For immediate release

Israeli settlers take over Palestinian home, elderly resident suffers severe medical complications

On Tuesday morning at around 9.30am, a group of settlers surrounded the al-Kurd family home in Sheikh Jarrah and took over a section of the house.

Fifteen to twenty settlers, accompanied by private armed security and Israeli police forces, entered an extension of the Palestinian house, and started clearing it of the family’s belongings. The family was not present in this section of the house in compliance with a previous court order, however local sources reported that the settlers also attempted, on several occasions, to gain entry to the inhabited part of the house.

One Palestinian resident, Khamis al-Gawi, has been arrested shortly after the settlers arrived, and is still being held at a local police station. Two international activists, American and Swedish nationals, who were filming the settlers taking over the house were also arrested by the police and their video cameras confiscated.

Later in the day, two Palestinian women suffered medical complications as a result of the take-over and had to be transported to a local hospital in an ambulance. One of them, the daughter of the owner of the house Refka al-Kurd, Nadia, was taken to the hospital with a suspected heart attack.

The take-over came minutes after an appeal, challenging an earlier court decision that deemed this section of the house illegal and gave the settlers the right to enter the property, submitted by the family’s lawyer, was rejected by the Magistrate Court this morning. The al-Kurd family only found out that their appeal was rejected when they saw the settlers approaching their home.

The first attempt of the settlers to take over the house came on 3 November 2009. In a similar scenario, settlers entered the al-Kurd property and locked themselves in, leaving only when escorted out by the Israeli police. However, the house remained occupied by armed settler security 24 hours a day since then. Further attempts followed including one on 26 November at 1am, when five settlers invaded the house, attacking the Palestinian family. An elderly woman, Refka al-Kurd (87) suffered a stroke following the incident.

The al-Kurd home was built in 1956. An addition to the house was built 10 years ago, but the family was not allowed to inhabit the section, based on an earlier agreement with the settlers (reached by the family’s former lawyer without their knowledge), which is currently still under dispute.

The al-Kurds have become the fourth Sheikh Jarrah family whose house (or a portion of the home) has been occupied by settlers in the last year. So far, 60 people have been left homeless. In total, 28 families living in the Karm Al-Ja’ouni neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, located directly north of the Old City, face imminent eviction from their homes.

These actions are illegal under international law, which prohibits the occupying power (in this case Israel) from transferring its own population into the occupied territory. East Jerusalem, along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights, is considered an occupied territory and its de-facto annexation by Israel has not been recognized by international law.

An appeal submitted by the family’s lawyer will be heard tomorrow, 2 December 2009 at noon, in the District Court in Jerusalem.

A court case, determining the ownership of the whole house, including the section built in 1956 by UNRWA, will be heard on 15 February 2010. Similarly to the Hannoun, Gawi and Kamel al-Kurd families in the past, this hearing can result in an eviction order against the al-Kurd family.

Background on Sheikh Jarrah

Approximately 475 Palestinian residents living in the Karm Al-Ja’ouni neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, located directly north of the Old City, face imminent eviction from their homes in the manner of the Hannoun and Gawi families, and the al-Kurd family before them. All 28 families are refugees from 1948, mostly from West Jerusalem and Haifa, whose houses in Sheikh Jarrah were built and given to them through a joint project between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956.

The eviction orders are a result of claims made in 1967 by the Sephardic Community Committee and the Knesseth Yisrael Association (who since sold their claim to the area to Nahalat Shimon) – settler organizations that claim to have deeds for the land dating back to 1875. In 1972, these two settler organizations applied to have the land registered in their names with the Israel Lands Administration (ILA). Their claim to ownership was noted in the Land Registry; however, it was never made into an official registry of title. The first Palestinian property in the area was taken over at this time.

The case continued in the courts for another 37 years. Amongst other developments, the first lawyer of the Palestinian residents reached an agreement with the settler organizations in 1982 (without the knowledge or consent of the Palestinian families) in which he recognized the settlers’ ownership in return for granting the families the legal status of protected tenants. This affected 23 families and served as a basis for future court and eviction orders (including today’s take-over), despite the immediate appeal filed by the families’ new lawyer.

Furthermore, a Palestinian landowner, Suleiman Darwish Hijazi, has legally challenged the settlers’ claims. In 1994 he presented documents certifying his ownership of the land to the courts, including tax receipts from 1927. In addition, the new lawyer of the Palestinian residents located a document, proving the land in Sheikh Jarrah had never been under Jewish ownership. The Israeli courts rejected these documents.

The first eviction orders were issued in 1999 based on the (still disputed) agreement from 1982 and, as a result, two Palestinian families (Hannoun and Gawi) were evicted in February 2002. After the 2006 Israeli Supreme Court finding that the settler committees’ ownership of the lands was uncertain, and the Lands Settlement officer of the court requesting that the ILA remove their names from the Lands Registrar, the families returned back to their homes. The courts, however, failed to recognize new evidence presented to them and continued to issue eviction orders based on decisions from 1982 and 1999 respectively. Further evictions followed in November 2008 (al- Kurd family) and August 2009 (Hannoun and Gawi families for the second time). At present, settlers occupy all these houses and the whole area is patrolled by armed private security 24 hours a day.

