Today was an exhausting and frustrating day for many, including myself. No, I was not at the airport, nor did I speak to anyone who was. But a few people whom I know were to have flown in probably did not, else I would have heard from them.
For me it was exhausting because it was tense. Israel’s leaders choose all the wrong ways of handling things. Yes, they won this round, both with the flotilla and with the flytilla. But have they won? As Dahr Jamail says in opening item 1 “While it is the lawful right of a country to prohibit air passengers from entering, the move remains controversial.” In other words, it might be lawful but be unwise.
Thus I disagree with item 3, in which the author thinks that this time Israel’s leaders did the right thing by taking the diplomatic route to stop the flotilla. There are, I believe, 2 basic considerations that Israel’s leaders do not take seriously: 1. The Palestinians are not going to disappear. 2. If they continue to suffer and see no hope of improving their situation by non-violent means, it is not unlikely that some will again resort to violence to try to obtain what they could not obtain via nonviolence.
Time will tell. The present situation is, as others have said, unsustainable!
Many of the leading newspapers had articles on the flytilla. The best seems to me to be one of two in Al Jazeera. It is item 1, and with it a brief video by Reuters of protests at airports abroad by those denied the right to fly to Tel Aviv.
In item 2 Cindy Corrie, distressed by the flotilla being grounded, points out “The US government has failed repeatedly to obtain accountability for its own citizens and Palestinian civilians harmed by Israel. Now, it is an accomplice in manipulating policing of the Mediterranean and maintaining Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza. It has thwarted and threatened citizens acting in the nonviolent tradition of our most revered champions of human rights.”
Item 3 argues that Israel was right this time to use the “diplomatic route” to prevent the flotilla from sailing.
In item 4 Yael Sternhell correctly maintains that in Israel “Empathy toward the Palestinian side involves hatred and distrust.” She compares what is happening here to the violence waged against the civil rights movement in the United States, and believes that some day people will see Israelis “as people who couldn’t grasp reality, who waged a useless war against others’ legitimate aspirations.” May that day come soon, and without violence.
Item 5 reports that Israel is expropriating land from a village so as to build a colony.
Item 6 is last week’s Twilight Zone, which presents a situation that many Palestinians face—SEPARATION. Families are denied the right to unite. Can you imagine what it is like for spouses to be separated from their families? How cruel can Israel be, all for the sake of demography!
That’s it for tonight. Now I’ll check out some of the 2,000 emails that have accumulated in my folder. If, by chance, you have written me and I haven’t responded, please resend and write in the subject “ATTENTION DOROTHY”—I apologize if I haven’t responded, but just can’t keep up.
Also, I will be in the SF Bay Area from August 10 through the 18, and again from August 28 through September 13. Will be happy to meet with activists and/or to speak to audiences weekdays and week evenings during that period.
Hoping still for the light at the end of the tunnel.
Dorothy
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1. Al Jazera,:
08 Jul 2011 13:24
Israel’s no fly zone
While it is the lawful right of a country to prohibit air passengers from entering, the move remains controversial.
Israel has effectively managed to keep most ‘flytilla’ activists from boarding their flights to Tel Aviv [GALLO/GETTY]
The majority of an estimated 600 Tel Aviv-bound pro-Palestine activists intending to arrive on Friday, July 8 as part of the “Welcome to Palestine” movement have not been allowed to board their flights at originating airports.
The activists, approximately half of which are French nationals, were destined for the West Bank town of Bethlehem. The campaign name “flytilla”, is in reference to a parallel maritime protest flotilla, most of which was never allowed to leave Greek ports from which the ships were to sail.
According to activists involved in the action, the main goal was to show the injustice and human rights violations imposed on Palestinian community by Israel.
Nearly 100 activists were not allowed to board their Lufthansa Air flights at Charles de Galle airport in Paris on Friday morning.
