From the top of the hill, I see a blotch of navy blue and khaki green against the backdrop of a Biblical landscape. There are about 30 police officers and soldiers in full riot gear. They huddle together on opposite sides of the road. All is silent for a moment, then a rock comes flying and they race after the youth who has flung it. A loud and percussive pop reverberates around the valley and a fog of tear gas fills the air. It is a typical Friday afternoon in East Jerusalem.
Two years have passed since the last time I was here in the Silwan district, on the cusp of the Old City. The tension is more palpable and there are more Israeli flags here now, a sure sign that Palestinians are being driven from their homes by force.
Fakhri Abu Diab, a community leader, says he had been expected in court a few days earlier. The Israeli authorities want to take over more than 80 Arab houses to make way for the City of David park. That park is promoted by Zionist extremists who claim to have unearthed a royal palace from 3,000 years ago. The court hearing on the project was called off at the last minute because the judge handling the case committed suicide.
The Diab family are paying a heavy psychological price for their efforts to save their homes. Last month the Israeli police turned up at his front door in the early hours of the morning. They arrested his 19-year-old son, alleging that he had been throwing stones. Diab followed them to the police station. “They took my ID and I waited for four hours,” he tells me. “One said: ‘I want to cut your tongue because what you say is dangerous’. I said: ‘All people have the right to speak. Me and my children are against the demolition of our home but we are non-violent people.’”
Diab had to pay 2,000 shekels (€400), more than the average monthly wage for a Palestinian worker, to have his son released. Arrests of children and adolescents are common in Silwan; in early February, police also nabbed a 42-year-old woman, who they found alone when they broke into her house. The habitual use of tear gas means that locals often feel they are smothering. The metal canisters containing tear gas are collected by residents after they have been fired. A recent inspection of such canisters found that some had past their “use-by” date almost five years ago. Israeli forces still fired them, even though doctors have warned that tear gas becomes more toxic after it expires. The tear gas grenades are manufactured by Combined Systems Incorporated, a firm based in New Jersey. Although promotional catalogues describe them as non-lethal, Jawaher Abu Rahmah died at the beginning of January after she inhaled tear gas during a protest against the massive wall Israel has built in the West Bank.
On paper, the European Union is opposed to the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem. In a secret report, that was leaked to the press last month, EU diplomats protested at Israel’s expropriation of Arab property. This is in contravention of international law; the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into the territory that it occupies. Of more than 500,000 Israel settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories, about 190,000 live in East Jerusalem, the report noted.
The apparently strong stance of these diplomats is not replicated by other EU bodies. In their report, the diplomats criticised the way a pro-settler group El’ad has been tasked with managing the archaeological sites Israel regards as central to the City of David scheme. “The organisation has entered into a partnership with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) which is paid directly by El’ad to physically carry out the excavations without Palestinian involvement or international oversight,” the report said.
The same IAA is among the participants in Euromed Heritage, an EU-funded scheme allocated €13.5 million between 2008 and 2012. That is despite how the authority is located in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem. This is just one example of how the EU is failing to live up to its legal obligations not to confer any recognition on Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967. Europol, the EU’s police office, is examining ways of cooperating with the Israeli police, despite how its national headquarters are also in East Jerusalem.
Catherine Ashton personifies the inconsistency of the EU’s approach. As the Union’s foreign policy chief, she has issued several statements against the expansion of Israeli settlements here. Yet she has embraced the political architects of the expansion. When she chose the Middle East for her first working trip abroad of 2011, she exulted in how EU-Israel relations are “strong and solid” and voiced hope they will become even stronger in the months ahead. She is scheduled to discuss the practical aspects of these links with Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister, this week.
There is much talk here about the uprising in Egypt that caused Hosni Mubarak’s downfall. The Israeli government is petrified by the turn of events. Israel had relied on Mubarak to abet its crimes, particularly to enforce the blockade on Gaza. It is too early to say what the Cairo protests will mean for Palestine but the discomfiture of the Israeli elite offers at least some hope.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 20-26 February 2011
Showing posts with label Jawaher Abu Rahmah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jawaher Abu Rahmah. Show all posts
Monday, February 21, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
New year, new lies from Israel lobby
One of Israel’s most dubious inventions is a form of public relations generally unconnected to the truth. It is called hasbara, a Hebrew term that has no “real, precise” translation into other languages, according to a senior Israeli diplomat Gideon Meir.
The hasbara machine was cranked into action early in 2011. On New Year’s Eve, Jawaher Abu Rahmah collapsed from inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli troops during the weekly protest against the massive wall that penetrates deep into her native Bilin, a West Bank village. After she died the following morning, the Israeli army spread malicious rumours – reported faithfully in some newspapers – that she may not have attended the demonstration and instead perished from cancer.
