visit to the region this month. In addition, “given the instability in the region right now, [moving forward on E-1] would be a very risky, ill-advised decision,” said Betty Herschman, director of international relations and advocacy at Israeli NGO Ir Amim (“City of Nations”), which works to preserve Jerusalem as a home for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The decision to move ahead with E-1, she pointed out, came as a “retaliatory gesture to the UN resolution” and in the lead-up to Israeli elections, when there was “a lot of political cachet to be gained” from such an announcement. Because of the ill-understood, multi-level process of planning and approvals, such an announcement could be made, and yet, “theoretically, [construction] might never happen.”

On the other hand, she and others said, Netanyahu could agree to freeze settlement expansion for one year, continue with the preparatory bureaucratic steps required, and begin construction of E-1 one year later without any delay in the process.

Much of the infrastructure for a settlement in E-1, including a major road, utilities, and levelling of ground as a preparation for the future neighborhood, was built in 2004 and 2005; as such “if construction gets going at the site, it will proceed far more rapidly than under normal circumstances,” Peace Now, an Israeli NGO, has said.

Regardless of whether construction starts, Hagit Ofran, director of the Settlement Watch project at Peace Now, told IRIN, the bureaucratic steps would bring any future government that much closer to implementation.

What are the implications of starting construction?

The Israeli government argues that the status of settlements will be determined in future peace talks. But many diplomats and rights groups have termed E-1 a “nail in the coffin of the two-state solution”, because it effectively puts a wedge between Palestinian East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, destroying the territorial contiguity of a future Palestinian state.

E-1 would also have more immediate consequences.

In the 1990s, when Ma’ale Adummim was first expanding, more than 200 Bedouin families were relocated – some forcibly – further south right next to a landfill near Al Ezariya town. According to OCHA, the move left 85 percent of them unable to practice their traditional herding livelihoods and exposed them to the health hazards posed by the garbage site.

“It was a very painful process,” Lein told IRIN.

Some 2,300 Palestinian Bedouins live in 20 communities in the hills to the east of Jerusalem, in and around the Ma’ale Adummim settlement, within the contours of the Israeli separation barrier. More than 80 percent of them are refugees from what is now Israel and over two-thirds are children, according to OCHA. Ir Amim says around 1,100 of them live within the area slated to become E-1.

Bedouin communities – not only in the area around Ma’ale Adummim, but even more so in the Jordan Valley and other parts of Israeli-controlled Area C – have had their homes demolished and are regularly displaced on the basis that they do not have legal building permits or are living in Israeli military zones.

The Israeli government has long planned to relocate Bedouin living in and around E-1, arguing they are living there without permits. It says their planned transfer (still under legal negotiations) is completely unrelated to the E-1 settlement plan. But observers say their transfer will likely be expedited if E-1 goes ahead. After many objections to the old site near the garbage dump, the Civil Administration has identified a new relocation site next to Jericho.

Forcible transfer of an occupied population is a violation of international humanitarian law. But aid workers fear the communities may “choose” to leave voluntarily, knowing they will soon be kicked out anyway, in order to settle on the best possible land in the new location.

“When you don’t have a meaningful option, even if you agree, it’s not legitimate consent,” Lein said.

An international fact-finding mission on Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory recently found that the effects of settlements go much further, affecting nearly every aspect of Palestinian life.