SEPTEMBER 2006

What does this mean?  Well, if you have been following my posts and reading Amria Hass' articles on the topic*, you know it means I will need to bid farewell to my wife and two girls, leave home, exit Israel and attempt to reenter in order to get back to the Palestinian areas under occupation by Israel.  Sounds simple enough, given I've been dancing to this routine for 13 years now.

But, as you are all aware, Israel has been denying entry to thousands like me, foreign nationals who do not have a Palestinian I.D. card (I applied for family unification 1994 but Israel refuses, to date, to issue me a I.D. card too).  So telling me, like the many before me ever since Hamas was elected into government, to leave Palestine/Israel by not providing a serious visa extension while I'm in the country, is an off-the-radar way of silently transferring Palestinians living here out of Palestine.  Of course, Israel is betting that on every family it can break this way, the remaining family members will voluntarily leave to relocate in order to join their exiled loved one(s).

The final result of this transfer policy - A land with no people, for a people with no land. Finally, the original myth that Israel was created on can be made to come through.  After creating scores of refugees by numerous war, killing scores under occupation, deporting scores more, detaining yet scores more, making life under occupation miserable for scores more, and now by refusing to allow Palestinians that come from around the world to contribute to a better future, Israel would have finally succeeded in emptying the land from the majority of Palestinians, opening the way for more illegal settlement, land grabs and annexations.

I have much more to write about this, and will, as I wage the battle to remain with my wife, with my girls, in my home, in my father's and grandfather's homeland.  I will soon write an essay to make my case and that of all Palestinians prohibited from reaching their homes and families.

If I only had the email of the multi-lingual occupation soldier that wrote "last permit" on my visa, I would send him the attached pictures of my two girls, Areen, 12, and Nadine, 6.  I wonder if his/her children look any different on the first day of school.

I thank all those who are assisting in this issue, especially the many Israeli friends who understand that those being DENIED ENTRY are those that have come to build bridges, not walls.  We have come to invest and create a new reality - a reality that ends this racist occupation and brings a brighter future, a joint future, to both Palestinian and Israeli children. 

I end by passing to you the link to yesterday's bold article by Amria Hass, that never-tiring Israeli journalist living in Ramallah who forces us to always remember that peaceful coexistence is not a pipe dream, but rather a historical inevitability. (text follows)


Steadfast (like never before),Sam


Can you really not see?
ByAmira Hass
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/756413.

Let us leave aside those Israelis whose ideology supports the dispossession of the Palestinian people because "God chose us." Leave aside the judges who whitewash every military policy of killing and destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who knowingly jail an entire nation in pens surrounded by walls, fortified observation towers, machine guns, barbed wire and blinding projectors. Leave aside the ministers. All of these are not counted among the collaborators. These are the architects, the planners, the designers, the executioners.

But there are others. Historians and mathematicians, senior editors, media stars, psychologists and family doctors, lawyers who do not support Gush Emunim and Kadima, teachers and educators, lovers of hiking trails and sing-alongs, high-tech wizards. Where are you? And what about you, researchers of Nazism, the Holocaust and Soviet gulags? Could you all be in favor of systematic discriminating laws? Laws stating that the Arabs of the Galilee will not even be compensated for the damages of the war by the same sums their Jewish neighbors are entitled to (Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz , August 21).

Could it be that you are all in favor of a racist Citizenship Law that forbids an Israeli Arab from living with his family in his own home? That you side with further expropriation of lands and the demolishing of additional orchards, for another settler neighborhood and another exclusively Jewish road? That you all back the shelling and missile fire killing the old and the young in the Gaza Strip?

Could it be that you all agree that a third of the West Bank (the Jordan Valley) should be off limits to Palestinians? That you all side with an Israeli policy that prevents tens of thousands of Palestinians who have obtained foreign citizenship from returning to their families in the occupied territories?

Could your mind really be so washed with the security excuse, used to forbid Gaza students from studying occupational therapy at Bethlehem and medicine at Abu Dis, and preventing sick people from Rafah from receiving medical treatment in Ramallah? Will also you find it easy to hide behind the explanation "we had no idea": we had no idea that the discrimination practiced in the distribution of water - which is solely controlled by Israel - leaves thousands of Palestinian households without water during the hot summer months; we had no idea that when the IDF blocks the entrance to villages, it also blocks their access to springs or water tanks.