The ultimate goal of the settler organizations is to turn the whole area into a new Jewish settlement and to create a Jewish continuum that will effectively cut off the Old City form the northern Palestinian neighborhoods.

On 28th August 2008, Nahalat Shimon International filed a plan to build a series of five and six-story apartment blocks – Town Plan Scheme (TPS) 12705 – in the Jerusalem Local Planning Commission. If TPS 12705 comes to pass, the existing Palestinian houses in this key area would be demolished, about 500 Palestinians would be evicted, and 200 new settler units would be built for a new settlement: Shimon HaTzadik.

27 November 2009

The choice of civil resistance in challenging the Israeli occupation is considered by some as a form of “surrender.” In an interview [in Arabic] on Al Aqsa, Palestinian activists Mazen Qumsiyeh and comrade Haidar Eid answer these questions.

Eid was asked about the meaning of civil resistance of which he spoke about the numerous terms coined to non-violent resistance, civil resistance, non-violent struggle and therefore multiple definitions to each term. There is, he says, the Gandhian non-violent struggle, Satyagraha, which is to depend totally on people power and the strength of economic boycott of the occupier’s products. “What happened in South Africa was that this concept was further developed to include multiple and different forms of struggle, of which complete one another. And there was an emphasis in the later part of Apartheid, during the eighties, on Boycott [in all its forms].” Eid emphasized that the four pillars of struggle in South Africa should be taken as a model to learn from in the Palestinian struggle.

In the Palestinian context, the word “peace” has come to have a negative connotation, and Eid explains that this is due to the “industry of peace” processes that the Palestinians had to face constantly, and particularly from 1993 till now, where peace as a process was not linked to the attainment of justice for the Palestinian people, and the right of return of the refugees with reparation of the decades of suffering, estrangement, refugeehood and exile. “When we speak of peace, we will speak only of peace that leads to the implementation of Palestinian people’s legitimate rights.” What the settler colonial policies and direct military occupation of the WB and GS since 1967 require, says Eid, is an amalgam of the different forms of struggle. And, as such, the Palestinian call for Boycott, which brings together and is a common ground to all Palestinian national and Islamic factions, was initiated and appeals to the official and unofficial international community to boycott Israel. As a result of this initiative, the BNC [BDS National Committee] was formed in 2005 of which held the participation of all Palestinian national and Islamic factions.

“I believe that we in Gaza, unlike the WB, have not invested much in other forms of resistance. I don’t believe that armed struggle, of which I do not oppose and believe to go hand-in-hand with other forms of resistance, is enough taking into consideration the absurd imbalance of power between the Israeli state and the Palestinian national and Islamic resistance-there is a need to turn to people power as well.” Eid mentioned that if a minority involve themselves in armed resistance, then the majority of the people “from farmers, academics and intellectuals” need engage more in civil resistance against occupation.

“Can we imagine the Palesitnian people without Edward Said, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish?” Eid asks. “What makes those Palestinians stand-out is their emphasis on the fact that the struggle against the Israeli occupation is an ideological struggle: we must defeat the Zionist mentality that this land is for the Jews, and that, we as Palestinians, should prove to the world that we posses the higher moral ground, that the Palestinian people in their resistance, whether armed or civil, will re-humanize the Israeli, unlike the latter whom strips the Palestinian off her humanity.”

Qumsiyeh, answering to “what is civil resistance,” mentioned that the Palestinian struggle has, since the British mandate till this date, involved resistance in all its forms: from civil to armed.

“Sumuud [endurance] by itself is resistance,” says Qumsiyeh. Simple acts as “getting married, going to school, reading a book” become acts of resistance. “When a student comes to my class at eight in the morning after passing numerous checkpoints- that is resistance,” Qumsiyeh notes.

Civil resistance is inclusive[at a time when exclusivity seems dominant]: from a woman, to a child to an elderly – all can resist. And that was what both academics and activists implied.

“We all need to look at Bil’in, ” says Qumsiyeh, “the demonstrations against the wall occurring all those years, unhesitatingly and consistently.” Not only in Bil’in does this civil resistance emerge but, more recently, in Gaza, says Eid, when the Palestinians in the Strip attempted to break the wall separating them from Egypt, twice, in forming a human chain from the beginning till the end of the Strip. Beit Sahour, the town of which Qumsiyeh is from, was exemplary in its civil resistance and civil disobedience, during the First Intifada, according to Eid. “When the Palestinians from Beit Sahour gave up their IDs to the military officer there,” this, Eid says was an example of civil resistance.

What about the use of bodies and human shield? Eid says that this is one of the most sublime forms of civil resistance, using the body in fighting off the bullets the bombs, in protection and defense of home and land.

