Looking for children's activities in Gulf War-obsessed Jerusalem, a group of parents recently took our kids to the zoo. The West Bank town of Qalqilya hosts a small one. The children were excited: "Look, there's the zoo!" they said, as we approached. "There's the wall all round it. That must be to keep the lions in". Sure enough, there was a massive concrete wall snaking its way along the new Israeli highway. 24 feet high, it would cage in King Kong. The children began a debate: what animal could get over the wall: a giant kangaroo, a blue whale? The red roofs of illegal Israeli settlements crowned the hills around us. Suddenly (there had been no signposts to Qalqilya, as though the map lied), sheltering in their lee, was an old town with minarets and market gardens. The wall we had seen was not to keep the animals confined. Even the children realized this as we drove up to the check-point that is now the only way in or out of the town. Forty-five thousand people live inside, entrapped by an impregnable barrier, with Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers deciding whether or not they may pass. Qalqilya lies almost on the pre-1967 border, and the wall we had seen follows the Green Line at this point. In most places, however, the 'security fence' is being built well inside the West Bank, and thereby divides communities from their lands and from one another. Not only is the 'security fence' a massive land grab constituting 10% of the West Bank, it also traps 95,000 Palestinians on the 'wrong side'. Sandwiched between Israel and the wall, unable to reach their own services, not permitted access to those in Israel, these Palestinians will have little choice but to perform 'voluntary transfer'. We were allowed through the check-point because our vehicles had diplomatic license plates and because we were not Palestinian, though it took a while for the soldier, a young immigrant from the Ukraine, to ponder our passports and say "OK". Palestinians must apply to the IDF for a permit even to step outside their town, and any incoming or outgoing goods must first be unloaded at the check-point, then loaded up again onto another truck on the other side. We went to see the wall close up, from the inside. Where there had once been nurseries growing a host of different shrubs, fruits and vegetables, there was now a barren no-man's land. It is difficult to appreciate the true scale of the wall until you walk right up to it. It was while we did this that the IDF shot at us, a group of parents and children, twice, to force us back. As though the feeling of oppressive incarceration were not already enough, to complete the visual imagery there were watchtowers along the length of the wall: rounded, lowering keeps, capped with low-domed concrete roofs with narrow slits for soldiers to peer out and take pot-shots at the town's inmates. We left the wall and went to the zoo. An ordinary, well-kept little zoo whose space for animals was far too limited. It is out of the ordinary because it is a zoo within a zoo. The inner perimeter – the animal zoo – encloses bears, a giraffe, a lion, crocodiles, birds and monkeys. The lion obligingly roared, the hippo came to the fence and yawned open her mouth to show us her vast, fleshy palate, and the giraffe stretched his head over the fence to be fed by the children. Qalqilya itself did not start life as a zoo whose population, like the giraffe, must be fed from across a fence. It was a thriving market town until two years ago, famous for its nurseries, vegetables and fruits. Now that the fence divides the town from the outside world, the farmers from their land, the populace from their vegetable allotments and water supplies, making citizens dependent on humanitarian aid, it is not surprising that many have emigrated to Jordan. Hence the policy of 'voluntary transfer' is already working: the Mayor of Qalqilya reports that up to 20% of its citizens have already left. My first trip to Qalqilya, a few months ago, was to visit the hospital's obstetric department. To illustrate the problem of the check-points, the midwife told us of a 17-year-old first-time mother. She had delivered at home, as many Palestinians now must, fearing being stuck at the check-points. She bled badly after the birth. Her father, a paramedic, rang ahead to get an ambulance from Qalqilya to meet them at the check-point, where he thought the soldiers would allow her through to the waiting ambulance. He was wrong: she was not allowed through, and died of a post-partum haemorrhage, the ambulance a few meters away, unable to help. After seeing the animals, we retreated for lunch: a Palestinian national dish – falafel – from a café on the main square. A van drove past selling gas canisters, ringing out its tinny call-tune. At the falafel café we met a lab technician who can no longer go to his job in a nearby town because he can't get a permit to leave Qalqilya. "Now they are building this wall, they are slowly continuing all the time, flattening everything near it, all the gardens, all the homes. The Israelis have killed everything in Qalqilya. And during Eid they attacked us and killed three, one an eight year-old boy." As we left, my 9 year-old asked if the ambulance we saw being searched at the check-point would be allowed through or not. I asked the soldiers: they were Russian, and spoke no English. But the two Palestinian ambulance-workers looked at us, and said that yes, they were being allowed through – today. "No problem", they smiled, and went on showing the soldiers the contents of their ambulance. My son turned to me and said, "You know, today was OK, I like animals. But zoos – I don't like zoos at all". Beyond the concrete enclosures that imprison first the animals and then the people of Qalqilya, the zoo-within-a-zoo analogy ends - the difference is that Israelis don't come and gawp at these inmates. The purpose of the wall and fence is the opposite: to put the inmates out of sight and out of mind, to remove every vestige of livelihood and dignity from them, and preferably, persuade them to leave. Plus, of course, most other zoo-keepers don't shoot their animals. Read More...