But it cannot be that you don't see the iron gates along route 344 in the West Bank, blocking access to it from the Palestinian villages it passes by. It cannot be that you support preventing the access of thousands of farmers to their land and plantations, that you support the quarantine on Gaza which prevents the entry of medicine for hospitals, the disruption of electricity and water supply to 1.4 million human beings, closing their only outlet to the world for months.

Could it be that you do not know what is happening 15 minutes from your faculties and offices? Is it plausible that you support the system in which Hebrew soldiers, at checkpoints in the heart of the West Bank, are letting tens of thousands of people wait everyday for hours upon hours under the blazing sun, while selecting: residents of Nablus and Tul Karm are not allowed through, 35-year-olds and under - yallah, back to Jenin, residents of the Salem village are not even allowed to be here, a sick woman who skipped the line must learn a lesson and will be purposefully detained for hours. Machsom Watch's site is available for all; in it are countless such testimonies and worse, a day by day routine. But it cannot be that those who are appalled over every swastika painted on a Jewish grave in France and over every anti-Semitic headline in a Spanish local newspaper will not know how to reach this information, and will not be appalled and outraged.

As Jews we all enjoy the privilege Israel gives us, what makes us all collaborators. The question is what does every one of us do in an active and direct daily manner to minimize cooperation with a dispossessing, suppressing regime that never has its fill. Signing a petition and tutting will not do. Israel is a democracy for its Jews. We are not in danger of our lives, we will not be jailed in concentration camps, our livelihood will not be damaged and recreation in the countryside or abroad will not be denied to us. Therefore, the burden of collaboration and direct responsibility is immeasurably heavy.

UPDATE::

The slippery slope of expulsion

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/758676.html

By Amira Hass

When a Civil Administration officer at the Beit El military base extended the tourist visa of Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American businessman from Ramallah, and wrote on it "last permit," he did not do so on his own initiative. When the officer issued what amounts to a deportation order against Bahour from the city in which his family has lived for many generations, and in which he has lived for 14 years with his wife and two daughters, he was only the messenger.

When a border official at the Allenby Bridge two weeks ago denied entry to a Palestinian-Jordanian woman arriving with her husband, a young doctor from Ramallah, he was following orders. So were the border officials who did not allow the Spanish wife of R.I. from Ramallah to return with their two-year-old daughter, and those who prevented S.A., a Ramallah-born Palestinian with Swedish citizenship, from returning to his wife, children and livelihood in Bir Zeit. The official who twice denied entry to P.Z., a Palestinian-American who has invested $300 million in the territories and is a senior director of a Palestinian investment company, was also obeying new rules dictated by the Israeli Interior Ministry.

When Interior Ministry spokespersons claim repeatedly that these are not new rules of entry, but rather a "freshening up" about existing procedures, they are not playing dumb on their own initiative. Neither is the senior Civil Administration official who explained to Zahi Khouri - one of the most prominent Palestinian-American businessmen, who has so far been spared the "last permit" stamp - that this was a matter of "an administrative misunderstanding." This well-laundered phrase was not invented by that official, who meant that if until now, Khouri and others in his situation have received tourist visas every three months, that was only a "misunderstanding."

An "administrative misunderstanding?" This practice has enabled thousands of Palestinians and their spouses to live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in a kind of twilight zone: not receiving residency rights from Israel, but coming and going as tourists so that they can live as Palestinians in their homeland, with their families, over the course of many years - 10, 15, and even 30. And all of a sudden someone energetic in the Interior Ministry discovered the misunderstanding and tells these people to leave?

In 2000, similarly "freshened up" rules were issued regarding Palestinians whose spouses were citizens of Arab, that is, non-Western countries. They were not permitted to return to their homes. Between 1994 and 2000, during the Oslo years, instructions were given that slowed the process of "family unification," for which tens of thousands of families in the occupied territories are waiting, to a minimum. These families are not living in Haifa or Ashkelon, but in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And despite this, in 2000, even this minimal process of family unification, which only Israel has the authority to approve, was frozen. Consequently, thousands of families were condemned to a cruel separation - between fathers and children, wives and husbands, grandparents and grandchildren.

