Dear All,
Just a few words tonight, as I’m in a rush.
Item 1 has 3 brief items, all from the Palestine news and Info Agency WAFA—things that you are unlikely to read in your local press or the Israeli press either. (a) is about a most usual event, though not for the individual families that receive them, namely eviction notices.
b) is about the Jerusalem Education board imposing its ‘new and improved’ curriculum on Palestinian schools. (c) relates treatment of prisoners
Item 2, “We are here to stay,” represents the fundamentalist religious idealist Jewish viewpoint about the West Bank, and all of Israel.
Item 3 is an article from the New Yorker (forwarded to me by A, who prefers not to have his name revealed). It is critical of both Netanyahu’s and Obama’s conduct regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Item 4 is from Gisha (English followed by Arabic) on 3 steps to end the closure of Gaza.
All the best (perhaps tomorrow will bring better news),
Dorothy
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1. 3 items from WAFA
a) Palestine News and Info Agency Wafa Thursday, March 17, 2011
Israel Hands Eviction Notices to Bedouins in Jerusalem Date : 17/3/2011 Time : 18:39
http://english.wafa.ps/index.php?action=detail&id=15543
JERUSALEM, March 17, 2011 (WAFA) – Israel Thursday handed eviction notices to six Bedouin families living in Wadi Abu Hindi, southeast of Jerusalem, as a prelude to demolishing them under the pretext they were built without permit.
The area is located between the settlements of Ma’ale Adumim and Qedar, but the land is within the territory of the village of Abu Dis, It is about 450 dunums in area.
With today’s notices, the number of the Bedouin families receiving notices reached 15, according to Hatem Abdul Qadder, a Jerusalem activist.
Israel is planning to destroy these houses in order to finish up building the Wall separating areas in Abu Dis from East Jerusalem.
Israel has been trying for years to evict all the Bedouin families from that area.
Abdul Qadder said that the families have decided to go to court to stop the eviction and demolition of their homes.
R.S./M.A.
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b) Palestine News and Info Agency Wafa Thursday, March 17, 2011
Israeli Municipality of Jerusalem Seeks Controlling Education Curriculum Date : 17/3/2011 Time : 19:49
http://english.wafa.ps/index.php?action=detail&id=15545
JERUSALEM, March 17, 2011 (WAFA) – The Israeli Municipality’s department of Education Thursday, mainstreamed its latest resolution on all the recognized public and private schools which it finances which includes purchasing only the supervised and improved curriculum.
The resolution which was issued on March 7; states that all schools must purchase the Israeli new supervised and improved curriculum for 2011-2012, thus canceling the Palestinian curriculum in East Jerusalem as a way of applying the Israeli law of school supervision issued in 1969.
Al-Maqdessi foundation considered this decision as clear, flagrant and systematic violations of the International Covenant on economic, social and cultural rights issued in 1966 which obliges states parties to recognize everyone’s right to education which enables individuals to contribute to effective and positive roles in society. The resolution made the occupation authorities able to oversee the programs and funds as well as monitor the schools’ activities to strengthen the policy of Israelizing East Jerusalem.
The foundation warned from the implementation and enforcement of the Israeli curriculum which will be forced on 60% of schools causing obliteration of the Palestinians’ cultural identity.
East of Jerusalem suffers from the lack of educational units that must be provided to hold the increasing number of Palestinian students. Studies estimated that at least 8 thousand students don’t have the right of education due to the lack of schools thus depriving them from the most guaranteed important rights by most of the laws especially the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child in which was confirmed by the United Nations in November1989.
Y.Y./F.R.
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c) Palestine News and Info Agency Wafa Thursday, March 17, 2011
Prisoner’s Club Demands Immediate Investigation on Assaulting Prisoners Date : 17/3/2011 Time : 20:16
http://english.wafa.ps/index.php?action=detail&id=15546
RAMALLAH, March17 (WAFA) – The prisoner’s club Thursday demanded an urge investigation due to the brutal attacks against prisoners during their arrests.
PPS (Palestinian Prisoner’s Club)Lawyer, Jacqueline Fararjeh, met a number of the prisoners who were arrested recently, and reported that the Israeli forces raided their homes, severely beaten their families and arrested them at down.
