The ongoing suppression of the Palestinian grassroots resistance has
included targeting international solidarity activists. Numerous
volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement have been
arrested or deported in past months.
A tactic of challenging the occupation and the Israeli authorities is
via legal measures.
As Israel’s crackdown on popular resistance escalates, International
Solidarity Movement activists are working on the ground to fight the
authorities’ attempts to arrest, imprison and deport us – all
strategies employed by Israel in their attempts at disconnecting us
from our role in the struggle against apartheid. Legal challenges are
an important battle field in non-violent resistance because often the
occupation is forced to change their policies when these are held up
to scrutiny.
The past six months have seen a surge in Israel’s crackdown on
Palestinian and international activists involved in the popular
resistance, marked by a wave of arrests targeting grassroots
organizers from the popular committees of Bil’in, Ni’lin, Al Masara
and Nablus and international activists involved in these regions’
struggles. Several ISM activists have been illegally abducted by
Israeli forces and continue to fight lengthy legal battles against the
Israeli state for these cases, in addition to the frequent arrests of
activists at the growing number of West Bank demonstrations that the
military has struggled in vain to crush.
American ISM activist Ryan Olander was arrested on December 18 in
Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. He was then illegally re-arrested by
“Oz” immigration unit the following day, just moments after his
release. He spent 29 days in Ramle Givon detention center resisting
deportation before he was released. On June 3 the Israeli District
Court ruled in Olander’s favor, the precedent-setting ruling
articulating that the police and “Oz” immigration unit practices were
illegal. This victory paves the way for a legal grounding for future
activists (see: http://palsolidarity.org/2010/02/11278/).
Czech activist and ISM media co-ordinator Eva Novakova was kidnapped
by Oz forces in a night raid operation on her Ramallah apartment on
January 11. Australian activist and ISM international co-ordinator
Bridget Chappell and Spanish activist Araidna Jove Marti were abducted
by Israeli military forces in a similar night raid on the ISM media
office in Ramallah on February 7 (see: http://palsolidarity.org/2010/02/11224/).
All three activists pursued the issue in the Israeli Supreme Court,
bringing Israel’s repreated violation of the Oslo accords in to focus.
In the case of Chappell and Marti, the State Prosecutor was forced to
admit the their arrests had been outside the legal framework, with the
judge declaring their detention illegal.
These legal battles, taking the Israeli power structures on at their
own game, constitutes a form of “resistance” that has the potential to
set decisive precedents and alter Israeli policy, while at the same
time exposing the level of corroboration between various Israeli
departments in the occupation’s implementation.
This kind of legal work comes at a high price tag, we currently owe
around 18,000 NIS to our lawyers. The ISM is asking its supporters to
donate now to support the work of the ISM’s solidarity with the
Palestinian movement against apartheid. Activist groups may consider
throwing fund-raising events to raise money, and continue raising
awareness for the cause. You can donate online via Paypal (not through
AJ Muste), please see http://palsolidarity.org/donate for details.
On the first Friday of Ramadan, thousands of Palestinians tried to reach the Haram Al-Sharif in Jerusalem for prayers in Al-Aqsa mosque. But only some men above 50 and some women above 45 year old were allowed to enter through the checkpoints in the apartheid wall. Some of those left behind participated in demonstrations.
Al-Walaja demonstration was particularly inspiring and faced the might of the apartheid system. The Apartheid wall here is being built to surround Al-Walaja on all sides. We marched from the mosque towards the village entrance and along the main road; here the wall facing Al-Walaja village is ugly concrete and the side of it facing the illegal colony of Har Gilo is decorated with Jerusalem stone.
As we stopped at the village entrance as planned, several military and police vehicles and dozens of heavily armed apartheid warriers prepared to attack us. Ali chanted in Arabic, I spoke in English, and then Ali spoke in Hebrew. We addressed the gathering and the soldiers telling them this was a peaceful demonstration against land confiscation. We explained that this village lost 80% of its land in 1948 and is now about to lose the rest.
The officers came and gave us five minutes to disperse but then started attacking us within five seconds with stun grenades and tear gas. They arrested Ali Al-Aaraj and then they ran into the nearby house and arrested his cousin Ma’moun (who was not participating in the demonstration) . Some colonial racist settlers showed up with an Israeli flag and waved uit and cheered their storm troops on.
Until recently, we had never heard of the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP). After some research on the subject of the One-State vs the Two-State solution, we discovered a long Study published by the ATFP in 2009 entitled “What’s Wrong With The One-State Agenda”. It made for interesting reading and shed some light on the people behind the ATFP which claim “to promote an end to the conflict in the Middle East through a negotiated agreement that provides for two states – Israel and Palestine – living side by side in peace and security”.
