FEBRUARY-MARCH 2008
“The U.S. president is not above international law”
Interview of Sam Bahour, Palestinian businessman and human-rights spokesperson Sam Bahour, co-editor with Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd of “Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians” (Olive Branch Press, Paperback, 1994), is a successful consultant and businessman in Al-Bireh/Ramallah, Palestine. The U.S.-born Palestinian is also a noted spokesperson for Palestinian rights. His website on the Palestinian situation is: http://www.epalestine.com Joe interviewed Mr. Bahour at his home in Al-Bireh/ Ramallah on Dec. 20, 2007, asking him to summarize some of the main issues and grievances in the book and to give an update on the situation.
SAM: Our book consists of oral
histories of Palestinians. It is important to understand
the context of when the book came out. My friends
Staughton and Alice Lynd and I were working in
Youngstown, Ohio in the peace movement against the first
Gulf War when the U.S. attacked Iraq. At that time we
became friends and had many, many discussions not only
about the war in Iraq but also about what I was
presenting as the core issue in the Middle East –
the continuation of the Palestinian catastrophe (their
being kicked out of their own homeland).
After the war ended, Staughton and Alice said they would like to learn more about the Palestinian issue and proposed doing an oral history, in which they are experts. At the time I had no idea how intense and how complex such an effort really is. I agreed, and we ended up taking two trips to Palestine and doing interviews in the U.S. as well.
This resulted in our book, which not only consists of accounts of people talking about their reality but was also tremendously footnoted mainly by Alice Lynd. She was able to corroborate the accounts with third-party reports. So I encourage not only people who want to read oral histories to read the book but also people who would like to have a kind of reference guide to all the international doctrines which can be used to support the case made in the interviews. This is important, because in the world of sound bytes one sometimes forgets the importance of being able to justify the things that are said.
In the book, for example, we cover the period from before the 1948 creation of the state of Israel through the first Intifada (1987-1989)[1]. We classified the accounts of that period in different ways. One category, for instance, has to do with refugees, and we tried to find elderly people with a long memory. In several accounts people spoke about the relationship between the Palestinian community in Palestine and the Jewish immigrants who were here before the creation of the state of Israel. Many Western readers may be surprised to know that that relationship was rather cordial. Someone mentioned that during the Jewish sabbath they would rely on Palestinian neighbors to turn on the electricity or turn on the water pot, because during the Jewish sabbath the Jews are not allowed to work with anything mechanical.
We also heard how the Jewish community would be very supportive during the religious holidays of Muslims and Christians. I learned something very important: that relationship was much less political and much more based on human interaction than the politicians today would like us to believe.
We also presented
accounts of women and of prisoners who were jailed before
or during the first Intifada. These talked about the
torture they faced in prison. Then Alice would dig deep
into various documents and find corroborative information
from the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and several
other international organizations and would footnote the
accounts. When someone said he was tortured with water,
Alice would research that, using lots of references from
Israeli human-rights organizations, which we think carry
even more weight for convincing a foreign audience that
what we are talking about is not propaganda but real war
crimes that are happening on the ground and that need to
stop. When Israelis are speaking of them as such, we feel
that this contributes to people’s understanding.
The book was published in 1994. More recently, during the
last seven years, i.e., during the second Intifada, we
have been facing another bitter chapter of our history
– probably the most bitter chapter in all our
history as Palestinians. The Israeli battering of our
society during this time has created not only another
wave of internal refugees (internally displaced people),
but it has also created an environment in which our
community is moving much more toward extremism because of
the economic despair and the social breakdown that has
happened.
This is troubling. And if anyone thought we were saying this just for propaganda purposes he or she needs only to look at some of the real issues on the ground: such as, that Hamas, an Islamist movement, was elected in 2006, when anyone who knows anything about Palestinian society knows that we are a very secular society; this move toward more religious extremism should have been an indicator to the powers that be that something was really wrong on the ground.