The prisoners said that the Israeli forces led them to an isolated area close to an army camp called ‘Karmi Tzur’ , covered their eyes and severely beaten them, after tying their hands and feet as well as floating some of them over a rocky ground causing serious bruises.
They added that some of the soldiers opened the military’s jeep back door and threw a prisoner from inside of the jeep while holding his hands dragging him as the jeep was going at a high speed causing severe injuries to his body.
The lawyer said that while she was meeting the prisoners, the Israeli soldiers constantly tried to convince her that they had nothing to do with the prisoners’ injuries.
Chief of the Legal Unit in PPS, lawyer Jawad Boulos said that “after receiving the complaints we went to the director of the Israeli prisons and the legal counsel in Beit El settlement and demanded an immediate investigation on these assaults.”
Y.Y./F.R.
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2. The Guardian,
March 17, 2011
West bank settlers: ‘We’re here to stay’
Nationalist religious Jews say Israeli government policy will not divert then from their divine mission to possess the land
I wrote this piece just before the news broke about the murder of five members of the Fogel family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. I suspect it’s less likely that the Israeli government will now go ahead with the dismantling of the outposts, but the perspective of the radical settlers is interesting, so I’m posting it anyway.
View from Jerusalem with Harriet Sherwood http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/view-from-jerusalem-with-harriet-sherwood/2011/mar/17/israel-palestinian-territories
I’m about to leave for London for a couple of weeks, so I won’t be blogging again until I return.
On a windswept hilltop deep inside the West Bank, Noa Alvily contemplates her family’s future with remarkable equanimity, unfazed by political decisions taken less than an hour’s drive away in Jerusalem.
In a few years time she hopes to have swapped her prefabricated home for a permanent house and to have enrolled her eight-month-old twin daughters into a new kindergarten on her doorstep. The close-knit community of around 20 young families will have grown, she expects, and Givat Haroeh, along with other fledgling settlements in the area, will be part of a secure, permanent Jewish presence on the land she believes is hers by divine right.
“We live in a beautiful and important place. People here are very dedicated. It’s our country, it belongs to us – and we believe that with every breath we take,” she says.
But if the Israeli government acts on a decision taken last week, Givat Haroeh and other unauthorised settler outposts built completely or partially on private Palestinian land will be demolished by the end of the year. The move will affect around 70 small communities dotted around the terraced hills of the West Bank, known by the biblical name of Judea and Samaria to their deeply religious Jewish inhabitants.
Noa, 28, and her husband Shachar, 30, shrug off the prospect of the army coming to tear down their home, believing they have God, righteousness and the track record of successive Israeli governments on their side. “This is the place the Lord has promised us,” says Shachar, serving us warm chocolate cake baked by his wife.
A neighbour, Pnina Ben Eli, dropping off her child to be minded for a couple of hours, is scathing about the government policy. “I don’t believe it will happen,” she says. “They’ve said the same thing a few times in the past nine years [since Givat Haroeh was established] and we’re still here. They change their position all the time.”
She describes the policy as one of “ethnic cleansing”. “It’s impossible that there could be places that Jews are not allowed to live, especially in Israel.” The question of legal ownership of the land is dismissed as a practical issue. “We received this land from the bible. On a spiritual or ideological level, it belongs to us.”
Ben Eli points out that despite the outpost being designated “unauthorised”, the residents pay taxes to local settler councils, receive utilities and services, and are protected by Israeli soldiers stationed at the outpost. Successive governments have either tacitly or explicitly encouraged settlers to move to the West Bank, and many of the large established settlements began as isolated outposts such as Givat Haroeh.
The reaction from settlers to the government’s announcement last week was unambiguous. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was accused of “treason” and the announcement was described as a “declaration of war”. It followed the demolition a week earlier of Havat Gilad, an outpost near the Palestinian city of Nablus, which sparked clashes between settlers and the army in the West Bank and protests in Jerusalem.
The residents of Givat Haroeh are reluctant to discuss whether they would violently resist any attempt to demolish the outpost. “I really don’t want to answer that question,” says Yehuda Ben Ali, Pnina’s husband. “All sides in this conflict have an interest in saying there will be violence.” The settlers, he says, have other tools to resist evacuation, namely political and public pressure. He points out that they command substantial support in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), adding that “almost all the people in Israel support us at a basic level. If there wasn’t international pressure, there’s no question that they’re supporting us.”