This document (the ATFP calls it a Study) was originally drafted by Dr Hussein Ibish (who is a Senior Fellow at the ATFP) at the time Israel was launching its criminal ‘Operation Cast Lead’ on Gaza in December 2008. That onslaught left 1400 Gazans dead and most of the Gaza Strip in ruins. One would have thought that ‘Operation Cast Lead’ would provide the ATFP with the clearest example yet of Zionism’s consistent policy of using force to attain total colonial stranglehold in all of historic Palestine. Events of the last 62 years would also provide a clear evidence of this policy.
A good reading of ATFP’s Study raised many questions some of which we put in writing to Dr Ibish, the author, via the ATFP website. An automated confirmation was received promising a reply which never came.
Overall, the Study attempts to demolish the whole basis on which the One-State solution is being promoted by its advocates including this writer.
It is surely high time that all politicians, historians, writers and academics who still believe in and support the idea of a Two-State solution to the Israel-Palestine tragedy to come forward and submit, once and for all, a clear and transparent statement outlining exactly what they really mean by the Two-State solution. They have had 62 years to advance this idea and they have failed.
This ATFP Study, whilst calling for an end to the Israeli occupation through negotiations, does not take into account the failed UN Resolutions, the endless summits and the numerous peace conferences which have dotted the Middle East political and diplomatic landscape since 1947. After 62 years, we are no closer to resolving this tragedy than we were when it started in 1948 with the Palestinian Nakba and the creation of the state of Israel.
Over the years, Israel, through its huge military machine and the ‘eternal’ support of the United States, has managed to reinforce its illegal occupation of Palestinian land not only since 1967, but since 1947 when an illegal Partition Plan was forced upon the Palestinian people.
The occupation continues unchecked, the illegal settlement construction is in full force and moves forward unabated, the destruction of Palestinian homes and farmland has become a daily occurance and the flagrant Israeli defiance of International Law is a routine phenomenon as the international community looks on.
Throughout all of historic Palestine, this picture of unrelenting colonisation by Israel is a very well documented one. It is probably the most documented conflict of modern times. The colonial picture has not changed but the Palestinian landscape has.
Israel’s occupation of all Palestine is pretty much complete and in line with the first Zionist declaration in 1897 which called for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine within 50 years. The Zionists finally managed it in 1948 – missing their target date by only 1 year.
The force of this near total occupation can only be maintained via a huge military machine and through an outdated Apartheid political system which will surely fail.
The network of physical obstructions built throughout the Palestinian landscape offer us a clear system of control unseen since WWII: from exclusive roads for Jews only, to the massive number of illegal settlements, to the prison Wall wrapping around Palestinian villages along and out of the Green Line, to the checkpoints and watch towers reminiscent of a Nazi regime and finally, to a judicial and political racist system which favours the occupier and dehumanises the occupied.
This is a picture of a solid iron grip over a whole indigenous people. Not just in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, but also a grip over the 1.5 million Palestinians inside Israel, otherwise called ‘the others’.
It is through this window that a One-State vs a Two-State debate must take place. The writer advocated a One-State solution back in 1968 as the dust settled on the 1967 war between Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. It was another wake-up call to focus on that Zionist declaration of 1897. Total occupation of historic Palestine was set in motion after the six-day war ended. If that was not enough to convince the world that Israel was determined to continue the course set for it 70 years earlier, then it must take a second look over the last 62 years since the Nakba of 1948.
It would be nothing short of ignorance to bury one’s head in the sand and cast a blind eye to all that Israel is doing in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. What is happening thier is nothing short of total occupation: physically, militarily, ethnically, and politically.
Which brings us to the ATFP Study: “What’s Wrong With The One-State Agenda”.
It is truly farcical, despite the above facts, that anyone should be calling for a Two-State Solution. It begs the question of what has been learnt by the American Task Force on Palestine (or any other Task Force or Think Tank for that matter), from the last 62 years which have seen millions of Palestinian refugees linger in their miserable camps and millions more suffocate under the longest and most cruel occupation in modern times.
In true fashion, the ATFP Study goes on the attack from the word go, against the authors of such publications as “The One State Solution” by Professor Virginia Tilley, “One Country” by the founder of the Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah, and against the authors of the “One State Declaration” issued in London and Madrid in 2007 on the 60th anniversary of UN Resolution 181 (the Partition Plan).
