MARCH 2004
Palestinian Council for Peace and Justice REPORT : during January 2004.........
http://www.imemc.org/headlines/2004/February/week3
.All "According to Procedure" as they say in the Knesset, the Government of Israel.
The has issued a report indicating the violations of Palestinian Human Rights in the month of January 2004.
The report states that during January 2004, Israeli Army killed 33 Palestinians; 10 of which were children and were assassinated in cold blood. 657 Palestinians were injured by army fire (IOA); 211 of them were children; 783 Palestinians were detained.
The Israeli Army demolished 444 Palestinian houses and 108 industrial sites, they swept away 1150 Dunums (4 Dunams = 1 Acre) of Palestinian Agricultural lands and uprooted 8480 fruit trees, 203 vehicles had been destroyed.
Casualties and Losses
The above figures bring the Palestinian toll records of causalities and losses since the 28 Sep. 2000 to the following: Palestinians killed toll records 2616; among them 680 children, 134 were women, 660 were students and teachers, 286 were members of the Palestinian National Forces, 110 of the martyrs were killed on Israeli Military check points, 371 were assassinated in cold blood operations, 42 were killed by Jewish settlers and 56 of the martyrs were disabled.
Medical
465 medics were injured, where 27 were killed, 38 Ambulances were totally destroyed, 31 infants and 105 patients died while being held on checkpoints. 59 delivery cases took places on such checkpoints. Of the 49,339 Palestinians injured, 16000 were treated from minor injuries and recovered, 13597 of the injured were children and 2300 were women, while 5910 were left with permanent disabilities; 2935 of the disabled were children.
Those Detained
Among the total of 24783 detained Palestinians, 7000 are still in the Israeli jails.
Houses and Land
Total number of the affected Palestinian houses is 42918 houses; 3619 of which were demolished.
822104
fruit trees had been uprooted.46.5 Dunums from Palestinian lands in Rafah lands confiscated to be annexed to the Wall near the Israeli settlement Mirage, which is between Rafah and Khan Younis in Gaza Strip.
In addition, 34 Dunums from the Palestinian lands in Gaza to be annexed to Kfar Darom Settlement.
Israeli bulldozers swept away 50 Dunums of land full of olive trees to the north of Deir Al Balah, as well as another 15 Dunums of Al Qarara - Khan Younis and 15 Dunums of fields just because the land is near the Jewish Kharsina settlement- Hebron.
Settlers from Kiryat Arba' - Hebron uprooted a large number of fruitful trees in Wadi Al Nasara.
The Wall
The committee of land defense announced that 640 000 Dunums of agricultural lands in Hebron
district will be confiscated to be annexed to the Apartheid Wall, this consists 60% of the Hebron district lands.
The army issued military orders by which 2500 Dunums were confiscated to be annexed to the Wall. The 2500 Dunums belong to the following villages: Beit O'Or, Beit Liqya, Beit Daqqo, Beit Surik, Beit Ijza, Beit Iksa, and Beddo. The (IOA) had already confiscated 340 Dunums of Agricultural lands of Beit Iksa and Beit Surik to be annexed to the Wall.
Israeli army presented maps showing that parts of the land of Beit O'or A;-Fuqa will be confiscated, the area includes the main school in the village will be in-between the Wall and the Israeli settlement of Horon.
The army issued a military order to confiscate 107 Dunums of Palestinian lands of Anata and Sho'fat camp to be annexed to the Apartheid Wall in Jerusalem and plans to confiscate 500 Dunums of the Palestinian land of Al Terah village - Ramallah.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture - Qalqilya District, more over 4047 Dunums of land was swept away to be annexed to the Apartheid Wall, 32000 Dunums were isolated behind the wall. The Wall affects Farmers, Water Supply and Olive Oil Husbandry
About 2500 Palestinian farmers were affected by the wall.
About 19 water wells were also isolated behind the wall, 1 well was destroyed and 42 wells were made useless.
The toll number of uprooted trees was 40880, 179481 trees were isolated behind the wall.
Israeli bulldozers uprooted 500 fruit trees from Selfiet district.
Finally 541 Dunums of the lands of Al Khas village - Bethlehem district will be annexed to the Wall zone.This procedure means the isolation of 28 Palestinian families from
their neighborhood.
Land-theft plain and ordinary
Israeli settlers from Nive Tsour settlement constructed another outpost near the Palestinian village Ras Karkar.
Military orders have been issued to confiscate 700 Dunums of Palestinian agricultural lands to be used for military purposes.
Arabic Media Internet Network
http://www.amin.org/eng/azmi_bishara/2004/feb11.html
A short history of apartheid
By: Dr. Azmi Bishara© January 8, 2004
Rhetoric about demography so dominates Israel's political discourse that one might be tempted to assume that Israel has abandoned its preferred designation as the Jewish democratic state in favour of the Jewish demographic state. The condition has reached the stage where it might be
diagnosed as an advanced case of demographomania. The mania, of course, is rooted in Zionist principles, in the need to maintain a Jewish majority capable of implementing a democracy that will absorb the Diaspora, accommodate pioneer settlement and the assumption of a common history, and that allows for the fetishisation of military service. For without any of the above Israel would have to practice government by the minority, which inevitably leads to apartheid or racial segregation, to government by a national minority that sees the state as the embodiment of its legitimacy.
