| NOVANEWS |
Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem
Chair of West Midland PSC
Dear Friends, Today’s news has not improved much from yesterday’s. True, I have not yet heard of anyone being killed today in the West Bank, even though that is not uncommon there for Palestinians. WB Palestinian villages in the vicinity of Itamar (the colony in which 5 members of a family were murdered) were trashed by settlers and the IOF, inhabitants of these villages were ‘detained,’ no one knows for how long. One of the people taken by the IOF for ‘questioning’ is 14 years old. Below items 1 and 2 relate the story of what one village has undergone since the murder. Item 3 relates Israel’s response to the murders, namely construction in the WB. Item 4 is a commentary by Robert Fisk, item 5 is a video showing a solidarity visit and tree planting in Al Arakib yesterday, and item 6 (the final one) is a link to ‘Today in Palestine.’ I do hope that you will take advantage of the compilation and scan at least the summaries. Additionally, I apologize for an error in yesterday’s message. The name of the individual who wrote Permanent Temporariness is Alastair Crooke, and not as I had it, Alastair Cooke, who is no longer with us.
All the best,
Dorothy
1. H. an Irish activist, reports:
Awarta, a small village near Ithamar settlement, 12 March, 2011. Following the brutal murders in Ithamar, Israeli army raided Awarta looking for ‘suspects’ without any evidence. Live ammunition, sound grenades used, 20-50 people arrested, including a 16 year old boy. Extensive destruction of personal property, homes thrashed, belongings smashed, money and phones stolen. Women crying, picking up the pieces, fixing broken homes. No news on the children, young men arrested.
The son of Faiysal Mahmoud Kawareek points to the bullet holes fired by the Israeli army on the raid on their home this morning. Fortunately no-one was hit by the gunfire – the family was sleeping.
One of the rooms in the home of Faiysal Mahmoud Kawareek. Belongings strewn everywhere, furniture broken, sons arrested..
The son of Faiysal Mahmoud Kawareek points to the bullet holes fired by the Israeli army on the raid on their home this morning. Fortunately no-one was hit by the gunfire – the family was sleeping.
One of the rooms in the home of Faiysal Mahmoud Kawareek. Belongings strewn everywhere, furniture broken, sons arrested..
2. The village of Awarta face repression from soldiers after attack on settlers
International Solidarity Movement. http://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/the-village-of-awarta-face-repression-from-soldiers-after-attack-on-settlers/ Today the village of Awarta, the Palestinian village located closest to the illegal settlement Itamar which witnessed the murder of an entire settler family this morning [not entire, 5 members out of 8 D.], was put under severe military restrictions. According to the village council, 19 people are still in custody after the Israeli military raided the village early this morning. Around 8 am the Israeli military cut off the roads to the village, preventing anyone from entering or leaving.
Around 25 people were arrested in total, among them a 14-year-old boy. When the soldiers entered the houses to arrest people they flipped over furniture, smashed windows, threw sound grenades and shot bullets in the air. Around 3 pm the soldiers returned a second time to search houses of the families who’s sons had been arrested. They forced the families to stay outside under armed guards for an hour while about 20 soldiers with dogs entered their houses. As they had done in the morning, the soldiers turned the houses completely upside-down, destroying the electricity by cutting the cables to the fuse box, and polluting the drinking water by throwing mud in the water-tanks. Computers and phones were destroyed and money and property were stolen by the soldiers. Once again the soldiers threw sound grenades inside and outside the houses. While the soldiers were searching the houses, the families, including women and small children, were forbidden to drink or eat.
It has been reported that an 80-year-old woman who suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure was beaten by the soldiers. She was taken to the Rafidia hospital in Nablus. Around 6 pm the soldiers left the village, but residents of Awarta are scared that settlers will attack again during the night. No one knows if or when the army or the settlers will return to the village. The families of the men and boys that were arrested do not know where their sons, fathers, and brothers are or when they will come home. Even though this kind of systematic collective punishment is illegal according to International law, is it frequently used by the Israeli military all over the West Bank and in Gaza.
