Just 4 items tonight—all dealing with a single subject: Civil Disobedience.
Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak was sentenced today to 3 months in jail for practicing civil disobedience. From my standpoint, he deserves a medal instead. The final 2 items are about him. Item 4, the Independent article on Jonathan was written prior to the verdict being given, but its details make it worth including. Item 3 from the Guardian reports the verdict. The 3 Israeli dailies also included news on the sentencing and some background
Amira Hass in item one relates the workings of the Shin Beit in certain instances. The young man whom Amira begins with, Matan Cohen, began practicing civil disobedience very young. I recall him at 14 or so joining us on nearly every demonstration and other activity against the occupation. Not all of these were overly safe. Settlers could become violent, as also the police, border police, etc. I’d ask him if his parents knew what he was doing, and if they did not mind his joining these events. He always said that his parents knew and that it was ok with them, even though they themselves were not politically active. I met them eventually—when we visited Matin in the hospital, after he had been hit in the eye by a rubber bullet shot by one of the IOF soldiers.
In item 2, Daphna Golan discusses the duty of the citizen. In a word, though she does not use the term, she essentially recommends practicing civil disobedience. I fully agree.
All the best,
Dorothy
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1.Haaretz,
December 27, 2010
Shin Bet puts Israeli ‘anarchists’ in crosshairs
Security forces’ Jewish Department warns leftist activists that they might be found to be violating the law.
The two security cadets at Ben-Gurion International Airport stood by the plane’s door. That Friday, December 17, they were waiting not for some Mohammad, but rather for a Cohen. Matan Cohen.
He disembarked, and they followed him through passport control. From there he was taken to a small interrogation room. The duty policeman told Cohen, 22, a student at Hampshire College, that he was being detained on suspicion of “hostile activity.”
Cohen: “Was it you who decided to detain me?”
Policeman: “No, security elements did.”
Cohen: “Meaning the Shin Bet security service?”
Policeman: “Yes, the Shin Bet’s Jewish department.”
Four more people in civilian clothes examined Cohen’s possessions. It took them two and a half hours. They asked some questions that showed Cohen they did not know a thing about him. (He is an anarchist activist and one of the coordinators of BDS – Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions on Israel – in the United States. ) They told him they did not have the security clearance to gain access to his file.
“We merely were warned that you are suspected of terrorist activity,” which means they have to go through his bags, they said. After the examination, he was taken back to the policeman, who said, “If it were up to me, I would let you go already. I’m waiting for a telephone call from the head of the Jewish department.”
Cohen: “[Am I] a suspect in something?”
Policeman: “You’re not a suspect. You’re suspected.”
Cohen: “Your grammar is amazing.”
Policeman: “It means that they think you’re connected to something but you are not suspected of anything concrete.”
Cohen: “In other words, you can detain me whenever you wish.”
Policeman: “These are the instructions I got from the Shin Bet and the decision is theirs.”
Eventually the policeman filed a detention report, writing: “Suspected of hostile terror activity by Shin Bet.” Cohen, who was home for a vacation from his studies in political economy, philosophy and psychoanalysis, left the airport for his parents’ house.
He was not the only anarchist the Jewish department dealt with that week. Five days earlier, Kobi Snitz was attending a conference when he received a call from an unidentified number. The caller told him, “Shalom, this is Rona from the Shin Bet. I’m sure you’ve heard about me.”
“She said she wanted to invite me for a friendly conversation and for us to exchange thoughts,” said Snitz, 39, an anarchist activist and a mathematician. He asked whether he was being called in for an interrogation and when she said no, he said, no thanks. In 2009, Snitz served a 20-day sentence over an attempt a few years earlier to prevent the demolition of a house in Kharbatha, a village west of Ramallah. Two months ago, he was given another five-day sentence over a protest against the Second Lebanon War in 2006.
