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Posted on: 02/11/2015
By Charlotte Silver
A group of Palestinians has decided to continue a lawsuit against several US-based “charitable organizations” accused of supporting violent Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.
Although the case had been rejected by a judge, the group has now decided to appeal against the dismissal.
The complaint was originally filed almost two years ago on behalf of thirteen Palestinian residents of the West Bank (two of whom are US citizens), a mosque and a Greek Orthodox monastery. All of the plaintiffs have suffered attacks by settlers.
In May last year, US District Judge Jesse Furman dismissed the complaint, claiming that the plaintiffs had failed to prove the US organizations had intended to facilitate violence.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments for appeal on 15 April. If the case is allowed to go forward it will be the first time for a Palestinian to sue a US-based charity under the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA).
The ATA allows civil action in US courts against those who allegedly support acts of terror. It has been primarily used to prosecute Muslim and Palestinian-Americans.
The plaintiffs have alleged that five US-based, tax-exempt organizations that have given large donations to settlements in the West Bank provided material support for terrorism due to the fact that settlers were known to have undertaken “price tag” attacks on Palestinians and their property. “Price tag” attacks have occurred when buildings or structures erected by settlers without permission from the Israeli authorities have been demolished.
In 2011, the US State Department referred to “price tag” attacks as “terrorist incidents.”
The plaintiffs have suffered attacks by settlers, including by gunfire, firebombs, vandalism of a church or mosque and the burning of farmland.
Tax-exempt
Melito and Adolfsen, the commercial law firm representing the plaintiffs, told The Electronic Intifada that their scope is more narrow than the judge characterized in his dismissal. Their suit is not looking at all settlements in the West Bank or alleging that all settlement activity amounts to terrorism; rather they are focusing on specific fringe settlements — Yitzhar and Bat Ayin — the residents of which espouse the most radical ideologies and carry out some of the worst violence.
These settlements, the suit alleges, have received ample funding from the five organizations that conduct their fundraising campaigns in the US with the benefit of a tax-exempt status.
For example, the Central Fund of Israel, one of the defendants named in the case, has given thousands of dollars to the Yitzhar settlement, which has advocated for such extreme violence that the Israeli army intervened last year. The Israeli government has, however, also funded the Yitzhar settlement.
In 2009, the Yitzhar settlement’s yeshiva — a religious school — published a book that provided a “justification” for killing non-Jews who allegedly pose a threat to Israel. Just last week, Israeli police seized arms from Yitzhar, which they believed were intended to be used against Palestinians.
The five organizations accused of aiding Israeli settlers are The Hebron Fund, Central Fund of Israel, One Israel Fund, Christian Friends of Israel and American Friends of Ateret Cohanim. All are based in New York.
Source:
http://electronicintifada.net
Posted on: Mar. 11, 2015
By Josh Harkinson
A few weeks before Benjamin Netanyahu delivered his controversial address to Congress, theJerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Prime Minister was considering a campaign trip to Hebron, a right-wing settler community in the Israel-occupied West Bank.
The proposed March 10 trip to Hebron, which would have been the first by an Israeli PM in more than a decade, raised eyebrows among Israel’s political class and inflamed tensions with Palestinian groups. Last week, Netanyahu called it off, citing security threats.
Here in the United States, meanwhile, few politicians have questioned why American taxpayers continue to subsidize the Hebron settlers, accused by international observers of human rights violations that includethefts, battery, and murder. In 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available, an estimated 45 percent of the settler community’s funding came from the Brooklyn-based Hebron Fund, whose status as a tax-exempt nonprofit allows Americans to write off donations to the group.
“The Hebron Fund has supported, either directly or indirectly, a wide array of acts that are definitely not charitable,” says John Tye, the legal director for the global activist group Avaaz, which last week petitioned the IRS to revoke the Hebron Fund’s nonprofit status. “They are basically using a small group of Jewish settlers in the West Bank to push Palestinians out of their homes. These settlers are arming themselves, they are engaged in military and paramilitary acts, some of them have connections to terrorism, and they are committing a wide range of crimes against Palestinians.”
The Hebron Fund declined to make anyone available for comment for this story, or to respond to my written questions.
Hebron, a community of some 200,000 Palestinians located about 30 miles south of Jerusalem, is home to several ancient Jewish holy sites. The modern Jewish occupation began in 1967, after the Six Day War. The Hebron Fund was founded in 1979 to support the settlers, who now number around 850.
After years of conflicts between Palestinians and settlers, the historic center of Hebron has come to be known as “The Ghost Town.” It is largely abandoned, with the doors of Arab shops welded shut by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during the second intifada. Palestinians are forbidden from entering much of the area. In other parts of downtown Hebron, Jewish settlers live in buildings above Palestinian shops. The shopkeepers have stretched nets and metal grates over the streets to catch the garbage that settlers routinely throw from their windows:
The behavior of Jewish settlers in Hebron has been repeatedly denounced by human rights groups. In 2001, Human Rights Watch called Hebron “the site of serious and sustained human rights abuses,” including “a consistent failure [by IDF] to protect Palestinians from attacks by Israeli settlers.” In 2011, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem wrote that settlers “have been involved in gunfire, attempts to run people over, poisoning of a water well, breaking into homes, spilling of hot liquid on the face of a Palestinian, and the killing of a young Palestinian girl.”
In 2013, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed “deep concern” at the abusive treatment and harassment directed at a Palestinian activist in Hebron by settler groups and the IDF. Breaking the Silence, another Israeli human rights group comprised of IDF veterans, offers guided tours of Hebron—but only rarely, the group writes on its website, due to “the Hebron settlers’ violence towards our tours and the limited ability of the Hebron police to protect our tours from this violence.”
Just in the past two months, according to B’Tselem, vandals in the Hebron area have destroyed Palestinian olive groves in four locations.
At least one former member of a terrorist organization has joined the Hebron settlement. Baruch Marzel, a one-time spokesman for the extremist Kach Party, which is listed by the United States and Israel as a terrorist group, lives in Hebron’s Tel Rumeida outpost. In 2011, he helped organize a manhunt for a Palestinian man, Hani Jaber, who’d just been released from jail after serving 18 years for killing a Jewish settler. Posters appeared on Hebron walls with Jaber’s face and the words, “Rise up and kill him.”
At times, the Hebron Fund has specifically sought to raise money for controversial settler activities. In 2007, according to Salon, it held a fundraiser on a cruise ship in New York’s Hudson River to support a settler who’d taken property from a Palestinian family. A year and a half later, the Israeli government ruled that the house had been illegally seized from the family and ordered the settlers out. Once evicted, the settlers set fire to Palestinian houses, olive trees, and cars—25 people were wounded, including a man shot at close range.