What is really wrong on the ground is that this Israeli occupation has been able to sustain itself for forty years mainly by U.S. support and political cover for it. We were hoping that many people abroad would come to their senses after seeing such an earth-shaking political development as the election of Hamas. If that didn’t do it, we hoped that the Hamas overrun of Gaza in 2007 would have been yet another, even more dramatic, indication that something is wrong.
Unfortunately, what we
are seeing is more lip service by the U.S. to peace, once
again, and on the ground not doing what is required to
hold Israel accountable for its actions. As Palestinians
we don’t expect the occupation to end overnight; we
understand that it is a very complex and complicated
phenomenon to deal with. But what we do expect is that
the international community hold Israel accountable under
international law.
In this conflict all of us, whether individuals or
states, need to make a choice. We have to apply
international law, and this law in relation to an
occupation means the Fourth Geneva Convention, which is
the law of occupation. Or we pick the law of the jungle.
And what Israel has created is an environment in which
the law of the jungle rules and the strongest survive.
Under the law of the jungle, Israel can justify what they
call “targeted assassinations” or house
demolitions or an F-16 bombing a residential
neighborhood, killing not only the person they were
targeting (and rightly so, probably) but also the
neighbors. That passes in the news as a sad event, but
the news moves on. They kill so-called militants without
any due process.
But the Israelis and Americans need to understand that in the law of the jungle suicide bombings are also justified, and in the law of the jungle killing civilians is also justified. I as Sam Bahour, and I think I represent the political consciousness of a lot of our people, do not justify those acts. That is why we continually say, even though the U.S. brushes this aside, that international law must apply and must apply to both sides.
So killing civilians is
not right, and suicide bombings are not right, just as
F-16s bombing residential neighborhoods in Gaza is not
right, or demolishing Palestinian homes is not right. So
we must choose international law over the law of the
jungle. That requires the powers that be to be bold
enough and strong enough to be able to stop Israel and
hold them accountable. When war crimes happen, there are
mechanisms created by the international community to deal
with them. We must make sure that Israel faces due
process and that the rights of the occupied people, the
Palestinians, are safeguarded –not because we are a
special people or a chosen people, but rather because we
are a people under occupation, and people under
occupation are protected under international law.
It is not only Israel that must take actions in line with
international law; but every country that has signed the
Fourth Geneva Convention, including the U.S., has an
obligation in that treaty to hold the occupiers anywhere
in the world accountable for the violations of
international law that they commit. So, when the U.S. is
silent, and not only silent but proactively supporting
Israel in its violation of law here, the U.S. itself is
putting itself in jeopardy, because it is an obligation,
not a luxury, for the signatories of the Fourth Geneva
Convention to take action. We as citizens in the States
need to bring this issue home to our elected officials
– that they cannot deal with this conflict or the
conflict in Iraq as something that is outside the realm
of international law. We as Americans are not above the
law; the U.S. president is not above international law.
Every day we allow that to happen, we allow the law of
the jungle, whether it is here or in Baghdad or in
Lebanon, to prevail.
In such an environment
all of us who are trying to bring peace closer do not
know how to operate. We can only operate if we have a
base line that is known and understandable and that we
can be held accountable for.
JOE: Could you speak about the effects of the occupation
on economic development and on church ministries, i.e.,
on the freedom of the church to carry out its mission?
SAM: This military occupation, which has lasted now for
over forty years, has reached the point where it has
become unbelievably sophisticated and polished – to
the point where I would call what is happening today
sterile ethnic cleansing. I use my words very accurately.
Ethnic cleansing as we know it in history is a very
bloody issue, as we saw in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in several
places in Eastern Europe. The world is shocked into
taking action.
What the Israelis have
been able to do in the last forty years, and with U.S.
cover – political and financial support -- to do it
unhindered, is to create an environment very slowly and
very methodically where they are able to control every
aspect of Palestinian life in a way that does not shock
the world into action but has the same effect as any
other ethnic cleansing. This is why I call it a sterile
ethnic cleansing.