3. The Guardian,
13 March 2011
Israel approves West Bank homes after murder of settlersBinyamin Netanyahu approves hundreds of settler homes in West Bank after Palestinian militants kill family of settlers http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/13/israel-netanyahu-settlers-murder-response
Harriet Sherwood and agencies guardian.co.uk, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu at the weekly cabinet meeting said Israel would build several hundred homes for settlers in the occupied West Bank Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/AFP/Getty Images Israel has approved hundreds of settler homes after five members of an Israeli family – including three children – were knifed to death as they slept in a West Bank settlement over the weekend. The attack and the government’s response threatens to drive Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking even further out of reach. The settlement construction, approved on Saturday night by the Cabinet’s ministerial team on settlements, would take place in major West Bank settlement blocs that Israel expects to hold on to in any final peace deal, the prime minister’s office said in a text message to reporters. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under domestic pressure to respond harshly to the killings, is a member of that team. On Saturday, Netanyahu demanded international condemnation of the murders, that Palestinian militants said was in reprisal for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Israeli soldiers mounted a massive search in the West Bank after a mother, father and three children, aged between three months and 11, were attacked with knives in their house in the settlement of Itamar, near the Palestinian city of Nablus. It was believed that two of the dead had their throats cut. The alarm was raised by the couple’s 12-year-old daughter who returned home from a youth event on the settlement to find the bloodstained scene. Two other children asleep in a separate room at the time of the attack were unharmed. The surviving children were being cared for by grandparents. The area was sealed off by Israeli police and soldiers. The army launched an operation in the nearby Palestinian village of Awata, arresting about two dozen young men. The dead were named as Udi Fogel, 36, his wife Ruth, 35, and children Yoav, 11, Elad, four, and Hadas, three months. The family previously lived in the Gush Katif settlement in the Gaza Strip, which was evacuated in 2005, and recently moved to Itamar. Rabbi Yaakov Cohen, a neighbour who entered the house with the 12-year-old girl, told the Ynet website that her two-year-old brother “was lying next to his bleeding parents, shaking them with his hands and trying to get them to wake up, while crying …
The sight in the house was shocking.” According to an Israeli settlement security official who visited the scene of the attack, one or two intruders scaled the security fence surrounding Itamar and entered the family’s home through a window. The father, said the official, who did not want to be named, was a teacher in a religious school. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of Fatah, the dominant political faction in the West Bank, said it had carried out the “heroic operation … in response to the fascist occupation against our people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip”. Netanyahu said: “I expect the international community to sharply and unequivocally condemn this murder, the murder of children. I have noticed that several countries that always hasten to the UN security council in order to condemn Israel, the state of the Jews, for planning a house in some locality … have been dilatory in sharply condemning the murder of Jewish infants.
I expect them to issue such condemnations immediately, without balances, without understandings, without justifications. There is no justification and there can be neither excuse nor forgiveness for the murder of children.” He said he was disappointed in the reaction from the Palestinian Authority. Earlier he had blamed its “incitement against Israel” for the attack. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, telephoned Netanyahu to condemn the attack. “Violence will only bring more violence,” he said, urging a comprehensive agreement to end the conflict. Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, said that “violence does not justify violence … whoever does it and whoever the victims are”. A statement from the White House said there was “no possible justification for the killings of parents and children in their home”. Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, denounced the attack as “an act of incomprehensible cruelty”. It was the first killing of settlers since four adults were shot dead near Hebron on the eve of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians in September.
The talks stalled following Israel’s refusal to extend a freeze on new settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The West Bank has seen few militant operations in recent years as the Palestinian Authority has stepped up security as part of its efforts to build the basis of a future state. Last month, Israel removed the Hawara checkpoint near Itamar. But there has been continued tension between Palestinian villagers and hardline settlers, with regular clashes over the destruction of olive trees. In the nearby Palestinian village of Awata, Khalil Shurrab said that “many, many soldiers” had come in the early hours, going house to house to round up people. Residents showed visitors rooms in houses that they said had been trashed by soldiers and spent tear gas canisters. Hilary Minch, a volunteer with a Christian monitoring group based near Nablus, said the army had used live ammunition and stun grenades. “The next 24 hours will be very tense,” she said. “The villagers fear retribution by the settlers.”
4. The Independent,
12 March 2011
Robert Fisk: Palestinians understand Gaddafi better than we do
Libya’s leader: expelled Palestinians to highlight refugee problem created by Israel To Beirut. Storms. Heavy rain. Seas sweeping over the little port by my home. A meeting with a close friend of a son of Gaddafi. “He wants a battle, habibi, he wants a battle. He wants to be the big guerrilla hero, the big man who fights the Americans. He wants to be the Libyan hero who takes on the colonialists. Mr Cameron, Mr Obama, they will do it for him. They will give him the hero title. They will do what he wants.” There is a lot of cigar smoke in the room. Far too much. So to the refugee camp at Mar Elias. A man who escaped the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, white-haired now, my age, shaking his head at the plight of his people in Libya. “You know we’ve 30,000 people there, Robert? Gaddafi flung them out more than 10 years ago. Most of them are from Gaza.
They went there and the Egyptians wouldn’t let them cross and the Israelis wouldn’t let them home, and so they came back and now they stay in Libya and hope for the best from this guy!” Poor old Palestinians. I should have guessed something was up in Jerusalem last year when an Israeli journalist asked me about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the agency that has been caring for Palestinian refugees for 60 years. “I’m sure,” he announced to me, “that they have some connection with terrorism, that they play a role in keeping terrorism going. What are they really doing in Lebanon?” At the time, I thought this all a bit odd. If any UN institution does its job well, it is UNRWA, arranging for the food, education, healthcare and other needs of millions of Palestinians who lost – or whose parents or grandparents lost – their homes in 1948 and 1949 in what is now Israel.