By: Palestinian Women’s Civil Coalition for the Implementation of UNSCR1325
Date: 26/10/2022
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Open letter to the UN Secretary General on the 22nd Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security Agenda (UNSC Resolution 1325)
Your Excellency Secretary General On the 22nd anniversary of UNSC Resolution 1325 and the annual open discussion at the Security Council for the advancement of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, the Palestinian Women’s Civil Coalition for the Implementation of UNSC Resolution 1325 would like to bring your attention to the fact that the suffering of Palestinian women living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) has unprecedentedly escalated since this resolution was passed, due to the Israeli occupation’s ongoing, hostile policies, systematic violations of human rights and grave breaches of international humanitarian law that are disproportionally impacting women and girls in the OPT. These violations include extra-judicial killings, arbitrary arrests, restriction on movement, military blockades, house demolitions, land confiscation and illegal de-facto and de-juri annexation, in addition to the ongoing isolation of areas of the OPT from one another. This has had both individual and collective impact on the lives of women, impeding their access to resources, compounded by the deteriorating economic situation due to the occupation’s control and dominance over land and resources. Added to this is the rise in poverty levels due to unemployment, military blockade on the Gaza Strip for over 15 years and the occupation’s exercise of systematic long-term violence against the Palestinian protected population in the OPT, settlement expansion combined with settlers’ violence and vandalism The Palestinian Women’s Civil Coalition strongly believes that 22 years since the passage of UNSC Resolution 1325 has not resulted in concrete measures for the advancement of the women, peace and security agenda to Palestinian women living under Israeli prolonged military occupation. A lot still need yet to be made by the Security Council to maintain peace and security for Palestinian women living under military occupation. To the contrary, complications and challenges to Palestinian women have increased in terms of implementing the WPS agenda, due to Israeli impediments to its implementation. Israel, the occupying power, has also placed enormous obstacles before Palestinian women who seek to implement this resolution, given its continued occupation of the OPT and the absence of a just and durable solution to end this prolonged belligerent occupation. No concrete measures were taken by the international community to implement UN resolutions related to the question of Palestine, namely UN Resolutions 242, 338, 194 and 2334. Instead, Israel is intent on confiscating and annexing more land to build settlements, which has severed any path to the establishment of an independent and contiguous Palestinian state. Instead, OPT has been transformed into isolated islands more like the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa, as indicated in the most recent evidence based-report by Amnesty International, describing Israel as an apartheid regime, where one racial group is discriminating against other racial groups. The Palestinian Women’s Civil Coalition, would also like to point out to the remarkable conclusions of a UN independent Commission of Inquiry (CoI) in its recent to the UN General Assembly in New York on 20/10/2022, which considered the Israeli occupation as unlawful according to international law. The report called on the UN General Assembly to ask the International Court of Justice for an urgent advisory opinion on the illegality of this prolonged military occupation, and the impacts of the Israeli illegal measures and violations against the Palestinian civilian population in the 1967 OPT. Your Excellency UN Secretary General, As the UNSC is meeting to discuss the advancement of the WPS agenda, we would like to draw to their attention the double standards employed by the United Nations in dealing with its own resolutions, especially when it comes to Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the practices of Israel, the occupying power against Palestinian civilian population. Israeli illegal policies in the OPT , has not only curtailed Resolution 1325 from guaranteeing protection for women and involving her in security and peacemaking, it has also thwarted all international tools and mechanisms for the protection of civilians in times of war and under occupation. This is due to the failure of the international human rights and humanitarian law especially the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protections of Civilians at time of War and under occupation. The reason for this is that the UN itself is discriminatory and has double standards in its handling conflicts, and peoples’ causes due to the huge imbalance in justice and the policy of impunity, which Israeli, the occupying power enjoys. These policies have allowed Israel to escape from accountability or any punitive measures in accordance to UN Charter and more specifically Article 11 of UNSC Resolution 1325, which demands that perpetrators of crimes and violations during war are not afforded impunity. The fact that Israel is treated as a country above the law, and the absence of any form of accountability has only encouraged it to commit more crimes and violations. A case in point is the recent murdering of Palestinian Journalist Shirine Abu Akleh, where no one has been held accountable thus far, although the incident was caught on tape and there is hard evidence proving that her death was the result of premeditated and extrajudicial killing by the Israeli army. During its evaluation and review of its action plan, the Palestinian Women’s Civil Coalition noted that Resolution 1325 and the nine subsequent resolutions, pinpointed the reasons for the outbreak and development of conflicts in various regions of the world to racial, religious and ethnic disputes. However, it excluded women under racist, colonialist occupation, which is the case of Palestinian women under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including occupied East Jerusalem. Thus, it has disregarded all international resolutions pertaining to the rights of the Palestinian people, over and above Israel’s disregard for its responsibilities as an occupying power. This necessitates a special resolution addressing the status of Palestinian women under racist, colonialist occupation, and addressing the root causes of the suffering of Palestinian women and the major obstacle they face in meaningful political participation, and in moving forward in the advancement of the women, peace and security agenda. Mr. Secretary General, Finally, we in the Palestinian Women’s Civil Coalition for the implementation of Resolution 1325, thank your Excellency for your understanding, and for conveying our concerns to all nation states during the open debate on WPS in the Security Council this year. We call on you to dedicate ample attention to the status of Palestinian women during the 22nd Security Council meeting on Resolution 1325, with the objective to develop and push forth the WPS agenda and put into action the role of international tools of accountability. We ask you to provide the necessary protection for Palestinian women under occupation, by closely overseeing the implementation of this resolution and the party responsible for impeding its application on the ground, namely, the Israeli occupying power that has exacerbated the suffering of Palestinian women at all levels and increased discriminatory measures against them.