The practice of hasbara is not restricted to official organs of the Israeli state, as a recent article by Daniel Mariaschin from the Zionist lobby group B’nai B’rith illustrated (“Europe’s misguided meddling in Israel”, EUobserver, 5 January). In taking a swipe at 26 former office-holders who have appealed for EU sanctions against Israel if it does not halt the expansion of settlements on occupied Palestinian land, Mariaschin attempts to dress up several falsehoods as facts.
Mariaschin asserts that the signers of the appeal – including Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief for most of the past decade – “all know Israel well and are surely familiar with its desire for peace”. Yet he provides not one shred of evidence to prove that Israel, the world’s third highest spender on the military (as a proportion of gross domestic product) and the only Middle Eastern country with nuclear weapons, has a “desire for peace”.
He defends the construction of exclusively Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem by claiming that Jerusalem has been the “capital of Israel for 3,000 years”. This perception has no basis in international law. In 1980, the United Nations Security Council declared Israel’s claims over East Jerusalem to be “null and void”.
Just as absurdly, Mariaschin argues that Israel’s control over Jerusalem “enables Jews, Christians and Muslims each to freely worship at their own holy sites in the city”. Where was that magical freedom in 2010, when Israel sealed off crossings in order to stop Christians in the West Bank from celebrating Easter in Jerusalem?
And Mariaschin regurgitates the trite Israeli line that it “withdrew” from Gaza in 2005, only to be bombarded by rockets from Hamas. He neglects to mention that Hamas observed an Egyptian-brokered truce with Israel between June and November 2008. It was Israel which resumed the cycle of violence by attacking Gaza on 4 November that year, a day when the world was preoccupied with the election of a new American president. Israel’s dismantlement of its settlements in Gaza does not alter the area’s status; the 1907 Hague regulations make clear that a territory is occupied when a foreign power exerts “effective control” over it. As part of its determination to maintain control of Gaza, Israel has imposed a brutal blockade by land and by sea. Gaza’s fishermen, for example, are regularly fired at by Israeli naval vessels while doing nothing more sinister than trying to earn a living.
Nonetheless, I have some sympathy for Mariaschin’s observation that the Palestinian leadership “is on its way to betraying its own people”. If the “leadership” Mariaschin is referring to is the Palestinian Authority, then I would go further by saying that it has been engaged in a steady process of betrayal. A US diplomatic cable made public lately by WikiLeaks indicates that Mahmoud Abbas, the authority’s “president” (his mandate expired in 2009) was told in advance about Israel’s plans to bomb Gaza in late 2008 but that he was so fixated on the rivalry between Hamas and his party Fatah that he kept silent.
To its shame, the European Union has been pressurising Abbas to act as a quisling. The late scholar Edward Said drew a distinction between how Fatah has behaved in the occupied territories and the African National Congress behaved in South Africa. Even after the ANC was granted recognition by the apartheid regime, it refused to supply police “in order to avoid appearing as the white government’s enforcer,” Said wrote. This in stark contrast with the situation in the West Bank; during 2011, the EU will give more than €8 million to the Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support (COPPS). This “mission” is confined to a sliver of the West Bank; Palestinian police trained under it may only arrest their kinfolk, not Israeli settlers on stolen land. In other words, the Palestinians are being required to police their own occupation – with unwitting assistance from the European taxpayer.
Shamefully, too, the EU has been helping Israel to hone a neo-colonial “divide and rule” strategy in the occupied territories. Catherine Ashton, the Union’s current foreign policy chief, has chosen Israel and the West Bank for her first working trip abroad this year. Although she met Fatah representatives, she refused to talk to anyone from Hamas, the victors of parliamentary elections in 2006 that official EU monitors deemed to be free and fair. The EU’s decision to ostracise Hamas – originally taken under pressure from Washington – does nothing to advance the search for peace to which the Union is rhetorically committed. Rather, it advances Israeli imperialism and the attendant dispossession of the Palestinians.
It is telling that senior politicians wait until they have left office before they criticise Israel. Before stepping down in 2009, Javier Solana exulted in how Israel enjoys a closer relationship with the EU than any other state outside the Union’s borders. Participating in EU programmes ranging from archaeology to enterprise promotion, Israel is a member of the Union, without being a member of its institutions, Solana noted.
The widespread public revulsion in Europe at how Israel treats the Palestinians as subhuman is not shared by our leaders. True, they feign concern every so often from one side of their mouths. From the other, they give Israel all the support it needs to keep subjugating an entire people.
·First published by EUobserver (www.euobserver.com), 7 January 2010
The hasbara machine was cranked into action early in 2011. On New Year’s Eve, Jawaher Abu Rahmah collapsed from inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli troops during the weekly protest against the massive wall that penetrates deep into her native Bilin, a West Bank village. After she died the following morning, the Israeli army spread malicious rumours – reported faithfully in some newspapers – that she may not have attended the demonstration and instead perished from cancer.