“We came this morning at 4:30 am to get our 6:30 am flight,” Satina, an activist who asked that only her first name be used, told Al Jazeera, “When we arrived and wanted to check in, they told us to go to another check in point, where there they told us they could not check us in. We grouped together and asked why, but they didn’t give us anything in writing.”
Her group then began demonstrating in front of all the airlines that were not allowing the activists to board, shouting “Collaborators, collaborators!” to condemn the French authorities for their action. In addition to Lufthansa, other airlines that disallowed activists from boarding were Air France, Alitalia, Malev Airlines, easyJet, and Swiss Air.
“We asked why they wouldn’t check us in and they would not give a reason, they simply said we could not board this flight,” Satina added.
Most of the passengers not allowed to board are French citizens with valid passports, according to Satina, who said activists were “supposed to go on two Lufthansa flights and one Swiss Air flight in terminal one, and Air Italia and Air France flights in Terminal two.”
A sense of proportionality
Israeli immigration spokeswoman Sabine Hadad admitted that Israel had given airlines a list of 342 “unwanted people” and warned airlines that those passengers would “immediately be turned back at the expense of the companies”.
After the warning was issued, Haddad said, “The companies have already refused to take on board around 200 of these passengers,” and added that two US activists who arrived overnight had already been sent back to the United States.
In Europe, German federal police said as long as passengers had valid tickets and passports, they had no grounds to stop any activists at airports there.
But Swiss Air spokesperson Donzel Jean Claude told Al Jazeera that this issue is regulated by the International Civilian Aviation Organization, and the position of the airlines is clear.
“If a country informs the airline that somebody will not be allowed to enter, that person will not be allowed to board the flight,” he explained, “This problem happens with a lack of visa, or invalid papers, or if in this case we have information from the country these people will not be allowed. For the airline we have to follow it and we cannot transport the passenger.”
Jean Claude said the airline is “legally obliged” to decline boarding said passengers, because “any country has the right to refuse entry. We are obliged to transport somebody having a ticket, but if their papers are not correct or if for some other reason they will be denied entry by the country they are traveling to, then we are not obliged.”
Dr Mark Ellis is the Executive Director of the International Bar Association in London. He told Al Jazeera that, while Israel’s move to bar the passengers from flying is controversial, the country is within its legal right to do so.
“It’s a little like the US no-fly list, in the sense the Homeland Security Department is sending out lists of individuals not allowed to enter the US. This has been controversial, especially in Europe. Anytime a country bars someone from entering and it requires an airline to initiate this, it’s controversial, but it’s not illegal.” Ellis explained that flight restrictions are permitted under a country’s domestic laws.
“Any country has the right to say who may or may not be permitted in the borders of their country.” But he added that he has always maintained that international law requires “a sense of proportionality that pertains to freedom of movement which is a right under international law, so you have to look at if the law that is restricting that freedom of movement to be sure the restrictions on that movement are not unreasonable.”
In this case, said Ellis, Israel finds itself in a strong position, as the country is arguing the move to ban the fliers stems from a security perspective, which gives Israel great latitude to implement flight restrictions. On July 5, Israeli Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch called the activists “hooligans” and said they would be barred from entry.
Israeli Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said officers deployed at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport have been prepared to deal with scenarios such as airport officials being attacked or activists settings themselves on fire.
“I can understand why the Israeli government would frame it this way,” Ellis said of Israel’s deeming the activists a security threat, “Because that would strengthen the government’s ability to put these restrictions on.”
We come in peace
Mazin Qumsiyeh is the international media spokesperson for the Welcome to Palestine Campaign in the West Bank, and has stated all along that the goal of the campaign has always been peace.
“The organisers did not come with any intention of demonstrating at the airport or doing anything like that,” Qumsiyeh told Al Jazeera. “Israeli authorities made the mistake of mobilising security on people who are obviously not a security threat.”
Mireille Rumeau, an organiser with the International Solidarity Movement in Paris told Al Jazeera that all of the activists are committed to peaceful methods, and the goal of the action is to highlight Israel’s blockade of the West Bank.