With our sincere thanks and appreciation,
By: Dr. Hanan Ashrawi
Date: 19/10/2021
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Statement to the United Nations Security Council, Quarterly Open Debate on the Situation in the Middle East, including the Palestine Question
Mr. President, Esteemed Members of the Security Council, I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to address you today, especially thankful to H.E. Ambassador Macharia Kamau, Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary and the Republic of Kenya for the kind invitation. For over 70 years, the UN and its various bodies have been seized of the Palestine question; repeatedly reviewing conditions, adopting resolutions, and dispatching fact-finding missions, to no avail. Sadly, this Council has been unable to assert authority, allowing this injustice to become a perpetual tragic human, moral, political and legal travesty. So it would be disingenuous of me to come before you assuming I could inform you of something you do not already know. Nevertheless, I do appreciate the opportunity to communicate in a candid manner, not to recite endless statistics, nor to reiterate the ongoing pain of a people, deprived of their basic rights, including even the right to speak out, admonished not to “whine” or “complain,” as a means of silencing the victim. The tragedy is that you know all of this; yet, it has had a minimal impact, if any, on the horrific conditions in Occupied Palestine. I imagine it must be disheartening and frustrating for this distinguished organization and its members to find themselves trapped in this cycle of deliberate disdain and futility. It is therefore imperative that this Council consider where it has gone wrong and what it can do to correct course and serve the cause of justice and peace. Undoubtedly, the absence of accountability for Israel and of protection for the Palestinian people has enabled Israeli impunity to ride roughshod over the rights of an entire nation, allowing for perpetuation of a permanent settler-colonial occupation. Mr. President, Much of the prevailing political discourse overlooks reality and is diverted and subsumed by chimeras and distractions proffered by Israel and its allies under such banners as “economic peace,” “improving the quality of life,” “normalization,” “managing the conflict,” “containing the conflict,” or “shrinking the conflict.” These fallacies must be dismantled. Volatile situations of injustice and oppression do not shrink. They expand and explode, with disastrous consequences. Similarly, the delusion of “imposing calm” under siege and systemic aggression, particularly as in Gaza, is an oxymoron, for calm or security on the one hand and occupation or captivity on the other are antithetical and irreconcilable. Likewise, the fallacy of “confidence-building measures” is misguided since occupation breeds only contempt, distrust, resentment, and resistance. The oppressed cannot be brought to trust or accept handouts from their oppressor as an alternative to their right to freedom and justice. The misleading and flawed “both sides” argument calling for “balance” in a flagrantly unbalanced situation is another attempt at obfuscation and generating misconceptions. Israel’s impunity is further enhanced using such excuses as being the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” or a “strategic ally,” or having “shared values,” or even for the sake of protecting its “fragile coalition.” There has also been tacit and, at times overt, acceptance of Israel’s ideological, absolutist arguments, including the invocation of religious texts as a means to dismiss and supplant contemporary political and legal discourse and action. Hence, the so-called “Jewish State Law,” which allocates the right to self-determination exclusively to Jews in all of historic Palestine, is endorsed and normalized. In the meantime, a massive disinformation machine persists in its racist maligning and demonizing of the Palestinian people, going so far as to label them “terrorists,” or a “demographic threat,” a dehumanizing formula exploited as a way to deny the right of millions of Palestine refugees to return. Such slander has warped political focus and discourse globally. Some states have gone off on a tangent pursuing Palestinian textbooks for so-called “incitement,” or adopting the IHRA definition that conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, or criminalizing BDS, or intimidating and censoring academics and solidarity activists who stand up for Palestinian rights. These distortions ignore the unequal and unjust laws designed to persecute Palestinians, individually and collectively. It is evidenced in the defamation of our political prisoners and the targeting of their families’ livelihoods, as though Israeli military courts or prison systems have anything to do with justice or legality. The mindless refrain that Israel has the “right to defend itself,” while the Palestinian people are denied such a right, is perverse in that the occupier’s violence is justified as “self-defense” while the occupied are stigmatized as “terrorists.” We cannot afford to disregard the context of occupation and its systemic aggression as the framing device for all critical assessments and action. Excellencies, Occupied Palestine, including Jerusalem, is the target of a comprehensive and pervasive policy of colonization and erasure, of displacement and replacement, in which Israel is appropriating everything Palestinian; our land and resources; our cultural and human heritage; our archeological sites, which we have safeguarded for centuries; our history; our cuisine; the names of our streets; and