Such practices demand dual sets of legality. Because a state with a Jewish minority in Palestine was never on the cards displacement always lay at the core of the Zionist project for a Jewish state located in a country with an Arab majority and in the midst of an Arab region. It is no coincidence that the portion of land that was initially supposed to host the Jewish state was "ethnically cleansed" early. Along the once flourishing Palestinian coast only two Arab villages remain today.
The first task, then, was to cleanse the areas of the Jewish state -- as defined in the partition resolution -- of Arab inhabitants. This was followed by the displacement of Arabs from the Galilee and other parts of the presumed Arab state. The result: a large Jewish majority made it possible to impose the democratic sovereignty of the Jews, albeit in a non-liberal manner and with military and settler values.
Thus did Jewish democracy turn religious commitment into a tool of national formation while it pillaged the Arab Palestinian people. The uprooting of Palestinians in 1948 was an exercise in demographic separation through displacement.
Today's plans for demographic separation -- now called peace initiatives -- invariably acknowledge the impossibility of repeating that particular process. That much, at least, was acknowledged by Igal Allon in the Allon plan following the 1967 War. He then suggested that populated areas be returned to Jordan. Ehud Olmert spoke in similar vein in defending his recent initiative on separation, or unilateral disengagement. "Transfer is no longer possible. It is neither morally defendable, nor realistic to start with."
So long as transfer is impossible, then, it becomes necessary to find another model of segregation. Which is why Israel's Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon has no qualms describing the current phase as "the second half of 1948". The displacement of 1948, and the post-1967 occupation -- an occupation that shirks annexation by preferring a formula that includes "the application of Israeli law in the West Bank and Gaza" though without, of course, granting citizenship and political rights to the occupied -- are two cases of demographic segregation undertaken on behalf of a Jewish majority.
The ugliness of the contradictory ideology of the Israeli right may have been thrown into greater relief by Sharon's statements of last year but the truth had been there for all to see since Likud came to power in 1977. The Palestinians, apparently, live beyond the pale of citizenry and political life. They dwell beyond a political system based on a Jewish majority, and this without the benefit of a wall. Once this society that lived -- and still lives -- under occupation evolved its struggle for national sovereignty and for separation in an independent state comprising Palestinian citizens Israel responded with plans to separate from the Palestinians on its own terms. What Israel wants to separate itself from is the largest possible number of Palestinians living on the smallest possible area of land.
The self-rule plans negotiated with Egypt in January 1980, the Oslo Accords, the Camp David proposals, the unilateral withdrawal schemes by Sharon and Olmert, the Geneva initiative by the Zionist Israeli left, and the separation wall, are merely different manifestations of such thinking. The flaw at the heart of all such initiatives, the clear evidence that they are destined not to lead to any real peace, is that they are rooted in a process of separation made necessary by the demand to maintain a large Jewish majority in the Israeli political entity. This is the demographic context within which Zionism deals with the question of land.
For some reason Zionist political culture and symbols are steeped in an unwavering conviction that any unpopulated land is ripe for confiscation and annexation. This assumption is so blatant that Arabs feel guilty when they leave a plot of land vacant for any vacant land is threatened with confiscation, either to become part of a settlement, a road to a settlement or a natural protectorate. Any uninhabited land is land fit for carving off. Here lies the iniquity of the demographic argument. On the one hand it is racist. On the other it has nothing to do with land. Segregation may take place without land, as in the case of displacement. Or it may take place on the smallest possible piece of land, as Sharon wants.
Some Arabs and Palestinians have internalised the logic of Zionist demographic scare tactics to the extent that they see the slur of "demographic bomb" as something good. They boast of the Palestinian woman's womb, for lack of anything better to boast. Is this what our unified strategy has come to? Aside from the primitiveness and backwardness of regarding women as wombs the demographic factor is not, in itself, conducive to righteousness. It embraces a racist vision that is not driven towards just solutions. Racism is the basic motive for separation. "They are there and we are here," Barak's electoral slogan once announced. Struggle is being waged so that the terms of this separation are not overly comfortable for Israel, not terminally tragic for the Palestinians living
under occupation. That internalising the colonialist vision has led to the cult of numbers, of quantity not quality, is saddening.
Often even progressive political and social forces, people who want a truly better future, such as a bi-communal state, use demographic scare tactics: unless withdrawal is implemented to the lines of 4 June 1967, and unless the Palestinian state is established within this border, we will become a demographic majority, and you will have no alternative but to agree to a bi-communal state. Those who want to persuade people of the merits of a bi-communal state should not be scaring people with the demographic argument. The argument is embedded in racist soil. It can never sprout a healthy plant.