“The goal is very clear, we are all fed up with being obliged to lie when we arrive in Allenby [bridge] or Ben Gurion [Airport] when visiting our Palestinian friends,” she said, “We are fed up with lying about being tourists, or coming for a pilgrimage. Now, we are all going to say: ‘we are coming to visit our Palestinian friends that have invited us.’ If we get through, there are events planned for Palestinian groups for us to take part in, as we were invited by them six months ago, and we are answering their call.”
Organisers chose July 8 for the “fly in” as it is the date in 2004 that the UN’s International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that Israel’s West Bank “security fence” stood contrary to international law.
Qumsiyeh’s group has called on airlines not to accept what he calls “provocative, blackmailing, and illegal actions by the Israeli government,” and added, “We are pleased that this episode further exposes Israeli policies towards anything or anyone relating to ‘Palestinians’ as dictatorial, racist, and criminal and not complying with basic elements of democracy or human rights.”
The only way to get to the West Bank is through Israel-controlled crossings – either by arriving at Ben Gurion Airport and driving to the West Bank, or from Jordan, by passing through the Israeli-controlled crossing on the Jordan-West Bank border.
Ellis stated that while travelers between countries have rights under international law, and should be treated with respect and dignity, Israel’s controversial action of banning the activists remains legal.
Nevertheless, Qumsiyeh says that the activists who had their reservations cancelled “will exercise their right of protest including bringing legal cases in their own countries,” and that his group “will also bring legal cases in Israeli courts under our continued attempt to expose the racist policies of the Israeli government.”
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Reuters July 8, 2011
Video pro-Palestinian activist prevented from boarding planes in Europe
Peace activist Rachel Corrie being interviewed by a TV crew in the Rafah refugee camp in 2003, two days before being killed by an Israeli bulldozer. Photograph: Getty
When Greek authorities prevented the US ship the Audacity of Hope leaving its port in Athens this week, they dealt a blow to a group of brave and principled Americans who were trying to carry thousands of letters from US citizens to those who wait on Gaza’s shores.
I know many of the people who were on this boat, and my family’s letter was part of their cargo. In 2003 my daughter Rachel Corrie made her journey to Gaza and was run down and killed by a US-made Israeli military Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer. She was trying to protect a Gazan family and their home, one of thousands illegally destroyed in Israeli military clearing operations.
Now my family is on a parallel journey with those activists as we return this week to Israeli court to confront Colonel Pinhas Zuaretz, the commanding officer of the Gaza Division’s Southern Brigade in 2003. His testimony should shed light not only on actions of troops responsible for Rachel’s killing but also on the Israeli military’s broad failures as an occupying power to protect civilian life and property.
This week’s flotilla was travelling to Gaza, as Rachel did, to stand with Palestinians against oppression and illegal occupation and for a just, enduring peace.
Some liken the action to those of “freedom riders” who 50 years ago journeyed bravely to the American south to oppose racist laws that kept blacks and whites from sitting together on buses. The flotilla participants are pursuing Israeli and US policy that provides access and egress for Gazans commensurate with what other peoples enjoy in their homelands. They demand freedoms for Gazans that we in the US celebrate for ourselves but are complicit in denying to Palestinians.
A senior administration official in 2010 told our family that the blockade of Gaza was a “failed policy”. He emphasised that the attack on the first flotilla that claimed nine lives (including a US citizen) was tragic, but had created movement for lessening restrictions for Gaza.
Some members of Congress have declared the “imprisonment” of Gazans a greater threat to Israeli security than rockets from Gaza. Nevertheless, a year after the Israeli commando attack on the Mavi Marmara, the US has been unwilling or unable to influence Israel to make many of the changes still needed.
In 2003 Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon promised President Bush a “thorough, credible, and transparent” investigation into my daughter’s killing. The US government’s position continues to be that the promise has gone unfulfilled. In 2008 the Department of State wrote: “We have consistently requested that the government of Israel conduct a full and transparent investigation into Rachel’s death. Our requests have gone unanswered or ignored.”