most egregiously the identity of Jerusalem, as we witness in the ethnic cleansing of the Old City, Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan among others. Even our cemeteries have been desecrated such as the building of a so-called “museum of tolerance” on top of human remains in Maman’ Allah cemetery. And, Israel continues to stoke the flames of a “holy war,” with repeated assaults on our holy sites, particularly Al-Aqsa Mosque. Jerusalem is being targeted in a deliberate campaign of annexation and distortion. Israel now brazenly declares its intent to complete the settlement siege of Jerusalem and destruction of the territorial contiguity of the West Bank, with its outrageous plans for E-1, Qalandiya airport (Atarot), “Pisgat Ze’ev” and “Giv’at HaMatos.” We cannot be distracted by symbolic gestures that create a false impression of progress. Claims that the “time is not right,” or that it is “difficult now” to work for a peaceful solution, give license to Israel to persist in its perilous policies. Likewise, repeating a verbal commitment to the two-State solution, while one state is allowed to deliberately destroy the other, rings hollow. Mr. President, All of this does not preclude our recognition of our own shortcomings. We do not shirk our responsibility to speak out against internal violence, human rights abuses, corruption, or other such practices that are rejected and resented by our own people. It is our responsibility to carry out democratic reform and revitalize our body politic while ending our internal divisions. This is a Palestinian imperative. But we must caution others against exploiting our shortcomings to justify Israeli crimes or international inaction, or to condition any positive engagement on the creation of an ideal system of governance in Palestine while we languish under a lawless system of Israeli control. We ask that you, trustees of the rules-based order, uphold your responsibilities: provide us with protection from aggression and empower our people to amplify their voice, both in governance and liberation. Esteemed Members of the Council, Peace is not achieved by “normalizing the occupation,” sidelining the Palestine Question, or rewarding Israel by repositioning it as a regional superpower. Such an approach maintains the causes of regional instability and insecurity, while enabling Israel as a colonial apartheid State to superimpose “Greater Israel” on all of historic Palestine. Generation after generation, the people of Palestine have remained committed to the justice of their cause, the integrity of their narrative, the authenticity of their history and culture, and their inviolable right to live in freedom, and dignity, as an equal among nations and in the fullness of our humanity. It is time to reclaim the narrative of justice and invoke our collective will to activate the UN Charter and affirm the relevance of international law. The time has come for courageous and determined action, not just to undo the injustice of the past but to chart a clear and binding course for a peaceful future of hope and redemption. I thank you. To view the full Speech as PDF
By: Global Coalition of Leaders
Date: 04/09/2021
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Open Letter to the States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty on the Need to Impose a Comprehensive Two-Way Arms Embargo on Israel
We, the undersigned global coalition of leaders –from civil society to academia, art, media, business, politics, indigenous and faith communities, and people of conscience around the world– call upon the States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) to act decisively to put an end to Israel’s notorious use of arms and military equipment for the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights against Palestinian civilians by immediately imposing a comprehensive two-way arms embargo on Israel. In the spring of 2021, the world once again watched in horror as Israeli occupying forces attacked defenceless Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and inside Israel. Palestinian civilians peacefully protesting against colonisation of their land were assaulted with live fire, rubber-coated steel bullets, sound bombs, tear gas and skunk water. Israel’s deadly military aggression against the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip was the fourth in a decade. Over 11 days, 248 Palestinians were killed, including 66 children. Thousands were wounded, and the reverberating effects of the use of explosive weapons on hospitals, schools, food security, water, electricity and shelter continue to affect millions. This systematic brutality, perpetrated throughout the past seven decades of Israel’s colonialism, apartheid, pro-longed illegal belligerent occupation, persecution, and closure, is only possible because of the complicity of some governments and corporations around the world. Symbolic statements of condemnation alone will not put an end to this suffering. In accordance with the relevant rules of the ATT, States Parties have legal obligations to put an end to irresponsible and often complicit trade of conventional arms that undermines international peace and security, facilitates commission of egregious crimes, and threatens the international legal order. Under Article 6(3) of the ATT, States Parties undertook not to authorise any transfer of conventional arms if they have knowledge at the time of authorisation that arms or items would be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva conventions of 1949, attacks directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such, or other war crimes as defined by international