This view is not supported by most opinion polls over the years, which show a majority of Israelis backing the evacuation of smaller settlements as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
The outposts are mostly tense places, suspicious of strangers and hostile to the media. In Givat Asaf, home to about 20 families in prefabs on privately-owned Palestinian land, we are firmly told we are not welcome and are escorted out of the outpost’s gates.
An Israeli army officer, just finishing a week’s duty guarding the unauthorised embryonic settlement, warns us to be careful. “They all have guns. They are better trained than I am,” says the soldier, who does not want to give his name.
He fears there could be violent confrontations ahead, but there was no guarantee the government would follow through on its announcement. “Maybe it will happen, maybe not. It’s very dynamic here,” he says with a wry smile. “It’s crazy that we have to protect these people. They are criminals.”
The outpost dwellers peremptorily dismiss the claims of Palestinians to the land that has been occupied by Israel for 43 years. “If you check historically, you won’t find any other nation what wanted this land,” said Yehuda Ben Ali. The Palestinian people, he added, were an invention by the Arab countries, a weapon with which to wage war on Israel.
In the West Bank outposts, the inhabitants view the machinations of their government as mostly irrelevant. Pnina Ben Ali says life is sometimes hard, but the air is sweet and she is fulfilling a mission given to her by God. “I wanted to do something important in my life for the Jewish people, and this was the best way,” she says. “We believe in God and the bible and our right to be here. We will never leave.”
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3.
A Man, A Plan
by David Remnick
March 21, 2011
http://www.newyorker.com/
Tweet
Keywords
Middle East;
Benjamin Netanyahu;
(Pres.) Barack Obama;
Israel;
Palestinians;
Diplomacy;
David Ben Gurion
Psychobiography in politics is ordinarily a mug’s game. Sometimes, though, an assessment of inherited traits and ideologies can be telling. For years, Israeli and American commentators have been waiting for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to leave behind the right-wing Revisionist ideology of his father, Benzion, a historian of the Spanish Inquisition, and, like Nixon leaving for China, end the occupation of the Palestinian territories. Just as Nixon set aside decades of Cold War ideology and Red-baiting in the interests of practical global politics, Netanyahu would transcend his own history, and his party’s, to end the suffering of a dispossessed people and regain Israel’s moral standing.
This waiting game is a delusion. The stubborn ideological legacy that, in part, blocks such a transformation runs deep. During Netanyahu’s first term as Prime Minister, in the late nineteen-nineties, I met with him in his office, in Jerusalem, and he fondly recalled how his father encountered David Ben Gurion, in 1956, not long after Israel captured the Sinai. Ben Gurion had vowed to keep the Sinai for a thousand years, but Benzion was convinced that he would lose it. Why? Ben Gurion asked.
“Because the U.S. will force you to,” the elder Netanyahu said.
“Of course, he was right, unfortunately,” the son said. “That was the first and last time an Israeli Prime Minister succumbed to an American diktat.” This ingrained wariness toward Israel’s most stalwart ally and benefactor is just part of Netanyahu’s inheritance. On that same trip to Israel, Benzion, who is now a hundred and one, invited me to his house for lunch, and I am not sure that I have ever heard more outrageously reactionary table talk. The disdain for Arabs, for Israeli liberals, for any Americans to the left of the neoconservatives was chilling. The bitter ideological resentments were deepened by genuine loss: another of Benzion’s sons, Yoni, was the Israeli commando killed in the extraordinary rescue of the hostages at Entebbe, in 1976. In books, speeches, and action, Benjamin Netanyahu has proved himself his father’s son.
Now in his second term and ruling in a coalition government that includes anti-democratic, even proto-fascistic ministers, such as Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu has stubbornly refused the appeals of Washington and of the Palestinian leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, who have shown themselves willing to make the concessions needed for a peace deal. In the midst of a revolution in the Arab world, Netanyahu seems lost, defensive, and unable or unwilling to recognize the changing circumstances in which he finds himself.