Consider my own case, for instance. I am a
Palestinian-American born in the U.S. I married a
Palestinian woman and have two Palestinian children. I am
in Palestine today only because the Israelis view me as
an American citizen, and I can be here for only three
months at a time. Every three months I must leave the
country and renew my visa, and every time I leave there
is the possibility that the Israelis will not allow me to
come back to the occupied territory.
Not only is this my own situation, but it is the case also of my father, who was born in this house we are sitting in. He too does not have a Palestinian I.D., which the Israelis issued after the occupation. The first thing they did in 1967 after they had occupied the Palestinian territory was a census: anyone who was in the country received an Israeli-issued Palestinian I.D. If you don’t have that I.D., as far as the Israelis are concerned you are not Palestinian. This is an unheard of kind of procedure in the world.
At the time my father was in the States. He had heard that there money grows on trees, so he was looking for that tree. Thus in 1967, when the occupation took place, he was out of the country. So by a swipe of a pen the Israeli occupation made him a non-Palestinian. Thus he can come back here only as an American citizen after he was naturalized in the States. He can visit his home and children and grandchildren for only three months at a time. That has been the case ever since the occupation started.
In 2006, after the Palestinians held elections and Hamas was elected, one of the elements that Israel looked at was how to turn the screws just one more notch on the Palestinian community. One way they did that was to stop providing automatic renewals of our visas. Many people like myself and my Dad, who either come and go on a regular basis or are living here like me and leave the country so we don’t violate our visa, found that Israel started to deny entry to them. (Israel is the only entity that is allowed to give visas here; they control all our borders.)
Hundreds and thousands of people have been denied entry – people coming to marry, or families coming back to visit for the summer, or caretakers coming back to care for their elderly parents, or people like myself in mid-career coming back to try to create a different kind of reality here. This is one way the Israelis are able to empty Palestine of the Palestinians. Every person they turn away at the border is a person who will probably take their family out of the country and follow them out.
That’s why I call it sterile. There are no pictures at the border; CNN is not at the border; there is no blood in this. It is an administrative operation. For example, I was married in 1993. In 1994 I applied for family unification – a request to the Israelis asking for permanent residency so I can stay with my wife and children. That application is still pending today.
They refuse to allow Palestinians to remain here permanently. If I would leave the country today and were denied entry to come back, I would be stuck in Jordan or somewhere; and it would be only a matter of time before my wife and children followed me.
There are over 200,000 people like myself who hold foreign national passports who are requesting family unification, to stay with their families in the Palestinian territory. If Israel turns back those 200,000 people, as they are doing now, ten or a hundred at a time, they will be emptying Palestine of over half a million people, because each one of those individuals would in time take their families out of the country. This is ethnic cleansing in a very sophisticated, non-bloody way. But the result of it is the same: it is a war crime that Israel must be held accountable for.
We request that the
U.S. administration, the sole superpower in the world,
take on not only its legal but also its moral
responsibility to stop this policy in its tracks.
JOE: Was your wife born here in Palestine?
SAM: Yes. But I cannot get residency here because the
Israelis are fully in control of what they call the
population registry. They define who is a Palestinian and
who is not. Never in the history of military occupations
does the occupier go to the level of actually defining
who is the occupied people. International law requires
that the occupier respect how the people under occupation
view themselves, but Israelis don’t do that.
Here we are not talking
about the refugees, who are in a different category. We
recognize that refugees are a political issue which is
being negotiated. What I am talking about are people who
are not originally from Israel proper but from Al Bireh,
Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus – people who are coming
back to their homes in the West Bank. We have no
intention to live in Tel Aviv. I intend to live here, and
my father has no desire to live in Ashdod but rather in
Al Bireh in the home he was born in. But he is not
allowed to do so.
In addition we have other restrictions. The
mega-restriction here is the access and movement
restriction, which is a whole series of restrictions. The
Israelis have not only built this illegal apartheid
barrier between the West Bank and Israel – and they
built it on Palestinian land – but this barrier has
been accompanied by over 540 military checkpoints that
Israel has placed throughout the West Bank.
