The initial 3 items of the 8 below report the inauguration of an exciting and timely movement: “a call for a comprehensive military embargo on Israel.” This will take time to build up, but surely is a huge step in the right direction. Item 1 is the announcement, item 2 the Free Gaza movement endorses the initiative, and item 3 the Guardian briefly reports it. We have to roll up our sleeves and help this move. Surely Americans in these days of economic stress should be able to convince Barak Obama that the United States needs for domestic purposes the $3billion in military aid that it sends Israel yearly.
Item 4 is on an entirely different subject. About an hour ago Pnina Feiler phoned me. She has just recently returned from Greece, she at 88 and another person who was 86 and a few others were told that they should not continue the trip. She stressed that all the news in Israel yesterday about one of the boats being under the Sierra Leone flag, and about Israel convincing Sierra Leone to tell the Greeks that the boat was not allowed to fly Sierra Leone colors was fake. A brief report of this fake news follows Dror Feiler’s remark. I was unable to reach Dror, but according to Pnina, the boat might already be on its way to await other of the boats. Apparently, we have not yet heard the last of the flotilla. The coming days will tell.
Item 5 is an interesting and informative article on ‘flotillas and the law.’
I have included item 6 purely because of one statement. The item reports that Israel and Turkey will meet to try to find a formula for the UN report on the Mavi Marmara flotilla that both can agree on. Highly unlikely unless Turkey drops 2 of its demands—one that Israel apologize, the other that the report declare that the blockade is illegal (in red below).
Item 7 “The tactic of arresting children” is about Israel’s middle of the night arrests of children. The report is mainly about these activities in Silwan.
Item 8 is Today in Palestine. Please at least glance through so that you have some idea of what is happening in the West Bank as well as in Gaza.
I really wanted to include a few additional items, but realize that it’s unlikely that you’ll have time to read even these below, so they will wait till tomorrow or another time..
The BNC is asking activists and organisations to get in touch to plan and discuss initiatives designed to achieve the implementation of a military embargo.
“A comprehensive military embargo on Israel is long overdue. It forms a crucial step towards ending Israel’s unlawful and criminal use of force against the Palestinian people and other peoples and states in the region, and it constitutes an effective, non-violent measure to pressure Israel to comply with its obligations under international law,” reads the BNC’s call.
Youth activists delivered the demands of the call to UN offices in Ramallah (see photos).
The BNC has today also released adetailed legal and political analysis of international military relations with Israel, their impact and the obligation of the international community and civil society to take action.
The call, released to commemorate the anniversaries of the ICJ ruling on the wall and the BDS call, has been supported by Nobel Peace prize winners and prominent political figures. The Brazilian and South African trade union federations CUT and COSATU have released statements of support for the military embargo call, and dozens of arms campaign and Palestine solidarity organisations and NGOs are due to announce actions they plan to take in support of the call over the weekend and on Monday.
Organisations that are issuing statements of support or announcing campaigns as part of the launch are kindly requested to send links to relevant material to info@bdsmovement.net.
“A comprehensive military embargo on Israel is long overdue. It forms a crucial step towards ending Israel’s unlawful and criminal use of force against the Palestinian people and other peoples and states in the region, and it constitutes an effective, non-violent measure to pressure Israel to comply with its obligations under international law,” reads the BNC’s call.
The call comes amidst mounting pressure to hold Israel accountable to international law, including from the Freedom Flotilla 2 and the Welcome to Palestine “Fly-in” which began arriving at Tel-Aviv airport this morning amidst chaotic scenes despite many activists being prevented from flying from Western airports.
Palestinian activists with the Hirak Shababi youth movement gathered in front of the United Nations office in Ramallah to symbolically deliver the call along with evidence of international military collusion with Israel.
Youth activist Aghsan said: “We face Israeli repression and violence on a daily basis. Our generation has grown up under occupation and seeing friends and relatives killed, injured or imprisoned. We demand that the international community stops funding and profiting from the military and security apparatus that sustains the colonial Israeli apartheid regime. All trade and cooperation must stop. Young Palestinians demand a comprehensive military embargo now”
Supporters of the military embargo call include Nobel Peace Prize winners Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire, Betty Williams and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. Alternative Nobel Prize winners Walden Bello and Chico Whitaker and best-selling Canadian writer and journalist Naomi Klein have also supported the demands of the call.
