| Background material from | |
December 2003- January 2004
When we all finally got together there were 15 people on the tour organised by the newly established Olive Co-operative. We were all Jews, from different backgrounds who came together in the Knights Palace Hotel in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem early in the New Year 2004. This was a wonderful hostel for Christian pilgrims that looked as though it had once been a Crusader castle, but was decked out for Christmas, the knight's armour and the portraits of the Madonna suitably garlanded.
Max came from Holland via European Jews for a Just Peace, Bruce and Sophie from New York, Lucy from Oxford, Naomi, Lynne, Richard, Sybil, Ruth, Pam, Mica, Jude and Irene from JfJfP in London, Stephen and Hilary Rose came along, too, to attend the two-day conference of the Faculty for an Israeli Palestinian Peace, which formed part of our Study Tour and is described in this report. Jo Bird from Olive and Samir from the Alternative Tourism Group in Beit Sahour arranged the programme of visits described here.
We had come to see conditions for Palestinians and particularly the building of the separation Wall at first hand and also to meet Palestinians and Israelis involved in different ways in the broad Peace Movement. For some this was the first visit to the Middle East, for others the first time they had been on the West Bank, but some of the party had more experience of the area, and a few spoke Hebrew and some Arabic.
The majority of the Group came to Jerusalem on January 2nd, but a smaller group had a pre-tour tour in Bethlehem, Qalqilya and Jerusalem, partly to join up with the international women's humanitarian march through Israel and Palestine over the holiday period. And some stayed on beyond the tour to engage with other organisations.
29th Dec International Women's March; Qalqilya and Jayyous
30th Dec B'tselem Jerusalem
31st Dec Hope Flowers School, Bethlehem Tree Planting Beit Jala Festivities Beit Sahour 1st Jan Refugee Camp Bethlehem Settlements and wall Bethlehem
2nd Jan Israeli Women's Coalition for Peace, Jerusalem Women in Black Vigil, Jerusalem 3rd Jan ICAHD tour of settlements especially Ma'ale Adumim; house dermolitions; wall at Al Quds, and Qalandia Checkpoint Ahoti/ Mizrahi women's group
4th Jan FFIPP conference Women' Settlers
5th Jan FFIPP conference Zochrot/ Refuseniks
6th Jan Alternative Information Centre, Jerusalem Bisan Centre, Ramallah Arafat's compound, Ramallah
7th Jan Rabbis for Human Rights, Jerusalem Jerusalem Women's Centre Bereaved Families' Circle
8th Jan Qalqilya: the Wall, the Gates
9th Jan WINDOWS, Tul Karem WINDOWS, Tel Aviv Tay'yush Arabic Project
Photos from the women's delegation
Women from across the world, from Australia, the USA, France, Italy, Germany and Scandanavia in particular, came to Israel /Palestine on an international Peace March in December. They included one woman who was over 80. We joined them on their visit to Qalqilya and Jayyous, both surrounded by the separation Wall, and participated with them in the Israel Women's Coalition for Peace's conference and vigil on Jan 2nd and in discussion with women settlers, living in the Old City of Jerusalem.
On the 29th we were forced to wait over an hour before the IDF would let us through the one checkpoint into Qalqilya and were then warmly addressed by the mayor and the women's committee at the municipal centre. He told us how Qalqilya, which is 20 minutes or so from Tel Aviv, had thrived as a market centre attracting people from Israel every week to buy produce and to get their cars serviced cheaply and well. Since they were now surrounded on all 4 sides by the wall, the town's economy was ruined and at least 10% of the 40,000 inhabitants had left, ethnically cleansed by the construction of the wall. Later on January 8th we saw the problems Qalqilya's farmers had in reaching their fields, now separated from them by the wall. In Jayyous, a local village, we also witnessed the wall as a series of hairpin bends, snaking through the hills so that the surface water was captured on the Israeli side.
We had a bizarre checkpoint encounter on the way back. It looked as though we were stuck in a coach in no-mans-land all night. Having promised to keep the checkpoint open to allow us to return, the soldiers let us into the area between the two fences and then went home, leaving the outer gate locked. Luckily the driver was skilled enough to take the coach over the fields on to another road, but when we eventually reached a second checkpoint, they refused to let us through because they had no female soldier to body-search us. When we offered to strip to avoid the necessity for such a search, they got embarrassed but would not yield. We then sailed through a third checkpoint, without question.
At the Women's Coalition for Peace conference we heard about all the different types of peace initiatives Israeli women were involved in. We also got a hint of the tensions between both Jewish and Arab Israeli women and between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jewish women. We then all joined together to walk to Zion square, where we held a vigil, without generating too much hostility from the passers by.