The ATFP believes that because Israel ‘withdrew’ from Gaza (my italics) and from some small illegal outposts in the north of the West Bank, the logical conclusion would be that the Zionist leadership would not be adverse to the transfer of “sovereignty over a sufficient number of West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements to accommodate a viable and acceptable Palestinian state…”.
The key word here is, crucially, ‘accommodate’. Israel accommodates and a Palestinian state becomes magically viable. The ATFP author, Dr Ibish, must be blind to all the facts on the ground and fails to explain Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements about the ‘natural growth’ of his illegal settlements. If anything, ‘natural growth’ is what I call an illegal and one-sided ‘accommodation’.
The Study goes on to tackle the Right of Return for the Palestinian refugees to their homeland, which is a main demand by those advocating a One-State solution. The Study submits that “some form of limited ‘return’ to the new Palestinian state would be an integral part of conflict agreement”. Another key statement here is: ‘some form of limited return’. In other words, no one should expect the ‘sovereign state of Israel’, to “open its borders to large numbers of Palestinian refugees to return to live in Israel under any conceivable circumstances”.
What are we to understand by ‘limited return’ and from which miserable camp will the refugees be ‘returning’. Does any one of the millions of Palestinian refugees have any say in this? The ATFP does not volunteer an answer.
One of the most sensitive issues this Study tackles is ethnic and national identities of the Palestinians and ‘Israeli Jews’. It states that “one of the greatest strengths of the Two-State solution is that it does not require Israelis and Palestinians to reconcile their national [and ethnic] narratives” when each people have a state of their own.
But the reality on the ground shows that only one narrative is allowed to develop to the detriment of the other narrative, and that is the Jewish/Zionist narrative. The erasure of memory, the uprooting of the foundations of the Palestinian society, and the ethnic cleansing of a whole nation and its people, are daily occurrences in the OPT today.
They remain solid proof of how one narrative claims sole right over the other under occupation. By promoting a Two-State solution (if at all possible now) on the basis that two peoples have had a bitter history of conflict, bloodshed and distrust, the author of the Study seems to forget the lesson history teaches us.
The most recent of these are Northern Ireland and South Africa, where truth and reconciliation managed to forge the basis of a miracle of unity.
Palestinians, throughout their history had no conflict with the indigenous Jewish and other ethnic groups in Palestine. Many wonderful examples of that harmony can be heard from testimonials of living descendants of villages like Lifta (where Abunima’s family lived) and others. The aim of a political solution must certainly not be, as suggested by the ATFP Study, the separation of ethnic groups because they had a history of conflict, but to unite them in a single democratic, multi cultural and free state. Israel, as it stands today, cannot claim that mantle.
In Part III of the Study, Dr Ibish argues that “the creation of a single Palestinian-Israeli state is not possible given the existing international and regional power equations”. He writes that “Israel is not going to agree to dismantle itself simply because it has lost a moral argument or an academic debate”. True. But Zionism, albeit with financial clout, never gave up arguing, debating, lobbying and arm-twisiting real power players, large and small, across the international arena ever since that onerous year of 1897.
The Palestinian struggle, though helped by academic debates, moral arguments and international boycotts, is fundamentally about self-determination, justice and freedom from occupation, not simply about scoring in academic debates. Dr Ibish argues that advocates of the One-State solution cannot simply ask an entire people [the Israelis] to simply abandon their national goals and strategies, even though these national goals and strategies have been aimed at the ethnic cleansing and the colonial conquest of an entire people.
A call for the abandonment of such goals and strategies must not only come from advocates of a One-State solution, but also from the international community at large.
The Study, in a desperate attempt to give credence to its Two-State logic, tries to have its cake and eat it. It admits that there is no official international support for the Israeli settlement activities and that international calls (including from the United States) for Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, make Israel’s legal position untenable.
But the Study uses this fact to forward a naive argument that the One-State agenda effectively “lets Israel off the hook” because the settlements, the occupation, the Wall and all resulting injustices become, in the one state, matters to be resolved “through the political and legal processes of a single state, rather than [being considered] abuses committed by an occupying power…bound by the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention and other international instruments”.
This argument defies all logic as it falsely assumes that a crime by a state within its borders is less likely to be punished under International Law because such a crime would be considered as “one of civil rights within a given country…[and] the rights and interests of the international community in cases of domestic discrimination are not equivalent to those attached to territories considered by the UN Security Council to be under foreign military occupation”.
The Study thus considers that the rule of the jungle within a state is to be tolerated because it is inherently a civic matter within that state and not answerable under International Law.
The Study also assumes that the One-State advocated by us is the same Zionist Apartheid State called Israel.