So for me to go from my
headquarters in Al Bireh to, for example, Nablus, which
is one of the largest Palestinian cities, I need to go
through multiple checkpoints to get there. And at every
checkpoint the soldier in the street has the power to
turn me back. This denial of movement inside the West
Bank, let alone outside the country, has brought our
economy basically to a standstill.
The Wall has created an environment where even
children are separated from their schools by what I call
the Apartheid Wall, and so a trip which used to take a
kid three minutes now may take him 45 minutes to go
around the Wall. Not only that, but as the child is on
the other side of the Wall and the parents are on the
West Bank side, in a situation that is so unstable, can
you imagine a mother wondering if something is going to
happen today that would result in the Wall being closed
with her child caught on the other side of it?
This is unheard of. It is unheard of. The amount of
restrictions here that have no relation whatsoever to
Israel’s security is tremendous. That is why I
continue to call for the Israelis and the international
community to start unbundling the occupation. It’s
unheard of that Israel should say – and they state
this publicly, not hiding their actions, which is even
worse – that we are holding every aspect of
Palestinian society basically hostage to a final status
agreement that is yet to be seen.
If every single checkpoint, and every single visa, and every single water supply, and every single street is going to be held hostage, then what the Israelis are doing is creating a Gordian knot that will never be able to be opened to allow a true peace process to result in a final status.
There is no reason
today, for example, why 540 checkpoints exist inside the
West Bank. The vast majority, if not all of them, can be
removed tomorrow morning, and it would have no effect on
Israeli security. In addition, they would be creating an
environment with a little more confidence that the
Israelis really do have a notion that they want us to
live a different kind of reality.
Here is another example. I have a client who happens to
be the second mobile telecommunications operator who
wants to open up a telecom company. They are here, it’s
a regional company, and they are ready to hire 500
Palestinians to be able to compete against a current
monopoly telecommunications operator. The reason they can’t
start is that the Israelis control, like everything else,
the frequencies. Not only is our land, our water, and our
people under occupation, but also our airwaves. My client
has been waiting for one year now, making requests at the
highest level possible, for the Israelis to release the
control of the needed frequencies in order to provide a
cellular service.
Five hundred people being employed here would be like a mini-GM. It would make a tremendous change in people’s opportunities to work. When Israel does not allow businesses to operate, when it separates us from our water supply, when it controls all of our utilities, all of these constraints create conditions which force people to leave the area.
A recent poll shows that, for the first time in our history, 44% of Palestinians want to emigrate voluntarily out of Palestine. These are shocking numbers. Israel is creating the conditions that are emptying Palestine of Palestinians. It’s ethnic cleansing, sterile, polished, with a lot of PR spin, and with U.S. support. It must stop. It must stop.
Otherwise the events in
Gaza and the election of Hamas are going to continue down
that very, very dark path until we become not only a
political problem to the world, not only a humanitarian
problem, but the world will become involved here in what
is basically quicksand we are sitting in.
JOE: Are there also restrictions on the Church because of
the occupation?
SAM: Not only is the business community being affected by
the restrictions. We just had a meeting with Church
leaders, and I was shocked to hear of the extent to which
the Israelis are putting restrictions on the Church
community. During Christmas many Church leaders come to
Palestine, but the Israelis are creating almost
insurmountable administrative restrictions in terms of
how priests, nuns, and people coming to study religion
get visas. We heard stories of priests who have had to go
through an application process of one year before they
were able to enter the country to serve in their Church.
This is an important issue because the Church community
is by nature an element of constructive creation of a new
reality, and yet it is not allowed to have access to the
area. This to me would be the easiest place Israel could
show some flexibility.
Many of the churches view this region not with the political boundaries we see on the map. For most of the churches, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel is one community. So, many of the Churches appoint leaders to serve in this region as a whole. But if you are appointed in Jordan and you want to reach Jerusalem or Nazareth, the Israelis don’t allow you to operate within the area of your own Church. This is catastrophic.