The United States tax code does not provide detailed information about what can disqualify groups from nonprofit status, though precedent suggests that it includes illegal and discriminatory behavior. In 1974, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that the IRS was justified in revoking the nonprofit status of Bob Jones University over its refusal to admit black students.
The Hebron Fund has not released detailed financial information, making it impossible to determine whether it directly bankrolls prohibited activities. Yet Tye of Avaaz argues that the settlements’ finances are sufficiently fluid and dependent upon the Hebron Fund to make it inherently complicit in any abuses. “I can’t tell you precisely where every dollar has gone,” he says. “But when there is a doubt, the legal burden is on the Hebron Fund to produce documents that show how its money is spent.”
This isn’t the first time a group has asked the IRS to revoke the Hebron Fund’s nonprofit status. In 2009, a similar complaint was submitted by the Washington-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The IRS never responded.
Though Tye believes there’s already sufficient public evidence to revoke the fund’s nonprofit status, he at least wants the IRS to conduct a thorough investigation. A spokesman for the IRS declined to comment on the case, citing a federal law that bars the agency from discussing specific taxpayers.
*** Mother Jones is a nonprofit news organization that specializes in investigative, political, and social justice reporting.
Source:
Posted on: 2014
An Israeli human rights organization has accused the country of torturing Palestinian minors, with reported cases of public 
caging as well as threats and acts of sexual violence.
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) condemned Israel’s failure to protect Palestinian minors from the alleged torture. The group demanded authorities introduce specific provisions for the protection of all children against torture in Israeli domestic law.
The human rights group states that international law against torture, as outlined in the Istanbul Protocol Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture, is not reflected by Israel’s domestic legislature.
PCATI argues that “torture is a means of attacking an individual’s fundamental modes of psychological and social functioning” as described in the Istanbul Protocol. Furthermore, “torture can impact a child directly or indirectly. The impact can be due to the child’s having been tortured or detained, the torture of parents or close family members or witnessing torture and violence.”
The group’s report was published ahead of Tuesday’s hearing by the Knesset’s Public Petitions Committee on related issues. PACTI based their complaint on data from filed reports of abuses against children collected over the past decade.
The practice of placing the children in outdoor cages was stopped once Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni intervened following the discovery, the Jerusalem Post reports.
PCATI states that it continues to actively investigate cases concerning children’s torture and ill treatment by IDF soldiers and interrogators. They are investigating threats and acts of sexual violence, caging prisoners in iron cages (including children), military conduct during detentions and arrests of Palestinians. Their collected data is also supported by a number of NGO’s also involved in documentation of torture allegations.
According to the Israeli Public Defender’s Office, knowledge of people being kept in iron cages surfaced during a night-time inspection of a prison at the height of a recent winter storm. Children were found kept outside in freezing temperatures for hours overnight following their arrest, and until they faced court charges the following morning.
“During our visit, held during a fierce storm that hit the state, attorneys met detainees who described to them a shocking picture: in the middle of the night dozens of detainees were transferred to the external iron cages built outside the IPS transition facility in Ramla,” the Public Defender’s Office wrote on its website.
“It turns out that this procedure, under which prisoners waited outside in cages, lasted for several months, and was verified by other officials.”
PCATI emphasizes that “failure to allow the arrested child or minor to full enjoyment of his or her rights, including the failure to allow for an attorney or accompanying adult at the time of arrest and interrogation places the child in a state of helplessness, distress and increases the pressure being applied to the child by the security forces in order to achieve a confession or information during the interrogation.”
PCATI says that the threshold for an “act of abuse” by Israel must be lowered when it comes to children. The NGO also believes that children and adults have the right to rehabilitation. The human rights group also says that abuse cases have the right to have their complaints fully examined and be “accompanied by a representative of their choosing when giving testimony to an Israeli investigator.”
Citing this year’s report by Defense of Children International (DCI-Palestine) and Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights (LPHR), PACTI reiterated that “Israel is the only nation to automatically and systematically prosecute children in military courts that lack basic and fundamental fair trial guarantees.”
The human rights association estimates that up to 700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12 years-old, are subject to Israeli military detention system each year.
“The majority of Palestinian child detainees are charged with throwing stones, and 74 percent experience physical violence during arrest, transfer or interrogation,” according to evidence collected by Defence for Children International Palestine. Furthermore, “no Israeli children come into contact with the military court system.”
Source: RT news
Posted: December 20, 2014
By Samer Badawi
Diyaa was knocked to the floor of his family home, kicked, and beaten by Israeli soldiers.
For speaking these words, Diyaa was knocked to the floor of his family home, kicked, and beaten by Israeli soldiers who, two weeks earlier, had done the same to his two friends. It was 3 am, and Diyaa’s parents could only watch as their 16-year-old son was dragged to an army jeep, blindfolded, and—like thousands of Palestinian children before him—forced into a military detention center in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
What happened next, according to affidavits given by Diyaa and his friends, fits a pattern of Israeli abuse designed to coerce confessions from Palestinian children. Among the most troubling of their experiences were prolonged periods of solitary confinement, a correctional tactic usually reserved for adult prisoners—and, even then, only after they are convicted.
“Although it’s true that, in the United States, children and juvenile offenders are sometimes held in solitary confinement—either as a disciplinary measure or to separate them from adult populations—in Israeli military detention, Palestinian children are held in solitary confinement for interrogation purposes,” said Brad Parker, international advocacy officer and attorney for DCI-Palestine.
That, says Parker, “amounts to torture under international law.”
Isolation, interrogation, and beatings
On the day of his detention, 16-year-old Diyaa remembers being thrown into a windowless cell, where he was to spend the next 15 days. During that time, he emerged only to be escorted to an interrogation room. He estimates that he was interrogated 15 times, for two hours each—all with his feet and hands bound to “a low metal chair.”
The interrogator accused Diyaa of throwing stones, an offense that, according to a November 2009 Israeli military order, could carry a sentence of up to 20 years. “I kept saying I wanted to see a lawyer,” Diyaa recalls.
“He asked me when I threw stones and with whom, but I did not answer. He interrogated me for about two hours. He did the same the following five days.”
On the fifth day, Diyaa relented. “I had to confess to throwing stones because of my horrible detention conditions in the cell. I also thought they would transfer me to a regular prison if I confessed.” But even after his “confession,” Diyaa was thrown back into his cell. His isolation was to last another 10 days, punctuated by more interrogations and, this time, beatings.
“One of the jailers used to beat me whenever I knocked on the door to ask for something,” Diyaa told DCI-Palestine. “He would come to the cell with another jailer, tie my hands and feet, and kick me hard while I was on the floor, and punch me on my stomach and head without any mercy.”