“The Jewish department believes that every Arab is dangerous and that they can take us, the naive activists, for a ride,” says Snitz. “They call us in order to create a psychological profile, to know which of us they can exploit, and who can be exploited by others. They are not looking for information.”
Assaf Kintzer received a call on December 9: “Shalom, this is Rona from the Shin Bet. How are you?” After he said “okay,” she said she wanted to see him and asked him to come to the Dizengoff Street police station in Tel Aviv. It’s urgent, she added. Kintzer, 33, said he could not come immediately. She said: “I’ll call you again soon, and it’s worth your while to come.” She then continued, as Kintzer recalled, “Listen, if you aren’t coming now, I’ll tell you a bit by phone. I want you to know that we know what you are doing and that it will have repercussions. At the moment, what you are doing is on the borderline of the law and it is quite possible that information on you will show your actions are illegal. We know about all your files.”
That same day, Kintzer was called to the police station to be interrogated after being detained at two demonstrations against the separation fence at Ma’asara.
Then Rona added: “In addition to your activity in the West Bank, we know that you are involved in [a plan to demonstrate against] the business conference. If you do anything violent, there will be consequences. Why aren’t you talking?”
I have no reason to answer, he said. So Rona, he recalls, said in parting: “You should know that I’m not against you at all. I am on your side and take part in demonstrations.”
One person who did go to meet Rona two weeks ago, mainly out of curiosity, was N., 30, another member of Anarchists against the Wall.
The entire meeting, including the security check with a magnometer and the screening of his bag, took less than 20 minutes. Rona could not get N. to respond to her questions, but N. said she had the following message: “We know what you are doing. At the moment you are not violating the law and we don’t have any problem with you. The moment you violate the law, we’ll be there.”
Haaretz asked the Shin Bet whether it was warning activists about violating laws that the Knesset may pass in the future, thus making their actions illegal. The newspaper also asked who was considered “suspected,” and whether members of the service could participate in demonstrations against the government.
The Shin Bet responded, “The security service acts in keeping with the authority granted it by law to fulfill its objective of protecting state security, institutions and public order in a democratic regime from threats of terror, damage, subversion, spying and revealing state secrets, as stipulated in paragraph 7 (a ) of the Shin Bet security service law from 2002. As for the extent to which Shin Bet employees may take part in demonstrations, they are subject to the restrictions imposed on all civil servants.”
Ilana Hammerman’s articles challenge us to ask what the role of a citizen is in a country where the law is illegal. In this space known as Israel and the occupied territories, the space guarded by Israeli soldiers, there are six groups with different rights and different levels of freedom of movement, according to the law.
The first group consists of about 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, who have been under a prolonged closure for years, with only a small number of persons bearing special permits allowed to leave. The second group is the 2.4 million Palestinians in the West Bank, barred from entering Jerusalem or Israel proper unless they have special permits, which they can receive only in exceptional cases from the military authority known as the Civil Administration. The settlements, all of which are illegal by international law, have stolen 44 percent of West Bank land for Jewish settlers. They have been surrounded by patrol and access roads, on which Palestinians are not allowed to travel. The roads from one place to another inside the territories are also blocked by hundreds of checkpoints. The freedom of movement of almost all Palestinians in the West Bank is limited – to inside the West Bank only.
The third group is the quarter-million Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, who have blue identity cards and can travel in Israel, Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank, but whose travel outside of that space is controlled and restricted by Israel. Jerusalem Palestinians who leave the city to study abroad, or even in Bethlehem, lose their status of “permanent residents,” which signifies their future temporary presence in the city.
The Palestinian citizens of Israel are the fourth group, and supposedly have the same freedom of movement as the fifth group: the Jewish citizens of Israel. Neither group is allowed to enter Gaza or the main cities in the West Bank. But the law allows Jews from the whole world and from Israel to settle in Israel and the territories, and to receive Israeli citizenship, while forbidding – with the endorsement of the Supreme Court – Palestinians from the first, second, third and fourth groups to intermarry and decide where to live together.
