MONDOWEISS ONLINE NEWSLETTER

Hundreds of Jaffa residents gather on the main street in the heart of Ajami to protest settler intimidation in Jaffa. (Photo: The Daily Nuisance)

Tensions are rising between Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel after clashes in Occupied East Jerusalem and Jaffa this past weekend.
Ultranationalist religious Jews attempted to provoke and intimidate local Palestinian residents while marching through the Occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan on Sunday as hundreds of Israeli police stood guard. Hundreds of residents clashed with police in response, some throwing rocks and lighting tire fires. Twenty Palestinians and solidarity activists were injured as police shot rubber bullets and beat protesters. Two police were also injured when they were hit by rocks.
The seventy right wing Israelis were protesting a court order to evacuate Beit Yonatan, an illegal structure housing eight settler families in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan. In July 2008 the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the seven-story building to be sealed off for demolition, and another evacuation order was issued in July 2009, but neither has been enforced.
The previous day, in Jaffa’s last remaining Palestinian neighborhood – Ajami, hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel and their supporters rallied in opposition to settler youth from Kiryat Arba who invaded the property of a Palestinian family on April 18, when Israelis commemorated the night of the fallen soldier. Waving flags and banners in front of the house on Jaffa’s main road, Yeffet, they chanted in Arabic and Hebrew.
The mother of the household Zynab Rahayel says she was sitting in her dining room when three buses full of settlers stopped outside, got out and started to jump around while shouting that this piece of land was theirs and raising the Israeli flag. One boy who entered their garden and peered through their front door told Rahayel twice, “This is my house, not yours.” When she exited her home they shouted at her that Palestinians have been in Jaffa for only a short time and “This is our land and you will get out of here!” One settler pushed Rahayel’s son after he said something offensive. Soon other Ajami Palestinians came and began arguing with the boys.
Jaffa, which now conjoins Tel Aviv, was a busy Arab port city before over 90 percent of the Palestinian population was forced out by the advancing Israeli army in the 1948 war. “Sixty-two years ago we were afraid to lose our dignity and our land. But today we’ve already lost our land… and the only thing we have is our spirit and our houses,” says Yousef Asfor, housing coordinator for Amnesty International. “They can’t take our spirit, but they are trying to take our houses.”
“No to Apartheid” read a sign held by one boy standing on the sidewalk in the heart of Ajami Saturday. Meanwhile, Jaffa residents shouted: “Jews and Arabs don’t want settlers here!” and “Jaffa is for Jaffans!” and “With our souls and with our blood we’ll defend Jaffa!”
Sami Abu Schade, organizer of Saturday’s solidarity demo, says they are condemning the police for their inaction after the settler provocation in Ajami. He says the cops didn’t do anything “because of racist policies towards the Palestinian community inside Israel.” He explains, “If a few hundred people had just attacked a Jewish woman at her home in Tel Aviv and said, ‘We don’t want a Jewish presence here,’ police would have dealt with it differently.”
Abu Schade says the protest was also to send a message to the municipality that a policy that supports settlements in Ajami is inherently violent. The settlement he is referring to is the apartment buildings being constructed in Ajami by Bemuna, a company that mostly builds Jewish housing in West Bank settlements. Bemuna says the apartments are for Jews only and that they won’t sell to Arabs.
Tensions have been rising between the Palestinian community and Orthodox Jewish nationalists in Jaffa over the last few months. Local activists have been protesting weekly outside the Yeshiva in Ajami, while Jaffa’s housing coalition has been fighting the development of the Bemuna apartment complex. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has also brought a high profile legal suit against the Israel Lands Administration for awarding Bemuna the contract, who they say is clearly discriminating against Arabs in Ajami.
Abu Schade feels that once the apartments have been constructed and more religious rightwing hardliners move in, the settler movement will be strengthened in Jaffa, leading to more violence. “We have been warning Israeli police and the Tel Aviv municipality that the settler project is endangering the coexistence between the Jewish and Arab population in Jaffa. Unfortunately, they’re ignoring our calls to stop immediately this project,” explains Abu Schhade.
“Without international pressure, unfortunately things are going to be more dangerous for all residents of Israel,” says Abu Schade.
This story originally appeared on The Daily Nuisance.

UC San Diego will be joining Berkeley in holding a vote on divestment tomorrow evening. The San Diego bill under consideration is slightly different, and organizers seem to have learned from some of Berkeley’s challenges. From the UC San Diego newspaper The Guardian:

The resolution was drafted by members of several campus organizations — including Students for Justice in Palestine and the Student Sustainability Collective — and approved by Transfer Senator Adam Powers and Campuswide Senator Desiree Prevo. According to Associate Vice President of Enterprise Operations Rishi Ghosh — a co-sponsor of the resolution — the council was inspired by a similar effort at UC Berkeley, where the resolution passed 16-4 in the student Senate, but was eventually vetoed by Berkeley A.S. President Will Smelko.
The resolution calls for the UC system to stop investing in companies such as General Electric and United Technologies, which supporters of the resolution claim promote violence by providing technology — such as helicopters and aircraft engines — to warring countries around the world.
Sixth College senior Leena Barakat — who helped draft the resolution — said the UCSD version was altered to ensure that it condemned human-rights violations as a whole, and not specifically actions taken by the state of Israel.