“I endorse this call for an arms embargo because we desire peace and justice for Palestinians and Israelis through non-violent ways,” said Archbishop Tutu.
Trade union confederations such as the South African COSATU and the Brazilian CUT, have announced their support for the campaign.
A spokesperson for COSATU said: “States and inter-state organizations, such as the United Nations, have a legal obligation to ensure that Israel complies with international law, but they have failed to do so. Impunity emboldens Israel while its international military trade relations bankroll and entrench its continued violence, militarism and expansionism..”
Civil society groups from more than a dozen countries are set to announce their support for the campaign and the actions they intend to take over the course of the launch.
The European Network Against the Arms Trade will announce its support of the military embargo call on Monday.
The call has been released to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the International Court of Justice ruling confirming the illegality of Israel’s West Bank apartheid Wall and the sixth anniversary of the Palestinian civil society call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law.
In Palestine: 00970-598921821 In Europe +44 (0) 2032 392 170 NOTES FOR EDITORS:
* Lo-res photos available on Flikr. Hi-res photos from the delivery of the demands today in Ramallah will be available on request from media@bdsmovement.net
* A background document published today by the BNC argues that military cooperation with Israel is a key form of international complicity with Israeli violations of international law. In 2010, approximately 80% of Israel’s military production output was exported, and exports by Israeli arms companies totaled $7.2bn. From 2000 to 2009, the United States gave to Israel $24.1bn in military aid. Using this public money, the United States delivered weapons and related equipment valued at $18.9bn during the same period. From 2003 to 2008, European Union member states approved licenses worth over 1 billion euros in arms sales to Israel.
(London, 9 July 2011) – The Free Gaza Movement welcomes, endorses, and supports the Palestinian Boycott National Committee (BNC) call for an immediate and comprehensive military embargo on Israel.
Freedom Flotilla II, and Israel’s attempts to thwart it through outrageous acts of intimidation, lies, threats of violence, and sabotage, has reminded the world that the criminal blockade on the Gaza Strip is still in force, depriving Palestinian civilians of their basic rights.
Last May Israel used its arsenal to launch a full military assault on Freedom Flotilla I, killing nine of our colleagues and injuring over 50. This violent assault on an unarmed civilian convoy in international waters was just another example of Israel’s unlawful use of military force and its blatant disregard for international law.
It is through the use of military force that Israel maintains its occupation and colonial apartheid regime in Palestine. Further, every Israeli military operation is used as an opportunity to showcase and promote its weapons to the global arms market thus ensuring the profits needed to support its unlawful actions.
It is with this backdrop, and on the 7th anniversary of the historic International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision ruling the Apartheid wall illegal, that we support the call for a military embargo on Israel.
In doing so, we join hundreds of civil society organizations representing millions of people from all across the globe, including trade union confederations such as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the Brazilian Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), anti-arms trade, and justice and solidarity campaigns who have announced their support for the campaign.
The appeal for an embargo is issued at a time of growing civil society mobilisation and pressure on Israel. The Freedom Flotillas, the growing Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, and yesterday’s ‘fly-in’ to Ben Gurion airport, all serve to highlight the continued injustices faced by the Palestinians and the resolve of international civil society to take action to bring these wrongs to an end.
The call finds legal legitimacy in the form of the ICJ decision which stated that all states are obligated “not to render aid or assistance” in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s violations of international law. It aims to target the complicity of state and inter-state organisations in Israel’s violent repression of Palestinians and the bankrolling of Israel’s colonial regime through the partaking in military trade relations.
Supporters of the call, including Nobel peace laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mairead Maguire, believe that a comprehensive military embargo, like the one imposed by the UN Security Council against the apartheid regime in South Africa, is an essential step to pressure Israel to abide by international law.