The sixth group is asylum seekers and migrant laborers, whose freedom of movement is restricted and who live in fear of being deported. While this group is new here, after 43 years of occupation, the regime that separates different groups of people with different rights is not temporary and resembles the apartheid regime.
In South Africa, too, the apartheid system was created thanks to detailed legislation that determined who had the right to vote, who had the right to live where, which persons had to carry passes to stay in white cities and which lived there by right, and which were considered strangers in the very cities in which they were born and grew up. Apartheid was not only a system of racial discrimination maintained by the military through the use of extreme force, but a system of discrimination regulated by legislation.
The State of Israel also emphasizes, both to its own citizens and the international community, that it is a state of law; the occupied territories are administered by a system of laws, orders and directives. The Supreme Court expanded its jurisdiction into the territories. Furthermore, Israel has signed most of the main international conventions on human rights (although with significant reservations ), and invests considerable efforts in maintaining the rule of law. Like in South Africa, separation and discrimination are enforced by the law.
Like Ilana Hammerman, I too refuse to obey illegal laws. In a country where spacious prisons were built under the protection of the law, in which people live in fear, it is not only our right but our duty to offer a space of hope. As long as we do not have agreed-upon borders, we are living in an occupying country that discriminates between the rights of different groups based on their ethnicity.
In such a country, just like in South Africa under apartheid, it is our right and our duty to challenge the legality of the law.
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3. The Guardian,
27 December 2010
Israeli activist imprisoned for protest against Gaza blockade
Jonathan Pollak handed three-month term after taking part in Tel Aviv protest cycle ride in January 2008
Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak has been sentenced to three months in prison by a Tel Aviv court for taking part in a bicycle demonstration against the blockade of Gaza. Photograph: Bernat Armangue/AP
The prominent Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak was today sentenced to three months in prison by a Tel Aviv court for taking part in a bicycle demonstration against the blockade of Gaza almost three years ago.
Human rights activists condemned the prison term, saying it was an unusually harsh punishment for a charge that usually results in a non-custodial sentence.
Pollak, 28, is one of the founders of a leftwing Israeli group called Anarchists against the Wall, which demonstrates with Palestinian activists in the occupied territories.
In January 2008, he participated, along with 30 others, in a “critical mass bicycle ride” through Tel Aviv. During the demonstration, police arrested Pollak but allowed the rest of the activists to continue with the protest, his lawyer said.
Pollak remained defiant after sentencing. “I have no doubt that what we did was right and, if anything, not sufficient considering what is being done in our name,” he said in a telephone interview. “If I have to go to prison to resist the occupation, I will do it gladly.”
Pollak described his sentence as “part of the general deterioration in the right to dissent from the general Israeli discourse regarding the occupation”.
His lawyer, Gaby Lasky, who defends many activists arrested while protesting against Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank, said the sentence was unusual.
“It is not common that someone found guilty of illegal assembly will be sent to prison,” said Lasky, who has worked in this field for eight years.
“We are in the midst of a high wave of detentions of activists,” she added. “The criminalisation of leftwing demonstrations is a policy these days”.
An official at the court of first instance in Tel Aviv, who asked to remain anonymous, said it was extremely rare for judges to hand down a jail sentence in an illegal assembly case.
The official pointed out, however, that Pollak had three previous convictions, including one for “distraction of order and vandalism”, and a three-month suspended sentence for demonstrating against the West Bank separation barrier.
The Israeli police and the ministry of justice declined to comment.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel criticised the sentence. “Placing Pollak behind bars because of his participation in the critical mass bike ride is an extreme punishment and an unusually harsh measurement,” Dan Yakir, the organisation’s chief legal adviser, said in a statement.
“The entire affair raises suspicion that Pollak was personally targeted because of his views in an attempt to silence him and prevent him from partaking in various acts of protest.”