I believe that in the
upcoming Christmas message the Churches, now so
frustrated with the Israeli bureaucracy, are going to
state that Israel is denying access by the religious
community to the Holy Land. Where are the Israelis? Why
don’t they see the damage being done not only to
relations with the Palestinians but to relations with the
entire global Church community? We hear of the Vatican
representative here having to go through hoops to move
his car from one place to another. Where is the outcry?
Is there no outcry only because Israel is the nation
doing this?
JOE: There are so many forms of oppression that you have
to live under.
SAM: But we are here, and one thing the world needs to
understand is that we Palestinians may not have learned
yet how to win, to shed off this Israeli occupation, but
I can guarantee you for a fact that we have definitely
learned how not to lose. This community is so steadfast
and has so much resilience and is so human at its core
that we have been able to sustain a society, to sustain
community, without a central government, without a
judicial system that is operating properly, under a
tremendous amount of Israeli military pressure, and we
still wake up in the morning and worry about our
neighbor. This kind of environment is not easy to find
anywhere else in the world, and I think we have become
better because of our struggle. But we also need to end
this occupation so we can move forward.
JOE: A very crucial issue, one which is getting all kinds
of publicity, has to do with the settlers. What can you
tell us about this issue?
SAM: The Israelis have done something which is in blatant violation of international law: they have moved their own population, Israeli citizens, or have permitted them to move, into the occupied territory. These Israeli-only Jewish settlements are scattered on all of the mountaintops throughout the West Bank and previously also in Gaza before the disengagement.
(pic
Jewish Settlers and the Military)These settlements are
basically plots of land that either have been confiscated
from private citizens or were public lands under
Jordanian rule. They are enclosed communities of very
modern-style homes where Israelis have been able to come
and live, often promoted by the Israeli government which
gives them incentives such as better mortgage deals and
so forth, trying to move the population into the West
Bank. It is very clear in international law that this
cannot happen.
These barricaded settlements are not only the plots of land they are built on, but under Ariel Sharon they actually built an entire network of roads connecting these settlements. And another network of roads connects the settlements to Israel proper. This has resulted in the confiscation of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dunums[2] of land, because when the Israelis confiscate that mountaintop for the settlement they also go around the settlement and draw a circle 100 or 200 meters beyond the settlement, making that a closed military area as well. Then the road connecting the settlement to the network of settler roads is not only a road that is confiscated but it also includes 50 to 70 meters on both sides of the road which is also confiscated.
Then
they issued a military order that we as Palestinians are
not allowed to build within 500 meters, I think, of the
area designated as a security zone.
This is just another way that the Israelis have created a situation in which it is impossible for us to develop. Around every single Palestinian metropolitan city, Bethlehem being the first of them, there are settlements encircling the city. Since they are on the mountaintops, they can capture a lot of the rainfall before it gets to the valleys where the Palestinians live. Thus they also disrupt our own natural water supply as well.
These settlements, under international law, are illegal. The Israelis have tried to create a lingo, a lexicon of the occupation, to make it sound like they are OK. We hear of “legal” settlements and of “illegal” settlements; we hear of outposts, which are the beginning of settlements, and “illegal” outposts. This is all a façade to try to justify illegal action. Every settlement is illegal, including the settlements in the middle of East Jerusalem which have been there since the early 1970s and which started under the leadership of Shimon Peres, the Labor leader who is now the president of Israel.
This was a policy of creating physical structures within the West Bank, within the occupied territory, to try to change the topography, to make it look as if the Israelis are an integral part of the area since they have been here for so long.
Over and over again the Israelis have tried to buy time by creating a reality on the ground that can’t be changed. One litmus test for Oslo, and why Oslo failed, was that these settlements, which are clearly illegal under international law, and which historically have been deemed illegal even by the U.S. administration and seen by the whole world as an obstacle to peace, doubled in Palestine during the ten years after Oslo. Rather than stopping the damage and entering a peace process in which they would try to reverse the damage they had created, Israel used the Oslo peace process as a cover to be able to continue rushing to build more and more settlements, to create more facts on the ground to be able to say that now the settlements are too large to move.[3]
Unfortunately, in 2004 in a letter to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, Bush gave Israel a document which said that facts on the ground are overwhelming and that basically some of the large settlement blocs may have to be annexed to Israel.[4] By the swipe of a pen, Bush played judge, jury, and the sheriff all at the same time. But he has no right to do that, and that cannot happen.
