APRIL2006
Rewriting H.R. 4681 so that it actually produces peace
Rima Merriman, The Electronic Intifada, 24 March 2006
| The Israelis are calling the Kalandia checkpoint, Atarot, after the Jewish settlement north of Jerusalem, on the road to Ramallah. To understand the checkpoint best, you must see it in juxtaposition to everything around it. The Israeli structure is gleaming and carefully planned in every detail, sprawling over quite a bit of real estate it grabbed from the Palestinians. (Photo: Rima Merriman) |
Palestinian newspapers are full of the faces of the new
Palestinian government, smart men and one woman, who will
come in to lead an already impossible task -- Palestinian
development under occupation in education, health,
agriculture, planning, social affairs, tourism,
telecommunications, transportation, Jerusalem affairs,
etc.
There is not one terrorist among them, but that makes no
difference to the US which has already started
undermining the new government in the name, outrageously,
of promoting "the development of democratic
institutions in areas under the administrative control of
the Palestinian Authority, and for other purposes".
This is the language of an anti-Palestinian bill (H.R.
4681) just introduced in the US House of Representatives
by a bunch of people among them, literally, a Mr Israel.
The biased hearing for this bill included just three
witnesses: An Israeli brigadier general, a researcher who
claims that the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics
overcounts Palestinians by 1.3 million people, and a
researcher who claims that the European Union funds a
Palestinian Authority war against Israel.
And it's not only money that the US wants to keep away
from the Palestinians' democratically elected government.
It's also manpower or "human capacity",
something that donors have been trying to develop in the
occupied territory for decades. The US government is
threatening to strip anyone who is contracted to work
with this government of his or her US nationality, or so
the word is going around in Ramallah.
Palestinian students coming back after being trained in
the US on USAID scholarships also must not offer their
services to the Palestinian government. The idea is to
let the beleaguered Palestinians flounder in the effort,
which has been in progress for some time now, of
reforming their governmental institutions, to let
whatever development projects in which the donors have
been investing for years backslide to square one, to let
the Palestinian public be served by NGOs. This all fits
in perfectly with Israel's objective, namely, the
continued fragmentation of Palestinian national
aspirations.
The West Bank is now well on its way to be divided into
three cantons by means of the wall and the
"passages" Israel is constructing.
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| An incongruous attempt is made to offset the maze of bars and turn-styles that herd the Palestinians through by the daubing of color on the steel bars and providing innocuous signs - even one featuring a rose and wishing people a happy new year. The sign above says Mukuthan Mumt''an! ("Have a Pleasant Stay!"). (Photo: Rima Merriman) |
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| "Happy New Year" says the Arabic text on the sign with the rose. (Photo: Rima Merriman) |
The good US citizens who introduced the bill in the House
of Representatives (Ros-Lehtinen, for herself, Lantos,
Cantor, Chabot, Ackerman, Engel, Pence, Weller, Harris,
Burton of Indiana, McCarthy, Cardoza, Mack, Bean,
Crowley, Lynch, Jo Ann Davis Of Virginia, Chandler, Brown
of South Carolina, McCaul of Texas, King of New York,
Israel, Berkley, Poe, Royce, Blackburn, Tancredo, Schiff,
Sherman, and Nadler) have only Israel's interests at
heart and not one shred of sympathy for the Palestinians'
57 years of hardship and dispossession in the greedy
shadow of Israel. They have no interest in resolving the
conflict, in acknowledging Palestinian rights or any
Israeli obligations -- obligations that Israel has time
and time again refused to heed.
What a shame! The good US citizens behind the bill are
pulling completely in Israel's favour, tilting the
balance of power between the two sides even further, a
balance that is already so far off kilter as to be
practically perpendicular.
Witness the terrible and humiliating spectacle of Israeli
tanks and air power in Jericho recently muscling
themselves easily against people helpless to defend
themselves in kind -- and I am not talking about the
prisoners, but about the Palestinian Authority-less.
Witness the spectacle of Gazans going hungry and jobless
because Israel, the unilateral withdrawal of settlements
notwithstanding, has them imprisoned well and good.