After eight years, our family remains engaged in prolonged court proceedings seeking accountability that the US government has been unable to secure – though it has no difficulty sending Israel $3bn annually in weapons that do the damage.
The US government has failed repeatedly to obtain accountability for its own citizens and Palestinian civilians harmed by Israel. Now, it is an accomplice in manipulating policing of the Mediterranean and maintaining Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza. It has thwarted and threatened citizens acting in the nonviolent tradition of our most revered champions of human rights. Much of the world is watching, disgusted with US abandonment of its own and with its collusion in the imprisonment of the people of Gaza.
Gaza flotillas reflect the world’s embrace of the Palestinian cry for freedom – and most immediately their cry for an end to the blockade and siege of Gaza. Israel and the US may slow or stop the boats, but in doing so, will only find themselves increasingly isolated. Civil society is acting and will continue to until the US government and others catch up. Only when we apply to Israel/Palestine a framework of international law, human rights, and a belief in freedom and equality for every human being, is there realistic hope for a sustainable resolution and peace.
During the course of our lawsuit those not on the witness stand often figure most in my thinking. Palestinian and Jewish Israelis have supported our family’s needs for legal assistance, housing, translation, medical care and companionship. I treasure memorable conversations over meals in homes and Haifa neighbourhood cafes, and the friends who come to be with us at court. Whatever the eventual judgment from the legal system, Israeli supporters have made clear that what happened to Rachel, and to many others in this poisonous conflict, should not have occurred and should not continue.
Rachel did the right thing going to Gaza – taking all of us with her. Her example is best served by supporting those who journey there in the same brave spirit, acting upon values articulated in our own Declaration of Independence, rather than circumventing them as our government seems bound to do.
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3. The Guardian,
8 July 2011
Gaza flotilla II: This time, Israel took the diplomatic route
With Greece and Turkey desperate to repair relations, it was an easy matter to stop the flotilla reaching Gaza
An activist gestures on board Juliano, part of a Gaza flotilla, as it departs from Perama near Athens for the southern Greek coast. Photograph: John Kolesidis/Reuters
For months, anti-Israel activists have been planning a second flotilla to Gaza, after last year’s epochal events when nine of their colleagues were killed by Israeli troops on the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara.
They have been trumpeting the latest flotilla’s size, making claims about what it will achieve and taunting Israelis with what they intend to do. And yet their actions have instead strengthened Israel’s hand.
Take what’s happened with the IHH, the proudly Hamas-affiliated Turkish group behind last year’s flotilla. Three weeks ago it announced that because of “technical problems” it would not participate this year. The decision, it said, “has nothing to do with the government or state”.
And the pope isn’t Catholic, either. The decision was taken for no other reason than that the Turkish government has made restoring its previously excellent relationship with Israel a priority. The very last thing the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wants is another pointless conflict. Having been re-elected for a third term he no longer needs to play to the gallery and paint Israel as a pantomime villain – his stock message since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009.
With Syrian troops on his southern border, Erdogan has been keen to move on from the Mavi Marmara incident and return to good relations and military co-operation with Israel.
Turkish diplomats have been holding talks with an Israeli team led by strategic affairs minister Moshe Ya’alon, with the aim of agreeing a compromise on the wording of the UN report into last year’s incident. Such has been the progress that, according to the Turkish daily Hürriet, all that is needed now is “to find a word that sounds in Turkish like an apology but not in Hebrew”.
Given that the report has concluded that Israel acted lawfully in its blockade (although it also says Israel used more force than it should have done in boarding the Mavi Marmara), this would be a major Israeli diplomatic triumph.
But even better from Israel’s perspective, the attempt at a second flotilla has prompted the arrival of a new ally: Greece. The Greek coastguard has been vigilant in intercepting three would-be flotilla boats and watching the remaining seven in Greek ports. Last week, IDF helicopters were part of a large military exercise with the Greek army, after which Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu thanked Greek PM George Papandreou for all his help.