Forced confessions
The aim, it turned out, was to extract another confession—for a specific stone-throwing incident to which Diyaa’s friend had, according to the interrogator, already admitted.
But in sworn testimony to DCI-Palestine, Diyaa denied any involvement in the incident:
“The interrogator said that my friend Thabet accused me in his statement of throwing stones with him at a settler car, that the car overturned and the passengers were injured. I told him that was not true, and that I was at the local supermarket when I heard about the incident.”
Diyaa’s friend Thabet, it turns out, had just admitted to stoning a car carrying residents of an illegal settlement near his hometown of Nablus, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. But the 16-year-old’s “confession” came after four days of solitary confinement and abuse, culminating in a threat so terrifying that Thabet immediately agreed to whatever charges had been leveled against him.
According to Thabet, an Israeli interrogator told him: “If you don’t confess, I’ll have both of your parents arrested, brought here to this room, and killed.”
“I was scared they would actually do what they said they would do about arresting and killing my parents,” Thabet told DCI-Palestine. “So I confessed. I confessed to throwing stones several times at a settler car, and the stones hit the car and overturned it, and that the passengers were injured, as I [recall].”
Fending for themselves
Until their “confessions,” Diyaa, Thabet, and a third friend—17-year-old Bashar, also accused of stone-throwing—were left to fend for themselves, deprived of family visits and legal counsel. Parker says this, too, is part of a pattern of Israeli abuse:
“[Child detainees] are often denied access to an attorney until after being subjected to several days of prolonged interrogation and isolation,” according to Parker. “The apparent goal,” he says, “is to obtain a confession” at all costs.
Between the three of them, Diyaa, Thabet, and Bashar spent a combined total of 62 days in solitary confinement. In 40 similar cases documented by DCI-Palestine between 2012 and 2013, the average time an individual child spent in solitary confinement was 10 days. The longest period of confinement documented in a single case was 29 total days in 2012 while, in 2013, another child was held in isolation for 28 total days.
“This pattern of abuse by Israel is grave,” said Richard Falk, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Falk, who is also a professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, called Israel’s use of solitary confinement against children “inhumane, cruel, degrading, and unlawful; and, most worryingly, it is likely to adversely affect the mental and physical health of underage detainees.”
An October 2013 report by The New York Times on the use of interrogations among teenagers held in US prisons concluded that the detainees were “too young to know better,” often incriminating themselves without understanding their legal rights.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, child detainees have no such rights. Between 2008 and 2013, DCI-Palestine documented 80 cases of Palestinian children held in solitary confinement prior to being charged with any offense.
Torture
“Using solitary confinement in this way is conduct that amounts to torture under international law,” says Parker. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has explicitly found that solitary confinement, when “used intentionally during pretrial detention as a technique for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession” amounts to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
In more than 97 percent of cases documented by DCI-Palestine between 2012 and 2013, “children held in solitary confinement were not properly informed of their right to silence, were denied access to legal counsel and did not have a family member present during interrogation,” according to a May 2014 report prepared by the organization. In the same time period, more than three-quarters of child detainees were strip searched, subject to physical abuse, and denied access to food and water.
In some cases, Israeli authorities use solitary confinement to punish children already detained as political prisoners. In April of this year, a 15-year-old Palestinian from East Jerusalem, who had been sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for stone-throwing, was subject to 25 days of isolation for refusing food—a desperate measure that, he says, was intended to protest the harsh conditions in which he was being held. Obaida, whose last name was withheld at his family’s request, told DCI-Palestine that his jailers threatened to tie him to his bed and force-feed him if he did not end his hunger strike.
Widespread abuse
According to the cases DCI-Palestine documented in 2012 and 2013, some 20 percent of Palestinian child detainees were subjected to solitary confinement during their interrogations. Any “confessions” extracted by this practice are suspect, say legal experts. Yet, like older political detainees, Palestinian children stand little chance of defending themselves in Israeli military courts, which function under a set of directives designed explicitly to “administer” Israel’s occupation.
“Israeli military court judges rarely exclude confessions or other evidence extracted from coercive interrogations,” says Parker. “Palestinian child detainees are denied access to counsel, ill-treated and tortured, and then find themselves before a military court process that falls drastically short of international juvenile justice standards.”
As of September, DCI-Palestine recorded 182 Palestinian children in Israeli detention. Since 2000, an estimated 8,000 Palestinian children have been detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system.
As for Diyaa, Thabet, and Bashar, the three friends have since appeared before a military judge to face charges for stone-throwing. The three have been removed from solitary confinement, but they face an uncertain fate in a court system that is not their own. Meanwhile, the three continue to be haunted by the memory of their arrest and interrogation.
“I was very scared of them,” Thabet said of his interrogators. “There were five of them, and they were huge compared to me.”
* Samer Badawi is a freelance contributor to Defense for Children International Palestine. Based in Washington, DC, he spent the summer reporting in Gaza for +972 Mag. Follow him@samwithaner.
Posted on: 20 Apr 2013
Palestinian teenager as a human shield during confrontations with protesters in the West Bank.
Muhammad R, 17, was used as a human shield by Israeli border police during clashes with protesters in the West Bank town of Abu Dis. (Photo courtesy of Huthifa Jamous)
Ramallah, April 20, 2013—Defence for Children International Palestine is disturbed by Israeli border police using a Palestinian teenager as a human shield during confrontations with protesters in the West Bank town of Abu Dis on Friday.
British journalist Kate Arno caught Israeli border police on video as they grabbed Muhammad R, 17, out of their armored vehicle onto the street and forced him to stand with them while they fired at protesters. His hands remained tied with a single plastic cord and held above his head throughout the incident. One of the policemen can be seen flashing the V-for-victory sign. The clashes between Palestinian youth and Israeli forces erupted during a demonstration in support of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike, according to news report.
“We’re outraged that Israeli soldiers continue to use Palestinian children as human shields with impunity,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, Accountability Program director at DCI-Palestine. “The teen in this case was deliberately exposed to danger after he had been taken into custody. Israeli authorities must conduct a prompt, transparent and impartial investigation and hold the perpetrators accountable.”
Israeli border police spokesman Shai Hachimi told Agence France-Presse that the police officer in charge only wanted to show the youth was unharmed during his arrest. He denied that the teenager was used as a human shield.
While transferring Muhammad to the Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim in the West Bank for interrogation, the border policemen allegedly roughed him up. His father told DCI-Palestine that he caught up with his son at the police station and saw him at a distance. Muhammad was struggling to stand on his right leg and his face was bruised, the father said. After questioning, Muhammad was taken to Ofer prison in the West Bank, according to his lawyer, Shadi Zaatreh.