For further information go to: freegaza.org
===========================
3. The Guardian,
8 July 2011
Palestinians launch campaign to embargo arms sales to Israel
Today marks seven years since the international court of justice ruling that the apartheid wall being built by Israel in the occupied West Bank is illegal and should be torn down. Yet the wall continues to be built, cutting children off from schools, farmers from their land and families from each other, devastating virtually every aspect of Palestinian life. A military embargo of Israel is long overdue.
Today, Palestinian civil society and its supporters worldwide are launching a global campaign for a comprehensive, military embargo against Israel, similar to that imposed against apartheid-era South Africa. The UK government continues to sell millions of pounds of arms to Israel in violation of its own arms export policy. In 2010, the UK government approved licences for arms exports to Israel worth £23.7m.
The government also buys military equipment from Israel which is “battle-tested” against Palestinians living in the occupied territories. By selling arms to Israel the UK is giving direct material support for Israel’s aggression and sending a clear message of approval for its actions. A complete arms embargo between the UK and Israel must be implemented immediately.
Hind Awwad Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee
Subject: Fight the outsourcing of the siege to Europe
There is a media war ouside and we need all your support. Israel and its allies are spreading fauls info, dont belive all you read about ships being stopped, detained and other rummors.
We are Swedish onboard, Jabar Amin, Maria-Pia Boetius and Stellan Vinthagen on the Juliano and me Dror Feiler on the French boat Dignite.
Both boats hve the needed pappers and are ready to sail. We are waiting other boats to be ready (maybe) and for a weaker wind. Make your voices heard all over. Protest against the outsourcing of the siege to Europe.
Dror Feiler
Bjurholmsgatan 1B
11638 Stockholm
Sweden
Tel : +46 8 6442717
Tel : +46 70 2855777 (mobile)
One incident that Dror refers to as being Media War is Israeli radio news claim that Israel had foiled an attempt of one of the boats to sail, as below. According to Pnina (Dror’s mother) he claims that the ship never sailed under a Sierra Leone flag. I was unable to reach Dror for comment, but it appears likely that the boat will sail to meet with other vessels and continue to Gaza. In any event, it seems that we have not yet heard the last of the flotilla.
———-
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)– Israeli pressures on Freetown succeeded in foiling the sail of a Sierra Leone flagged ship, a part of the Freedom Flotilla II, from Greece to the Gaza Strip.
The Hebrew radio said on Saturday that Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman made a telephone contact with the president of Sierra Leone Ernest Bai Koroma and asked him to take whatever steps necessary to block the sail of the Juliano ship, which is flying the flag of his country and which is anchoring at a Greek port, claiming that its sail to Gaza would be a provocation.
It pointed out that Koroma ordered the removal of the ship’s flag which gave the Greek authorities the pretext to deny it sailing right.
Part I – Civil Society Movements vs. Corrupt Politics
When it comes to the struggle against Israel’s policies of oppression there are two conflicting levels: that of government and that of civil society. The most recent example of this duality is the half dozen or so small ships held captive in the ports of Greece. The ships, loaded with humanitarian supplies for the one-and-a-half million people of the Gaza strip, are instruments of a civil society campaign against the inhumanity of the Israeli state. The forces that hold them back are the instruments of governments corrupted by special-interest influence and political bribery.
Most of us are unaware of the potential of organized civil society because we have resigned the public sphere to professional politicians and bureaucrats and retreated into a private sphere of everyday life, which we see as separate from politics. This is a serious mistake. Politics shapes our lives whether we pay attention to it or not. By ignoring it we allow the power of the state to respond not so much to the citizenry as to special interests. Our indifference means that the politicians and government bureaucrats live their professional lives within systems largely uninterested in, and sometimes incapable of, acting in the public good because they are corrupted by lobby power. The ability to render justice is also often a casualty of the way things operate politically. The stymieing of the latest flotilla due to the disproportionate influence of Zionist special interests on US and European Middle East foreign policy is a good example of this situation.
There are small but growing elements of society which understand this problem and have moved to remedy it through organizing common citizens to reassert influence in the public sphere. Their efforts constitute civil society movements. Not all of these efforts can be deemed progressive. The “Tea Party” phenomenon in the United States is a radical conservative movement that aims at minimizing government to the point of self-destruction. But other movements of civil society, in their expressions of direct action in the cause of justice, are much healthier. The worldwide movement for the boycott, divestment and sanctioning (BDS) of Israel, of which the flotilla movement is an offshoot, is one of these.