A question arises of whether or not this kind of resistance creates a battle within the psyche of the occupier. This, Eid says, was something Mandela wrote about in his diaries and something which Said questioned a while before his death: “who possesses the higher moral ground: the colonized or the colonizer; the occupied or the occupier?” According to Eid, that as a civilian struggling for your moral and legal rights possesses the higher moral ground and, therefore, psychologically attacks the occupier. “This was what happened with the Nazi German, this was what happened with the White South African colonizer,” Eid says.

Eid mentions that “Israel is one of the societies of which domestic violence is most encountered” and “that there is a direct relation between domestic violence and suicide cases in the Israeli society and between the occupation in the WB, GS and 1948 lands.” He continues, “I think this is very important. For instance, there are many US soldiers who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan who commit suicide shortly after their return.” Thus the occupied possesses a moral and psychological power that should be invested against the occupation itself.

Eid re-emphasises that the obvious, huge imbalance of power in the Israeli-Palestinian case requires the moving away from negotiations that are but a waste of time:

“Israel has more than 450 nuclear heads, it has Apaches, it has F16s- it has the most strategic alliance with the USA. I mean, how can we as 10 millions Palestinian, more than half living in the Diaspora and in refugee camps living under horrendous conditions, fight that? People power.”

This inclusivity which brings together and encourages Israeli Jews against Israeli Apartheid and policies of colonization, with 1948 Palestinians, along with the farmer, the student, the fisherman, and all supporters of these universalistic rights share together this moral grounding, and can channel their suppression through civil resistance, through boycott – which is but the simplest of forms of resistance, and one of the most powerful simultaneously.

According to Eid, “if you hit the occupation in the core of its existence, through its strategic relations with the USA, through US boycott of Israel in all its faces [...] if all the Islamic Palestinian factions, for instance, from Islamic Jihad, to Hamas, which all have a supportive stance from Islamic movements worldwide, promote BDS in their discourse, when every leader of an Islamic movement speaks and it was demanded to boycott US & Israeli products till the implementation of every basic Palestinian right-” then we can talk about the road to liberation.

29 November 2009

There are currently approximately 11,000 Palestinian prisoners being held captive in Israeli jails across Israel. Whilst their imprisonment is of itself in direct contravention of international law, the whole arrest, judiciary and imprisonment process compromises their basic human rights. In Gaza, the families of prisoners in Israeli jails meet every Monday at the premises of the International Committee of the Red Cross to hold a weekly vigil asking for the release of Palestinian prisoners. The demonstration also takes place at the ICRC building in order to send out a message to the international community, asking it to uphold international law and put pressure on Israel for the release of all prisoners.

Palestinians taken captive are held in one of the 24 prisons across Israel. The Fourth Geneva Convention through Article 76 prohibits an occupying power, in this case Israel, from imprisoning prisoners outside the territory it occupies and Article 47 of the same Convention clearly outlines that convicted prisoners should serve their sentence within the occupied territory.

Since September 2000 Palestinian citizens living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip require special permits to travel within the 1967 borders of Israel, yet these permits are very hard to come by. For these last three years all permits have stopped being issued and Palestinians from West Bank and Gaza are prohibited from entering 1948 land1.

The use of telephone is controlled and only in rare exceptions are Palestinian prisoners allowed to call their families. Without family visits and telephone calls the only ways of communicating is through letters and greetings families send through radio stations. Letters are received sparingly by both sides, months after they were written and sent2.

Hazem Shubair was imprisoned in an Israeli jail in 1993. His brother Tayseer has been denied the permit to visit his brother for the past 15 years. Hazem’ parents were allowed to visit him until 2002 and for the last 7 years they were forbidden access. All forms of communication between Hazem and his family have been severed. Hazem was sentenced to life imprisonment and the prospects of him being released in the near future are bleak. “I just want to see him, to have the opportunity of talking with him once more and to know how he is doing. These 17 years have been horrible” Tayseer states. Hazem has another 6 siblings anxiously awaiting his news and to be able of seeing him.

In terms of the judiciary system, Palestinians are tried within Israeli military courts located within Israeli military centers. These military tribunals are conducted by a panel of three judges appointed by the military, two of whom often do not have any legal training or background. This juxtaposes the impartiality and reliability of the legal apparatus since the judges are also soldiers who work on orders they receive from their supervisors and are dependent on the latter for promotion.3 These tribunals rarely fall within the required international standards of a fair trial.

Many Palestinian prisoners are either wounded or ill. Many prisoners were taken captive after having been shot at with live ammunition. According to Addameer Centre for Human Rights based in Gaza, “prison clinics tend to offer aspirin as a remedy for all health treatments and physicians within the clinics are all soldiers. Health examinations are conducted through a fence, and any necessary surgery or transfer to hospital for additional medical treatment is usually postponed for long periods of time”.

In 1999 the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled that it does not forbid the use of torture but rather allows interrogation methods deemed as torture to be used in situations of national defense. The victim of torture can only submit a complaint in that case that torture can be clearly proven. Israel interrogators are able to use methods of torture without impunity. Legalized torture includes sleep deprivation, denial of food and water, denial of access to toilets and shackling4. A Palestinian detainee can be interrogated for up to 180 days, during which access to a lawyer may be denied for 60 days.