Muhammad has enlarged tonsils and adenoids that restrict his breathing, according to his father. He requires medication to sleep at night and uses an inhaler throughout the day.
In February, DCI-Palestine documented a case where Israeli soldiers forced a 9-year-old Palestinian boy at gunpoint to walk among them while they confronted Palestinian demonstrators near Ofer prison outside Ramallah.
Since 2004, DCI-Palestine has documented 21 cases of Palestinian children used as human shields by Israeli forces, 20 of which occurred after the 2005 decision by the Israeli High Court of Justice prohibiting the practice under Israeli domestic law.
The use of human shields is prohibited by international humanitarian law, and involves the forced presence of civilians to shield an area or soldiers from harm or forcing civilians to directly assist in military operations.
Video:
@Kate_arno abudes
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-VWY-dTfas#t=75
Posted on: 27 Aug 2012
Violence against Palestinian children
The Israel Defence Force’s arbitrary use of violence against Palestinian children, including forcing them to act as human shields in military operations, has been exposed by veteran soldiers in detailed statements chronicling dozens of brutal incidents.
The most disturbing trend that emerges from the soldiers’ testimonies relates to the wounding and killing of children in the occupied West Bank and Gaza by either targeted shooting or by failing to protect minors during military operations, the report from veteran soldiers’ group Breaking the Silence says.
“If I am frightened of the soldiers I will not live my life, so it is better not to be afraid.”
“The commander gripped the kid, stuck his gun in his mouth . . . The kid was hardly able to walk. We dragged him further, and then he said again: ‘One more time this kid lifts a stone, anything, I kill him. No mercy’,” one former soldier states.
Video
Another recalls: “There was an ambush where a kid coming up with a Molotov cocktail had his leg blown off. They laid ambush exactly at that spot. Kids came, the soldiers were there, the kids lit a bottle, and they were shot in the leg.”
The release of the testimonies follows the publication of two damning reports — one from a group of eminent British lawyers who visited Israel’s military courts and the other from the human rights organisation Defence of Children International — that detail multiple violations of international law by Israel in its treatment of children.
These include Israel’s practice of holding Palestinian children in solitary confinement and denying them legal representation, as well as its use of physical violence, shackles and coerced confessions in interrogations.
“It is crucial that people in Israel are confronted about what it means for Palestinian children to live under military occupation,” says Yehuda Shaul, one of the founders of Breaking the Silence.
All the incidents detailed in the report occurred in what Israel admits is a “quiet period” — from 2005 to 2011, after the violence and suicide bombings of the second Palestinian intifada, in which at least 972 Israelis and 3315 Palestinians died.
Israeli soldiers and Palestinian children come into regular conflict as Israel seeks to maintain its control over areas of the West Bank where 300,000 settlers live across the 1967 “Green Line” in contravention of international law.
Children throw stones to protest against the presence of soldiers and settlers, sometimes with deadly consequences, soldiers say.
But that does not excuse the use of excessive force against children or the military’s consistent arbitrary invasion of villages and homes as part of a campaign to suppress the Palestinian population of the West Bank, Mr Shaul says.
“Every soldier who has served in the occupied territories has these images of breaking into a house in the middle of the night, little children are crying, you wake up the family,” he says.
“That is 24 hours a day, seven days a week you have patrols that bump into random houses and disrupt the life of people — that is idea — it is what we call in the military litzur tchushat nirdafaut’ or ‘to create the feeling of being chased’.”
Mr Shaul says it is only once soldiers have finished their active duty and begin to think as civilians that they can see the military’s actions in a different light — when the order to shoot to kill a child who is 200 metres away and not threatening anyone stops making sense. “This is what our society is made of, you cannot ignore it, you cannot just run away from it — this is who we are as people and I think this is something we should face.”
But according to the Israeli government, Palestinian children pose a grave threat to the country’s security.
“Over a period of years now we have seen Palestinian minors involved in violence against Israeli civilians, whether it is throwing rocks at cars, whether it is throwing petrol bombs or Molotov cocktails,” says Mark Regev, the spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“We have established a parallel system to deal with minors because we recognise minors have special needs and . . . we are trying to do this in a manner that is as sensitive as possible in very difficult conditions.”
It was unfortunate, Mr Regev said, that militant Palestinian organisations chose to put minors “on the front line”.
He urged anyone with a complaint against the Israel Defence Forces to come forward.
“We have a very strict code of behaviour under which our soldiers are allowed to act and if there are violations of that code of behaviour soldiers face discipline and they can go to jail.
“There is an independent part of the military that investigates all such allegations . . . I don’t think it is the norm but in any large system there are aberrations and we have to stamp them out.”
Sixteen-year-old Anan Tamimi has been arrested three times by the IDF, and released each time without charge.
He lives in the West Bank village of al-Nabi Saleh, where there are weekly clashes between the army and residents, who are protesting against attempts by Israelis from the Halamish settlement and its outposts to take over the al-Qawas Spring and the surrounding land.
Two human rights organisations — B’Tselem and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel — have consistently expressed grave concerns about the behaviour of the IDF at al-Nabi Saleh.
The first time Anan was taken by the IDF, the soldiers came at 3am. His mother, Bushra Tamimi, says at one point there were more than 30 soldiers, some with dogs, on the second floor of the family’s home.
The soldiers had a photograph and they were searching Anan’s closet and drawers to try to find clothes that matched the person in the photograph, Mrs Tamimi told the Age. They found nothing to link her son to the photograph, but they took him anyway.
“When they took me outside the house . . . they turned my hands back to my back and they tied my hands with this plastic tie and blindfolded my eyes immediately,” Anan says.
“I spent 17 hours in the settlement here . . . then they transferred me to Ofer [Prison] . . . on the fourth day they took me to the court and . . . I was released.”
The second time he was arrested, he was again taken to the nearby settlement of Halamish, where after several hours he was released, still with his hands tied tightly behind his back and blindfolded, on the side of the road and left to find his own way home, Anan says.
Soon after, using the same photograph that had been found by the IDF’s own military court to have no link to Anan, he was again arrested.
This time the 16-year-old spent 15 days in Ofer Prison before he was released without charge.
With the quiet bravado of a teenage boy, he says he is not worried about whether the Israeli army will raid his house again at night and take him away.
“If I am frightened of the soldiers I will not live my life, so it is better not to be afraid.”
The most common offence children are accused of is throwing stones, says Gerard Horton, head of Defence of Children International in Palestine.