Antoine Raffoul
Co-ordinator
1948.Lest.We.Forget info@1948.org.uk
Antoine Raffoul is a Palestinian architect living and practising in London. He was born in Nazareth and was expelled with his whole family by the Zionist underground when they entered Haifa in April 1948. The family settled in Tripoli Lebanon. In 1968, Antoine received his university degree in Architecture in the United States. After a working period of 3 years in New York City, he moved to London in 1971. He is the Founder and Co-ordinator of 1948: Lest.We.Forget, a non-partisan and mutli-professional group campaigning for truth about Palestine. He can be reached at info@1948.org.uk.
Palestinian sources revealed a letter sent by Obama that outlines carrots and sticks approach to get Mahmoud Abbas to go to direct and endless negotiations so as to keep the disastrous Oslo cover for the occupation going a few more years.
This revealed once and for all that Washington is indeed Israeli-occupied territory.
Despite our political differences, we can only feel pity for Abu Mazen whose two open choices are both bad: a) negotiate while Israel continues to colonize and ethnically cleanse what remains of the occupied areas and thus lose what little credibility remains among the Palestinian public, OR b) insist on reference to International Law (and thus a settlement freeze) and lose hundreds of millions in funding and lucrative positions of power over the now de facto self-rule areas.
In either case there will be no end to the occupation and no real or sovereign Palestinian state in the foreseeable future. Will he choose a third route that preserves dignity and self-respect and give up the charade of Oslo and its trappings that he started (and convinced Arafat to follow for years until Israel killed him when he hesitated)? (there are ways to do this since an agreement signed under duress and especially one that violates basic international law is null and void anyway and does not remove the rights of native people even when someone representing them signs it).
Will PLO reclaim its name sake as Palestine Liberation Organization or degenerate into the Palestinian Leftover Officials? Will the Palestinian people realize that they hold the keys to their own future and that salvation will not come from anyone else?
Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD
A Bedouin in Cyberspace, a villager at home http://www.qumsiyeh.org
Professor, Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities
Chairman of the Board, Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People:http://www.pcr.ps
(snowshoefilms series #3) Teddy Katz, a Haifa University graduate student, interviewed over 100 people – Arabs and Jews – for his masters thesis about what happened at Tantura, one of the 553 coastal Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948 by the new Israeli state. According to the eyewitnesses and participants Katz interviewed, some 270-280 villagers were slaughtered in a massacre orchestrated by the Alexandroni Brigade. Once Katz story prematurely went public, to the chagrin of Katz, Haifa University tried to disassociate itself from their graduate student and his thesis, although it had previously approved it and recommended for honors. Subsequently, Haifa University turned on tenured professor Ilan Pappe for defending Katz’ thesis.
On April 22, 2005, a week after Katz’s Olean talk in western New York, Britain’s Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted for an academic boycott of Israel, specifically citing the case of Teddy Katz and two universities, Bar Ilan and Haifa. A member of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, Katz toured the U.S. in a series of speaking engagements in April, 2005. (Lecture recorded April 14, 2005, Olean, New York by snowshoefilms). yoryevrah
8000 rockets are no excuse
Suicide bombers, it’s all just a ruse
Unless you’re Israel, self-defense is right
A Jewish army response is disproportionate might
The activists sailed to deliver their aid
Jihad cash is what they were paid
Turkish delight in the media’s glare
Slashing knives don’t seems fairAnd the song goes on…
This is how I sat listening to the charming power of music: a strikingly amazing Israeli piece made me on the verge of crying, sympathizing with the poor defenseless Israelis against the terrifically heavily-armed and fanatic Palestinians.
However, while I sat staring at the young lady, as she gently played the piano with her slight fingers, a sudden immense collection of images kept turning up in my mind: images of bloody corpses lying lifelessly on the ground amidst the rubble; a huge devastated area, which had just been bombarded by a US-made F16, covered with an enormous, rising, thick, black smoke; images of phosphorus bomb, thousands of serpentine white braids descending like white lines of smoke creeping towards the earth to burn; images of a mother tearing her hair, crying over the death of her eldest son who hasn’t been married for more than a month, the agonizing wails of the mother are drastically intensified by the dumb silence of the wife who retreated to a corner of her crammed room, covered in black, and staring at the crying women; images of women and children endlessly queuing up in the early morning in front of a bakery waiting for their lot of bread; images of a firefighter standing before a huge burning fire, which lit the dead night, holding on to the water hose while helicopters hovering above in the sky in the aftermath of shelling a mosque; images of trickling blood, trickling tears, corpses, destruction and debris; sounds of wails, cries, whines, snivels, bombs, overhead drones, and prayer calls. All these images, and others far more disconcerting, filled my mind as the song went on.