The settlements must be removed because they are illegal. Having said that, we are not blind to the fact that millions of dollars have been invested in the settlements, nor are we blind to the fact that there are people living in those settlements. Recent reports say that, if Israel will give the same kind of economic incentives to leave the West Bank that they gave the settlers to come into the West Bank, then 30 to 50 percent of the settlers would leave voluntarily.
So what is Israel waiting for before they give incentives to people to leave the settlements, instead of giving incentives even today for people to move into this occupied territory and create more obstacles to peace? They made a strategic mistake, and I think they know it, in creating the settlement enterprise. They can correct that mistake starting today by giving incentives for settlers to move voluntarily back into Israel.
No one is telling the settlers that they should be pushed into the sea. We are telling them to leave the occupied territory because they are the crystallization of the military boot of occupation that is on the Palestinians’ neck.
In the future peace
treaty, if these settlers accept to live under
Palestinian rule, I personally have no problem having an
Israeli, a Jewish person, living in a Palestinian state.
I come from the U.S., a place where one can have his
religion separate from the state. However, if Israel
wants to continue to dictate reality by forcing their
population, in violation of international law, to take
more land, water, and resources and restrict our own
development as Palestinian society, this is
unsustainable. I fear for the days to come if the
international community does not hold Israel accountable.
JOE: Doesn’t the Wall, which Israel calls a security
barrier, cut into Palestinian territory precisely in
order to protect the Israeli settlements?
SAM: Absolutely. The Wall is built on Palestinian land,
not on the 1967 border. An analogy would be this: if you
and I were neighbors in Michigan, and I decided I wanted
to build a fence around my house so no one could enter my
land, but I built that fence through your kitchen and
said it is only a fence but in reality it is a concrete
wall – would you sit there and accept it? The
Palestinians did not sit there and accept it but rather
are engaged in serious nonviolent resistance against the
Wall. The Bil’in village has been at the forefront
of this nonviolent resistance. [5]
But we
didn’t stop there. The Palestinians took the Wall to
the International Court of Justice and after a serious
debate within the Court actually won an advisory opinion
which basically stated not only that the Wall itself is
illegal but that the occupation embodied by the Wall is
illegal.
What are the
Palestinians to do? They are nonviolently resisting on
the ground; they are facing a tremendous amount of
economic and social hardship because of the Wall; they
have taken the Wall to the highest levels of diplomacy
and justice in in the world. Where else do we go? That is
why we are begging the international community to wake
up, because if all of these continue to fail, the
Palestinians will have no option but to revert to a more
extremist role in trying to end this occupation --
something that would not be good for my family or for the
families of Israeli soldiers who would be sent here to
repress that kind of resistance. (pic.Palestinian in
wheelchair at protest)
We have been trying nonviolent resistance for decades.
Only recently has this conflict become militarized, only
recently. 
Palestinians
have lived under occupation since 1967; only in 2000,
with the second Intifada, in the West Bank and Gaza strip
was a military or armed kind of role introduced.
People have tried everything they can try. We have been deported, imprisoned; we have had our houses demolished; we have seen settlers take our land; we have been stopped from having movement and access. What else is expected from us? I can tell you for a fact that if a third of what has happened to the Palestinians would happen to the population where I’m from, Youngstown, Ohio, I can guarantee you that there would not be nonviolent resistance to it. It would be very violent resistance.
So I applaud the Palestinian people for being able to contain violence for so long. But we are people at the end of the day; and when you put people into a corner, with no hope, you can expect many bad things to come out of it. The international community has an obligation to this country to make sure that we get out of this occupation to be able to start the process of rehabilitation.
