If apartheid is a crime, there is only one way to treat its practitioners: arrest them. That is precisely what I tried to do when I confronted Avigdor Lieberman, the architect of a series of laws designed to make Israeli apartheid even more draconian than it already is.
As the Israeli foreign minister was about to give a press conference in Brussels on Tuesday (22 February), I stood in front of him and shouted: “Mr Lieberman, this is a citizen’s arrest. You are charged with the crime of apartheid. Please come with me to the nearest police station.” I was about to explain the charge further but two security guards had already whisked me away from Lieberman and his inscrutable glare. So I shouted “Free Palestine” and “Israel is an apartheid state” to underscore my point.
My action will probably lead to the confiscation of the badge that had given me access to the headquarters of the EU’s main institutions. Most journalists to whom I have spoken in the past few hours appear to view this as a major issue. For me, it is a trivial one. Palestinians are deprived of liberty every day because of the policies pursued by Lieberman and his government colleagues. Compared to the restrictions on movement caused by military checkpoints in the West Bank or by that medieval blockade of Gaza, the loss of my press card is of no consequence.
The decision to confront Lieberman was taken following a recent visit to the occupied Palestinian territories. Spending a Friday afternoon in the Silwan area of East Jerusalem felt like being transported back to Derry or Belfast in the early 1970s. I was shocked by how Israeli soldiers and police in full riot gear were firing tear gas at young boys who were doing nothing more sinister than throwing stones at the forces of occupation.
It was my first time in Silwan in almost two years and there had been a marked proliferation of Israeli flags there since my previous visit. That was a sure sign that Palestinians who have lived in East Jerusalem for many generations are being forced from their homes to make way for Israeli settlers. The dispossession is taking place so that an extremist group called E’lad can realise its plans for the City of David archaeological park. With the official blessing of the Israeli state, E’lad believes that Israeli settlers have more rights to live in the area than its actual residents, based on how the remnants of a three-millennia-old royal palace may have been discovered in Silwan.
Apartheid is the best word I can think of to describe the machinations of these settlers and their friends in government. Although apartheid is synonymous with South Africa, it has been recognised as a crime by the United Nations since 1973. The relevant UN convention refers to the dominance of one racial group over another. Israel was always intended to be a state based on a toxic notion of racial supremacy; Theodor Herzl, the ‘founding father’ of political Zionism wrote back in 1896 that he wished to set up “an outpost of civilisation against barbarism”.
More than a century later, Avigdor Lieberman is giving practical effect to Herzl’s blueprint. In the two years that Lieberman and his party Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) have been in government, about 20 new laws and bills have been brought before the Knesset (Israeli parliament) with the specific aim of copper-fastening Israeli apartheid. The party is seeking to make Arab citizens of Israel – who comprise about one-fifth of the country’s population – swear an oath of allegiance to a “Jewish and democratic state”, crack down on commemorations of the Nakba (the ethnic cleansing which led to Israel’s formation in the 1940s) and limit the rights of Palestinian prisoners to meet lawyers. Just last week, the Knesset held a debate about a proposal to outlaw activities promoting a boycott of Israeli goods or institutions.
If you get a sense of déjà-vu reading about the measures favoured by Lieberman, it is because they bear many similarities to those introduced by the white minority government in South Africa during its apartheid era.
As well as being recognised as a crime by the UN since the 1970s, apartheid has more recently been one of the offences covered by the Rome Statute, under which the International Criminal Court was founded. The EU is nominally a strong supporter of the ICC, yet the Union’s representatives have mostly kept their mouths shut about Israeli apartheid and its consolidation.
Apartheid is not the only crime on my mind right now. Bertrand Russell, the great British intellectual, once referred to the crime of silence. This is a crime that the EU commits when it embraces Lieberman, as it did this week. If our politicians are silent, then it falls to ordinary people to shout as loud as they possibly can.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 22 February 2011
Showing posts with label Silwan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Silwan. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
Europe's double standards on East Jerusalem
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
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
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