“But in many cases it is very difficult for the army to actually identify who was throwing the stones . . . so the modus operandi of the army appears to be that when an incident of stone-throwing does occur someone has to be punished for that even if you cannot identify who the perpetrator is.
“The army needs to maintain control in the West Bank and they need provide protection to 300,000 settlers who are living in the West Bank, contrary to international law. In order to do that they need to make sure that any form of resistance, no matter what form that takes, has to be crushed.”
The IDF’s spokesman, Major Arye Shalicar, said the security situation in the West Bank had improved significantly because of the army’s work.
“In the end if you compare it to 10 years ago we have had a decline in suicide attacks,” he said.
“We had hundreds of suicide murders in 2002 and none in 2012. It shows that there is some kind of effectiveness in the actions of the security establishment and its coordination with the Palestinian security forces.”
If there was maltreatment of Palestinian children it was important that the IDF investigate the claims, he said.
He expressed frustration that Breaking the Silence did not provide the IDF or other relevant bodies with the information necessary to launch an investigation.
But Mr Shaul said it was important that Breaking the Silence protected the identity of its sources, many of whom were breaching IDF policy to expose the system of abuse.
Extracts from testimonies of Israeli soldiers
First Sergeant, Kfir Brigade
“The commander gripped the kid, stuck his gun in his mouth, yelled … The kid was hardly able to walk. We dragged him further, and then he said again: ‘One more time this kid lifts a stone, anything, I kill him. No mercy’.”
Kfir Brigade, Ramallah
“We had lots of X’s (marked on the side of a soldier’s rifle, indicating the number of people he’s killed] at that time. The battalion loved it. There was an ambush around there where a kid coming up with a Molotov cocktail had his leg blown off. They laid ambush exactly at that spot. Kids came, the soldiers were there, the kids lit a bottle, and they were shot in the leg.”
First Sergeant, Nablus
“We would enter villages on a daily basis, at least twice or three times a day, to make our presence felt, and … it was like we were occupying them. Showing we’re there, that the area is ours, not theirs. At first you point your gun at some five-year-old kid, and feel bad afterward, saying it’s not right. Then you get to a point where … you get so nervous and sick of going into a village and getting stones thrown at you.”
First Sergeant, Hebrón
“So there’s a school there. We’d often provoke riots there. We’d be on patrol, walking in the village, bored, so we’d trash shops, find a detonator, beat someone to a pulp, you know how it is. Search, mess it all up. Say we’d want a riot? We’d go up to the windows of a mosque, smash the panes, throw in a stun grenade, make a big boom, then we’d get a riot.”
Source:
http://www.dci-palestine.org
By Dina Elmuti
Fouzi, 16, works in the agricultural fields of the Israeli settlement of Hamra in the Jordan Valley region of the West Bank. (Dina Elmuti / DCI Palestine)
The invisible workers of Israeli settlements.
The Palestinian Authority prohibits children from working in Israeli settlements, and under Israeli law employing minors is illegal, resulting in a workforce that is invisible under the law and not guaranteed basic protections and rights, writesDina Elmuti.
The summer air grew considerably hotter as we drove down to the Jordan Valley. Its red fertile soil radiated heat beneath our feet as we walked toward the lush agricultural field dotted with young boys picking vegetables.
Wearing a red hoodie over his baseball cap, Omar, 17, quickly jumped off a tractor to greet us. He appeared thin and sun-burned and his hands felt calloused from picking vegetables bare-handed. Omar’s younger brother, Fouzi, 16, wearing a baseball cap and carrying his plastic bucket, followed close behind. Beads of sweat trickled down their faces as they proudly displayed the eggplants and peppers they had collected over the past five hours.
Four years ago, Omar became the primary breadwinner for his eight member family after his father passed away. In significant debt due to medical bills, Omar began picking, cleaning and packaging fruits and vegetables near the agricultural fields of the Israeli settlement of Hamra in the Jordan Valley.
When balancing work and school became exhausting, both Omar and Fouzi left school to work full time in the fields. Depending on the season, around 10,000 to 20,000 Palestinian laborers work in Israeli agricultural settlements in the Jordan Valley. Approximately five to 10 percent of these workers are child laborers, according to the Maan Development Center.
One of the most restricted places on earth, the Jordan Valley is home to vast swaths of rich agricultural land used by Israeli settlements. Since 1967, Israel has implemented systematic measures to ensure absolute control over the region, depriving Palestinians of their right to their own resources.
While Israeli settlers make up 13 percent of the population, they effectively control 86 percent of the land. The annual value of agricultural production in the Jordan Valley settlements is estimated at about $132.6 million, according to a report by the Palestinian human rights organization, Al Haq.
Omar and Fouzi are from the West Bank village of Duma, 13 miles southeast of Nablus. During the months they work, they stay in storage units near the Hamra settlement sleeping on tiny cots for months at a time.
“We work up to 10 hours or more and we don’t get many breaks to drink water and rest throughout the day,” says Fouzi. “The units we sleep in are very cramped and humid; sometimes it feels like we’re choking, but we’re used to it.”
At the end of each week, they send the money they earn home to their mother. Child laborers earn an average of 40 to 60 NIS ($12 to $18) per day. This is not even enough to buy a bag of flour to feed her family, Omar and Fouzi’s mother, Muntaha, says.
Palestinian children as young as 11 work up to 12 hours a day, in temperatures that can reach up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit and drop to 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
Child laborers can suffer from injuries and chronic pain due to long hours, poor working conditions and the harsh physical nature of the work. The use of inorganic pesticides and fertilizers is widespread and unregulated in the Jordan Valley, creating highly polluted runoff water with high levels of chemicals to which children are exposed.
Exposure to these chemicals can have grave long-term consequences including hormonal, renal and nervous system abnormalities, and cancer.
Palestinian child laborers are undocumented, meaning no records of their hours worked are kept. They are paid in cash so that there is no proof of them working on settlements, and they have no official status, health insurance, or rights as employees. Settlers that employ them are well aware of this.
“Last year, one boy fell off the tractor and injured his back. He’s nearly paralyzed and didn’t have insurance so he can’t work,” shares Omar, eyeing the tractor he was just riding.
Undocumented child laborers are more vulnerable to exploitation, fearful of complaining or exposing any rights abuse that may jeopardize their source of income and safety.
“Cases of sexual assault and abuse are very common in settlements,” according to Amjad Jaber, director of the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Labor office in Jericho. “I hear horrific stories from many women and children, who are most vulnerable to the abuse.”
Limited vocational training or other alternatives forces many Palestinian families to turn to waseets. Families trust waseets to find work for their children in Israeli settlements. Many waseets were child laborers themselves.