Part II – The Forum of International Law
The resulting struggle between the corrupt politics that keeps the West aligned with the oppressive and racist ideology that rules Israel and the civil-society movement that seeks to liberate the victims of that ideology goes on worldwide and in many forums. One is the forum of international law. Presently, the debate revolves around the legality of Israel’s blockade of Gaza and the effort of the flotilla movement to defy it. Let us take a look at this aspect of the conflict.
1. The well-known American lawyer Alan Dershowitz, a strong defender of Israel, has blatantly stated, “Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is legal under international law – anyone who tries to break it can be arrested and prosecuted in a court of law.” Of course, Dershowitz is not an expert on international law. Rather he has made his reputation as a defense lawyer with a passion for murder cases (which makes him quite suited to defend the Israeli state). This being said, what is the basis for his assertion that the Gaza blockade is legal?
2. The argument for the legality of the blockade is based on the 1909 Declaration of London and the 1994 San Remo Manual on Armed Conflict at Sea. Both are part of an international treaty system that sets down the parameters of much international law. According to these documents two states engaged in armed conflict can legally blockade one and other for clear military reasons. However, any blockade would cease to be legal if “damage to the civilian population is, or may be expected to be, excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the blockade.” Defenders of Israeli actions such as Dershowitz do a very superficial reading of the documents and reason that Israel is in an armed conflict with Hamas, which is the ruling authority in Gaza, and so Israel can legally blockade Gaza so as to stop the importation of weapons and “terrorist” fighters.
3. The holes in this reasoning are big enough to sail a flotilla of small ships through (if only they were not imprisoned in Greek ports). Thus, Israel certainly does not consider itself engaged in an armed conflict with another state. If you doubt this just ask any member of the present Israeli government whether he or she would define Palestine, including Gaza, as a state. In truth, the proper definition of Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza is that of an occupying colonial power whose policies and actions are stark violations of the Geneva Conventions. That is, by virtue of their colonizing actions and treatment of residents of the Occupied Territories, their presence in Palestine beyond the 1967 borders is not legal (one can also argue over the legality of Israel within the 1967 borders). That means those they are in armed conflict with are those resisting illegal occupation. There is no international law that makes it legal for Israel, itself acting illegally, to blockade those legally resisting its actions. The arbitrary labeling of those resisting as “terrorists” does not change this legal situation.
4. As noted above, “legal” blockades must have a military objective and must not do excessive harm to the civilian population. Yet there is evidence that Israel’s goals for the blockade are not primarily military but are, instead, aimed at committing excessive harm to the people of Gaza. The Gaza blockade was not done out of fear of weapons smuggling or terrorist infiltration, but rather constituted a conscious act of economic warfare against the people of Gaza for having the audacity to be ruled by Hamas, the winner of a 2006 free and fair election. There is documentary evidence for this interpretation of events. For instance, in 2006 Dov Weisglass, an adviser to then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, publicly stated that the goal of Israeli policy in Gaza was to “put the Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger.” Then, in June of 2010 McClatchy Newspapers published Israeli government documents attesting to the fact that Jerusalem primarily saw the blockade as an act of economic warfare, and not as a security measure. To this you can add the fact that Israeli gunboats keep shooting at Gaza fisherman who they know are doing nothing except fishing. What we have here is the collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians. As such, it is not legal, it is illegal – a violation of the Geneva Conventions. The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, usually so responsive to US demands, momentarily broke free and in his 2009 annual report told the Israelis they should end their unwarranted blockade. He was ignored.
Part III – We Cannot Count on Governments or International Law
So how is it that the Israelis can get away with these crimes? It is because, at the level of government, their lobbyists and advocates wield enough influence to successfully warp the policy formulation of Western governments. Against this corruptive influence, international law means very little. Even embarrassing historical analogies mean little. Nima Shirazi, whose blog Wide Asleep In America can be found at http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/, wrote a very good piece entitled “The Deplorable Acts: The Quartet Comments on Gaza.” In this piece he points out the relative similarity between the Gaza blockade and the blockade of Boston set up by imperial Britain in late 1773. The Americans of that time labeled the action “the Intolerable Acts.” Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and her boss in the White House ought to consider this analogy, but then there is that lobby power factor that would prevent them from ever acknowledging it.
