SEPTEMBER 2005
The settlers' retreat was the theatre of the cynical
There was no 'sensitivity training' when bulldozers went into Rafah
Jonathan Steele
Guardian
Friday August 19, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1552190,00.html
Contrast the world's overwhelming coverage, especially on television, of the departure of Israeli settlers from Gaza with the minimal reporting of larger and more brutal evictions in previous months.
There was no "sensitivity training" for Israeli troops, no buses to drive the expellees away, no generous deadlines to get ready, no compensation packages for their homes, and no promise of government-subsidised alternative housing when the bulldozers went into Rafah.
Within sight of the Gush Katif settlements that have been handled with such kid gloves this week, families in Rafah were usually given a maximum of five minutes' warning before their houses, and life savings, were crushed. Many people did not even have time to go upstairs to collect belongings when the barking of loudspeakers ordered them out, sometimes before dawn. Fleeing with their children in the night, they risked being shot if they turned round or delayed.
As many as 13,350 Palestinians were made homeless in the Gaza Strip in the first 10 months of last year by Israel's giant armour-plated Caterpillar bulldozers - a total that easily exceeds the 8,500 leaving Israeli settlements this week. In Rafah alone, according to figures from the UN relief agency Unrwa, the rate of house demolitions rose from 15 per month in 2002 to 77 per month between January and October 2004.
Parts of Rafah now resemble areas of Kabul or Grozny. Facing Israeli army watchtowers and the concrete wall that runs close to the Gaza Strip's boundary, rows of rubble and ruined homes stretch for hundreds of yards.
The house where I stayed three years ago, which was then one row back from the frontline, has gone. So have three more lines of houses behind it, thanks to Israel's remorseless policy of clearing the zone for "security" reasons even after Ariel Sharon announced his plan to leave Gaza.
Palestinians who visit the ruins or try to use one or two rooms that survived the onslaught risk their lives from Israeli bullets. A warning shot rang out as one homeowner took me on to his roof in broad daylight last month to survey the miserable scene. We quickly came down.
These cruel evictions have of course been reported, and some foreigners who tried to block or record them, such as Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall and James Miller, paid with their lives alongside scores of murdered local Palestinians. But coverage was never as comprehensive or intense as this week's removals of Israelis. Sharon wanted the world's media to see the protracted agony of the settlers, so as to make the (spurious) point that if it is hard to get 8,500 to leave Gaza, getting 400,000 to withdraw from the West Bank and east Jerusalem will be impossible. However sincere the settlers' grief is at leaving their homes, for the organisers of the retreat it was theatre of the cynical.
The exaggerated focus on the settlement evictions has some benefits. Those who claim, genuinely or dishonestly, that the world's media are biased in favour of Palestinians had their argument collapse this week. TV viewers around the world have also been exposed to the ugly sight of rampant religious fundamentalism. ....................
Perhaps the ugliest part of the Israeli settlers' behaviour was their corruption of youth, with parents instigating their children to wrap themselves in prayer shawls and sob or shriek defiance.
No one who spends time in Gaza's Palestinian communities can avoid being saddened by the ubiquitous focus on the gun, which also diverts children from normal growing up. It appears on graffiti everywhere alongside the names and faces of those who died by violence, in suicide attacks or shot down by Israeli fire. Almost every teenage boy aspires to use a Kalashnikov or hand grenade. At a recent wedding, I saw a dancing mother twirl a rifle in both hands above her head like the baton of a majorette.
j.steele@guardian.co.uk
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 www.news-report-owner.com Forwarded by Raja Mattar
Jennifer Loewenstein wrote:
Excerpt:
Where were the cameramen in May 2004 in Rafah when refugees twice over lost their homes again in a single night's raid, able to retrieve nothing of what they owned?
Where were they when bulldozers and tanks tore up paved streets with steel blades, wrecked the sewage and water pipes, cut electricity lines, and demolished a park and a zoo; when snipers shot two children, a brother and sister, feeding their pigeons on the roof of their home? When the occupying army fired a tank shell into a group of peaceful demonstrators killing 14 of them including two children?