Waseets generally take commissions from the wages of the child laborers they recruit. Some also collect fees for housing and transportation. Israeli settlers pay higher wages to waseets because their services make running the entire agricultural settlement enterprise affordable and profitable.
The Palestinian Authority prohibits children from working in the settlements, and under Israeli law employing minors is illegal, which results in a workforce that is invisible under the law and not guaranteed basic protections and rights.
“I view the use of child labor inside settlements as a form of human trafficking,” said Khaled Quzmar, an attorney at Defence for Children International Palestine, who was involved in drafting the Palestinian Labor Law that went into effect in 2000.
“Child labor is a very complicated issue,” says Quzmar. “The fractured legal system in the West Bank makes it easy to exploit child labor because Palestinian Labor Law only applies to children working in areas under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction, not Israeli settlements.”
Sitting down with Omar and Fouzi’s mother, Muntaha, in Duma, the sound of distress in her voice over her dependency on her children’s work is clear.
“No mother wants to send her children to work in a settlement. Of course not,” Muntaha sighs. “But what choice do we have?”
Source:
http://www.dci-palestine.org
Posted on: 31 Dec 2014
Israeli forces detain a Palestinian boy following a protest on September 26, 2014 in the village of Silwad, north of Ramallah.
For many observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 2014 will be remembered for the images it broadcast to the world from the Gaza Strip. These images depicted children fleeing from heavy bombing and shelling by Israeli forces, taking shelter with their families in crowded UN schools, or convalescing in Gaza’s overstretched hospitals. Among the most tragic were those that showed the bodies of four young boys, aged between 7 and 11, killed by a projectile fired by the Israeli navy, as they played on a Gaza beach during the offensive.
But the suffering of Palestinian children was not limited to the 50-day offensive on the Gaza Strip, nor was it limited to the geographical confines of the 25 square mile coastal enclave. In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, it was Palestinian children who continued to pay the heaviest price for the ongoing Israeli military occupation.
Wholesale violations of children’s rights across the Occupied Palestinian Territory led to numerous fatalities and injuries, as well as psychological trauma resulting from collective punishment policies that affected children, such as house raids and demolitions.
Here are the five factors that most affected Palestinian children in 2014, as observed by DCI-Palestine.
Violence in Gaza
According to DCI-Palestine’s research, at least 480 children lost their lives in the 50-day military offensive, dubbed Operation Protective Edge, that saw vast swathes of the Gaza Strip flattened. The children who died made up a fifth of the 2,205 Palestinians who were killed during the conflict. Many more thousands of children were wounded, with approximately 1,000 sustaining permanent disabilities.
The high number of child and civilian fatalities raised critical questions about the disproportionate use of force by the Israeli military, and the illegal targeting of locations protected under international law such as schools, hospitals and shelters. Top UN human rights official Navi Pillaystated publicly that war crimes may have been committed by Israeli forces.
DCI-Palestine documentation also uncovered one instance in which the Israeli military used a Palestinian child as a human shield. This case involved a 16-year-old boy who was detained for five days, physically assaulted, and made to search for tunnels inside the Gaza Strip.
Though the media focused on the violence throughout the conflict, fatalities and injuries were being recorded even before the start of Operation Protective Edge. Before the conflict began, three children lost their lives as a result of Israeli gunfire or airstrikes, while at least 43 were injured in similar circumstances.
Since the end of the offensive reconstruction has been limited, despite the easing of the blockade being a key factor in reaching a ceasefire agreement. Children displaced during the conflict have remained in shelters into the winter season, which brought with it widespread flooding across the Strip.
Military detention, solitary confinement
Military detention is a reality for hundreds of Palestinian children each year, exposing them to physical and psychological violence, interrupting education, contributing to mental health issues, and placing large numbers of families under stress. This continued to be the case in 2014.
This year, the average number of children held in Israeli military detention stood at 197 per month, largely unchanged from the 2013 figure of 199 per month. This stable figure, however, masks the undercurrent of change taking place within the system, with a clampdown on Palestinian youth becoming apparent in the second half of 2014.
In September, a new military order, involving the interrogation of children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, appeared to safeguard children’s rights. On closer inspection, however, it became clear that children arrested for throwing stones – that is, the majority of children entangled in the Israeli military court system – would not be protected by the new law.
In November, the Israeli cabinet approved a bill extending the maximum penalty for those found guilty of throwing stones to 20 years, equivalent to the longest possible sentence for manslaughter. This bill also applied to children.
As a backdrop to these developments, the use of solitary confinement as a means of coercing confessions, and the arbitrary use of house arrest, continued to prevent Palestinian children from enjoying their rights as enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Settler violence
Settlers – Israelis who live in the West Bank in settlements that are deemed illegal under international law – have long been attacking Palestinians, including children. In June, DCI-Palestine published a report detailing incidents of settler attacks that took place in 2013, including attacks on children as they made their way to school and on school buildings during classes.
The report noted the implicit cooperation of soldiers in settler attacks, including cases in which soldiers either ignored overt attacks or even participated in the violence.
Documenting settler violence, DCI-Palestine found that 129 instances of settler attacks against children were recorded between 2008 and 2012. The announcement in October of a further 1,000 new settler homes across East Jerusalem will likely expose Palestinian children to further violence, as the number of Israeli settlers living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory continues to swell.
Live ammunition and deaths across the West Bank
At least 11 Palestinian children in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, lost their lives in 2014 after being shot with live ammunition by Israeli soldiers. Fatalities increased in the aftermath of the killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank in June and the subsequent revenge killing of 16-year-old Palestinian Mohammad Abu Khdeir, who was murdered in early July. This, as well as the conflict in Gaza during July and August, led to a rise in protests and a clampdown on Palestinian youth in East Jerusalem by the Israeli military.
Israeli forces stationed in East Jerusalem and the West Bank routinely used excessive force to disperse crowds, including using live ammunition, resulting in injuries and fatalities to children. Live ammunition, according to the Israeli military’s own regulations, must only be used in circumstances in which a direct, mortal threat is posed to a soldier. DCI-Palestine, to date, has found no evidence that suggests that the children killed in 2014 were posing such a threat at the time of their shooting.
In May, two teenagers, Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Salameh Abu Daher, were fatally shot with live ammunition as they protested outside Ofer military prison in the West Bank town of Beitunia. CCTV and news footage of the event clearly indicated that both boys were unarmed at the moment that they were shot during a lull in the protest. In the aftermath, Israeli officials first disputed the legitimacy of the video evidence, and then categorically denied that live fire was used during the protest: weeks later, it was proven that both teens were killed by live bullets.