The practice of hasbara is not restricted to official organs of the Israeli state, as a recent article by Daniel Mariaschin from the Zionist lobby group B’nai B’rith illustrated (“Europe’s misguided meddling in Israel”, EUobserver, 5 January). In taking a swipe at 26 former office-holders who have appealed for EU sanctions against Israel if it does not halt the expansion of settlements on occupied Palestinian land, Mariaschin attempts to dress up several falsehoods as facts.
Mariaschin asserts that the signers of the appeal – including Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief for most of the past decade – “all know Israel well and are surely familiar with its desire for peace”. Yet he provides not one shred of evidence to prove that Israel, the world’s third highest spender on the military (as a proportion of gross domestic product) and the only Middle Eastern country with nuclear weapons, has a “desire for peace”.
He defends the construction of exclusively Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem by claiming that Jerusalem has been the “capital of Israel for 3,000 years”. This perception has no basis in international law. In 1980, the United Nations Security Council declared Israel’s claims over East Jerusalem to be “null and void”.
Just as absurdly, Mariaschin argues that Israel’s control over Jerusalem “enables Jews, Christians and Muslims each to freely worship at their own holy sites in the city”. Where was that magical freedom in 2010, when Israel sealed off crossings in order to stop Christians in the West Bank from celebrating Easter in Jerusalem?
And Mariaschin regurgitates the trite Israeli line that it “withdrew” from Gaza in 2005, only to be bombarded by rockets from Hamas. He neglects to mention that Hamas observed an Egyptian-brokered truce with Israel between June and November 2008. It was Israel which resumed the cycle of violence by attacking Gaza on 4 November that year, a day when the world was preoccupied with the election of a new American president. Israel’s dismantlement of its settlements in Gaza does not alter the area’s status; the 1907 Hague regulations make clear that a territory is occupied when a foreign power exerts “effective control” over it. As part of its determination to maintain control of Gaza, Israel has imposed a brutal blockade by land and by sea. Gaza’s fishermen, for example, are regularly fired at by Israeli naval vessels while doing nothing more sinister than trying to earn a living.
Nonetheless, I have some sympathy for Mariaschin’s observation that the Palestinian leadership “is on its way to betraying its own people”. If the “leadership” Mariaschin is referring to is the Palestinian Authority, then I would go further by saying that it has been engaged in a steady process of betrayal. A US diplomatic cable made public lately by WikiLeaks indicates that Mahmoud Abbas, the authority’s “president” (his mandate expired in 2009) was told in advance about Israel’s plans to bomb Gaza in late 2008 but that he was so fixated on the rivalry between Hamas and his party Fatah that he kept silent.
To its shame, the European Union has been pressurising Abbas to act as a quisling. The late scholar Edward Said drew a distinction between how Fatah has behaved in the occupied territories and the African National Congress behaved in South Africa. Even after the ANC was granted recognition by the apartheid regime, it refused to supply police “in order to avoid appearing as the white government’s enforcer,” Said wrote. This in stark contrast with the situation in the West Bank; during 2011, the EU will give more than €8 million to the Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support (COPPS). This “mission” is confined to a sliver of the West Bank; Palestinian police trained under it may only arrest their kinfolk, not Israeli settlers on stolen land. In other words, the Palestinians are being required to police their own occupation – with unwitting assistance from the European taxpayer.
Shamefully, too, the EU has been helping Israel to hone a neo-colonial “divide and rule” strategy in the occupied territories. Catherine Ashton, the Union’s current foreign policy chief, has chosen Israel and the West Bank for her first working trip abroad this year. Although she met Fatah representatives, she refused to talk to anyone from Hamas, the victors of parliamentary elections in 2006 that official EU monitors deemed to be free and fair. The EU’s decision to ostracise Hamas – originally taken under pressure from Washington – does nothing to advance the search for peace to which the Union is rhetorically committed. Rather, it advances Israeli imperialism and the attendant dispossession of the Palestinians.
It is telling that senior politicians wait until they have left office before they criticise Israel. Before stepping down in 2009, Javier Solana exulted in how Israel enjoys a closer relationship with the EU than any other state outside the Union’s borders. Participating in EU programmes ranging from archaeology to enterprise promotion, Israel is a member of the Union, without being a member of its institutions, Solana noted.
The widespread public revulsion in Europe at how Israel treats the Palestinians as subhuman is not shared by our leaders. True, they feign concern every so often from one side of their mouths. From the other, they give Israel all the support it needs to keep subjugating an entire people.
·First published by EUobserver (www.euobserver.com), 7 January 2010
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