Many prisoners receive administrative detention where charges are based on secret evidence. In this case both the lawyer and the detainee are not aware of the reason for arrest and cannot practice their right of defense. The detainee and lawyer are also not informed about the date of release. In administrative detention the army hands over the detainee to the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) who interrogates the prisoner. After interrogation, ISA can either file for indictment or release detainee. If none of these two paths are chosen the military commander can choose administrative detention. Administrative detention can be extended indefinitely. This usage of administrative detention as a tool to imprison civilians violates International Law and Human Rights Charters but is legal according to Israeli legislation5.

Nayef Abu Azra, a 23 year old from Beit Hannoun, was arrested in 2007. Since then he has never been brought before a court. To Nayef’ mother there is no consolation. Asia Abu Azra stated “A group of Israeli infantry soldiers invaded our home and took Nayef. We do not know why he was arrested or when he shall be released. Nobody is giving us any information. Nayef was hard working and well respected in the community. My only hope is to see him again”.

Nowhere can the discriminatory laws within Israeli judiciary be clearer than in terms of Palestinian imprisonment which is reminiscent of apartheid South Africa. A Palestinian can be held in custody for 18 days before being brought before a judge. An Israeli citizen, however, can be held in custody for only a maximum of 48 hours before being brought before a judge. A Palestinian can be held without charge, by order of a judge for a period from one to 6 months. An Israeli citizen can be held without indictment for 15 days and can only be extended to 15 days. Lawyer visits can be prohibited for up to 3 months for a Palestinian detainee. The meeting between an Israeli detainee and his attorney can be delayed for 15 days6. In addition, when Palestinian detainees are arrested, the army is not obliged to inform the detainee’s family of their arrest or the location of their detention.

38 year old Ashraf Al-Balouji from Al-Sahaba area in Gaza was detained in Ramallah on December 14, 1990. He was ordained in the Israel military court and sentenced to 320 years imprisonment. His father Hassan Al-Balouji states “there is a different policy for Palestinians and Israelis in Israel. If my son were Israeli then his sentence would be very different. We all know that. Three years ago my wife passed away and Ashraf was not allowed to visit her or attend her funeral. His 7 children are also prohibited from visiting him.”

These discriminatory laws also affect children. There are now 337 Palestinian children in Israeli jails.7 Like the majority of other Palestinian prisoners, Palestinian child prisoners routinely face violations of their human rights during arrest, interrogation and imprisonment. They are exposed to physical and psychological abuse, amounting to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and sometimes torture. They are denied prompt access to a lawyer and often denied contact with their families and the outside world. This is a clear breach of international law, which makes special provisions for the prisoners, specifically forbidding the use of physical and psychological torture8.

Nedal Mohammed Al-Soufi was just 17 years old when he was arrested. In 2007 during an army incursion, Israeli soldiers entered their home in Rafah and took him. Jana Al-Soufi, Nedal’ mother does not know the reason for his arrest. Nedal was sentenced to 9 years. The lack of communication sources between Nedal and his family concerns his mother. “I worry for his health and mental state. I have not received his news for many months”.

The imprisonment of Palestinians has been used routinely by Israeli authorities as one of the main tools to enforce the apartheid regime and ensure the ongoing success of the occupation. Israel has violated and is still violating a number of basic human rights in the way it kidnaps Palestinians, holds them captive without access to a lawyer and eventually tries them in a mock court which itself falls short of internationally agreed upon minimum standards. The injustices being perpetuated upon the 11,000 Palestinians prisoners must not be overlooked.

Bianca Zammit is a human rights activist and a member of the International Solidarity Movement “ISM” in Gaza.

Fadi N. Skaik is a BDS activist and an independent author based in Gaza

[1] Amnesty International (2009) Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories

[2] Addameer – http://www.addameer.org/index_eng.html

[3] UN Human Rights Committee (2007) Article 14: Right to equality before courts and tribunals and to a fair trial, UN Doc: CCPR/C/GC/32, 23 August 2007, page 6, paragraph 22.

[4] Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (2008) No Defense: Soldier Violence against Palestinian Detainees, page 3 – http://www.stoptorture.org.il/en/node/1136

[5] Hamoked and B’Tselem (2009) Without Trial -Administrative detention of Palestinians by Israel and the Internment of Unlawful Combatants Law, page 9.

[6] Addameer – http://www.addameer.org/index_eng.html

[7] Save the Children (2009) Fact Sheet – Palestinian Child Detainees at http://mena.savethechildren.se/Documents/Resources/Fact%20Sheet_oPt_detainees.pdf

[8]Defense for Children International (2009) Palestinian Child Prisoners- The systematic and institutionalized ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities, DCI Palestine: Jerusalem.

28 November 2009

For immediate release:

This morning, a group of demonstrators in the West Bank village of Ni’lin managed to surprise the Israeli army and, using bolt cutters, cut open one of the gates in the fence built on the village’s lands. Israeli soldiers arrived at the scene and fired rubber-coated steel bullets as well as tear gas canisters at the demonstrators, followed by the use of live ammunition.