agreements to which they are a Party. Under Articles 7 and 11, they undertook not to authorise any export of conventional arms, munitions, parts and components that would, inter alia, undermine peace and security or be used to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law. It is clear that arms exports to Israel are inconsistent with these obligations. Invariably, Israel has shown that it uses arms to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, as documented by countless United Nations bodies and civil society organisations worldwide. Military exports to Israel also clearly enabled, facilitated and maintained Israel’s decades-long settler-colonial and apartheid regime imposed over the Palestinian people as a whole. Similarly, arms imports from Israel are wholly inconsistent with obligations under the ATT. Israeli military and industry sources openly boast that their weapons and technologies are “combat proven” – in other words, field-tested on Palestinian civilians “human test subjects”. When States import Israeli arms, they are encouraging it to keep bombing Palestinian civilians and persist in its unlawful practices. No one –neither Israel, nor arms manufacturers in ATT States parties– should be allowed to profit from the killing or maiming of Palestinian civilians. It is thus abundantly clear that imposing a two-way arms embargo on Israel is both a legal and a moral obligation. ATT States Parties must immediately terminate any current, and prohibit any future transfers of conventional arms, munitions, parts and components referred to in Article 2(1), Article 3 or Article 4 of the ATT to Israel, until it ends its illegal belligerent occupation of the occupied Palestinian territory and complies fully with its obligations under international law. Pending such an embargo, all States must immediately suspend all transfers of military equipment, assistance and munitions to Israel. A failure to take these actions entails a heavy responsibility for the grave suffering of civilians – more deaths, more suffering, as thousands of Palestinian men, women and children continue to bear the brutality of a colonial belligerent occupying force– which would result in discrediting the ATT itself. It also renders States parties complicit in internationally wrongful acts through the aiding or abetting of international crimes. A failure in taking action could also result in invoking the individual criminal responsibility of individuals of these States for aiding and abetting the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity in accordance with Article 25(3)(c) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Justice will remain elusive so long as Israel’s unlawful occupation, settler-colonialism, apartheid regime, and persecution and institutionalised oppression of the Palestinian people are allowed to continue, and so long as States continue to be complicit in the occupying Power’s crimes by trading weapons with it. In conclusion, we believe that the ATT can make a difference in the Palestinian civilians’ lives. It has the potential, if implemented in good faith, to spare countless protected persons from suffering. If our call to stop leaving the Palestinian people behind when it comes to implementation of the ATT is ignored, the raison d'être of the ATT will be shattered. Joining organisations:
Joining individuals:
By the Same Author
Date: 19/05/2003
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Letter From Qalqilya
Looking for children's activities in Gulf War-obsessed Jerusalem, a group of parents recently took our kids to the zoo. The West Bank town of Qalqilya hosts a small one. The children were excited: "Look, there's the zoo!" they said, as we approached. "There's the wall all round it. That must be to keep the lions in". Sure enough, there was a massive concrete wall snaking its way along the new Israeli highway. 24 feet high, it would cage in King Kong. The children began a debate: what animal could get over the wall: a giant kangaroo, a blue whale? The red roofs of illegal Israeli settlements crowned the hills around us. Suddenly (there had been no signposts to Qalqilya, as though the map lied), sheltering in their lee, was an old town with minarets and market gardens. The wall we had seen was not to keep the animals confined. Even the children realized this as we drove up to the check-point that is now the only way in or out of the town. Forty-five thousand people live inside, entrapped by an impregnable barrier, with Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers deciding whether or not they may pass. Qalqilya lies almost on the pre-1967 border, and the wall we had seen follows the Green Line at this point. In most places, however, the 'security fence' is being built well inside the West Bank, and thereby divides communities from their lands and from one another. Not only is the 'security fence' a massive land grab constituting 10% of the West Bank, it also traps 95,000 Palestinians on the 'wrong side'. Sandwiched between Israel and the wall, unable to reach their own services, not permitted access to those in Israel, these Palestinians will have little choice but to perform 'voluntary transfer'. We were allowed through the check-point because our vehicles had diplomatic license plates and because we were not Palestinian, though it took a while for the soldier, a young immigrant from the Ukraine, to ponder our passports and say "OK". Palestinians must apply to the IDF for a permit even to step outside their town, and any incoming or outgoing goods must first be unloaded at the check-point, then loaded up again onto another truck on the other side. We went to see