The 4 items posted below begin with incidents [items 1 and 2] and end with theorizing [item 4]. Item 3 is Neve Gordon’s report on the fascist bills now before the Knesset, and that very likely will pass to become laws.
The initial item is atrocious on several counts: 1. a 13 year old boy is subjected not only to jail, but also to treatment there that no parent or decent human being would want a youngster to have to face. 2. As if that punishment (for a crime he denies committing) were not enough, the boy is now under house arrest for 5 months, and not allowed to go to school (brilliant thinking of those who hand out punishments to Palestinian children. Would they wish their own kids to be subjected to like circumstances?). 3. Now when he needs to see a psychologist and needs medical care, the family fears to take him since that could be considered breaking the law and result in further imprisonment. Small wonder that Ynet entitles its report with the question “Fair Punishment?” 4. And the reply of IOF (there is no IDF—Israel’s military has never been strictly a defense army. It is an occupation army, hence IOF) of the spokesperson sounds good, but I invite any of you to try following the procedure to see where it will get you.
The 2nd report is no better. Israel obviously does not like Bedouins. It demolishes their villages in the Negev, and has long been after this particular tribe. Among other things, it does not want their children to go to school. Months ago I sent you a video of the school at issue in the report. It is a school built from tires and mud—a really wonderful innovation. For those of you who have not seen the video, or wish to refresh their memories, the 3-4 minute video is still available, but begins with a minute of advertisement from CNN http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/07/12/wedeman.mideast.recycled.school.cnn
And this is what the occupation forces wish to demolish! What they are really saying is ‘get out of here, go to Jordan or disappear. We don’t want you!’
Item 3, as I said above, is a summary of the bills awaiting approval to become laws/
Item 4 is an analysis of who cooperated with the Nazis and who cooperates with the occupation. It is an important paper and worth your time. My only comment about it is that governments allowed Hitler to commit his crimes, and then had to go to war to stop them, and governments allow Israel to commit its crimes against humanity. Till when? And how will it end?
If you have any spare time, please glance through Today in Palestine. You needn’t read in depth (unless you want to). The headings themselves reveal much about what is happening daily.
Karem, 13, placed under five-month house arrest after six days in jail on suspicion of throwing stones at IDF soldiers. ‘What has he done to deserve such a punishment?’ his grandfather asks
A 7th grader under house arrest: Karem, a 13-year-old boy from Hebron, was arrested in late September on suspicion of hurling stones at Israel Defense Forces soldiers. After spending six days in the Ofer Prison, he was placed under house arrest for five months in his uncle’s home and can’t even go to school.
The boy’s relatives say he is in a serious emotional state and is finding it difficult to recover from his days in prison. All he told his family members was that he was handcuffed and chained, and was sometimes left alone in a room or in solitary.
His friends and teachers have been visiting him in a bid to update him on the study program, which he hardly even began.
The boy himself refuses to talk. Asked what he went through during the interrogation and in jail, he responds, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Karem’s grandmother says his mental state has influenced his health. “You can tell that he is afraid and frightened from his days in jail. He has fungus on his body and his skin has peeled from all the pressure, fear, and nerves. He barely talks. Today we looked for him and found him hiding in the chicken coop because he didn’t want to talk to anyone.”
According to his grandfather, the family is afraid to send Karem to the doctor due to the house arrest. “If they decide that he violated the house arrest conditions, he may go to jail together with his uncle who signed the bail, and we don’t want to take the risk,” he explained.
“We hope this problem will be solved. He has been out of school for a month and a half now, and we are concerned. What has he done to deserve this punishment?”
Israel Prison Service Spokesman Yaron Zamir said in response, “The IPS is acting in a professional manner, especially when it comes to minors, while ensuring that they are held together with other detainees, without being tied, and receive proper medical care. This was implemented in this case too.”
The IDF Spokesperson’s Office said that “according to the law applied in Judea and Samaria, any person who feels hurt by his arrest conditions is entitled to submit an appeal or request for a re-examination, which will be discussed by the suitable court without any delay and in accordance with the incident’s circumstances.”
Raanan Ben-Zur and Yair Altman contributed to this report
“It’s not easy living here. You never know what will happen tomorrow,” says N. Abu Dahuk, a community play worker at the Jahalin School in the Bedouin community of Khan al Ahmar, in the West Bank. The school is under imminent threat of demolition.
Despite uncertainty over the future of their school, the Jahilin Bedouin community held a series of fun activities there this summer with the support of UN agencies, national and international NGOs. N. Abu Dahuk, an assistant at the school, underwent training to put on fun summer activities. “Children need routine in times like this, and the summer camp has helped the children to have fun and keep learning so they are busy and happy,” she says.
“We all benefited from the activities. We hope we can keep our school, so we can do the activities again next summer.”
Demolitions and displacement
Khan al Ahmar is located east of Jerusalem, near the large Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. Like many herding communities living in Area C, the Israeli-controlled area that comprises over 60 per cent of the West Bank, the community there faces threats of demolition and displacement, as well as harassment from Israeli settlers, restricted movement and collapsing livelihoods.