Eight people were wounded during the action. Seven demonstrators were injured by rubber-coated steel bullets, and a one and a half year-old baby was evacuated to a Ramallah hospital suffering from tear gas inhalation, caused by soldiers firing a tear gas canister into her house.

Today marks the first time Israeli soldiers invade the residential parts of Ni’lin in an attempt to suppress a demonstration, since Palestinian demonstrator Aqel Sadeq Srour was shot dead by sniper fire approximately six months ago (5 June 2009), during a protest at the village. Srour’s brother was arrested today in the village center.

Today’s response by the Israeli army illustrates the ongoing policy of escalation which the army has been implementing in Ni’ilin for the past three weeks. This policy includes reintroducing the use of 0.22 caliber live ammunition as a means of crowd dispersal – in direct contradiction to the Chief Military Attorney’s orders.

Since June 2008, five Palestinian demonstrators have been killed by soldiers’ fire during protests in Ni’ilin, including two minors – 10 year-old Ahmed Mousa and 17 year-old Yussef Amirah. A further 34 demonstrators have been injured by live ammunition, and 87 have been arrested.

As a result of the separation barrier’s construction, 3,920 dunams of Ni’lin’s lands (30% of all accessible lands) have been de-facto confiscated; this is in addition to the 1,973 dunams on which Israeli settlements have been built since 1967.

For the last 3 weeks, ISM activists have stayed with a community of cave-dwellers in Bir Idd, south east of Hebron, on the very border to the Negev desert. The villagers, who live off raising sheep and goats as well as seasonal farming, moved in recently, after a court order gave them permission to do so following 10 years in exile. In 1999, the Israeli army forcibly evicted 700 people living in the area, destroying stone houses and blowing up caves. Until now, attempts by the villagers to reclaim their land have been quashed by violence perpetrated by settlers from the three nearby settlements of Mezadot Yehuda, Susiya and Mitzpe Yair, all of which are illegal under international law.

The response from human rights groups has been tremendous. Tayush makes frequent expeditions to the village, the International Red Cross has supplied the villagers with tents, mattresses and cookware, among other things, and Breaking the Silence brought 30 people on a tour of the area to raise awareness of the plight of the people living there. Already, several tents have been raised and sheep pens restored, and 3 families are now living in Bir Idd, hopefully only the first of many.

The success so far, however, has been met by harassment from the army. They continue to intimidate the Palestinians when they use the road that they themselves had built at great expense, instead directing them to use a dirt track that has barely been prepared at all. On Wednesday, 25 November, the village ran out of drinking water due to a miscommunication, and when Tayush attempted to bring water the next day, soldiers delayed the transport for several hours. The local DCO (District Coordinating Office) chief visited the village on the that day, reprimanding the Palestinians for using the road, saying that it bothered the local settlers. When the Palestinians referred to the court order saying that they had the right to use the road, the DCO officer said simply “I don’t care about the courts, I’m military”.

It is this blatant arrogance toward not only International, but even Israeli, law, that composes one of the main problem for Palestinians trying to live their lives in the occupied West Bank. The army takes its orders from fanatical settlers living on stolen land, not from the courts. But the villagers of Bir Idd are ready to face this injustice and repression, insisting to live their lives on the land that is legally theirs.

Israeli settlers have annexed a further 40 dunums of what remains of the endangered Palestinian village of Yanoun, east of Nablus. Settlers from the illegal settlement Itamar were witnessed ploughing the land in question yesterday, effectively laying claim to it and furthering their annexation of Yanoun’s land, already entirely encircled by outposts of Itamar.

Two settlers were sighted driving their plough on to land that had previously remained accessible to Yanoun farmers yesterday morning. Noticing the audience they had gained, one settler approached Rashid, mayor of Yanoun, and villagers and the activists assembled to inform them that he had legal claim to the land as it had not been worked by farmers from the village in over five years (despite the 40 dunums in question having been used by Yanoun farmers as recently as 2 years ago). Land that stands unused for this time period becomes property of the state by Israeli law, the means by which settlers have managed to claim much of Yanoun’s land, under the continued campaign of intimidation and harassment wrecked on farmers that stray too close to the settlement and its outposts. An argument ensued between the settler and villagers over who had rights to the land, which was effectively ended as a second settler arrived on the scene brandishing an M-16 rifle.

Activists were told of how just the day before, the same settler had led a tour group of 60 Israeli settlers through the village itself, frightening the villagers and forcing them to withdraw to a state of effective curfew inside their houses, an all-too-common event in Yanoun. Settlers proceeded to strip naked and bathe in two of Yanoun’s wells (few of which have not been taken by the settlement), contaminating their drinking water.