The good US citizens behind the bill are demanding among
many other soulless demands that the Palestinian
Authority "publicly acknowledge Israel's right to
exist as a Jewish state and recommit itself and adhere to
all previous agreements and understandings". But
what is Israel? Where are its borders? On the Internet,
I've noticed that when certain sites republish the
columns I write for The Jordan Times, they edit my text
by enclosing every mention of the word "Israel"
in quotation marks. Palestinians behind walls that have
eaten up their lands are forced to make room for Israel
and its settlements right in their midst. It is an Israel
with huge quotation marks around it.
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| The Israeli monstrosity has sprawled to the very edge of the Kalandia refugee camp, barely leaving room for the Palestinians to carve out a footpath, let alone for venders to make a living at this formerly key crossroads. Poverty and bleakness are all around the Kalandia checkpoint and its grand design. (Photo: Rima Merriman) |
Palestinians who daily cross the Kalandia border, now
complete with a waiting room and border protocols, know,
helplessly, that Israel has expanded its borders. The
wall, which has eaten up so much land already, is a
border deep in occupied land forcing people to zigzag and
go through mazes of roads to get from one point to
another. Only a few days ago (March 19) the Israeli army
handed the citizens of Al Walja, Batteer, Houssan, Al
Qabu, Wad Foukeen and Soreef villages warrants to seize
their lands to build the wall eating up 766 dunums. It
will seize an additional 72,000 dunums from the lands of
Bethlehem to expand Jerusalem.
I have made a few amendments to a portion of H.R. 4681.
These amendments have a much higher chance of producing
peace in Palestine than the original:
Declaration of Policy
It shall be the policy of the United States to
promote the emergence of a democratic Israeli government
that:
- denounces and combats state terrorism;
- has agreed to and is taking action to disarm its settlers in the occupied territories as well as any terrorist agency, network, or facility;
- has agreed to work to eliminate anti-Palestinian incitement and the commemoration of militarism in Israeli society;
- has agreed to respect the boundaries and sovereignty of its neighbours by ceasing to make statements that claim that "Jordan is Palestine";
- acknowledges, respects and upholds the human rights of all people, including Israeli Palestinians;
- conducts free, fair and transparent election in compliance with international standards; that means not assassinating and kidnapping Palestinians for election propaganda purposes;
- ensures institutional and financial transparency and accountability even for people whose second name includes the word Sharon.
Limitation. Assistance may be provided
under this act or any other provision of law to Israel
only if it promises the United States that it will not
use that money for expansion and colonisation, for
building walls, or bulldozing houses during a period for
which a certification described in subsection (b) is in
effect.
Certification. A certification described in
this subsection is a certification transmitted by the
president to Congress that contains a determination of
the president that no ministry, agency or instrumentality
of Israel is controlled by a military officer who has
committed what the international community defines as
crimes against humanity (that includes shooting children
on their way to school, bulldozing houses or killing
human rights activists who protect children, e.g., Rachel
Corrie):
- completing the process of purging from its security services individuals with ties to state terrorism; violent settlers who view the Bible as a real estate document and selectively use the Bible for expansion;
- dismantling all settlement infrastructure, confiscating unauthorised weapons, arresting and bringing terrorist settlers who have killed to justice, destroying state arms factories, thwarting and preempting settler attacks, and fully cooperating with the Palestinian security services to rein in violent Israeli soldiers in need of psychiatric care as well as settlers who destroy Palestinian olive and grape crops and terrorise children;
- halting all anti-Palestinian incitement in Israel-controlled electronic media, especially radio stations and publications of settlers, and right-wing print media and in schools, synagogues and other institutions it controls, and replacing these materials, including textbooks, with materials that promote tolerance, peace and coexistence with Palestinians, and do justice to Arab history, instead of keeping Israelis ignorant of Arab claims to Jerusalem;
- recognising the rights of the Palestinians to a viable, independent state with its capital East Jerusalem and with 1967 borders;
- recognising Palestinian right of return to their homes;
- dismantling the illegal wall Israel continues to build.
In
Memoriam: Deir Yassin
Arjan El
Fassed writing from Utrecht, The Netherlands, Live
from Palestine, 9 April 2004
Deir Yassin: New road around the southern border of the village, looking north. The ruins in the foreground are those of the dayr ("monastry") after which the village was named (Photo: All that remains, Walid Khalidi, 1986)
Fifty-six years ago, 11-year old Fahimi Zeidan lived with
her family in the Palestinian village Deir Yasin. The
livelihood of the village largely dependend on
agriculture and by residents keeping livestock. Many
others worked in Jerusalem. The area around the village
was rich of limestone. The villagers excavated quarries
and developed a thriving industry in stone cutting. As
the village prospered its homes radiated from the Hara
uphill and eastward, towards Jerusalem. The village,
which was home to some 700 residents, was a prosperous,
expanding village at relative peace with its Jewish
neighbours with whom much business was done.