Israel’s closure regime has left these marginalised communities increasingly dependent on humanitarian assistance.
New school
In 2009 the Khan al Ahmar Bedouin communities, facing mounting levels of debt and increasingly unable to meet transport costs, had to cancel the private bus that transported their children to UNRWA schools in Jericho.
After some young children were killed by fast-moving traffic as they waited on the highway for the public bus, the communities decided to withdraw the primary school age children from school.
With the support of Vento di Terra, an Italian NGO, residents built a local school out of recycled rubber tyres.
Court ruling
In February this year, after a court challenge on the grounds the structure lacked a building permit, the Israeli High Court ruled that the school could be demolished in June, at the end of the school year.
The summer camp, held between mid-July and the end of August, helped make use of the building outside the school year. The camp established the school as a community centre where children, women and men gathered to play, to learn and to laugh.
Football match
The itinerary included children’s play activities and a football match between community members and UNRWA staff.
Ali, 9, said: “My favorite bits were the football and throwing the clay. That was funny, we were all laughing a lot.”
School representative Abu Raid Arare said: “The summer activities made us feel supported by the humanitarian community and that we are not a forgotten story. We welcomed the summer programme, and it was very good to see my children coming home with things they had made every day and telling us about all the activities.”
Equipment and classes
The summer camp provided important psychological support to children and adults facing the stress of demolitions and settler harassment.
The NGOs installed a safe-play area and provided educational materials, including toys, sports gear, story books and ‘back to school’ supplies for children entering the new school year.
UNESCO trained three local women to run literacy activities with the children, while UNRWA health staff provided first aid and health sessions for women and hygiene classes with the children.
Continuing support
UNRWA will continue to provide mobile health services, cash-for-work projects and food distributions, and its mental health staff plan to run further training sessions later in the year in the community.
The summer camp brought together UNRWA, UNESCO, Save the Children, Right to Play, UNICEF and YMCA. UNRWA’s protection project is supported by the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid department (ECHO).
With the exception of public UN sources, reproduction or redistribution of the above text, in whole, part or in any form, requires the prior consent of the original source. The opinions expressed in the documents carried by this site are those of the authors and are not necessarily shared by UN OCHA or ReliefWeb.
Would Meryl Streep, Spike Lee, Tim Robbins or Susan Sarandon be willing to swear an oath of loyalty to the United States and its policies in order to receive public funding for feature films that they star in, direct or produce? In Israel, the far-right Knesset member Michael Ben Ari has proposed a bill that would require entire film crews to pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and to declare loyalty to its laws and symbols, as a condition for receiving public funding. It’s just one of more than ten bills to be discussed during the Knesset’s winter session that several commentators in Ha’aretz have characterised as proto-fascist.
As in most democracies, all new Israeli citizens must declare loyalty to the state and its laws, but the cabinet last month decided to support (22 in favour, 8 against) an amendment to Israel’s citizenship law that would require all newly naturalised citizens to declare loyalty to the Jewish character of the state. In Britain, this would be like requiring Jews, Muslims and atheists who wish to become citizens to declare loyalty not only to the laws of the United Kingdom but also to the Church of England.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has warned that this amendment, which will soon become law, is the tip of an iceberg. Some of the bills now going through the Knesset, which have a good chance of being ratified, would make support for an alternative political ideology, such as the idea that Israel should be a democracy for all its citizens, a crime.
A proposed amendment to the existing anti-incitement bill, for instance, stipulates that people who deny Israel’s Jewish character will be arrested. This extension to the penal code, which has already passed its preliminary reading, incriminates a political view. Another bill lays the groundwork for turning down candidates for membership in communal settlements built on public land if they do not concur with the settlement committee’s political views or are adherents of a different religion. The point of this is to make it legal to deny Palestinian citizens of Israel access to Jewish villages.
Still another bill that has already passed its first reading stipulates that institutions marking the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 will be denied public funds. This is like denying public funding to schools in the United States that wish to commemorate slavery or to memorialise the crimes perpetrated against Native Americans.
Then there is a bill against people who initiate, promote, or publish material that might serve as grounds for imposing a boycott against Israel. According to this proposed law, which has also passed a preliminary reading, anyone proven guilty of supporting a boycott will be ordered to pay affected parties about $8000 without the plaintiff’s need to demonstrate any damages.
Finally, eight Knesset members are proposing a bill to ban residents of East Jerusalem from operating as tour guides in the city, potentially putting hundreds out of work. The rationale behind this is that Palestinian residents of Jerusalem should not be certified guides because they do not represent Israel’s national interest well enough ‘and in an appropriate manner’.
The sudden spate of these bills at this historical juncture is no coincidence. The struggle between the democratic demand that all citizens be treated equally and Zionism’s hyper-nationalist ideal seems to have been determined once and for all: Zionism’s aspiration to promote democratic values is giving way to its nationalist ethos.
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4. Gideon Spiro (translated by Mark Marshall) Israel is not a Nazi state—yet.