As a consequence, those who seek justice for the Palestinians must, for the moment, not place much hope in government or international law. They must act within the realm of civil society, building the BDS movement and its offshoots. Where government moves in and attempts to block civil society actions, these actions must be turned against government if only by using them as campaign tools to expand the BDS movement further. If we persist there will come a time, as was the case with South Africa, when the power of civil society will be such that politicians and bureaucrats will see the cost of defying popular opinion as greater than defying Zionist lobbies.
For all intents and purposes, when it comes to the Palestine-Israeli conflict, the United States and Israeli governments have placed themselves above all law. That means not just international law, but selective domestic law as well. The ubiquitous and improper use of such categories as “terrorist,” or “rendering material aid to terrorists,” are the corruptive vectors here. The only hope for justice and the integrity of law is in the realm of civil society, which might in the future redeem not only Palestine, but the US and Israel too.
——————————————————————————–
Lawrence Davidson is a professor of Middle East history at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. His blog is To the Point Analyses.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
======================================
6. Ynet Saturday,
July 09, 2011
Turkey’s Erdogan. Insisting on apology Photo: Reuters
‘Israel-Turkey talks to resume in NY’
Turkish diplomat tells Hürriyet daily that despite failure to resolve differences, countries’ representatives will hold another round of negotiations in late July
After failing to resolve their differences during three-day talks this week, Israel and Turkey will resume negotiations later this month in New York, Özdem Sanberk, the Turkish member of the UN panel investigating the Israeli raid on the aid ship Mavi Marmara, told the Hürriyet daily on Friday.
Jerusalem and Ankara have been trying to solve the crisis in the past few months ahead of the publication of the UN report, but to no avail. The report’s release has been postponed to July 27.
The next round of talks between Israel and Turkey is also expected to be held in New York, although an exact timetable has yet to be set.
Turkey is demanding that Israel apologize for the death of nine activists onboard the Marmara ship during the IDF raid, a demand Israel has refused to accept.
But this isn’t the only problem. Sources in Turkey say Ankara won’t have the report authorize the blockade on the Gaza Strip and insists on the siege being defined as “illegal”, as determined by the UN Human Rights Council.
Israeli sources said the report would include the conclusion that Israel acted prematurely against the flotilla activists last year and used excessive power, but that its actions were legal and that the blockade on Gaza was legal. The report will also criticize Turkey.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan said on Friday it was “unthinkable” to normalize ties with Israel unless the Jewish state apologized for the killing of nine pro-Palestinian Turkish activists aboard the Gaza-bound Turkish ship.
=================================
7. Al Jazeera,
08 Jul 2011 10:56
The tactic of arresting Palestinian children
The Israeli tactic of arresting and detaining Palestinian children is aimed to deter resistance.
Palestinian children, traumatised by the occupation, are regularly arrested, detained, and interrogated by Israeli security forces[GALLO/GETTY]
Dozens of Palestinian children clamoured excitedly in the East Jerusalem village of Silwan on June 26, each clutching the strings to as many helium-filled balloons as they could. Moments later, the children watched as the sky above this flashpoint Palestinian neighbourhood filled with red, green, black and white – the colours of the Palestinian flag – and the hundreds of balloons were taken away by the wind.
“This event is to make the children happier, as they’re letting go of these little balloons, and so they see that we’re taking care of them and support them and will always be here with them,” explained Murad Shafa, a Silwan resident and member of the Popular Committee of al-Bustan, which organised the event to commemorate International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.
“These balloons represent every small child that has been arrested and beaten at the hands of police,” Shafa said. “The duty of the police is to protect children and not to try to arrest them. [We and] our children suffer greatly from the municipality and the occupation police.”
Nestled just south of Jerusalem’s Old City walls and the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif, in what is known as the Holy Basin area, Silwan is the scene of weekly confrontations between some of the village’s 40,000 Palestinian residents, more than 400 Israeli settlers, and Israeli soldiers, police officers and private settler security guards who maintain a constant presence in the neighbourhood.