Six of us visited B'tselem, the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories where we were given an overview of its activities by its Fundraising and International Coordinator, Rachel Greenspahn
B'tselem was set up in 1989 specifically to monitor human rights violations in the OPTs, not the civil rights of Palestinians within Israel of the green line. In addition, it attempts to educate the Israeli public about the realities of the occupation and to hold the Israeli government to account in relation to its obligations under international law.
We were warmly welcomed and it is clear that, while B'tselem has many visitors, Jewish delegations are a rarity. B'tselem produces an annual report which it circulates very widely. Around half the population in Israel is at least aware of its work, even if relatively few view it sympathetically. In relation to its work generally, it finds it very difficult to get a hearing from the army – which simply does not want to know.
B'tselem is responsible for a wide array of reports, researched and produced to a very high standard. These cover issues such as torture, fatal shootings by security forces, restriction on movement, expropriation of land and discrimination in planning and building in East Jerusalem, administrative detention, and settler violence. 'The focus on documentation reflects B'tselem's objective of providing as much information as possible to the Israeli public, since information is indispensable to taking action and making choices. Readers of B'tselem publications may decide to do nothing, but they cannot say, "We didn't know."'
B'tselem has reported extensively on the Wall and associated human rights violations. When we visited they were particularly concerned about the impending building of the wall through Jerusalem which, among its other consequences, will leave a number of Palestinians with rights of residency in Jerusalem on the wrong side of the Wall.
B'tselem is fairly well funded, by a variety of foundations and private individuals in Israel, Europe, and the US. It is able to maintain eight field workers in the OPTs monitoring, investigating and following up reported human rights violations. It was clear from our discussions that there is no point in us trying to raise money for it as a few hundred pounds here or there will not make any significant difference. Far more important is to make use of their material in our campaigns and they are willing to supply materials, in bulk if need be, for specific lobbying or other targeted activities. This could be invaluable in particular in relation to any campaigning work we do on the issue of the Wall.
Photos of visit to Hope Flowers School
Hope Flowers School is at the very edge of Bethlehem beyond Solomon's Pool. The school had to plead for the roadblock to be narrowed so that the school bus could get in and out. It is a very modern school, with a southern vista that lets you forget every day life in the territories - except for the encroaching outpost/settlement. (pic1 and 2) It was the last day for the primary level pupils, boys and girls from the large Christian community of Bethlehem as well as from the Moslem areas. They were lively and well behaved, obviously used to visitors from abroad. The pictures and posters round the school were bright and very internationally orientated, with very few military images, so often found in Palestinian schools. It is a private school, independent of the Palestinian Authority or any religious group, which allows it to pursue more of a 'peace curriculum' with a 'mixed' staff , but also creates financial problems. Not only because parents find it harder to afford fees than before, but also because all sorts of international funding is routed through religious organisations and therefore not available to the school.
The school has links with an Israeli school in Hadera and some students have been able to get together in a third country, principally Germany. The community organiser at the school is trying to extend this contact with a satellite-based internet link between the schools. They have a computer suite, which is used to help local women become familiar with PCs, but no prospect of linking to the net without considerable investment.
The school is open to help of any kind from internationals. They have set up a 'guesthouse' within the complex to enable people to stay in reasonable comfort. People are very welcome to teach English, to help with the fruit and vegetable gardening programme and to help with computer expertise. They said that they had no minimum period for which they would welcome such help and it looked like it would be a rewarding thing to do, though the children were clearly far less needy than those in the large schools on the Refugee camp in Bethlehem nearby. The community co-ordinator, whose father had founded the school and who was very well educated, had grown up in the refugee camp and gone to the school there, showing that the two worlds were not quite as separate as they now appear to be.
Since we were there we have heard from the school that they are due to have their canteen demolished as it is on the route of the Wall around Bethlehem. We responded to their pleas for help to finance a court case, but they obviously need all the help they can get.
We met up with Daoud Nasser and his family in Manger Square, Bethlehem. Like Ibrahim Issa at Hope Flowers he was well educated and travelled and sincerely dedicated to building a peace process from below. The family had bought land in 1923 high up above Bethlehem off the new (settler-only) road to Hebron. The air was clear and the views terrific. They lived some way away but some members of the family had cultivated the land, living in caves they had furnished under the land. They are now developing a camp site on the land for a 'tent of nations' , for internationals to come and stay and help work the land. We went up there with Daoud, his sister who had studied Physiotherapy in Edinburgh and works with neonates, his mother and three brothers.