the wall close up, from the inside. Where there had once been nurseries growing a host of different shrubs, fruits and vegetables, there was now a barren no-man's land. It is difficult to appreciate the true scale of the wall until you walk right up to it. It was while we did this that the IDF shot at us, a group of parents and children, twice, to force us back. As though the feeling of oppressive incarceration were not already enough, to complete the visual imagery there were watchtowers along the length of the wall: rounded, lowering keeps, capped with low-domed concrete roofs with narrow slits for soldiers to peer out and take pot-shots at the town's inmates. We left the wall and went to the zoo. An ordinary, well-kept little zoo whose space for animals was far too limited. It is out of the ordinary because it is a zoo within a zoo. The inner perimeter – the animal zoo – encloses bears, a giraffe, a lion, crocodiles, birds and monkeys. The lion obligingly roared, the hippo came to the fence and yawned open her mouth to show us her vast, fleshy palate, and the giraffe stretched his head over the fence to be fed by the children. Qalqilya itself did not start life as a zoo whose population, like the giraffe, must be fed from across a fence. It was a thriving market town until two years ago, famous for its nurseries, vegetables and fruits. Now that the fence divides the town from the outside world, the farmers from their land, the populace from their vegetable allotments and water supplies, making citizens dependent on humanitarian aid, it is not surprising that many have emigrated to Jordan. Hence the policy of 'voluntary transfer' is already working: the Mayor of Qalqilya reports that up to 20% of its citizens have already left. My first trip to Qalqilya, a few months ago, was to visit the hospital's obstetric department. To illustrate the problem of the check-points, the midwife told us of a 17-year-old first-time mother. She had delivered at home, as many Palestinians now must, fearing being stuck at the check-points. She bled badly after the birth. Her father, a paramedic, rang ahead to get an ambulance from Qalqilya to meet them at the check-point, where he thought the soldiers would allow her through to the waiting ambulance. He was wrong: she was not allowed through, and died of a post-partum haemorrhage, the ambulance a few meters away, unable to help. After seeing the animals, we retreated for lunch: a Palestinian national dish – falafel – from a café on the main square. A van drove past selling gas canisters, ringing out its tinny call-tune. At the falafel café we met a lab technician who can no longer go to his job in a nearby town because he can't get a permit to leave Qalqilya. "Now they are building this wall, they are slowly continuing all the time, flattening everything near it, all the gardens, all the homes. The Israelis have killed everything in Qalqilya. And during Eid they attacked us and killed three, one an eight year-old boy." As we left, my 9 year-old asked if the ambulance we saw being searched at the check-point would be allowed through or not. I asked the soldiers: they were Russian, and spoke no English. But the two Palestinian ambulance-workers looked at us, and said that yes, they were being allowed through – today. "No problem", they smiled, and went on showing the soldiers the contents of their ambulance. My son turned to me and said, "You know, today was OK, I like animals. But zoos – I don't like zoos at all". Beyond the concrete enclosures that imprison first the animals and then the people of Qalqilya, the zoo-within-a-zoo analogy ends - the difference is that Israelis don't come and gawp at these inmates. The purpose of the wall and fence is the opposite: to put the inmates out of sight and out of mind, to remove every vestige of livelihood and dignity from them, and preferably, persuade them to leave. Plus, of course, most other zoo-keepers don't shoot their animals. Date: 19/05/2003
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The Reek of Injustice
Living in Jerusalem for the past two and a half years has meant living Israeli fear: the fear of taking children to school and hearing a suicide bomber detonate himself outside the school gates; of not wanting to go to a restaurant or bar or coffee shop for fear of being blown up; of hesitating to call Israeli friends for fear that one of their children had been killed in the latest Palestinian terrorist atrocity. Living in Jerusalem also means seeing the suffering imposed on three million Palestinians because of these fears. The realities are ugly, difficult to talk about, difficult to believe: the brutality, the injustice, the silencing, the denial, the racism — above all, the Occupation. Most Israelis never go to East Jerusalem; most Palestinians avoid the West. Jerusalem is desperate, beautiful and divided — so clearly divided that you could put up a wall along the seam. Indeed Israel is putting up a wall, but not along the seam. It doesn’t so much divide Israelis from Palestinians as Palestinians from each other, and Palestinians from Israeli settlers, grabbing yet more land in the process; all part of the extremists’ plan to make any future Palestinian state unworkable by expanding the network of colonies, intersecting roads and industrial developments, leaving the Palestinians living between the mesh, in ghettoes. Unhappy word, ghetto; but there is no other word for the enclosures being built around Palestinian towns. Qalqilya, a once thriving market town of 45,000 people, is now shut off from the world by a fence and wall of concrete 24 feet high. There is one exit, guarded by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), who