An average day in Silwan normally involves a sky filled with a mixture of suffocating Israeli tear gas and thick, black smoke curling up from burning tires in the road, regularly used to block Israeli army vehicles from entering the area. Israeli security forces regularly clash with Palestinian youth in the densely populated neighbourhood, and night raids, arrests, and the use of live ammunition, among other weapons, against residents is commonplace.
Children arrested and detained
In the past year, however, a surge in the number of arrests of Palestinian youth has been witnessed. According to Israeli police records, 1,267 criminal files against minors accused of throwing stones were opened across East Jerusalem between November 2009 and December 2010. This pattern has continued into 2011, as hundreds of children continue to be arrested and detained for allegedly throwing stones, especially in Silwan.
Frequently taken from their beds in the middle of the night, children have been interrogated without the presence of lawyers, their parents or other family members, and nearly all have been subjected to some form of either physical or psychological abuse during their arrest and questioning. This practice violates both international conventions, such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Fourth Geneva Convention, and Israel’s own laws related to the rights of minors.
According to The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), Israel’s Youth Law is routinely violated in the arrest and interrogation procedures of Palestinian children from East Jerusalem. More specifically, the law’s provisions that arresting a minor should be avoided if possible, that a minor’s arrest will be for the shortest possible period of time, and that “in any decision to arrest a minor, the suspect’s age and the impact of the arrest on his physical and mental well-being and development must be taken into account” are regularly ignored.
Further, while the age of criminal responsibility is 12-years-old, children as young as seven have been arrested in Silwan and interrogated on the suspicion of stone-throwing. “Even when the police have been aware that the minor in question was under the age of criminal responsibility, they have made no distinction between these younger children and older ones in the way they have conducted their investigations,” ACRI found in a March 2011 report.
“Children have been detained for hours on end, handcuffed, they have been threatened during interrogations, screamed at, and coerced by any means into revealing information about the incidents taking place in their neighbourhoods. In this context it is important to emphasise that the younger the child is, the greater the chance that he will experience trauma and psychological damage from such treatment,” the report continued.
According to Sahar Francis, the Director of Addameer, the Prisoners Support and Human Rights Association, these arrests are not only meant to intimidate and scare youth, but are used as a political tool to discourage Palestinian political activism more generally.
“First, it’s to threaten [the children] and make them think ten times before being active in the future of any political activism. [The Israeli authorities] are aware that this experience will be with the person for the rest of his life so by one way or another, it will affect the whole community,” Francis said.
“It’s also about collecting confessions against adult activists because they know that it’s are easier to collect confessions from [younger people], and they can give names of older organisers,” she added.
Settler presence inflames tensions
In Silwan specifically, the purpose of arresting Palestinian children is clear: to deter Palestinian residents from resisting ongoing Israeli settlement expansion and Jewish-only control of the neighbourhood, as well as being submissive in the face of police and army violence, house demolitions, and the daily oppression that accompany this colonisation project.
Private, right-wing Israeli organisations with the stated goal of settling Jewish families in various parts of East Jerusalem have increased their presence in Silwan in recent years, including Elad and Ateret Cohanim.
According to a report released by Israeli NGO Ir Amim, the first settlers affiliated with Elad moved into the Wadi Hilweh neighborhood of Silwan in 1991. Today, the organisation has acquired a number of properties and manages the City of David archaeological site, which brings in over hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.
According to residents, the Jerusalem municipality has also pushed zoning and planning policies for the exclusive benefit of Jewish residents and tourists in Silwan. Plans to build a park where King David’s garden was once allegedly located, for instance, would necessitate the demolition of 88 homes in al-Bustan, in effect destroying the entire neighbourhood and evicting all its residents.
Today, it is estimated that approximately 400 Israeli settlers live amidst Silwan’s 40,000 Palestinian residents.
These settlers are provided with 24-hour private security guards – the majority employed by private Israeli security firm Civilian Intelligence (“Modi’in Ezrahi” in Hebrew), which is subcontracted by the Israeli Ministry of Construction and Housing – and cameras have been set up throughout the neighbourhood.