The IDF has been trying to acquire the land as 'state land', using Ottoman Empire regulations that allow land uncultivated for 10 year to be acquired by the State. There are settlements creeping up on two sides. The family have fought off this challenge since 1991 and the High Court ruled that the IDF had not provided sufficient evidence that the land had not been cultivated. The dispute seems now to have shifted to that part of the land that was not used. Planting trees there is then more than symbolic. Daoud feels that if it has been planted by foreigners to remember their dead, and diaspora Jews in particular, he has more of a chance of keeping it. We planted a variety of trees, fruit trees near the house and olive trees in a grove further away. We could only manage to plant some of those our supporters had ordered, but found some other people to help Daoud plant the rest.
Pictures
We spent New Years Eve in Beit Sahour at a very large, fairly full, banqueting hall that could hold a thousand people , mainly in large Christian families spanning at least three generations. There were incredibly welcoming, really happy that we had come to join them, and danced with all of us. Pics
On New Years day we went to vist Deheishe refugee camp. It was immediately clear that the standard of living in the camp was lower than elsewhere, but compared to other refugee camps on the West Bank families made real efforts to beautify their own houses, outside as well as inside. The density and lack of proper streets made this difficult, but still there were some well tended plants. We went to the community centre that had amazing murals in the stairwell depicting the history of the camp residents. It was a bit of a shock to realise that these refugees came from villages to the West of Jerusalem, now obliterated by the Jewish National Forests. We talked to a young refugee about the camp and his ideas about 'return'. He saw it as going back to the area where his family came from, not to some actual house or piece of land. He thought 'Palestinian Jews' had every right to stay in Israel, but that 'Americans' had other homes to go to.
After that we had a fantastic lunch in a roadside restaurant outside Bethlehem and toured the roads, settlements and barriers around Bethlehem. At one point our guide from the Alternative Tourism Group drove on an unfinished new road. We came around a corner to see 5 Israeli soldiers, rifles at the ready, standing over some workmen digging(?) the road. For that moment it looked like a slave camp. They approached our minibus without lowering their weapons and quizzed our guide, who was shaking with fear. It was all rather scary. After this tour, most of us went back to Jerusalem, but Max went to stay with a local family.
We were dumbstruck by what we saw that day. However often you are told that the settlements have commandeered hilltop after hilltop on the West Bank, seeing the combination of suburban housing development and military fortification dominating the biblical landscape, comes as a shock. Ma'ale Adumim the secular settlement we visited is populated primarily by Russian immigrants enjoying government-subsidised housing, swimming pools and six times as much water as their Palestinian counterparts. But now, in addition to the clearances and house demolitions surrounding the settlements and their bypass roads, there is at Abu Dis the concrete wall, 9 metres high in places, being edged into place between suburban villas and their gardens. We were in shock. It had been very lively were we watched and helped the locals climb over the lower bits of unfinished wall, but the sight of the huge cranes and the concrete sections ready to be swung into place was awesome.
As was people's first sight of the Qalandia checkpoint. The point through which all traffic from one part of the West Bank to the other is now forcibly channelled. The concrete pens, the high wire fences, the endless queues and the chaotic traffic, are a little piece of hell on earth, almost impossible to capture on camera.
As we met - some three hundred people from Israel, Western Europe, USA, South Africa and Australia - Israeli shootings & Palestinian deaths, in ever rising numbers, were occurring daily in Nablus – the historic city near shattered.
In the midst of such savage destruction, Palestinian community leaders & Israeli academics (members of MIFTAH [Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue] & FFIPP [Faculty for Israel-Palestinian Peace], plus international supporters (academics, MEPS, human rights spokespeople), discussed differing strategies for peace.
One of the key themes that emerged from the conference was that the wall is a threat to the viability of a future Palestinian state – a point made first of all by Peter Sansom, the UN representative and reinforced by Mustafa Barghouti who called it “the worst thing that has happened” 'an apartheid wall' destroying the economy, uprooting trees, separating people from school, hospitals, jobs but he also pointed out that it is 'a weak link' making Israel vulnerable to international pressure.
But the dominant theme was the need to strengthen Palestinian civil society, and all those activist groups in both Israel & Palestine working together and talking a language of peace. Mustafa Barghouti argued that governments have opted out and we must now look to the representatives of civil society globally, trade unions, NGOs, grass roots activism from the international community for support, in order to:
Hanan Ashrawi
The remarkable Hanan Ashrawi gave the opening talk. She highlighted the serious
'de-development' of Palestinian society as a result of Israeli violence, the
systematic attempt to destroy Palestinian civil society and the peace camps
on both sides, the demonisation of Palestinians as inherently violent, denying
the complexity of their culture and home-grown democratic traditions, the re-emergence
of fundamentalism - among Jewish settlers, Christians in the U.S. and Islamic
fighters - and the effects of this in racist legitimation of the wall and in
judicial distortions, letting vigilante murderers go free while imprisoning
refusniks.