Of course pro-Israel students and organizations are attacking the effort, and some of their arguments seem especially desperate – including comparing United Nations documentation of human rights abuses in Gaza to Holocaust denial (huh?!). Again from The Guardian:

A.S. Engineering Senator Adi Singer — a member of the pro-Israel community and creator of the Facebook group “Students Against ASUCSD Anti-Israel Bias and Resolutions” — said the resolution is a pointed attack against Israel.
“It’s a very thinly veiled political statement,” Singer said. “If it’s about all human-rights violations, why are there a ton of citings specifically about Gaza and very few about anywhere else?”
Although Ghosh said the resolution has received endorsements from groups such as Jewish Voices for the Peace and that information in the resolution regarding companies profiting from occupancy was provided by the United Nations, Singer maintained that the draft is biased.
“My main issue with this is that it’s very one-sided,” Singer said. “It’s not hard to find news sources that support your point of view. I can go on the Internet right now and find tons of sources that say that the Holocaust never happened.”
She added that the resolution would be detrimental to relations between Israeli and Palestinian interest groups on campus.
“Say what you want about it — the intent is clear,” she said. “The pro-Israel community has been trying really hard to build relations with the pro-Palestine community, and we would never bring up a resolution against Hamas.”
Tritons for Israel President Dafna Barzilay said it is not the council’s place to pass resolutions pertaining to international issues.
“We don’t support any such resolutions, even if it was pro-Israel or anti-Hamas,” she said. “It’s not the business of A.S. to support international problems that require that scale of spending and is not directly related to the university.”
In contrast, Ghosh said it is the council’s duty to be aware of global issues.
“If they believe that, why weren’t they there when we passed a resolution to support Haiti with allocations?” he asked. “Why weren’t they in the past, when we’ve been fighting for human rights in Sudan, fair trade in Africa?”
He said the resolution is meant to be a politically-neutral gesture.
“It is not anti-Israel,” he said. “Israel was very cleverly kept out of it.”

You can learn more about the UC San Diego effort, and what you can do to help, at their website UCSD Divest For Peace.

From the JTA article “South Africa likens Israeli restrictions to apartheid“:

The South African government has compared new Israeli military restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank to apartheid laws.
The South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation issued a statement condemning the restrictions as “a gross violation of an individual’s human rights,” saying that the military order “further exacerbates the already fragile situation in Palestine,” according to a report in the daily Cape Times. . .
“South Africa, because of its history, is particularly sensitive to the infringement of human rights that the carrying of a permit implies and the unilateral punishments that can be brought to bear on an individual by the state,” the South African statement said.

The final vote on Berkeley divestment will be taking place tomorrow, April 28. Here is Matthew Taylor, a Jewish UC Berkeley Peace and Conflict Studies student, making yet another appeal to school Senators at the Daily Kos:

When will the University of California stop funding war crimes against Palestinian civilians and the occupation of Palestinian land? How much longer will grieving mothers have to wait for justice?
Zinad Samouni is still waiting. She is a 35-year-old Palestinian mother of eight who lost 48 of her family members in Israel’s assault on Gaza in January 2009, including her four-year-old son Ahmed.
“The soldiers came early on the morning of Sunday January 4th. [My husband] Atiyeh went to the door with his hands raised holding his ID but they shot him in the doorway,” said Zinad. “I shouted ‘children, children’ in Hebrew but they started shooting,” said Zinad’s nephew Faraj.
After the massacre, Israeli soldiers left messages for the dead Samounis on the walls of a neighbor’s house. The graffiti read: “Arabs need 2 die,” “Arabs are pieces of shit,” and “1 is DOWN 999,999 TO GO.” . .
Senators, how do you think it feels for us students to know that our tuition dollars are paying to kill our friends, family members, and colleagues in Gaza? Israel should not be entitled to special treatment and a free pass to commit war crimes just because it promotes itself as a Jewish state and certain defenders of Israel can’t bring themselves to see the reality of war crimes.
A vote in favor of the divestment bill is a small cry for common sense and ethics in UC investments, and removes the current UC bias toward funding Israel’s military.
Any other vote will continue the status quo of this University funding yet more war crimes against Palestinian civilians. A yes vote will finally begin the process of justice for Zinad Samouni’s 48 dead family members.
See: www.modoweiss.net