Perhaps many Arab leaders are unaware that the idea of racial segregation came first from the Labour Party. The first to call for Israel's unilateral separation from the Palestinians, under the highest possible wall, was Hayim Ramon. Likud adopted the proposal and went, literally, to the wall. The left is using the demographic threat to scare Israelis. It is trying to convince the Palestinians to abandon all other logic, through a virtual agreement that serves the segregationists. A worthier left would have sought peace in power and fought racial segregation in opposition. The left should fight the wall rather than draw up virtual agreements. This is the litmus test. So long that the logic of any settlement remains demographic, so long that it all boils down to separation from the largest possible number of Palestinians, land remains a secondary issue in the creation of a Palestinian entity.
Zionist colonialism inhabits the space between two extinct models -- those provided by South Africa and French practice in Algeria. It is not a blend of the two, but rather a distillation of the worst in each. In South Africa, that pioneer of apartheid, racial segregation was not absolute. It took place within a framework of political unity. The racist regime saw blacks as part of the system, an ingredient of the whole. The whites created a racist hierarchy within the unity, according to their own vision of the universe. They interpreted Christian religious texts accordingly. Blacks and whites, then blacks and whites and coloureds, were given different ranks and legal status within a frame of a unified system -- apartheid. Apartheid is one system for whites and blacks. The whites did not think for a moment of creating separation walls running along entire provinces. Assaulting nature in such a pattern was unthinkable. What they did was circumvent entire black towns, ghettos, and squatter camps, and restrict the movement of their inhabitants. The only walls they created were those to their own private dwellings. Behind these walls they retreated, in their
gardens, with their black servants.
The struggle for freedom in South Africa was a struggle against segregation and discrimination within the same political entity. Demographic segregation was not even considered. The entire logic of the struggle was to fight racism and segregation -- the goal to create one nation of blacks and
whites, a South African nation, a single democratic and sovereign state. This endeavour is still underway and it is premature to judge its outcome. Yet such is the thinking behind it.
French colonisation presented an opposite model, replete with geographic, cultural and societal separation between two entities, the occupier and the occupied. Whereas the Boers saw South Africa as their home and fought a ferocious war against what they considered British occupation, the colonisers of Algeria had a "mother county", an offshore home to look to. The impulse of French colonialism was to achieve unity within the separation between France and Algeria, not separation within the unity, as was the case in South Africa. This is why French colonialism was accompanied by the hectic quest to give Algeria, and its inhabitants, a French makeover. This is why the liberation movement adopted pure separatist dogma, with a stress on identity that still marks Algerian society. Even class conflicts and domestic politics in Algeria resemble a conflict of identity, one parodying the experience of the struggle against colonialism. The separation achieved through independence was a full one, of land and people. Over a million settlers left the country, even though they were given the choice of remaining as Algerian citizens.
The case of Palestine is not an attempt to achieve separation within unity, as was the case with apartheid, nor is it an attempt to unify what was originally separate, as was the case in Algeria. The Israelis identify with the land, but keep away from the locals. The Israelis want to stay in the country and deny citizenship to its inhabitants. Or they want to be separate but hold on to the settlements. Barriers and walls are the rule, not the exception. This unique type of colonialism does not seek to "develop" the inhabitants, as other colonialists once did in homage to the "white man's burden". This colonialism displaces people, confiscates their land or bypasses them (the term, often applied to roads, is pertinent). It "develops" the land for settlement, but not for the inhabitants. Because of this Moshe Dayan and his aides adopted a policy of open bridges after the 1967 War. They wanted the Palestinians to have an economic and demographic outlet to Jordan, the Gulf
countries, and other parts of the region, so as to free Israel from the economic and other responsibilities commonly assumed by occupying authorities. These open bridges helped the occupation endure, and helped the people endure it.
In all former colonies one comes across traces of French, English, Dutch, Belgian, or Muscovite architecture. One can find hospitals and administrative offices, prisons, railways, even universities built by the occupiers. Not in the areas seized in 1967. Not one Israeli building, not even a prison, is to be seen in Ramallah, Nablus or Gaza. Everything there was built by Arabs. There is not a trace of an Israeli building in Arab areas, apart from the settlements and their related infrastructure.
Separation, within separation, is the logic of Zionist colonialism, the thinking behind the wall of racial segregation, where Israel continues its crimes of barbarism. Separation is the logic underlying Sharon's recent proposals for further obstacles east of the wall, where Israeli forces will be stationed to oversee the outskirts of Palestinian towns and villages. It is difficult to describe the maze of walls and barriers constructed around the villages in the vicinity of Jerusalem. It is difficult to imagine the ugliness brought about in the course of controlling people and land: gates and observation towers, double walls, barbed and electrical wires.
What we have here is a wide-scale recreation of the detention camp which Giorgio Agamben called the essence of the modern fascist state. This is a place where the exception becomes the rule, and the state of emergency becomes permanent, to use the words of Walter Benjamin.
*Dr.Azmi Bishara,Member of the Israeli Knesset from Nazareth. He is heading the National
Democratic Coalition “Balad".
MAP: STRATEGIC INTERESTS IN WEST BANK