According to an ACRI report released in September 2010 titled “Unsafe Space”, the cost of employing private security guards for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem in 2010 alone was approximately 54.5 million NIS ($16m). This sum came entirely from Israeli taxpayers.
“From the testimony of residents, the neighbourhood perception is that security guards are abusive, both against children playing in alleyways and against adults. They employ verbal and physical violence, and even make use of loaded weapons. Moreover, according to residents, the security guards are “quick on the trigger”, and perceive themselves as holding the ultimate power to serve as arbiters of daily life in the neighbourhood,” the report found.
“Unlike police officers, whose ability to use force is limited by the strict guidelines established by law and police procedure, private security guards are not subject to these laws, nor are they obligated by the basic rules that guide the police in carrying out their duties … the result is that the security guards employed in East Jerusalem are not reined in by any clear working definitions, a situation which invites the abuse of power.”
Indeed, a seven-floor Israeli settlement named Beit Yonatan in Silwan’s Baten el-Hawa district was the site of the killing of 17-year-old Milad Ayyash in May of this year. The exact circumstances of Ayyash’s death have yet to be fully investigated. Even the Israeli state prosecutor has said the apartment block, built in 2004 by extreme right-wing settler group Ateret Cohanim, needs to be vacated as soon as possible.
In another case from September 2010, an Israeli settler security guard shot and killed 32-year-old Silwan resident Samer Sarhan under questionable circumstances. His death fuelled numerous days of riots throughout East Jerusalem and a string of arrests in Silwan for stone-throwing and other charges, all stemming from clashes with Israeli security forces.
End goal to displace Palestinians
Shortly after Israel began occupying East Jerusalem after the 1967 war, the state conducted a census of Palestinian residents and provided approximately 66,000 of them with Jerusalem identification cards. Anyone absent during the census was not given Jerusalem residency rights.
Since that time, more than 14,000 Jerusalem ID cards have been revoked from Palestinians, as a draconian system of proving that one’s “centre of life” is in the city has been enforced by the Israeli authorities. Leaving the country for seven years, or acquiring foreign citizenship, can mean losing the right to live in Jerusalem and even entering the city to work, visit holy sites or see family and friends.
This policy of revoking Jerusalem ID cards – combined with illegal Jewish-only settlement expansion, discriminatory zoning policies and home demolitions stemming from the inability of Palestinians to receive building permits – is implemented in order to safeguard the so-called “demographic balance” of the city. The Jerusalem municipality is ardently working to increase Jewish presence in Jerusalem, in particular in the Holy Basin area surrounding the Old City, of which Silwan is a part, in order to maintain a Jewish majority and limit the number of Palestinian Jerusalemites to fewer than 30 per cent.
In March 2011, Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, stated that: “The continued pattern of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined with the forcible eviction of long-residing Palestinians is creating an intolerable situation in the part of the city previously controlled by Jordan … [and] can only be described in its cumulative impact as a form of ethnic cleansing.”
Neighbourhoods such as Silwan – where resistance, political awareness and youth empowerment projects are thriving, and which sit in key areas the municipality deems in its interests to control – pose a real threat to Israel’s fulfillment of its stated, and highly sought-after, goal of “demographic balance”.
Thus, while their ultimate purpose is to intimidate and deter Palestinian Jerusalemites from resisting Israeli policies, the arrests of over 1,200 minors throughout East Jerusalem must be seen as one of the many tools being used today to facilitate the displacement of Palestinian Jerusalemites and the preservation of Jewish control over the city.
“The Israeli police supports the municipality and tries to arrest our children, and acts brutally towards them, and fires [tear] gas at them, and arrests them on the way to school or to the store,” said Murad Shafa, shortly after children in Silwan released hundreds of balloons into the air on June 26.
“But to that we say that we will remain here, and we will teach our children steadfastness and stability and permanence,” he added. “That’s why we will remain in our homes, on our land, with our lives and in our Jerusalem.”
Jillian Kestler-D’Amours is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Jerusalem. She regularly contributes to The Electronic Intifada, Inter-Press Service and Free Speech Radio News. More of her work can be found at http://jkdamours.com/
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