We have neighbors
called Israelis that we need to rehabilitate with to be
able to live with peacefully. The sooner we can start
that, the easier the path will be, just as white South
Africa and black South Africa ended the oppression and
started a rehabilitation process that is going on even to
today.
JOE: You mentioned “house demolitions.” Israel
supposedly targets the house of someone they have a case
against?
SAM: There is no “case” required. The Israelis
are able to use the security mantra for anything they
want to do, especially when the world is just turning a
blind eye.
The Israelis refuse to provide permits. Remember that
they are in charge of every aspect of our livelihood.
When you want to build, for example, in East Jerusalem,
you apply for a permit. They refuse that permit, or
sometimes they do not refuse outright but make the costs
of the permit so complicated, so expensive, that you are
not able to obtain it. Again, a very polished way to be
oppressive.
When the Palestinians defy that by building without a permit, they can have their house demolished. Interestingly enough, when the Israelis issue a demolition order, it is active immediately and has no ending. So, if your house is deemed for demolition, that demolition could happen one hour from now or 20 years from now. You will live under the threat of your house being demolished every second. Can you imagine living under such a threat?
Also, if your house
becomes too close to a settlement that they just decided
to build, your house can be deemed a target for
demolition. When you demolish a house, you are not only
making a family homeless, but in the Palestinian culture
you are going further, because our home is a very
deep-seated element in our mindset. The home is not only
parents and their children but also an extended family
living in the home; so a single home may house 12 or 14
persons. Thus the impact of demolishing a home is
tremendous.
It’s just like the impact of imprisonment. They have
imprisoned since 1967 over 650,000 people. We are a very
small community: under occupation there are less than 4
million people. Six hundred and fifty thousand of them
have gone through the Israeli prison system. Currently
11,000 sit in prison. When you put someone through a
prison system, you are basically putting that person
through an education system of how to resist against you.
You are also taking out of the community breadwinners.
These 11,000 prisoners have families at home who have
lost their breadwinner.
The impact is catastrophic. The issues we have discussed
in this interview are only part of the restrictions we
have. When you add them all together, you can reflect on
the amount of despair and frustration that is in this
community. Again, any community in the U.S. would not be
able to withstand a third of what we are facing.
I will give you one last statistic that came out recently. A senior official in the World Bank stated the other day that what is happening to the Palestinian economy is worse than what happened to the U.S. in the Great Depression. A forty percent drop in our GDP since 2000 is worse than what happened during the Great Depression in the U.S. And we still wake up every day and we try to call on the international community to take action.
If mobility of the
population is not permitted, there can be no development.
This is stated repeatedly by the World Bank and other
international institutions. World organizations also
confirm that Israel can remove many of these restrictions
without jeopardizing its security, which is a just
concern. Why don’t they? Why aren’t they
starting to unbundle this conflict so Palestinians can
try to forge a path of hope? They refuse to do that.
Instead, they prefer to hold every aspect of our life
hostage to some as yet unforeseen final status
negotiations.
JOE: Thank you very much, Sam Bahour, for this clear and
moving analysis and presentation. I hope people will
consult your website -- http://www.epalestine.com/ -- and get on your
mailing list.
NOTES
[1] Intifada, which means “shaking off,” refers to two Palestinian campaigns of protest and resistance to end the occupation: the first, which began in 1987 and continued to 1993, and the second from 2000 to the present. See Sam
[2] One dunum is equivalent to approximately 1000 square meters (10,760 square feet).
[3] See "Settlements, Outposts, and the Law," Information Brief #117 (11 March 2005), The Jerusalem Fund, By Samar Assad -- http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/images/informationbrief.php?ID=134
[4] Bush’s letter stated in part: “It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair, and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel. As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations [sic] centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949....” (italics added) –
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040414-3.html
[5] See Michigan Peace Team Report on demonstration in Bil’in, Dec. 14, 2007 -- http://www.michiganpeaceteam.org/LTT_Dec14_2007.htm