On the eve of the war, Deir Yassin and the adjacent
Jewish colony of Giv'at Sha'ul signed an agreement
promising to be good neighbors. This agreement was
approved by Haganah headquarters in Jerusalem.
However, on the 9th of April 1948, Zionist forces entered
the home of Fahimi Zeidan, ordered her family to line up
against the wall and started shooting. Fahimi, two
sisters and brother were saved because they could hide
behind their parents. But all the others against the wall
were killed: her father, mother, grandfather and
grandmother, uncles and aunts and some of their children.
"As soon as the sun rose, there was knocking at
the door, but we did not answer. They blew the door down,
entered and started searching the place; they got to the
store room, and took us out one-by-one. They shot the
son-in-law, and when one of his daughters screamed, they
shot her too. They then called my brother Mahmoud and
shot him in our presence, and when my mother screamed and
bent over my brother, carrying my little sister Khadra,
who was still being breast fed, they shot my mother too.
We all started screaming and crying, but were told that
if we did not stop, they would shoot us all. They then
lined us up, shot at us, and left."
Members of Irgun Zvai Leumi and Stern Gang captured the
village and massacred 120 Palestinian men, women and
children. During and after the attack on the village,
members of these armed groups fired indiscriminately,
blew up homes with their inhabitants still inside,
executed men, women, and children, firing at close range,
and looted whatever came to hand. The surviving villagers
were loaded on trucks and paraded in a march through the
main streets of Jerusalem.
This massacre marked the beginning of the depopulation of
over 400 towns and villages, and the exile of more than
700,000 Palestinians. It also marked the beginning of the
Palestinian catastrophe, "Nakba", and the
creation of the largest and one of the longest standing
refugee cases in the world today. More than 6 million
persons, comprising around three-quarters of the
Palestinian people, and nearly one-third of the global
refugee population, remain without a durable solution to
their plight.
On 11 April 1948, Jacques de Reynier, a representative of
the International Committee of the Red Cross visited the
village. Two days later he wrote a memorandum to the
headquarters of the ICRC in Geneva: "In the third
room of one house it appeared that something stirred and
I discovered a little girl about ten years old,
frightfully wounded, comatose but alive, who had not
received any care for at least 24 hours despite the
presence in the village of the troop doctor who was at my
side. I was at great pains to overcome the Irgun’s
resistance and I had to forcibly place the wounded child
in our ambulance."
In the summer of 1949 several hundred Jewish immigrants
were settled near Deir Yassin and the new colony was
named Giv'at Sha'ul Bet. Many of the village homes on
this hill are still standing and have been incorporated
into an Israeli hospital for the mentally ill that was
established on the site. The cemetery was later bulldozed
and, like hundreds of other Palestinian villages to
follow, Deir Yassin was wiped off the map.
The Israeli government has never apologized for the
massacre of Deir Yassin. The perpetrators of the massacre
at Deir Yassin were never punished. Victims were never
offered compensation.
In 1978, Yzhar Smilansky (aka S. Yizhar) wrote
in his 'Tale of Hirbet Hiza', about his experiences as a
young Israeli intelligence officer who witnessed the
expulsion. He wrote: "We came, shot, burned. Blew
up, pushed and exiled. Will the walls not scream in the
ears of those who will live in this village?"
Something along the walls and ruins of Deir Yassin, no
one knows how to listen to the unforgetting silence of
this land. "The land, it its depth, does not forget.
There, within it . . . suddenly, at different times, one
can hear it growling an unforgettting silence, unable
also to forget even when it has already been plowed and
has already brought forth fair, new crops. Something
within it knows and does not forget, cannot forget."
press release
:Deir Yassin Day 2006 'How Palestine
Became Israel'
Award winning plays, music and stories capture a life,
now forgotten.
Sunday, 9th April & Monday, 10th April 7.30 p.m.
Bloomsbury Theatre, 15 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AH
Tickets £12.50 (concessions £5.50)
Box Office: 020 7388 8822
Email: info@thebloomsbury.com
For further
information: 079 4630 8168