She said: "Unilateralism is the key [to both Israeli & US strategy]; Militarism is the problem". 'Anticipatory retaliation' now characterises both the Israeli & US military establishment: total aggression masquerading as self-defence (all justified in terms of the brand new totalizing polarization, with the subordinated side, as ever, seen as the powerful: Islam Vs the R/West): 'as if', Hanan continued, 'the world were not always more complex', 'as if God distributed land rights' [aka Jewish settlers], 'as if US Christian fundamentalism weren't just as frightening/destructive as Islamic fundamentalism'. 'Palestine is the last colony, & we are seeing a new post-colonial colonialism [Iraq] as exemplified in the Israeli/Palestinian domination of a whole people.'
Today there are clear attempts to redefine 'democracy' as something that can be militarily imposed.
She point out that there are also counter attempts to revive active democracy & civil society, growing as well: important to all Arab countries, but especially Palestine, currently a traumatized community, where deadening cruelty, collective punishments, destruction of houses, orchards, roads etc. strengthens Hamas (which a few decades ago did not exist) and where despair fuels suicide bombers. The international community must intervene wherever possible to support Palestinian civil society, and to provide an antidote to Sharon: it is a time when pacifists are jailed, while murderers go free.
Judith Butler
In an elegant paper (available
on line) the American philosopher Judith Butler made short shrift of a politics
which eschews justice. She drew on the tradition of Martin Buber to counterpose
his universalist spiritual conception of Zionism to Zionism as Jewish state
sovereignty and colonial settlement. She traced successors of his position including
Primo Levi's denunciation of Sharon and Begin's war in Lebanon and his call
for withdrawal from the occupied territories, underlining the significance of
this denunciation coming from 'within the moral framework of the Holocaust'.
Politically taking responsibility for changing American foreign policy, she raised the real possibility of unifying the 30,000-40,000 progressive American Jews in a variety of groups to untopple Aipac (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee), as the dominant representative of American Jewry on Israel, with its 60,000 members, and to undermine its monopoly view of support for the Occupation.
The Geneva accords
We were in the unusual position of having our of the Geneva negotiators on the platform. While Geneva gives the lie to Sharon's claim that there is no partner for peace, this did not stop the widely differing assessments. Mustapha Barghouti who saw no contradiction between mass popular struggle and political negotiation per se had serious objections to Geneva because it backtracked on the compromise of 22% of the land of historic Palestine by accepting that 2% of settlements would remain. Secondly he accused the Geneva negotiators of acting without democratic accountability to Palestinian civil society by negotiating without an electoral mandate.
The Geneva negotiatiors however, argued that their aim was to end the violence and come to a realistic agreement, acceptable to the mainstream on both sides and thus decredit Sharon's unilateralist logic. They vehemently denied Geneva was a continuation of the Occupation or of Oslo, in a number of respects, that it does address the refugees' situation, with a right of return -though not to the original place of residence but choice of a permanent place of residence (within limits set by the Israeli government on the level of return migration to Israel), financial compensation for having been uprooted and for replacement property and the end to all further claims, and a staged implementation process which Oslo did not have.
A problematic aspect it did not address, which was raised from the audience was that it has nothing to say about the 1.3 million Palestinian Israelis who live under Israeli rule as second class citizens. As one young Palestinian Israeli woman exploded in the corridor “I don't want to be left as a Palestinian in a Jewish state.”
On Jerusalem, as the Palestinian geographer, Jad Isaac pointed out in his talk, the claim of rough parity - 50:50 in Jerusalem fails to take into account the unsustainable population density in East Jerusalem, exacerbated by the lack of open land for future expansion because of the wall. The fear expressed in the discussion was that there will not be sufficient water or land left for a viable Palestinian state.
Jamil, a waiter in our hotel, provided living testimony of the cruel splitting up of families by the wall, cutting off the working population of Ramallah and Bethlemem who have no East Jerusalem ID from Jerusalem, or forcing them to live clandestinely in the capital to earn a living.
In response to discussion, one of the Geneva negotiators concluded that the real alternative to the two state solution is the worst nightmare, a Sharonite solution where the wall becomes the permanent border, rather than the pre-1967 borders.
Yehudit Harel ( a leftist activist. made a plea to present the Geneva Accords in terms of justice and democratic rights and not defensively as a pragmatic alternative to impending demographic threat.