determine whether the occupants, their produce, their food and medicines may or may not pass. The word ‘ghetto’ comes from mediaeval Venice. It described the walled-off quarter in which Jews were obliged to live: a barbarous, discriminatory policy. But they were allowed out of the ghetto when they wanted. And even in the worst days of P.W. Botha, the Bantustans were nothing like as restrictive as life in some of the West Bank cities or Gaza — surrounded by a massive barrier, with armed guards at the only entrance that allows through selected foreigners and a handful of Palestinians with special permits. It is hard to describe the pricking alarm you feel when approaching the giant wall and its concrete watchtowers, manned by IDF soldiers who, for whatever reason, sometimes fire in the direction of the children within. I can say this from experience; it happened to my children, who are six and nine, when I took them to the local zoo. ‘How irresponsible to take your children to such a place!’ I hear the outcry. Blaming the victim is common practice in this conflict. In March a 23-year-old American student, Rachel Corrie, was crushed to death by an IDF bulldozer. The response: she was ‘irresponsible’ to have been there in the first place. It was an image reminiscent of another brave demonstrator, this time in Tiananmen Square, facing down a tank — except that the driver managed to go round, not over, him. Corrie was demonstrating against the demolition of Palestinian homes. Apparently it is the Palestinians’ fault when they see their life savings, possessions, memories — their homes — crushed under the military earth-movers. They shouldn’t build without a permit. But wait; permits are given to Israelis to build illegal settlements on occupied land, yet not to Palestinians to build on their own land. Injustice: the place reeks of it. Drive along the apartheid settler roads. Look at the watered settlement lawns and just beyond to the dusty Palestinian towns where water is rationed. Listen to Palestinian joy at a shower of rain, not because it is good for the crops (or the lawn), but because they might be permitted a little more drinking water. Daily the caged-in Palestinians watch the settlements bloom across the West Bank, riveting the Occupation into what remains of their small share (22 per cent) of Palestine. The start of the Intifada set the scene: before a single Palestinian shot was fired, the world was shocked to see ‘riot control’ that consisted not of baton charges and water-cannon, but of shooting dead scores of stone-throwers and bystanders. After that, the massively disproportionate response to Palestinian provocation, and the disregard for justice and international law, became commonplace. Unless it was bizarre, or directed at foreigners such as Ian Hook, a senior British UN official killed in his office by an IDF sniper, it was rarely considered newsworthy. Almost all studies of violence in the occupied territories have found countless cases of Israelis firing on children, onlookers, old women; of pregnant women dying at IDF checkpoints because they are not allowed through; of hundreds of schools closed, tens of thousands of olive trees uprooted, thousands of houses bulldozed into rubble, entire quarters of historic Palestinian towns razed to the ground. Earlier this year the Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that the IDF fired internationally banned fléchette shells (designed to explode into thousands of razor-sharp darts) at a children’s soccer field in Gaza while boys were playing. Nine were hit. Israel’s supreme court has rejected an appeal by Physicians for Human Rights, an Israeli advocacy group, asking the court to ban their use. Most stories of the daily brutality against Palestinians, unlike those of brutalities against Israelis, are not reported by international witnesses. But some slip through. Chris Hedges of the New York Times witnessed an IDF unit in Gaza taunting children over loudspeakers, in Arabic, to come out and throw stones: ‘“Come on, dogs. Come! Son of a whore! Your mother’s cunt!” whereupon the soldiers shot them with silencers.’ Hedges commented that he had seen children shot in several other conflicts, ‘but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport’. The statistics speak of an Occupation unhindered by international or humanitarian conventions, that keeps thousands in administrative detention, imprisons hundreds of children, and has only recently abolished the official use of torture. B’Tselem, the Israeli human-rights organisation, numbers 102 planned assassinations by the IDF, in which 50 bystanders were also killed. There have been 231 incidents of Palestinian ambulances coming under fire. There is an unspoken consensus among the international community in Jerusalem — at least among those who have any exposure at all to Palestinians — on two points: the enormity of the injustice, and the difficulty of being able to report it fairly. It is the same with diplomatic cables, published UN reports, news stories and articles: you meet the authors, hear their outrage at what they have seen, and then bemoan the reality that their products are unfailingly censored somewhere along the line (often by themselves in order to avoid the ubiquitous charges of anti-Israel bias by chancelleries, lobbies, editors, proprietors and advertisers). There is almost universal admiration for the courage of Israelis who speak out: journalists such as Gideon Levy and Amira Hass who report graphically on the horrors of the Occupation; activists such as Jeff Halper, who takes matters into his own hands (literally) by rebuilding demolished