Where have they been for the past five years when the summer heat of Rafah makes life so unbearable it is all one can do to sit quietly in the shade of one's corrugated tin roof -- because s/he is forbidden to go to the sea, ten minutes' walking distance from the city center? Or because if they ventured to the more open spaces they became walking human targets? And when their citizens resisted, where were the accolades and the admiring media to comment on the "pluck," the "will" and "audacity" of these "young people"?
On Tuesday, 16 August, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that more than 900 journalists from Israel and around the world are covering the events in Gaza, and that hundreds of others are in cities and towns in Israel to cover local reactions. Were there ever that many journalists in one place during the past 5 years to cover the Palestinian Intifada? Where were the 900 international journalists in April 2002 after the Jenin refugee camp was laid to waste in the matter of a week in a show of pure Israeli hubris and sadism? Where were the 900 international journalists last fall when the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza lay under an Israeli siege and more than 100 civilians were killed?
Where were they for five years while the entire physical infrastructure of the Gaza Strip was being destroyed?
Which one of them reported that every crime of the Israeli occupation ? from home demolitions, targeted assassinations and total closures to the murder of civilians and the wanton destruction of commercial and public property- increased significantly in Gaza after Sharon's "Disengagement" Plan - that great step toward peace - was announced? Where are the hundreds of journalists who should be covering the many non-violent protests by Palestinians and Israelis against the Apartheid Wall? Non-violent protesters met with violence and humiliation by Israeli armed forces? Where are the hundreds of journalists who should be reporting on the economic and geographic encirclement of Palestinian East Jerusalem and of the bisection of the West Bank and the subdivision of each region into dozens of isolated mini-prisons?
Why aren't we being barraged by outraged reports about the Jewish-only bypass roads? About the hundreds of pointless internal checkpoints? About the countless untried executions and maimings? About the torture and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons?
Where were these hundreds of journalists when each of the 680 Palestinian children shot to death by Israeli soldiers over the last 5 years was laid to rest by grief-stricken family members? The shame of it all defies words.................................................
Jennifer Loewenstein will be a viisiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre at
Oxford University beginning this fall. She can be reached:
amadea311@earthlink.net
| Charley Reese wrote: |
| As I
watched the extensive, plainly sympathetic
coverage of Jewish settlers being evicted from
their Gaza homes, I couldn't help but take note
once again of the striking double standard
applied by American news media as well as the
U.S. government. I cannot recall any sympathetic coverage of Palestinians being evicted from their homes. No interviews with weeping mothers or fathers. No discussions of whether the evictions were right or wrong. This is obviously a deliberate policy on the part of America's television networks, for after all, they had 4,170 opportunities to report on Palestinian evictions since September 2000. That's how many homes were destroyed, and, of course, doesn't count the orchards and olive trees bulldozed by the Israeli army or Israeli settlers. Of course, Palestinians were not evicted by sympathetic soldiers or promised huge amounts of money to relocate. No, they were brutally told to get out of their houses, which were then blown up or bulldozed into rubble by decidedly unsympathetic Israeli soldiers. What little they had was destroyed, and they were offered nothing except verbal abuse by the Israelis and invisibility by the American media. One idealistic American girl who tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer from destroying a Palestinian home was crushed to death by the bulldozer. Naturally, the United States government did nothing, and the American media obediently either ignored her death or accepted the Israeli excuse that the driver couldn't see her, which is bull. She was killed in broad, sunny daylight while wearing a blaze-orange jacket and standing atop a pile of dirt..................... |
meanwhile....
Israeli Occupation Government Confiscates
Palestinian Area Larger than the Gaza Strip (62,000
Dunums) to Expand Illegal Settlement of Ma'ale Adumin (PMC, 8/23/05).
and Reveals a plan to build a new Jewish settlement in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City near Herod’s Gate
Another illegal act in East Jerusalem undertaken by the Israeli Government and the Municipality of Jerusalem has recently been uncovered:
"Increasing Israeli control over Palestinian land in East Jerusalem is intended unilaterally to create facts on the ground. With such policy Israel is violating international law, which does not recognize Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem, occupied in June 1967."