Some activists have responded with pure antisemitism, arguing that the impoverished Greeks have caved in to Israel’s financial power.
The Greeks’ behaviour has not escaped Erdogan’s notice and has resulted in a form of bidding war between the two leaders to help Israel stop the flotilla. As a senior IDF officer told the Jewish Chronicle this week: “We will make peace with the Palestinians long before the Greeks and Turks resolve their differences.”
So successful has Israel been in stymieing the flotilla that what is actually setting sail amounts to one small boat with nine activists on board, leaving two weeks late. It is barely worth noting, and poses no threat to the Israeli naval commando unit, Flotilla 13, which played out a range of scenarios in expectation of a more substantial group, from a peaceful takeover of the boats to dealing with activist violence.
In frustration, the anti-Israel activists have embarked on what they are calling a “flytilla”, arriving by scheduled plane into Ben Gurion airport to protest inside the building.
Whatever Israel’s mistakes last year, this time it has played a blinder.
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4. Haaretz,
July 7, 2011
Empathy toward the Palestinian side invokes hatred and distrust
The anger at Israelis who support Palestinian independence resembles the treatment of whites who supported the black civil rights movement.
The July 15 march scheduled by the solidarity movement for Palestinian independence will surely stir an ugly wave of threats against Jews who dare to deviate from the consensus: those who express their identification with the Palestinian desire to end the occupation and establish an independent state. In the Israel of 2011, every manifestation of basic human empathy toward the Palestinian side, every disclosure of understanding for its aspirations and priorities hits a wall of hatred, distrust and the growing siege mentality.
How we got this far is one question, but since we’re already here, maybe we’d benefit from remembering another march, in a different place and time, and the people who dared to take part in it despite the opposition of the stunted, racist consensus.
On March 21, 1965, activists left Selma, Alabama, and headed for the state capital of Montgomery to protest the denial of black voting rights in the American South. It was the third time civil rights organizations had tried to set out on such a march.
The first time, 600 participants ran afoul of the local police, headed by Sheriff James Clark, an untrammeled racist who decided to block the civil rights movement with his own body. His men treated the protesters with exceptional brutality, even according to the norms prevailing in the South. They used batons and tear gas; their horses trampled on the demonstrators. Skulls were cracked, bones were broken and organs crushed. The demonstrators, helpless before the force of the police, left the front lines for home. But the pictures, broadcast all over the country, had an effect.
The third attempt attracted 25,000 people, accompanied by federal police. This time the demonstrators reached Montgomery, and America took one step closer to returning the right to vote to the black minority. This was a high point in the struggle of the civil rights movement, a movement that, adhering to an ideology of nonviolence, managed within just a few years to topple the apartheid regime that had lasted for decades.
Leaving their comfortable lives
Anyone who looks at the photos from those fateful days in 1965 sees immediately that white faces – of women and men, nuns and rabbis, young and old – emerge in the sea of black faces. These were the movement’s white supporters, who left their comfortable lives in the cities and suburbs and came to Selma to express solidarity with the most oppressed and hated minority in America.
It wasn’t an easy task. From a distance of just a few decades, with a black president in the White House, it’s hard for us to imagine why millions didn’t march for African-Americans’ just struggle in the South to enjoy basic freedoms, to realize the equality they deserved as citizens of a democratic country. But we must remember how deeply rooted was the belief among Southern whites that blacks were not entitled to civil rights, that whites had to preserve their social and politic superiority at any price, and that members of both races were eternal enemies.
All white people who disagreed with these beliefs, who agreed to come out openly against the majority, came to the South and declared that they were willing to stand beside black citizens in their struggle against oppression and discrimination and put their lives on the line. So the whites who took part in the marches also suffered the violence and hatred aimed at their black compatriots.