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4. The Independent,
27 December 2010
Jewish activist faces jail for West Bank resistance
Jonathan Pollak could be jailed for up to six months
It is not every day that a leading Palestinian activist issues an emphatic statement of support for a Jewish Israeli – “this friend, whose friendship I am proud to share” – facing prison.
But then Jonathan Pollak, who could be jailed for between three and six months when the Tel Aviv Magistrates Court decides on his prosecution for illegal assembly today, is an unusual figure even in the long history of Israeli dissent.
The man praising him, Ayed Morrar, has become internationally known thanks to an award-winning documentary on the victorious unarmed struggle he led to change the route of the Israeli military’s separation barrier in the Palestinian village of Budrus. Mr Pollak, 28, is already a veteran of that and many other battles against the barrier and settlements in the West Bank, protesting alongside Palestinian residents and sharing the same physical risks in the clashes between armed security forces – that sometimes use live ammunition – and stone-throwing young villagers that the struggle tends to generate.
Thanks to his media work for the Popular Struggle Co-ordination Committee, which loosely links these village protests, Mr Pollak is the best known of the small-but-persistent group of young Israelis who go week after week to the West Bank to take part.
Yet the current indictment is for something closer to home – his participation in a cycle ride through the streets of Tel Aviv some 30 Israelis held in protest at the siege of Gaza in January 2008. The cycle ride was similar to many others that have been held unimpeded in the city to further environmental goals. He was the only one arrested. “From the arrest itself to the indictment, this has been a political case,” he said yesterday. “Had we not been protesting the occupation, none of it would have taken place.”
Mr Pollak was born to leftist parents, who will be present in court today. His father Yossi is one of Israel’s most prominent actors – among those pledged to boycott performances some of Israel’s leading theatres are planning to stage in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Ariel. His maternal grandfather, Nimrod Eshel, was jailed for his leadership of a strike by seamen in the 1950s.
He attended the first of very many demonstrations as a months-old babe-in-arms at the huge mass rally in Tel Aviv calling for an end to the first Lebanon war in 1982. What makes him and his Israeli comrades unusual, however, is the decision to go beyond mere demonstrations to, as he himself puts it, “crossing sides, moving from protest to joining resistance”.
A high school dropout at 15, he was a teenage animal right activist, a cause with few Israeli adherents – and most of those Israelis who were part of it were anarchists. Very much part of Tel Aviv’s young counterculture in the politically relatively relaxed Nineties, Mr Pollak became one too. He remains an anarchist and a vegan, still a strong believer in animal rights, which he sees as consistent with his wider politics. For him, “racism, chauvinism, sexism, speciesism all come from the same place of belittling the other”, he said.
A few minor brushes with the law appear to have been enough to convince the army that he was not suitable material for compulsory military service. “I don’t think they wanted me any more than I wanted them,” he said. He spent two years in the Netherlands, living in a squat, before being deported back to Israel.
By this time, the second intifada was at its peak, and Mr Pollak found himself drawn, despite the dangers for a young Israeli of visiting the West Bank at the time, to the unarmed dimension of the Palestinian cause – including, most significantly, the very first anti-barrier protests in the West Bank village of Jayyous.
According to Mr Morrar, a long-term opponent of armed uprising, “Jonathan… is a man trying to prove that those who believe in occupation cannot claim to be humanitarian or civilised. He also wants to prove that resisting oppression and occupation does not mean being a terrorist or killing”. Just as Mr Pollak learned his Arabic on the Palestinian street, as a serial leafleteer he discovered a talent for graphic design, which makes him a living when he needs the money.
His lawyer, Gaby Lasky, has been arguing throughout the case that his indictment was discriminatory. But if he is convicted he will go to prison “wholeheartedly and with my head held high”, as he hopes to tell the court in a polite but uncompromising address. He planned to say: “It will be the justice system itself… that will need to lower its eyes in the face of the suffering inflicted on Gaza’s inhabitants, just as it … averts its vision every day when faced with the realities of the occupation.”