The Jewish girl poured her magical voice out while this series kept turning in my mind. The girl apparently believed that she is oppressed, for she was singing with all her heart, with a sad and melancholic expression on her face, which I believe would make way better sense on the faces against whom she sang. At any rate, I would have no problem to believe she is oppressed, but from this video it is unclear – who is oppressing who? I would have been the first to side with the girl had she chosen to be another one’s enemy (perhaps ‘enemy’ here is unpleasant to describe such a sensitive delicate girl, but this is the actual fact).
Let’s keep ourselves away from illusive political talk and unceasing historical arguments and pose the ultimate question: who is in power? Who is murdering the other? Who is besieging the other? Who is occupying the other? Who is waiting at checkpoints for long hours in mid-day under the burning sun of September? Who has lost 1500 in less 22 days? Who is spending the nights in the dark? There is an unending series of ‘who is’?
‘Only Israel’ was the name of the song. Only Israel doesn’t have the right to self-defense. Only Israel doesn’t have the right to respond. Only Israelis are not cared for. Only Israel is discriminated against while the Palestinians, who are never mentioned in the song, are surrounded by cousins flowing with oil demanding the Israelis to give up their land! It would have given me a stoic smile to have watched myself listen to these words. Can’t she take herself as far back as to 1948? Who has taken the other’s land? Can’t she open up her eyes and see things better than that? How accurate it would have been had “Israel” been replaced with “Palestine!” It is only Israel, young lady, who has the right to talk, attack, kill, bomb, besiege others, seize their land, expel them, build settlements, own weapons and the list continues.
It is only Israel.
The music was no longer charming, and the words were a greater ruse than the ‘suicide bombers’ she spoke of, for we both had not heard of a suicide bomber in the region for long (perhaps the disproportionate bombing helped wipe them out). The words were a ruse, for the 8000 rockets certainly look different when you consider how many Israelis were killed or even hurt by these rockets. It might amuse the young lady to know that these 8000 rockets put together will almost certainly weigh less than just eight of the several hundred bombs that Israel dropped in only one area in the last war. It is a ruse.
I am not going to refute the lyrics of the song one by one, nor am I to defend myself against the song. I will only backtrack to the one moment where I felt myself going with the rhythm, abandoning my people’s misery in the blink of an eye. I twitched. I felt the grave sin of my treachery and knew I should tell no one of how fragile my faith and I are against the poignant influences of a short piece of music.
Yes, young lady, the song is all just a ruse: It is only Palestine.
Mohammed Rabah Suliman, 21, is a student of English Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. He blogs at http://msuliman.wordpress.com/.
Transformation. Fabulous video of the strong young artist Emily Henochowicz singing an anthem to Palestine she wrote for her friend. A lot of great rage here, toward the state that destroyed her eye during a demonstration on May 31. Some of the lyrics, about 2-1/2 minutes in:
Translated by Mounadil :
In Palestine, oh I miss you Palestine.
En Palestine, Oh tu me manques Palestine.
And you know I think back to the memory of my grandparents in Poland
Et tu sais, je repense au souvenir de mes grands parents en Pologne
And I think of what they suffered through in Europe. It makes me sad
Et je pense à ce qu’ils ont souffert en Europe. Ca me rend triste.
I think they would be sad how all those Jews who died in the Holocaust would be so very sad
Je pense qu’ils seraient tristes, que tous ces Juifs qui ont péri dans l’holocauste seraient très tristes
If they knew that this is how their memory was being used
S’ils savaient que c’est ainsi qu’on se sert de leur mémoire
Oh-Oh, in Palestine
Oh-Oh, en Palestine
It’s fascist what they’re doing
Ce qu’ils font est fasciste
It is ethnic cleansing what they’re doing
Ce qu’ils font est du nettoyage ethnique
It is just as bad as what had happened to them
C’est tout simplement aussi mal que ce qui leur est arrivé
Don’t they see?
Ne voient-ils pas?
Don’t they see?
Ne voient-ils pas?
If they don’t want people to be anti-Semitic, then they better act like good Jews!
S’ils ne veulent pas que les gens soient antisémites, alors ils feraient mieux d’agir comme de bons Juifs!
They can’t say that they are moral when this is what they do!
Ils ne doivent pas dire qu’ils sont moraux alors que c’est ce qu’ils font!
The ongoing suppression of the Palestinian grassroots resistance has
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