Recently the Sub-committee of the Local Committee for Planning and Construction in Jerusalem has confirmed a plan to erect a Jewish neighbourhood in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. According to the plan, 30 housing units and a synagogue will be built to accommodate some 150 people. Professionals (Bimkom - Planners for Planning Rights) warn of the planning implications of the plan: The proposed plan violates the basic planning principles of all construction in the Old City:
1.Principles of preservation: in order to preserve the history and heritage of the Old City, any construction is limited by height and proximity to the walls of the city. The proposed plan violates these two principles.
2. The Old City is the most densely inhabited place not only in Jerusalem but also in Israel; this density in the Muslim Quarter is 182.7 capita per dunam (5-20 capita in other neighbourhoods in Jerusalem). In recent years planners have been working to find ways to decrease or dilute that density. Any new project aiming to house external communities will badly harm the planners’ work.
3.In addition to the density, changing the open space, which is among the extremely few open spaces in the Old City, into a housing area will seriously harm the welfare of the people living there.
Besides the above planning defects and the environmental implications, we recognize the political danger inherent in the plan. Building housing units for Jews in the Muslim Quarter has far-reaching implications over the delicate social fabric of the city. The Palestinians in East Jerusalem live in socio-economic distress, therefore a permanent presence of Jews in such a vicinity, in improved living conditions, would lead to provocation and a serious political and social crisis. Not only this, but the proposed plan is also a continuation of a consistent Israeli policy whose purpose is a violation of the balance between Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem, creating by this policy a Jewish majority in East Jerusalem.
Increasing Israeli control over Palestinian land in East Jerusalem is intended unilaterally to create facts on the ground. With such policy Israel is violating international law, which does not recognize Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem, occupied in June 1967. This is basically a political plan that gives new meaning to the term "United Jerusalem," in this way preventing any possibility for political negotiation for a just solution in Jerusalem.
Your letter or inquiry may make a difference. Please write a polite but firm letter to:
Min. Interior Ofir Pines, fax: 03-763 2638/ 02-566-6376 or email pinespaz@knesset.gov.il
Minister for Building & Infrastructure, Isaac Herzog, fax: 02-584-7033 and 02-582-4111
Director of J”m District Planning, Ruth Yosef: fax: 02-624-1986 or phone: 02-629-0216
Jerusalem Mayor, Uri Lupoliansky, Fax: 02-629-6014
Rabbi Yehoshua Pollak, Chairman, Municipal Local Committee of Building & Planning: fax: 02-629-6178
Emails to Meir Margalit at meir@icahd.org will be hand delivered to the Municipality and copies of letters may be sent to Bat Shalom (info@batshalom.org) or ICAHD: The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (anjie@netvision.net.il)
Signatories:
AIC:
Alternative Information
Centre
Bat Shalom
Gush
Shalom
MachsomWatch
ICAHD: Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
Peace Now
Ta’ayush
meanwhile......
DOROTHY'S LETTERS
Dear All, Just in case you haven't seen
this. The
settlers have become so sure of themselves, they steal
land in open daylight anywhere in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories. This has happened also in
Yanun and in the South Hebron hills, Kufr
Thulth, but the practice is spreading.
Settlers as these are a good part of Sharon's forces for
creating the 'greater israel' by means of steal and
conquer. Dorothy
----------------------------------------------------
From: International
Solidarity Movement <neta_golan@yahoo.com>
10 Palestinians injured by Israeli
soldiers in Liban Al-Gharbi
This morning, ten Palestinians were injured when soldiers
opened fire in Liban Al-Gharbi, near Rantis - 15 km south
of Qalqilya. The conflict began six days ago, when
a group of 25 settlers and soldiers brought heavy
machinery onto a piece of land that belongs to the
village. They began digging and excavating the
land, claiming to be in search of archeological
ruins. On several occasions in the last week, the
settlers have also come into the village to harass and
threaten the Palestinians. Each day, the
Palestinians have gone down to the occupied land to talk
to the settlers - insisting that the land belongs to the
village and that the settlers do not have the right the
work there. This morning, when the Palestinians
confronted the settlers, the situation escalated into a
fight, with settlers and villagers throwing rocks at one
another. Israeli soldiers then opened fire on the
villagers with rubber coated metal bullets - injuring ten
Palestinians. Seven of the injured have been
transferred to Ramallah Hospital; two are in serious
condition. Bajis, 33, was shot twice in his
left leg from a distance of less than 5 meters.