In an unusual move by Israeli authorities, a border policeman has been charged with manslaughter for the killing of Nadeem. For the other children who died in 2014, however, justice remains unlikely: no soldiers or border policemen have been charged with their deaths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGo4Z7-Pmbo
Collective punishment
Israeli policies designed to collectively punish the civilian population, including children, continued apace across the Occupied Palestinian Territory. During Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza, the overwhelming majority of children were killed when their homes were bombed by Israeli missiles. In one case, 18 children from the same extended family, aged between 4 months and 14 years old, died when their home was bombed in an Israeli airstrike, which, authorities claimed, was targeting a Hamas member visiting the building at the time.
In the West Bank, Israeli authorities regularly approved the demolition of houses of thosesuspected, but not convicted, of crimes. The demolition of homes in which children are living contributes to psychological trauma, the interruption of education, and significant distress, and have been condemned by human rights groups in recent years.
Source:
http://www.dci-palestine.org
Posted on: 4 February 2015
By Ghada Ageel
Children are the most precious natural resource that communities and humanity have.
The League of Nations Declaration of 1924 pledges, “Mankind owes to the child the best it has to give.” The Declaration stressed that children should have “by right” the means necessary for their normal development. The 1959 UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child affirmed the rights set forth by the League of Nations and noted that children need “special safeguards and care” and that a child has to enjoy “special protection”.
Neglecting these rights and safeguards harms children and endangers their self-esteem, healthy growth and development. Violating these rights using systematic and institutional oppression harms not only the psychological, social and emotional well-being of a child, but also the future resources of nations. Even when children are not direct victims of a traumatic event, they can still be harmed by witnessing it transpire against their friends, their family members and the community at large.
Growing up in a refugee camp among many children whose fathers weren’t around to care for them made me aware at a very early age that I did have my father. Some fathers were locked up in Israeli jails with a very limited number of visits, where children briefly talked to their fathers behind bars and were not allowed to be with them in person. Other fathers worked in Israel for most of the week, meaning they left the camp at dawn and returned at night when children were already in bed. The fathers of some children were even more distant, having travelled to the Gulf to provide for their families. And, of course, the fathers of some children had been killed by the Israeli military. Some children grew up, got married, and even had their own children while their fathers were behind bars.
In the camp, however, we share almost everything. We share pain and love and also the thin resources we have. Orphans and children of prisoners in particular receive special care. But there were always occasions such as Eid days, marriages, funerals of close family members or days when a child would be asked to bring his dad to school – for good or bad reasons – that no matter what the community did, these children would feel alone or broken.
I will never forget the words of my relative, Maysa, then a six-year-old girl, whose dad was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Our neighbour, Ni’ma, had her second baby boy. This was a nice opportunity for many of the women and children of the camp to gather at her home to have a cup of tea celebrating the new arrival and to provide help in selecting a name for the child. Maysa, a shy girl, loudly shouted “call him Baba.” All the children burst into laughter and the women paused talking. Maysa ran out of the room battling her tears. The next day, I visited Maysa’s home and talked to her mom who said that Maysa missed her dad very much and always woke up at night asking for him and calling “Baba.” In calling the child Baba (father in Arabic), Maysa wanted to fulfill her desperate need to utter the word, but was also conveying the profound sense of love that the word carried for her.
More than two decades after that story, the violations of Palestinian children’s rights are still occurring and the mental and physical well-being of children is deteriorating. The “opportunities and facilities” granted by law and by other means” for healthy and normal physical, mental, moral, spiritual, and social development “in conditions of freedom and dignity,” have never been fulfilled for Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank.
On 21 January, the Israeli military court in Ofer prison sentenced a 14-year-old child, Malak al-Khatib, from Beiteen village in the West Bank, to two months imprisonment and a suspended fine of 6000 shekels (£1000). The girl was arrested on charges of throwing stones and having a knife in her schoolbag, charges which her father described as baseless, accusing the soldiers of falsifying their testimonies.
In a stark violation of international treaties and laws regarding the protection of children, Malak was subjected to interrogation and harsh treatment without legal representation. Her family was never allowed to see her and her mom was prevented from approaching or talking to her during the court hearing.
Malak is one of the youngest girls ever detained and sentenced by Israel. As of November 2014, Defence for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P) recorded 156 Palestinian children in Israeli detention. Since 2000, an estimated 8,000 Palestinian children have been detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system. And, of course, more than 538 Palestinian children were killed and over 1,500 became orphans in Israel’s military assault on Gaza in 2014.
DCI-P also reported that 75 percent of Palestinian children imprisoned by Israel were physically assaulted during interrogation and detentions. UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has documented violations of children’s rights, including patterns of killing and injuries, arrest, ill-treatment and torture, displacement and denial of access to health and education services.
While hundreds of children are subjected to imprisonment every year, all Palestinian children face other sources of violations. Too many are subjected to house demolitions and movement restrictions, both of which cause considerable turmoil and pain for children and their families.House demolitions, used routinely as collective punishment, can have an immense psychological impact. In 2014 alone, according to UNRWA, more than 96,000 homes were damaged or destroyed by Israel in its 51-day assault on Gaza.
Israeli officials know that this policy hits Palestinians in the heart. This form of punishment denies Palestinian children a sense of belonging, a concept of possession and an idea of home. It’s as if the occupation were designed to strip Palestinian children of their last sanctum of physical protection. Confined within an open-air prison in Gaza and within the Bantustans of the West Bank, the message is clear: you are not welcome in this land. In a recent report published by the Israeli rights group, B’tselem, Israel was criticised for a deliberate policy of airstrikes on Palestinian homes during its 2014 aggression on Gaza.
The report stated that a hallmark of the 2014 Gaza aggression “was the numerous [Israeli] strikes on residential buildings, destroying them while their occupants were still inside.” “There is no question,” the report added, “that this is not the outcome of a low-level decision, but rather a matter of policy, a policy that in some cases has violated international humanitarian law, in other cases raises severe questions.” For many, this is “old news”. Similar conclusions were reached by numerous respected international reports, including Goldstone’s and the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. The question is whether any Israeli official will be held accountable. Will human rights and the protections for human dignity ever restore the wholeness that has been broken by Israeli patterns of deliberate incidents of dehumanisation and marginalisation of Palestinian children.
The struggle for Palestinian children to regain their rights and dignity is the struggle to restore the future in all its fullness. It is, however, a task the international community is failing every day in Gaza as reconstruction projects languish and Palestinian children continue to suffer the ravages that came with the shock of Israel’s intense bombardment of that tiny parcel of land in July and August of last year.
Donor countries have made their pledges. Yet no one in Gaza expects them to be good to their word. These empty promises are, of course, a far cry from providing “special safeguards and care” for children.