Residents of Yanoun have suffered many years of terrifying violence at the hands of Itamar settlements – the murder of villagers, slaughter of their livestock, desecration of crops, property destruction and daily invasions and intimidation by armed settlers. The increasing brutality climaxed in 2002, as settlers rampaged the village, cutting down over 1000 olive trees, killing dozens of sheep, beating Palestinians in their home with rifle butts and gouging out one man’s eye. The settlers left promising to return the following Saturday, with the threat to spare no witnesses next time. Unable to stand the fear – and indeed reality – of terrorism any longer, the entire village evacuated, most families fleeing to the nearby village of Aqraba.

An international and Israeli activist campaign was launched immediately to allow the residents of Yanoun to return to their lands. A permanent international presence was established in the village by EAPPI which has assisted in encouraging people of Yanoun to return home, and has remained instrumental in what little peace of mind Yanounis have salvaged since they were uprooted from their land and one by one, have boldly returned to.

Over the 2002-06 period the entirety of the village’s families eventually came back to their homes and attempted to start their life over in the shadow of Itamar’s ever-increasing outposts, that dot the hills surrounding the village. This number has once again begun to dwindle however, as the younger generations of Yanounis mature and seek a life of career, education, urbanisation – a life outside of daily harassment and torment at the hands of those who have stolen their land, and what, in a more peaceful Palestine, could be a means of livelihood for them. Approximately 100 people remain in the village – 40 in “lower Yanoun” in the valley, and 60 in “upper Yanoun”, whose houses ascend the hill to where just a few hundred meters away lie dozens of settlement houses and agricultural complexes.

Although the entire village is located in Area C – under full Israeli civilian and military control – and stands at risk of being slated for demolition, residents believe that the settlement’s – and Israeli government’s – strategy is what may already be underway – a gradual exodus of families and individuals as they are confined to an ever-shrinking amount of land, engulfed by the expanding settlement and its violent inhabitants.

There are some who remain though, who are determined to stay – many families steadfastly refusing to relinquish the connection to the land that is rightfully theirs. The very existence of Yanoun today bespeaks its fighting spirit, one that will hopefully continue despite the
collective punishment waged on the village.

Israeli Occupation Forces arrested an elderly resident of Jayyous this week, a Palestinian village located in the Qalqilya region, that has maintained an active campaign against the terrorisation of its people and the annexation of its land by the illegal Apartheid Wall.

Mohammad Salim, a 63 year old resident of Jayyous was taken from his home in the middle of the night by Israeli Occupation Forces this week. Salim, an elderly man, was just a few short hours away from leaving for Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to make the holy pilgrimage of the Hajj when he was taken by the military. Residents – even his own family – are dumbfounded as to why he would be targeted.

This is not atypical of the military’s strategy in Jayyous – what appears a haphazard campaign of unpredictable – seemingly random – arrests and violent invasions is a methodical attempt of the army to sow the seeds of internal discontent and provocation within the village.

“They want to create problems inside the community,” says Jayyous activist Abu Azam. “They always give the excuse that people are throwing stones at the Wall, but really they just want to make us fight with each other.”

And the sheer brute force exhibited by the army must surely take its toll. Invasions occur any time during the day or night, accompanied by the sound of sirens, tear gas grenades, sound bombs and bullets – plastic, rubber-coated steel or live ammunition – announcing the arrival of Israeli jeeps inside the village. Curfew was imposed three days consecutively during the last month. Parts of the village now have only 2 days of running water a week after dozens of water tanks were damaged by bullets, while farmers have reported the death of 8 lambs and over 600 chickens from tear gas suffocation.

The danger of military violence is only one of Jayyous’ many problems. Construction of the Apartheid Wall began in Jayyous in 2002, prohibiting access of farmers to 8,600 dunums of their land. Demonstrations began almost immediately, and the Palestinian Land Defense Committee launched a case in the Israeli Supreme Court against the government. They succeeded in a 2006 ruling to re-route the Wall, returning a meager 750 dunums to the village. Almost 8,000 dunums stand on the other side, including 3 water wells. The Israeli government has refused requests for permission of residents of Jayyous to pump the water from these wells to their side of the wall. This affects not only the village itself but the surrounding region, such as the larger town of Azzoun that relies on Jayyous’ small supply of water as well, after the nearby settlement of Qarne Shomron annexed all but two of the towns’ supplying wells.

When it comes to accessing the land, the Israeli government employs bureaucracy itself as a weapon, in the form of a labyrinthine system of permit applications for farmers hoping to reach their fields. Although well over 600 families from Jayyous own farmland on the other side of the wall, only 300 permits farming permits were issued in October for farmers hoping to gain access to their crops for the yearly olive harvest. The permits issued rarely meet the needs of the farmers – such as only one or two family members being permitted access to the land, or access restricted to a few short days, entirely disproportionate to the necessary amount of time to collect crops. The situation is even worse during the rest of the year, as the number of permits issued shrinks to 120, for farmers hoping to plough, prune and work their land. Due to this, thousands of dunums of crops become unharvestable, and agriculture becomes an impossibility for many families.