Arguments for One State Solution
The basis for a one state solution was laid by the revisionist historians. Lev
Grinberg argued the lethal combination of three factors in producing the Palestinian
Israeli conflict: the British colonial legacy of ethnically defined geographical
areas and religious quarters combined with a concept of the nation state based
on forcible displacement: reinforced by left-wing Labour Zionism's, desire to
remove Palestinian competition from the labour market; allied with militarism,
identified with left-wing Zionism's pioneering spirit and territorial ambition.
However, he also criticised the idea of return as a myth to reconstruct group identity with negative effects on the Palestinian struggle by confining political activism to refugees and marginalising the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza, neglecting life in the refugee camps while waiting for return. ( a member of the audience pointed out that even in the best of circumstances historically only 20% of refugees have ever returned).
Ilan Pappe who focussed his critique on left-wing Zionism as premised on a racist ideology of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians argued no peace process could work unless this ideology were abandoned, with its racist selectivity in immigration and nationality policy. His argument also assumed that Zionism is an inherently racist, expansionist form of nationalism of the left, which lets Likud off the hook entirely for its long tradition of racial terror, and does not countenance any non-racist form of Israeli state within a two-state solution. Consequently he argued for the dismantling of ethnic exclusivity in Israeli nationality law and an open-ended, undefined right of return of Palestinian refugees.
Omar Bhargouti presented a seemingly invincible case for a secular democratic
state solution, declaring the two state solution dead, in part because Israel's
expansion had left only a fifth of the land of historic Palestine, and in part
because the refugees, who constitute two thirds of the Palestinian people, have
been left out. He defined the racist characterisation of Palestinians as 'relative
de-humanisation' that deprived them of inalienable rights, legitimated ethnic
cleansing in the occupied territories and double standards within Israel towards
the original Palestinian inhabitants, with majority support among Israelis for
unequal treatment and encouragement of Palestinian Israelis to emigrate. Allied
to this dehumanisation of Palestinians is a racially exclusive basis of the
state and a racist demographic policy encouraging Jews to reproduce. Bhargouti
pointed out the moral obligation of Palestinians to differentiate justice from
revenge and end 'relative humanisation' thus restoring the humanity of both
peoples.
The 'One-and-a-bit State Solution'
The scenario which had been raised by a Geneva negotiator as the real alternative to a two state solution, re-emerged in the chilling but outstanding presentation by Jad Isaac. He showed with the help of a series of maps the progressive annexation from the 1947 partition plan to today of 35-40% of the West Bank land under total Israeli control.
Since 1967 the unilateral carve-up of Jerusalem and expansion of settlements has created 115,000 settlers in East Jerusalem, and with Ma'ale Adumim ( a secular settlement we visited, populated primarily by Russian immigrants enjoying government subsidised housing, swimming pools and six times the consumption of water of their Palestinian counterparts) and other settlements, 635,000 in metropolitan West Jerusalem. The Oslo II agreement in 1995 had not only differentiated the West Bank and Gaza into areas A, B, and C under full Palestinian control, Palestinian civil responsibility with Israeli military control and full Israeli control, respectively, but reduced the number of roads connecting Palestinian areas to only two and put 15% of Hebron, a heavily Palestinian city, under Israeli control – the basis of subsequent conflicts over the Tomb of the Patriarchs.
He demonstrated that the expansion of settlements went on under the guise of the peace process, with the exception of the Rabin period. 149 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza were accepted by Israel in May 2000 although satellite pictures showed 202. From 2001 to date 24 new settlements have been established with 113 new outposts. Isaac highlighted the strategy of using the outposts as spearheads to 'fattening the settlements' and giving tax exemptions of 7% in the West Bank and 10% in Gaza as incentives to settlers at the cost of $34 million a year. Another chilling feature of this policy is the construction of bypass roads - 734 km on the West Bank - which Palestinians are not allowed to access which connect up settlements on short, direct routes, forcing Palestinians to take long routes round. The uprooting of over 1 million trees forms another element of the annexationist strategy.
The wall, however, is the apogee. Built 6-8 metres high it began by creating buffer zones with gates to give access to agricultural land, but within ten years in Isaac's prediction, they will become complete urban ghettoes, cut off from the agricultural hinterland. In his terms this is a Segregation Plan . The settlements and bypass roads are turning Palestinian territory into cantons with no contiguity and when these areas are completely cut off, they will house population densities which are unsustainable. Isaac predicted within six months when the wall is completed, Sharon could announce the end of the Occupation, leaving it to apparent 'natural population excess' and 'voluntary migration' to settle the rest' the forced transfer of Palestinians out of the remains of historic Palestine.