A visit to the filth of the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut, or to Ein el-Helweh in Sidon, is enough to teach anyone that amid this swamp of misery and hopelessness, UNRWA represents the world’s only collective sympathy, underfunded, short-staffed, poor though it is. Yet now, the whole organisation is being singled out by a right-wing Israel and its so-called (and self-proclaiming) supporters as purveyors of darkness, “de-legitimisers”, a network of support for Palestinians which must be destroyed lest the poorest of the poor – including those in the misery of Gaza – become addicted to their social services. UNRWA – I find it hard to believe this is a real quotation from a research fellow at a major US university, but it is – has “created a breeding ground for international terrorism”. I suppose we might as well laugh as cry, but this comes from a cruel – indeed vicious – article that appeared in the American Commentary magazine a few weeks ago, written by one Michael Bernstam, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. I single it out not because it is atypical, but because it represents a growing and quite ruthless trend in right-wing Israeli thinking, the kind of self-delusional brutality that is supposed to persuade us that the destiny of the poorest of the Palestinian poor is the destruction of their camps.
In his article, Bernstam actually claims that “for 60 years, UNRWA has been paying four generations of Palestinians to remain refugees, reproduce refugees and live in refugee camps”, where it is, “in effect, underwriting a self-destructive Palestinian cycle of violence, internecine bloodshed and a perpetual war against Israel”. Get the point? The UN is now the fount of all terror. There was a time when this kind of drivel would be ignored but it is now part of an increasingly dangerous narrative in which charity is turned into evil, in which the one institution supplying help to perhaps 95 per cent of almost five million Palestinian refugees is to become a target. And since UNRWA in Gaza did appear to become a target in the 2008-9 bloodbath, this is pretty frightening stuff. But hold on. It goes further. “UNRWA’s mandate created … a permanent supranational welfare state in which simply placing most Palestinians on the international dole has extinguished incentives for work and investment … and created a breeding ground for international terrorism. It is this open-ended refugee status that puts bread on the table in the rent-free house, together with an array of rent-free services.”
This allows the Palestinians – mark these words – a “permanent refugee … war as it is fuelled by a particular ‘right of return’ claim – the argument that the Palestinians should be given title to the land they occupied before Israel’s independence”. Note that word “occupied”. Far from owning the land, they “occupied” it! They had a “particular” “right of return” claim. And – wait for the next bit: “The claim of the Palestinian right of return is intended for one historical ethnic diaspora of the descendants of perennial refugees to repopulate another people’s nation-state, Israel. This is not the right of return to a country; this is the right of return of a country, a reconquest after a lost war, a claim of the right of retake.” And so it goes on and on and on … UNRWA should be abolished, which “would signal the end of the world body’s support for the continuance of the Palestinian’s agony … Israel is obviously unsuitable as a country of resettlement because integration there is not feasible … Instead of perpetuating the dead end that the international welfare state for the Palestinians represents, ending UNRWA’s horrific six-decade reign would instantly create the conditions for an honest, meaningful and viable peace process to begin in the Middle East”. There you have it. Mr Bernstam should meet Mr Gaddafi. They have a lot in common. Total contempt for the Palestinians. Total abuse for a people who have lost their future and their lives. Total abuse for anyone but their own tribe. Wasn’t it Gaddafi who invented the word “Israeltine”?
5. Video of a solidarity demonstration with Al Arakib and tree planting action to replace the trees that the Israeli authorities have had uprooted. Al Arakib is a Bedouin village that the Israel Lands Authority has demolished 20 times these past months, and on which the Jewish National Funds intends to plant a forest. The villagers refuse to leave, and keep on rebuilding and putting up tents after every demolition. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ekolskdwz0 4-5 minutes One sign in Hebrew reads ‘There are no unrecognized villages,’ a comment on Israel’s policy of declaring Bedouin villages (mostly in the Negev, but not only) ‘unrecognized,’ meaning that the government does not recognize their existence, and therefore, they are not allowed to have any infrastructure as schools, health clinics, water systems, electricity, roads, etc etc etc. For more information on unrecognized villages: The Association of Fortyhttp://www.assoc40.org/ “Unrecognized” Villages of the Naqab [‘Negev’ in Hebrew]http://www.hic-net.org/document.asp?PID=580 There are NO Jewish ‘unrecognized villages’——-The head of the village says in his brief speech that he hopes that all those who participated in the planting of the trees on Saturday will eat together the fruit of those trees: their olives.
6. Today in Palestine
One thought on “Dorothy Online Newsletter”
Collective punishment is part of every war.
Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima and hundreds of other cities were bombed burned with huge damages to the civilian population.
Arabs are using collective punishment against the other families and clans in cases of rape and murder.
It would only be natural if the Jews would resort to the collective punishment of the Awata village: Since the murderers come from that village.
Additionally it is entirely true that UNRWA is perpetuating the problem by refusing to cooperate with any proposal about re-settling the descendants of the Arab. Why the hell are they still in the camps 60 years later? Why are they not citizens in Arab countries?
The much larger number of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries never had to live in the camps?
They became citizens of Israel.
Hard question for the antisemite Dorothy to answer.