Jayyous has been a prominent village in Palestinian resistance, as one of the first villages to begin demonstrating against the wall and the continued legal campaign for its removal. The recent imprisonment of Jayyous activist Mohammad Othman has brought the village’s struggle into focus. Othman was arrested at the Jordanian border to the West Bank by Israeli military as he returned from a trip to Norway to promote the BDS campaign. He has now been placed under administrative detention, the detention of an individual by the state without trial – in Othman’s case, for a minimum of three months with the possibility for a renewed term. This clear violation of human rights works in conjunction with Israel’s continued repression of popular resistance such as Jayyous’ fight against the illegal Apartheid Wall and the Israeli occupation.

27 November 2009

Under the slogan, “Towards a Palestine free from settlements, the Wall, Apartheid roads, checkpoints and roadblocks, and for one united Palestine with no islands and cantons”, the residents of Bil’in, joined by international and Israeli activists, gathered in a protest after the Friday prayer. The protesters raised Palestinian flags and banners calling to hold on to Palestinian rights including Jerusalem, right of return, borders, access to water, the release of all detainees and removing the Wall and settlements.

A representative leader of Fatah, Mohammed al-Madaniy, and Leila Ghanam, the Governor of Ramallah and al-Bireh, joined the Bil’in residents in today’s demonstration.

A Greek group participated with the people in Bil’in to give their support. The international activists carried banners showing their solidarity with the Palestinian people and the Palestinian right to resist the occupation and live in peace on their land. A British activist, Jody McIntyre, said: “We came to be in solidarity with the Palestinians, we believe in their right to live in peace. We are here today in Bil’in because we see the Wall as an obstacle to the building of a Palestinian state”. Sasha Solanas, from the United States, said: “I’m here today to show my solidarity with the Palestinians in Bil’in on the International Day for the Solidarity with the Palestinian people. I have heard a lot about this village and the weekly protests against the Wall and settlements. I admire the struggle in Bil’in, and I’m happy to be here with you today.”

The protesters marched towards the Wall built on the land of Bil’in chanting and singing slogans to resist the occupation, hold on to the Palestinian rights, and a national unity among the Palestinians. When the demonstration reached the razor wire placed by Israeli soldiers to block the protesters, the Israeli army announced a closed military zone, but the protest kept moving towards the gate. The Israeli soldiers fired teargas canisters and stun grenades, dozens suffered teargas inhalation.

On Friday 27 November 2009, the Eid al-Adha celebration in Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem, was marked by prayers and demonstrations.

In the night unto Eid, the sleep in the neighbourhood was disturbed at 2am by loud music coming from a street party attended by Jewish settler youths, who gathered outside the Shimon HaTzadik Tomb, located just behind the Palestinian houses. This is the same location from which Jewish settlers threw stones at the Palestinian houses in the middle of the night on Friday 6 November. The disturbing music was played for 30 minutes until the police blue-lights drew near.

At 7am, the Palestinian families gathered in an open field in the neighbourhood to hold the traditional Eid Friday prayer. The prayer was led by Sheikh Raed Salah, an influential and well known imam, who in his speech talked about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, 1967, and until present. The speech emphasized the current evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, including the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, and blasted the illegality and immorality of these actions that are forcing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem and replacing them with Jewish settler population. The two-hour event was broadcasted live on Palestinian TV and ended with games, music, and sweets for the children.

Residents of Sheikh Jarrah hold an Eid Friday prayer against house evictions

Eid fun for children of Sheikh Jarrah

At 3pm, the second demonstration and march against the evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem arrived in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. The demonstration takes place every Friday, and gathers Israeli, Palestinian, and international activists at Zion Square in West Jerusalem at 1:30pm to subsequently march to the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem. An Israeli samba drum band helps to make the demonstration vibrant and also fun for the Palestinian children who towards the end of the demonstration learn to play the drums together with the Israeli activists. In Sheikh Jarrah, the demonstrators were, as usual, filmed and observed by heavily armed Israeli occupation forces.

Israeli activists and Palestinian children observed by heavily armed Israeli occupation forces

At 6pm, around 15 Jewish settlers gathered outside the Atiyeh family home in Sheikh Jarrah and conducted a provocative prayer directed towards the home; provocative because it manifests their desire to evict the Palestinian family and replace them with Jewish settlers. 28 Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah are threatened by eviction, including the Kamel Kurd, Hannoun, and Gawi families that were made homeless in the past year. This was the fourth provocative prayer in the past five weeks, directed twice at the Gawi family house (23 and 30 October) and twice at the Atiyeh family house (20 and 27 November). Each time, the provocation has been accompanied by heavily armed Israeli occupation police. This time a friend of the Sheikh Jarrah families protested against the provocation by standing close to the settler group and performing a muslim prayer towards the Atiyeh family house. Afterwards, the praying Palestinian was questioned by the police while the settlers were not. During the prayers, the police unnecessarily forced some Palestinian children to back well away from the street.

Background

The Gawi and Hannoun families, consisting of 53 members including 20 children, have been left homeless after they were forcibly evicted from their houses on 2 August 2009. The Israeli forces surrounded the homes of the two families at 5.30am and, breaking in through the windows, forcefully dragged all residents into the street. The police also demolished the neighbourhood’s protest tent, set up by Um Kamel, following the forced eviction of her family in November 2008.