Viola Liuzzo, a housewife from Detroit, was shot to death by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Every white who dared to lend a hand to the black struggle was seen as an enemy of the race in the eyes of many, as a traitor whose life was cheap.
Still, they marched. They marched because they understood that it was time to break through the indifference of the white community in the United States, that it was time to stop cooperating with the paranoia and racism of whites in the South and to stand on the side of justice and ethics, to stand on the right side of history. To this day they are remembered as people who did the right thing, who saw beyond prejudice and the hollow political conventions of their time, despite danger and fear.
Our necessary enemy
We, the Jews who live in Israel, participate each day, each hour, in the denial of basic rights to Palestinian citizens, in the perpetuation of the settlements and the occupation. We’re in a similar position to that of many whites in the United States in the 1960s.
Most of us find it hard to support the Palestinian struggle for independence, whether out of laziness, indifference or a basic loathing of those we’ve been told all our lives are a necessary enemy. Most of us find it hard to stand up to the story told by the government and most of the media that the Palestinian declaration of independence is a disaster for Israel, exactly as most whites in the South saw the granting of voting rights to blacks as the end of civilization.
Most of us find it hard to believe that it’s possible to live together in peace, just as those whites in Alabama found it hard to imagine life in a free society in which members of all races have the same rights. Most of us also have more pressing matters to attend to, just as the whites all over the United States found it hard to see why the fact that Southern blacks couldn’t vote should keep them awake at night.
The march supporting the Palestinian declaration of independence is a golden opportunity for change. It’s the moment we can say to ourselves, to our Palestinian neighbors and the entire world that we too can be freed from the chains of hatred, fear and the racism that grips the State of Israel.
This is the time to show that we too are capable of seeing beyond the paranoia that paralyzes us, that blocks all possibility of reaching a solution. In how many years will people look back on us, the Israelis, as people who couldn’t grasp reality, who waged a useless war against others’ legitimate aspirations?
Taking part in a solidarity march is a similar choice to the one of the whites who joined the march from Selma. It is the choice to take a stand, in real time, on the right side of history.
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5. Haaretz,
July 08, 2011
Israel expropriates Palestinian land in order to legalize West Bank settlement
Move is Netanyahu government’s first confiscation of land in the territories.
For the first time in three years, the state has confiscated uncultivated land in the West Bank. The land will be used to legalize a nearby settlement outpost.
Last week, acting on orders from the government, the Civil Administration declared 189 dunams of land belonging to the Palestinian village of Karyut to be state land, so as to retroactively legalize houses and a road in the Hayovel neighborhood of the settlement of Eli. This would seem to violate Israel’s long-standing commitment to the United States not to expropriate Palestinian lands for settlement expansion.
An Ottoman land law dating from 1858 allows uncultivated land to be declared state land. This law, which is still in force in the West Bank, is what was used to carry out the expropriation.
According to last Sunday’s decree, the lands in question belong to the village of Karyut. Hayovel was built on these lands in 1998 as a temporary outpost, and later permanent houses and an access road were built. A 2005 report on the outposts by attorney Talia Sasson concluded that Hayovel was built on private Palestinian land.
After the Peace Now and Yesh Din organizations petitioned the High Court of Justice against the construction in 2005 and 2009, the Civil Administration reviewed the land’s legal status. Since Jordan, which ruled the West Bank from 1948-67, had never registered them in its land registry, the Civil Administration reclassified them as under review. This meant that any place that was still cultivated in the late 1990s would remain private land, but the rest could be declared state land.
In 2004, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised U.S. President George W. Bush to stop this practice, and this promise was later reiterated by his successor, Ehud Olmert. In his speech at Bar-Ilan University in 2009, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We have no intention to build new settlements or set aside land for new settlements. But there is a need to have people live normal lives and let mothers and fathers raise their children like everyone in the world.”
This is the current government’s first such expropriation of lands. The last lands to be similarly expropriated were 20 dunams near Betar Ilit that were declared state land in November 2008 to allow the construction of a gas station.