Munthir, 40, was shot in the forehead and in the left
shoulder. The other villagers were treated and
released. The soldiers, settlers, and workers remain on
the land and the situation remains tense.
For more information, contact Muhammad Zeitun: 054
5738095.
Or the International Solidarity Movement media office: 02
2971824.
Letter No.2
Dear Friends,
I owe an update to all of you who contributed so generously to help 3 year old Palestinian Lina Taa’mallah from Qira have her much needed kidney transplant.
I am distributing this also to those who have not contributed funds. We are all asked to donate much these days, to Palestinians and Israelis alike, and all for good causes. And none of us can donate for every cause. Nevertheless, I am sending this out to as many people as I can, because Lina needs help badly, time is working against her, and perhaps even if you yourself cannot donate money, you might be able to furnish information about organizations or people who can, or perhaps help in other unexpected ways.
The tale of our endeavors to have the transplant performed is Kafka-esque to the extreme. When I say “us,” I refer to her father, the donor, myself, and additional individuals who have tried as best they can to further our efforts.
In brief, there are 2 main
problems: financial, and the donor of the kidney
1. When I originally appealed to you for help, we were certain that the Palestinian Authority was going to pay at least 75% of the $40,000.00 cost of having the kidney transplant performed here in Israel and that the Peres Center would contribute $10,000.00. This would mean that we had to raise about another $10,000.00.
As concerns the PA, either we misunderstood, or someone misinformed us. The PA agreed to pay only $7,500.00. We had to find the rest. As concerns the Peres Center, it can contribute the $10,000.00 only if the hospital agrees to lower its rates by 30%. So far, Schneider hospital has refused. If anyone can convince either Schneider Children’s hospital or Hadassah Hospital to lower their fees, it would help greatly.
After learning the above, we began to search for organizations that could help us, and appealed to about 30, of which only 3 bothered to respond. We also began
to search for hospitals elsewhere in the world that we could trust and that might be willing to perform the surgery for less than $40,000.00. Here we met with the 2nd p roblem.
2. Lina’s parents cannot donate the kidney, because neither is suitable for the child. A very close and trusted friend has offered her kidney for free. She does not want a penny. Tests have been made, and the donor is compatible. But, it turns out, that almost all the hospitals that we have appealed to (mainly in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe) refuse to perform the transplant when the donor is not a member of the family.
Today we received some hopeful news. The PA has agreed to pay ½ the cost: $20,000.00, but on the condition that the surgery be performed this month. Even with the additional help, we are still $10,000.00 short to have the transplant done in Israel. And it seems unlikely at this point that we shall find a hospital elsewhere in the world to do it, and especially within a month’s time.
If you can help in any way, please let me know. Below is the information needed to contact me and also to donate money.
For those of you unfamiliar with the case, the original appeal with the information is at the very bottom of this email.
We have learned that the fastest way to donate money is via bank transfer, but that the cheapest way is to donate by checks made out to me. My bank has agreed to waive most of the fees for the purpose. By contrast, Fareed Taa’mallah’s Palestinian bank (the father’s bank) does not accept cheques from foreign banks of less than $500.00, and charges $50.00 on bank transfers up to $5000.00. Nevertheless, if you feel uncomfortable making checks out to me, bank transfers to Fareed are an option. The information for both follows.
Thank you very much for whatever you do. I know that you all, like myself, want Lina to live.
Dorothy
dor_naor@netvision.net.il
+972 9 958 4804
Make out cheques to me to Dorothy
Naor; write on the bottom ‘for Lina.’ Please
inform me by email about the amount you are contributing,
and whether by check or bank transfer. That will
help us know where we stand.