Palestinian houses; Israeli groups who try to protect Palestinian farmers from marauding settlers; the refuseniks who decline to be party to the Occupation, risking prison and ostracism in a society built on military service; and the many Israelis who demonstrate, refusing to succumb to the mass denial that holds the majority in its thrall. Denial makes the continuing brutality and injustice possible; most Israelis are ‘unconscious’ of what is being done in their name. It is impossible to believe that any Israelis who visit the Occupied Territories and see the pitiful state of the lives of Palestinians — screwed down under curfew, humiliated at checkpoints, forced, despite their degrees and skills and dreams, into penury and desperation — would not choke in revulsion. But they are not allowed to go. Nor do they want to. In February, Gershon Baskin described Tel Aviv as teeming with young people enjoying the sunny afternoon, as they should be. ‘But just a few miles away hundreds of thousands of people are living under curfew, locked in their homes and towns. Army jeeps parading the streets screaming “Curfew, curfew — get back into your house”; those who refuse the orders are threatened at gunpoint. This is the reality on both sides.’ One has to imagine what this means. Under curfew, you are in prison but have to fend for yourself, forced to remain indoors for up to eight days at a time, a brief release for an hour or two, and then several days’ curfew again. In the grinding heat of the Middle Eastern summer, a family of 14 people in two rooms, with no running water and no air-conditioning you run out of baby milk because the Israelis didn’t tell you how long the curfew would be, and anyway you have no money as you haven’t been allowed to work for months, and if you step out you are shot on sight, and sometimes if you just go near a window you will be shot. If someone is ill, you have no medicine, and have to risk breaking the curfew to get help. And all the time the children scream because they are hungry and bored and beg to be allowed to go to school or just outside. More than 700 Israelis and 2,000 Palestinians have been killed in this Intifada. That sentence is a problematic one, referring to the deaths of both peoples in the same sentence in order to be even-handed. Israelis call this ‘moral equivalence’ shocking. Many genuinely feel that to compare the intentional, random and innocent deaths caused by suicide bombings to those carried out by the IDF — always ‘with regret’, ‘in self-defence’ or as a ‘preventive measure against more terrorism’ — is an abomination. But there is another way to look at moral equivalence: as the violence of a people who have struggled for 36 years to free their land from foreign military rule, as opposed to the violence of a massively strong army fighting to maintain and tighten that rule — in contravention of far more UN Security Council resolutions than Iraq has ever been. One should be ‘even-handed’, but what is less acceptable is equivalence between the resistance of the occupied and the repression by the illegal occupier. Even-handed is what most members of the international press sincerely try to be, despite the reams of contrary accusations. There is always talk of suffering on both sides, as if they are somehow equal. Justice apart, and even numbers of casualties apart, one has to look at this suffering. It is true that the Israeli economy has declined by 5 per cent, that Israelis are demoralised, that people feel uneasy going to discotheques and shopping centres. But what about the other side? They don’t feel nervous about going to cinemas; they are forcibly prevented from going anywhere at all. Their economy has not declined; it no longer exists. Israelis justify all their actions on the basis of ‘security’, which cannot be compared with Palestinian ‘terror’. For a country whose intelligentsia has more of a conscience than any other in the world, how can so many be so unreflective when it comes to the Palestinians, especially given the security and economic millstone that the settlements represent for Israel? It doesn’t get more racist than this: critics silenced because of the ethnicities involved. I will be accused of racism — racism against the occupiers. There will be letters that accuse me of anti-Semitism; of not acknowledging that this is all in self-defence; that the occupiers don’t like doing this to their victims; that it’s the Palestinians who ‘make’ them do it. After two and a half years of watching the realities of this conflict, travelling and working in the Occupied Territories, getting to know many Israelis and Palestinians, I am left with a sense of the tragic waste of two peoples, their lives and their futures. Of course the Palestinians are guilty of atrocity and injustice, of silencing and racism. Theirs is a brutalised, sometimes brutal society. Many feel they have nothing to lose but their lives, and are ready to commit despicable acts in the process. On the other side, a majority of Israelis feel they have no choice but to trust a government that has brought them nothing but more insecurity and economic difficulty, which appears to have little intention of ending the Occupation, and some of whose members openly advocate ethnic cleansing. Talk of international ‘road-maps’ out of the conflict are to be welcomed, but when the political map proposing reason, hope and peaceful co-existence bears no resemblance to the geographical map, whose reality is an ever-expanding colonisation of steel, concrete and extremist ideology, which map is likely to prevail? And at what cost to Israel’s future? Contact us
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