– Ghada Ageel is a visiting professor at the University of Alberta Political Science Department (Edmonton, Canada), an independent scholar, and active in the Faculty4Palestine-Alberta. Her new book “Apartheid in Palestine: Hard Laws and harder experiences” is forthcoming with the University of Alberta Press – Canada.
Source:
http://www.middleeasteye.net
Posted on: 2007
By Mohammed Omer
“AYYAM ZAMAN” is Arabic for the “old days”—a time before occupation, checkpoints, dodging bullets from Israeli military snipers, seeking shelter from the steel rain of incoming hellfire missiles or from deafening sonic booms.
Gaza native Mustapha Al Jamal holds his Israeli-issued ID card (Photo M. Omer).
It was a time when tanks did not prowl the streets or bulldozers crush homes and people to death. A time when fishermen fished freely off Gaza’s coast, farmers grew their crops, children attended school, lovers married, families grew and businesses prospered as they had for thousands of years. Ayyam Zaman describes an era where borders existed without a single checkpoint, razor fence or military unit in sight.
Then, on June 6, 1967 everything changed.
The Israeli people were told they were under “imminent danger,” with a pre-emptive strike against Egypt, Jordan and other Arab nations their only hope. In truth, the Israeli government deliberately lied to its own people; the invasion had been planned years earlier. Declassified American intelligence reports for May and June 1967 prove Israel’s sole threat was the realization of peace with Egypt—because peace kills the Zionist dream of a Jewish-only greater Israel, the driving ideology behind Zionism since 1897. By 1973 several Israeli officials had confirmed that Israel was under no threat. In 1982, as Israeli invaders laid siege to Beirut, Prime Minister and former terrorist Menachem Begin described the 1967 aggression as a war of “choice.”
That the Six-Day War was launched under false pretenses serves as little comfort to the millions of people in the West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights, however, who watched their lives transformed from ones of freedom to oppression in less than a week. Nor could they have known that, 40 years later, most would still be living under apartheid, increasingly at risk of starvation, and enduring an ever-more sadistic and deadly occupation, protected, endorsed and supplied by the one nation founded upon human rights and democratic values—the United States.
Yet even reality cannot steal one’s past. Elderly Gazans remember life under Egyptian rule rather than Israeli occupation. Mustapha Al Jamal, known as Abu Kamal, was born in 1932. The father of eight sons and four daughters witnessed everything from the same home he lives in today. How is his life different, then and now? “Before”67 we lived in peace,” Abu Kamal recalled. “All of it [Gaza] was open land. Egypt was open to us. There were no borders, no customs…I could take the train from Gaza to Cairo. We had two trains per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.’
Pausing for a moment, he gazed south, taking a long, deep breath while motioning at the horizon.
“But now,” he lamented, “Gaza is under siege. Wherever you go, anywhere, it’s closed by the Israeli occupation.”
Abu Kamal continued: “Our curriculum was Egyptian before” 67, as was our currency. Israel eliminated the Egyptian currency and required that we use Israeli currency. Then they imposed a curfew in order to do a census of the Palestinians. We were then issued identification cards by the Israeli Liaison Office.
“Of course, we are still occupied,”Abu Kamal pointed out, sitting in his barber chair—the same one he owned over 40 years ago. “But today the occupation is much more aggressive than it was in 1967, much more aggressive. When Egypt was defeated in”˜67, Israel took the stage, seizing control of Gaza, thus ending both Egypt’s administrative and civil control, including the Palestinian police. Today I fear walking in the streets because of shooting and chaos.”
Like many people who today live in Gaza, Abu Kamal originally came from an area in what is now known as the state of Israel, the village of Yebna. Beginning in December 1947, David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and other Jewish terrorists instituted a campaign of ethnic cleansing designed to remove non-Jews from the land coveted by the Zionists. Many of the refugees ended up in Gaza, which was safe at the time.
Abu Kamal, like most of those displaced 60 years ago, hopes to return to his original home. If not him, then his grandchildren.
Nehad Al Shiekh Khalil, an historian and lecturer at Islamic University, remains ambivalent on the question of before and after. “I can’t say life was better for Palestinians in Gaza prior to or after 1967,” he stated. “However, occupation has created the worst Gaza of all times.”
When asked about major differences between pre- and post-1967, he elaborated, “For me, the most important to mention is the destruction or usurpation of Gaza’s natural resources and thus our self-sufficiency and ability to trade. For example, our water. The [Mediterranean] sea provided the backbone for Gaza’s economy, so Israel instituted policies that removed our ability to live off our resources, such as preventing fishing and refusing to allow Palestinians to trade or sell goods to other countries.” (Palestinian goods must pass through Israel by Israeli law, and Palestinians must accept whatever Israel decides is “fair market value.”)
In addition to limiting freedom of movement, restricting trade and destroying Gaza’s natural resources or access to them, Israel also has decimated a thriving economy over the past four decades. Prior to 1967 Gaza exported citrus, carpets, pottery, embroidery, textiles and woven fabric throughout the world. The elimination of Gaza’s industries transformed the small coastal strip from a wholly independent into a dependent society.
“After ” 67,” Khalil explained, “Israel controlled Gaza’s economy and all trade, within and out. By doing so it forced Palestinians to live on foreign aid. I can state that before ’67 there existed for Palestinians civil laws defining the relationship between different authorities in Gaza City. We had an economy and civilized culture that suited the population at the time. All of this was torn down by the occupation.”
Recalled 62-year-old Umm Al Abed Abu Sada, a mother of 14, one of whom is currently in jail: “Before”67 we had peace of mind. My husband used to build houses of mud. Life was much cheaper. Even the dowry required for marriage was less. Now everything is so expensive and the roads are closed. I am unable to go to Egypt for medication. Before, I could go anywhere.”
On a practical note, she added, “In the past, we used to cook daily. Now, one day we cook an okay meal. During the rest of the week we eat leftovers or a meal not so good.”
Asked before leaving his barber shop if he thought life will ever return to what it was before, Abu Kamal responded by opening his hands with both palms to the sky. “Inshallah (God willing),” he replied. “I hope so.”
Relevant Books on Gaza
– Eyes in Gaza by Mads Gilbert
– The Punishment of Gaza by Gideon Levy
– Gaza-Kitchen-Palestinian-Culinary-Journey by Laila El-Haddad
– Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky
– A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza Dervla Murphy
– Meet Me in Gaza: Uncommon Stories of Life Inside the Stri by
– Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, by Refaat Alareer
– The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction (Reading the City) by Atef Abu Seif and Abdallah Tayeh
– Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco
Source:
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