The declaration is another move toward retroactively legalizing Hayovel. The Palestinians now have 45 days to appeal to the military appeals committee. But the road to full legalization is still long, as the entire settlement of Eli lacks an approved master plan.
Peace Now chairman Yariv Oppenheimer said Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were going to great lengths to legalize isolated outposts deep in the territories, even if this involves land expropriations, but “as far as evictions are concerned, the state is dragging its feet.” He said this will encourage settlers to keep building illegally.
Eli’s mayor, Kobi Eliraz, said he is glad the state is making progress toward formalizing the status of the Hayovel neighborhood.
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6. Haaretz,
July 1, 2011
Twilight Zone / Separation anxiety
Because Israel has prevented any form of family unification in the territories since 2009, mothers and fathers are torn from each other and from their children.
A few days ago, the Allenby Bridge between Jordan and the West Bank was again the site of one of those almost routine heartrending scenes about which Israelis are blissfully ignorant. Exactly two weeks ago, Nasser Daoud accompanied his wife and their four children to the border crossing. The wife and mother, Manal Mahamra, was returning with the children to their home in the village of Al-Karmel in the south Hebron hills. Nasser, the husband and father, was parting from them for another year of tears, sadness, longing, wrenching phone calls and worry. Just before they were separated, the father promised he would join the family soon.
Just after the parting, the only daughter, Dana, a lovely girl of 10, implored one of the officers on the Israeli side of the bridge: “Uncle, bring my father.” But Dana knew, her father knew and the Israeli uncle-officer knew, too, that Dana’s begging would fall on deaf ears and an even deafer heart. Israel prohibits their father from living at home with them.
Since the current right-wing government took power in Israel, family unifications in the West Bank have stopped. Hardly anyone writes about this, no one takes an interest, but under cover of that lack of public interest, this draconian measure has sealed the fate of many families: to be torn apart. There are no statistics on the subject, because families have simply stopped applying, knowing there is no chance the application will be granted. Some families have abandoned their homes and relatives in the West Bank and moved to Jordan; the others continue to live a fragmented life in the West Bank, mothers and fathers cut off from their partners and from their children.
The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that the right to family life is a basic right and an integral element of human dignity, but that fundamental declaration crashes on the rocks of Israeli occupation policy.
Immediately after the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel conducted a population census in the West Bank; anyone who was absent on the day of the census lost the right to live in the West Bank. For example, Nasser Daoud’s father, from the town of Yatta. He had just completed his studies at a Jordanian university, and five days before the outbreak of the war he went to Amman to collect his B.A. diploma. Unfortunately for him, he was not at home on the critical day, and therefore was fated to spend the rest of his life in exile, along with tens of thousands of others.
He moved to Kuwait, where his son Nasser was born. In the first years of the occupation, first-degree family unification was allowed, but stricter rules came into force after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The approach was that the residents of the territories are in principle not entitled to family unification, and the handful of approvals that were given nonetheless, were considered by the occupying power as acts of gracious kindness.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the Jerusalem-based Hamoked – Center for the Defense of the Individual submitted a series of petitions to the High Court of Justice demanding family unification, following which an arbitrary quota was laid down: at first 2,000 approvals a year, then 4,000. The subsequent Oslo accords contained explicit Israeli recognition of what should be self-evident: that marriage justifies family unification.
When the second intifada erupted, in the fall of 2000, Israel completely stopped dealing with all such requests. After the Palestinian elections in 2006, all connection between Israel and the Palestinian Authority regarding family unification was severed. In October 2007, Hamoked again filed a series of petitions in the High Court of Justice, calling for the resumption of family unification. Israel then announced that it would allow family unification as a “political gesture” (wherein lies the “gesture,” and what makes it “political”? ) to the government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. As of July 2008, 32,000 requests were approved, but only for families already living in the West Bank who lacked a permit. There was no solution for people living in exile.