As Oren Yiftachel, the Israeli geographer of ethnic territorialism, put it, rather than talking about one or two state solutions, this posed the realistic possibility of a 'one and a bit state solution', the worst possible scenario.
Such a scenario made the discussion of what action participants should take all the more urgent. The Eyptian delegate, Ashraf Rady, spoke of the importance of involving Arab states, currently important backers of Hamas, in peace initiatives. Olivia Zemor, the French delegate from the 2nd largest Jewish diaspora in the world, argued for an international day of action on March 20th demanding the dismantling of the Wall by the end of 2004. She highlighted the action of French Jews in organising a peace concert which appealed to young people with 15,000 attending. Irene Bruegel (UK) speaking for JFJFP, spoke of the need to break the monopoly of representation of the Jewish community, organising in synagogues, among students and through public actions for an alternative view to be put. She also argued for forms of practical solidarity such as importing Palestinian olive oil and solidarity visits to Palestinians under occupation. The American delegate, Phyllis Bennis, responded mostly to Hanaan Ashrawi's appeal to mobilise international support, to uphold international law, shift the UN to isolate the US for its support for Israeli military aggression, while mobilizing global civil society through the UN, international human rights and development organisations.
Post-Conference Follow Up in Ramallah attended by a few dozen people who had played some role in the lead-up to this conference
Mustafa Barghouti, again emphasised that the confusion and chaos in Palestinian society was worse than he had ever seen hitherto, the level of international silence about it also nearly inconceivable. International work MUST take off. The conflict would not be solved without it. Again he emphasised, as did Hanan Ashrawi, the need for all possible forms of collective, international mobilizations possible, through trade unions, NGOs, academic forums, agitation on campuses, whatever actions and publicity people could dream up.
The objectives of international work should be:
This means that as well as opposing the occupation and the wall, strategies are needed to address the world media and other public institutions, to lobby Western governments.
Contention was highest when the issue of boycott of Israeli academia was raised (universities being one key site that many were hoping to mobilize for joint work for peace). The two women from Birzeit University were strongly in favour of an academic boycott, bitter that the leading figures in the Israeli academy had for the most part refused to support their 'Right to Education' Campaign, following the continual closure of their university, schools, and general attacks on Palestinian education. Others, including the chair of that session, also from Birzeit, seemed less sure of the tactic. Irene Bruegel argued strongly against tactics that prevented Israeli peace supporters & Refuseniks, for example, from entering Birzeit. It seems to me that some more nuanced strategy was needed, offering both stick and carrot: penalties and exemptions being made clearer. The issue was not resolved at the meeting.
A committee for future work was formed, consisting of the people at the meeting.
Meeting with the Women Settlers
This was arranged by the Israeli Women's Peace Coalition and we were asked to treat the three women who came as if they were guests in our homes. They were a rather bizarre trio; one was a very forthright very business-like American who said that she worked as a consultant in conflict resolution; the second had been born in the US but had lived in Israel for many years, she was older and very much a teacher; the third was a Sabra, but more of a feminist than the other two, she was an FE teacher with quite a few children and had at one stage lived on the Golan Heights, as a political commitment to a Greater Israel.
The conflict resolver explained that she had come to believe that she had to renounce the comfortable life in the US and had a duty to fulfil the Biblical requirement to return to the Old City of Jerusalem. She presented her own version of Jewish history and was rather taken aback that so many women there were well versed in that history. When pushed she acknowledged that other religious Jews did not accept her reading of the Bible and then put it more in terms of a personal spiritual journey to return to the land of her father(s). She could see that Palestinians might argue in similar terms of a right to return to the land of their fathers, but argued that the Koran did not state that the Land of Israel was Muslim land, whereas God, Abraham- you know the story. When Jude asked why she needed a State to fulfil her spiritual journey, her response was that she needed it to guarantee her right to visit holy shrines. She said she felt unsafe in the Old City without the military presence.
Whereas the Sabra painted an entirely different picture of having deliberately moved into the Muslim quarter of the Old City, where ' she got on really well with all her Muslim neighbours'. Her explanation was that she got on fine because she had a soldier on her roof 24 hours a day!
Collectively they refused to accept that the IDF was responsible for any atrocities, they felt sorry for the Palestinians led astray by their leaders, but generally regarded these questions as political and hence nothing to do with them.
The conflict resolver said it was impossible to resolve conflicts with the Palestinians since they did not accept the premises of the Israeli position, namely that they had a G-d given right to be there. I came away with a strong sense of the settlers' racism, a far cry from their own sense of spirituality.