At present, all three houses are occupied by settlers and the whole area is patrolled by armed private settler security 24 hours a day. Both Hannoun and Gawi families, who have been left without suitable alternative accommodation since August, continue to protest against the unlawful eviction from the sidewalk across the street from their homes, facing regular attacks from the settlers and harassment from the police.

The Karm Al-Ja’ouni neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah is home to 28 Palestinian families, all refugees from 1948, who received their houses from the UNRWA and Jordanian government in 1956. All face losing their homes in the manner of the Hannoun, Gawi and al-Kurd families.

The aim of the settlers is to turn the whole area into a new Jewish settlement and to create a Jewish continuum that will effectively cut off the Old City form the northern Palestinian neighborhoods. Implanting new Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is illegal under many international laws, including Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The plight of the Gawi, al-Kurd and the Hannoun families is just a small part of Israel’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from East Jerusalem.

26 November 2009

The architects of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank are highly skilled at the art of needlework, deftly stitching up land inside Israel proper and disputed territory over the Green Line as though it was the most natural thing in the world. According to their logic, it should be possible to seamlessly suture together the two parts without raising eyebrows either at home or abroad, regardless of the contravention of both international law and basic morality that such actions entail.

All that is required is a healthy dose of chutzpah, combined with a drip-drip effect in which a steady stream of expropriating activities are undertaken at a slow but relentless pace, in the hope that insufficient feathers are ruffled to put a halt to the overarching campaign of annexation.

The Jerusalem light railway is a case in point: in isolation, few Israelis would be too perturbed by the idea of providing a rail link between the city centre and outlying towns and suburbs on the periphery of the capital. However, in doing so, the authorities are simultaneously declaring their view that settlements such as French Hill and Pisgat Ze’ev are integral parts of Jerusalem and banging yet another nail into the coffin of a viable Palestinian state.

Under the guise of a desire to ease traffic congestion on Jerusalem’s streets, the project bears all the hallmarks of previous efforts to stake a permanent and intractable claim to areas that once might have been considered as appropriate territory to concede as part of a permanent settlement with the Palestinians. As the Alternative Information Centre notes, “by providing direct access to [these locations], the main illegal settlements will finally be linked with the centre and western part of the City. The adverse effects of this will serve to diminish any chance of East Jerusalem becoming the future capital of a Palestinian state under a two-state solution”.

Palestinian officials this week issued a call for overseas assistance in preventing the completion of the rail link, having recognised that without such external pressure there is no hope of putting a halt to the illegal construction. Basing their opposition on statutes that deem such building work a violation of international law, the Palestinian Authority urged all Arab countries to end their links with companies associated with the light railway – including French conglomerates Veolia and Alstom – in the hope that such a stance would encourage the corporations involved to pull out of the project.

The Palestinians know full well that the rail link’s presence will further ingrain in Israelis’ minds the idea that every affected township over the Green Line is to be viewed simply as a benign part of Greater Jerusalem, rather than a malignant settlement that threatens the security of both Israelis and Palestinians in the long term. To confirm their fears, they need only look as far as Gilo or Har Homa, both areas built over the Green Line outside Jerusalem’s original city limits, but now treated as no more contentious than Rehavia or the German Colony when it comes to Israel’s continued construction there.

Last week’s international criticism of plans to build a further 900 homes in Gilo raised hackles among the Israeli public. Many Israelis have become so accustomed to the idea that Gilo is part of Israel proper that they cannot for the life of them understand why anyone should deny them the right to construct houses there at will. Such a mind-set did not develop overnight; rather, it took years of patient joining of the dots by successive Israeli governments – by way of transport links, forging social ties between Gilo and other parts of Jerusalem, and so on – to convince Israelis that Gilo had come in from the cold and was now Jerusalem through and through.

When my army unit was based in Har Gilo (a suburb of Gilo even deeper into West Bank territory), none of the residents living alongside our headquarters saw themselves as settlers. Those to whom we spoke thought of themselves as simply Jerusalemites with no more reason to feel guilty about the location of their homes than those dwelling in Tel Aviv or Haifa. The fact that their houses were a stone’s throw from Palestinian towns such as Bet-Jalla did little to change their minds: the Israeli government had thrown a comforting arm around their shoulders and told them all was well, and that was what mattered. But all is not well – whether in terms of Israel’s relationship with the outside world, the spectre looming of a third Palestinian intifada, or the fact that Israelis are unquestioningly becoming more and more used to their collective status as perpetual oppressors of another people – and time is not on the peace camp’s side.

The light railway and the construction plans for Gilo are not deal-breakers on their own, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts when it comes to the annexation of the West Bank, and all interested parties should be doing their utmost to oppose anything that further cements an Israeli presence in the area. To sit back and do nothing is to be complicit with the insidious plans of those who seek never to accommodate Palestinian needs in terms of their statehood. Israelis, Palestinians and outsiders alike must continue to stand up to the occupation machine’s operators, before the rot sets in completely and for ever.