Upon the assumption of power of the current right-wing government, in early 2009, family unification requests for the West Bank ceased to be dealt with altogether – which might come as news to those who brag about “improvement” in the conditions of the occupation under the Netanyahu government or under the (imaginary ) control by the PA of civil matters in the West Bank.
Nasser Daoud wanted to be a law-abiding citizen. That was the mistake of his life, a fatal error. In contrast to tens of thousands of Palestinians who remained in the West Bank without papers, he traveled to Jordan in 2000, intending to return legally. His wife and children remained in the family’s home in Al-Karmel. Since then, all his requests to return to the West Bank, to the place where his father has a home and land, to the place where his wife and children live, have been turned down.
In 2008, when tens of thousands of requests were momentarily approved, he too was filled with hope. The PA’s Ministry for Civil Affairs informed him in an official letter, in the name of President Abbas – “may God protect him,” as the letter states – that his request for family unification had been approved. Authorization number: 500012384. That document now lies useless in the family’s bag of papers: Israel did not endorse it and Nasser Daoud was not allowed to be reunited with his family.
In 1994, Nasser Daoud arrived in the West Bank from Kuwait, where he was born, to visit his family in Yatta and stayed until 2000. In 1997, he married Manal, from the neighboring village. He is now 37, she is 29, and they have four children: Khalil, 12; Dana, 10; Nur a-Din, 7; and Daoud, 5. The family says that Daoud is named for a Jewish friend of his forebears who lived in Yatta in the 1930s. Dana was 40 days old when her father left for Jordan. He hasn’t been back since. Her two younger brothers were born after visits to Jordan by their mother.
For three years the family was completely separated. Then, in 2003, Manal and her children spent a year with their father in Jordan. Nasser lives in a tiny apartment in Amman, barely eking out a living as a peddler of underclothing, constantly harassed by city inspectors. The children had a hard time in Amman, and after a year returned home with their mother. Since then, they have visited their father a few more times for lengthy stays, a few months at a time. Their schooling is erratic, partly in Amman, partly in Al-Karmel.
Two years ago, Manal met Musa Abu Hashhash, the Hebron area fieldworker for B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and sought the organization’s help, but to no avail. Last year, the family again moved to Jordan, until they returned to the West Bank two weeks ago. All their belongings are still stuffed into two huge tattered backpacks.
They host us in an uncle’s home, apparently ashamed of their own meager dwelling. The mother and the four children now live in one room in the grandparents’ home across the street, a shabby room in a shabby flat, with a sheep pen, a chicken coop, garbage and junk in the yard. Nasser’s phone number in Jordan is written on the moldy wall. Manal, who obtained a matriculation certificate summa cum laude, did not go on to university because of her uncertain situation. Her mother, Intissar, sighs deeply as she relates this: All her children attended university; only Manal missed out.
Why did they come back again now? Manal says it’s because of the children, who feel out of place in their father’s slum neighborhood in Amman. Dana, wearing a pink Guess jersey, confirms what her mother says: “Here we know all the children, but in Jordan we don’t know anyone.” Grandmother Intissar adds that the school in Al-Karmel is better, too. The last time they spoke to their dad was when they were on the bus that took them back to the village, two weeks ago. Nasser just wanted to be sure that they got across the border safely. The phone calls are expensive, so they call only once a month, when Manal’s father, Msalem, a schoolteacher, receives his salary. Msalem sighs: his son-in-law has land in Yatta and could build a house for the family here.
Once every six months Nasser submits a request to visit the West Bank to the Israeli Embassy in Amman, for which he pays 25 Jordanian dinars; once every six months his request is rejected. Little Daoud now asks his mother to ask us, the omnipotent Israelis, to bring him his father. Msalem says that all they want is to implement the approval the family received in 2008. He faults the PA for doing nothing to unify his family. Before the family returned, he bought two used beds for his daughter and grandchildren, and a second- or third-hand computer for NIS 200, its innards torn apart. Msalem swears that the fragments of the computer work; he will show us.
No response from the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories was received by press time.