It was, however, a bit like viewing specimens in a zoo, though they were quite happy to continue a 'dialogue' with us
Bizan Centre, Ramallah (6.1.04)
The Bizan Centre for Research and Development is part of a secular progressive network of NGOs designed to promote community development and is housed in a comfortable well-equipped modern building in Ramallah.
The organisation has existed since the late 1980s. Its project is to build up 'civil society' among Palestinians, that is to say to improve local environmental and social conditions and promote democratic participation. Part of the project is also to nurture links between local organisations, social movements and political groups.
This is done through support for the development of local facilities such as playgrounds, internet cafes, youth and women's groups and educational courses in eg personal and child health and household education, physical fitness, computer and advocacy skills, and income generation. Specific projects include Neighbourhood Corners in refugee camps. Some of these are for women only and provide a safe and respectable space for social interaction and the acquisition of a range of skills, but are sometimes opposed by the mosques because of the new freedoms they offer.
The work of the centre is also not always supported by the PA and local groups. Political factionalism and family and clan interests remain a problem and competition for funds and control over NGOs is sometimes fierce. According to Izzat, most of the political parties do not have social programmes and actually do not have widespread support. This is in contrast to the NGOs which have increasing influence through their local initiatives.
Funding for their activities is received from eg EU, Canada and Australia but the constraints imposed by the funding bodies are considerable. Resources are often tied to 'emergency provision' (ie food) so are not available for on-going community work. Moreover the US requires ridiculous assurances that funding will not go directly or indirectly to anyone who has in the past or may in the future be associated with terrorist activity. This kind of demand is extremely counterproductive, impossible to subscribe to and could exacerbate local suspicion of the work of any organisation accepting such funding.
On the whole however they seemed surprisingly optimistic about the political and social future in the OPT despite the circumstances (to be contrasted with the far bleaker more negative - and guilty? - view we were given earlier the same day by the spokesperson at the Jerusalem branch of the Alternative Information Centre). They stressed that a majority of both Israelis and Palestinians were in favour of the peace process and made the point that many within the Palestinian territories did not support the PA. and obviously consider that the work being done in the development of civil society by his and similar organisations is productive
Rabbis for Human Rights
We met with Rabbi Asherman who currently heads Rabbis for Human Rights. He gave us both a personal history and an RHR analysis of the situation.
For him, growing up in the USA, being a Jew was synonymous with being concerned about international human rights, and pride in Judaism was based on its commitment to social justice. Yet the values he took as axiomatic were not shared by many religious Israelis.
Rabbits for Human Rights, like most of the human rights organisations in Israel, was founded during the first intifada, inspired particularly by Rabbi Abraham Heschel's post-holocaust writings (q.v. The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays in a Time of Crisis). It had two mandates:
RHR is the only organisation in Israel with rabbis from a whole range of religious orientations. It contains about a hundred rabbis and rabbinical students.
RHR works generally in coalition with others: through the courts, lobbying MKs, direct advocacy – and including acts of civil disobedience.
At any time it is involved in at least one issue to do with the human rights of Israeli Jews and on issue involving the human rights of non-Jews.
It is engaged in educational work in schools and has a human rights yeshiva. Students there go into placements where they get direct experience of the issues at stake.
It does work on economic justice in Israel. Before income transfers, one-third of Israelis are below the poverty line, reducing to about one sixth until last year's budget cuts increased this to about one in five of the population. And more cuts are now projected.
It is involved across the green line where the thread of its work is human rights violations. e.g. housing, where permission if generally refused for Palestinians to build legally and their illegal housing is then threatened with demolition, RHR will defend them against such demolitions.
RHR has been involved in an olive tree campaign and defending Palestinian rights to harvest their olives. More than $120,000 has been spent in replanting trees that have been uprooted. This year the olive harvest went better than in the previous years – and RHR were able to coordinate successfully with some army officers.
In 1999, 700 cave dwellers were expelled, but RHR took a court case which was won. But even now, the government is trying to reverse this decision.
On the issue of Palestinian terror, RHR is quite simply opposed and sees it as wrong. At the same time, RHR argues that Israeli has to take responsibility for the situation which has led to the intifadas. The Palestinians must learn that violence destroys the peace process, the Israelis that you can't have a peace process if you violate human rights. Israel has real self-defence needs, but these cannot be met by attacks on innocent civilians.
Until recently RHR did not even talk about occupation. Rabbi Asherman himself was one the few Israelis who went into Jenin after Operation Defensive Shield. But within the context of occupation there is always going to be the issue of kill or be killed which is why RHR have come to say that occupation as occupation is a human rights issue.