The occupation—illegal, inhumane, and inconsistent with Jewish values—has lasted forty-four years. Netanyahu thinks that he can keep on going, secure behind a wall. Late last month, he called the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to register his displeasure that Germany had voted for a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the Jewish settlements. According to an account in the Israeli daily Haaretz, a German source said that Merkel could hardly contain her outrage. “How dare you?” she said. “You are the one who has disappointed us. You haven’t made a single step to advance peace.” The U.S. vetoed the resolution, but sources in the Administration say that the vote was debated intensely.
Netanyahu told Merkel that he intends to give a speech in the next few weeks supporting an interim Palestinian state on about half the territory of the West Bank. If that is his plan, it will be unacceptable to the Palestinians, and he knows it. Smug and lacking in diplomatic creativity, Netanyahu has alienated and undermined the forces of progressivism in the West Bank and is, step by ugly step, deepening Israel’s isolation.
It is time for President Obama to speak clearly and firmly. Concentrating solely on the settlements, as he has done in the past, is not enough; he needs a more comprehensive approach. Administration officials talk about “getting it right” in the Middle East, by which they mean finding the right diplomatic levers in order to support the potential democratic elements in such varied countries as Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Bahrain, without moving too far ahead of events or becoming engaged militarily in ways that could lead to disaster. Getting Israel and Palestine right must be part of that effort. The old, wishful habit of waiting for Netanyahu is an abdication of American influence and interests.
If the Administration has been reluctant to put forward a comprehensive peace plan, it’s not because it has any difficulty imagining such a plan. Inevitably, the parameters of a two-state solution would be like those established at Taba, in 2001, and by Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, in 2008. The greater concern is domestic politics, both in the United States and in Israel.
For decades, AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, and other such right-leaning groups have played an outsized role in American politics, pressuring members of Congress and Presidents with their capacity to raise money and swing elections. But Democratic Presidents in particular should recognize that these groups are hardly representative and should be met head on. Obama won seventy-eight per cent of the Jewish vote; he is more likely to lose some of that vote if he reverses his position on, say, abortion than if he tries to organize international opinion on the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, some senior members of the Administration have internalized the political restraints that they believe they are under, and cannot think beyond them. Some, like Dennis Ross, who has served five Presidents, can think only in incremental terms.
Obama’s views are not mysterious. His political home is Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago, where he came to know liberal Zionists and Palestinian academics, and to understand both the necessity of a Jewish state after the Second World War and the tragedy and the depths of Palestinian suffering.
The President has made mistakes on this issue: it was a mistake not to follow his historic speech in Cairo, in 2009, with a trip to Jerusalem. When it comes to domestic politics in Israel, he is in a complicated spot. For some Israelis on the right, his race and, more, his middle name make him a source of everlasting suspicion. Yet he is also a communicator of enormous gifts, capable both of assuring Israeli progressives and of reaching out to the anxious center. A visit to Israel, coupled with the presentation of a peace plan, would also help structure international support and clarify American interests. The Palestinian question is not an internal matter for Israel; it is an international matter.
The importance of an Obama plan is not that Netanyahu accept it right away; the Palestinian leadership, which is weak and suffers from its own issues of legitimacy, might not embrace it immediately, either, particularly the limits on refugees. Rather, it is important as a way for the United States to assert that it stands not with the supporters of Greater Israel but with what the writer Bernard Avishai calls “Global Israel,” the constituencies that accept the moral necessity of a Palestinian state and understand the dire cost of Israeli isolation. Even as Obama continues to stress his commitment to Israeli security, he has to emphasize the truth that, without serious progress toward an agreement, matters will likely deteriorate, perhaps to the point, yet again, of violence.
One of the myths of Israeli history is that only a few intellectuals on the left could see, in the wake of the 1967 war, that a prolonged occupation of Palestinian lands would be a moral and political calamity. In fact, records of the first cabinet meeting after the war show that the Justice Minister, Yaakov Shimshon Shapira, said, “In a time of decolonization in the whole world can we consider an area in which mainly Arabs live, and we control defense and foreign policy? . . . Who’s going to accept that?”
Ultimately, no one. If America is to be a useful friend, it owes clarity to Israel, no less than Israel and the world owe justice—and a nation—to the Palestinian people.
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לקריאת העדכון בשפה העברית |
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