RHR sees itself as working very much in Israel's best interests.
In terms of what JfJfP can do for RHR, four areas were outlined:
Bereaved Families Circle
Of all the people we talked to the two men from the bereaved families circle, affected and impressed us most deeply. If they, Adel Misk a Palestinian Neurologist who had lost his father in an Israeli attack and Rami Elhanan an Israeli whose 13 year old daughter had been killed in a suicide bombing, could work together so closely, there was hope yet. For once we could see that Israelis and Palestinians could recognise each others common humanity and dedicate themselves to working together for a peaceful and mutually agreeable solution. Elhanan, for example, says that there´s no difference between the terrorist who killed his daughter Smadar on Ben Yehuda Promenade in Jerusalem and the soldier who stops a woman on her way to give birth at a checkpoint in Ramallah.
It was inspiring to hear how the bereaved families had learned to support each other across the different communities and how they are going out together to talk to groups across Israel and the wider world of their experiences and their visions of a future. They had developed some really thought-provoking actions, like the display of coffins of the victims of the occupation and the intifada from both communities. They had been able to speak in many schools in Israel and had become quite well known in Israel, leaving us wondering, how in the light of this, the Israeli Peace movement was not far stronger.
Zochrot
We also met young men from a new Israeli organisation that is seeking to acknowledge the wrongs done to Palestinians in 1947 in a very concrete way. They are attempting to put up plaques across the country wherever villages were destroyed, setting out in factual terms what existed before the 'Nakba'. They go with groups of Palestinians to the villages to record their stories and to allow them to se what has become of their homes.
Since we returned we have been supporting them in trying to get proper recognition of the village that was once on the land that Tel Aviv University stands on.
Qalqilya 7th January
We got into Qalqilya remarkably easily this time, except that it was pouring with rain and very cold. Qualqilya has a bit of the air of a frontier town in the American West, complete with decked sidewalks and verandas and an air of quiet suspicion. It is a religious place, and we were getting quite desperate for a drink. Some of the houses were new and substantial like others we had seen on the West Bank while the roads were something quite different. We had a really wonderful meal that night in a restaurant overlooking the city, with a couple of Swedish ISM members who had got lost in the no man's land between Israel and the town.
We went out at 4.00 pm when the gate in the 'wall' was due to be opened for 15 minutes to allow the Qualqilya farmers to return home from tending their land. To the North and South of the town farmers have been cut off from their land to the East of the Green Line by the wall which surrounds the town. There are two gates, but only one, it appears is ever opened, three times a day for 15 minutes at set times. It was sheeting down when we got there. We could see the farmers on their carts standing on the other side of the double gates, with no shelter, waiting for the army jeep. Some had plastic macs, but many covered themselves with bits of plastic sheeting and waited, and waited.
About 25 minutes late the IDF arrived, opened the far gate and called upon the farmers to line up to have their documents checked and their carts searched, while the rain kept lashing down.
We watched a bit taken aback. These guys would have been searched on their way out that morning, to their West Bank land now over the wall on the Israeli side, land they had cultivated for generations. They were now coming back to their West Bank homes. What was the need to search them and to rummage through their crops? Who were they posing a danger too? Presumably the soldiers could recognise each and every one without this whole theatre, but lacking a common language, and some distance away, we could only stand and watch.
Windows
We went to visit Windows in Tul Karm after spending the night in Qalqiliya. This time the checkpoint in Qalqilya had been abandoned and we simply drove out, but when we tried to enter Tul Karm from the Israeli side, the arbitrary controls came down on us. We were asked for our permits - the first time such a requirement was demanded for entry into the West Bank. Only the soldiers did not know any more than we did what these permits were supposed to be or where to get them from. We then had another hour with the soldiers phoning backwards and forwards to the commander to let us through, while Aziz, who had come to meet us from Tul Karm simply wandered over to us without being challenged at all! In the end we wore the young soldier down and he let us through, pleading with us not to let his commander know.
We then went to meet the children in an orphanage. These were very traumatised and institutionalised children who clung on to us, hungry for any attention and physical contact. The children we met at the refugee camp who had been at Windows Summer camp were quite different. Some spoke incredibly good English and were very articulate. What struck us about the others, many of whom appeared to have African backgrounds, was how forthcoming they were, especially the girls. They were brimming over with energy and vitality, quite different from other children we had met on refugee camps. They belted out a few songs and then sadly we had to leave, picking our way through the muddy lanes of the refugee camp, around the clapped out cars and the bits of rubble from houses that had been demolished.
page last updated 29 March, 2004