In 1996, these same decision-makers - the Labor government and the Likud-Shas government - issued a similar order: to revoke the Jerusalem residency rights of Palestinians born in Jerusalem who were studying or working abroad, or who had built houses in neighborhoods close to Jerusalem because longstanding discriminatory policies prevented them from building in East Jerusalem. In that same spirit of demographic manipulation, Israel forbids Palestinians to move from Gaza to the West Bank, and Gaza residents living in the West Bank are considered "illegal aliens" and are deported to Gaza.

Behind the officials and the spokespeople, whose names are known, behind the "procedures" that they quote, hide the people who give the orders. Who are they? Prime ministers (from the Likud, Labor-Shas and Kadima) or "just" their interior ministers? Perhaps they are ministry directors general who know which way the wind is blowing, along with the legal advisors who back them up. This is not known. After all, they do not publish these decisions with their signatures on them. In another 50 years, the state archives containing today's documents will be opened, and then we will know.

The important thing today is that a direct line connects various similar decisions made separately, as if unconnected. The decision-makers are only waiting for the right moment to expand them, to make them harsher, to include more categories of deportees. And all this is happening without any opposition - neither from Israeli individuals and political organizations that speak loftily of peace, nor from Western countries that know only how to make demands of Palestinian governments, but claim that they cannot intervene when it comes to Israel's sovereign decisions. The sovereign decisions of an occupying state.

If the anonymous decision-makers do not come up against courageous opposition, they will continue to invent new rules that will drag us further and further down the slope of expulsion.

..............................................................................................

A letter from Dorothy

Dear Friends,

Today you received a message advising of Sam Bahour’s treatment at the hands of the Israeli authorities.  Because he has American citizenship, he in the past was required to have his visa renewed every 3 months—a visa given by the Israeli authorities, who now refuse to renew it beyond one single month.

The long and the short of it is that Israel decides not only who may live in Israel, but also who may live in Palestine!

THIS ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE MUST BE STOPPED.I call on all Americans who read this, wherever they live, to phone the American Embassy in Tel Aviv and/or the US State Department and protest this treatment, not only with respect to Sam, but with respect to all others in his predicament.Demand that the US sanction Israel for its undemocratic behavior!

US Embassy in TA (ask for Consular Section) +972 3 519 7575; from Israel 03 519 7575 [will be closed Saturday and Sunday]

US Department of State switchboard, Washington DC: (202) 647 4000.  If you can think of anyone else to contact to protest to, please do.

For those unfamiliar with Sam and his writings, here is additional information on him. He came to Palestine believing that he could help develop its future. Do not let Israel kick him out!

Dorothy

............................................

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American businessman and activist based in Al- Bireh/Ramallah, Palestine.

Sam relocated with his family to Palestine from the United States in 1995 to assist in the privatization of the Palestinian telecommunications sector.  He was part of the core team that established the Palestine Telecommunications Company (www.paltel.net). He served as PALTEL's first Director of Information Systems after successfully participating in securing a 20-year fixed line and mobile operator's license for PALTEL from the Palestinian National Authority. Afterwards, Sam established a private business, AIM (www.aim-palestine.com), the first ICT-specific consulting firm in Palestine in the fall of 1997.  AIM has evolved into a management consulting firm specializing in business development and with a niche focus on the information technology sector.  Sam also served as MIS Manager for the Arab Palestinian Investment Company (www.apic-pal.com), the second largest private sector investment group in Palestine.  Sam founded the Palestine Diaspora Investment Company (PDIC) in the spring of 2000.

While in the United States he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Technology from Youngstown State University and was employed in several national software development firms, all working in the direct marketing industry. His combination of managerial and technical experience, coupled with his MBA degree from the joint international program from Northwestern and Tel Aviv Universities, has given him a keen appreciation for working in the dynamic Palestinian market.  Sam has extensive experience in the field of telecommunications operations, policy and regulation. Until recently Sam served as General Manager of the Arab Palestinian Shopping Centers P.L.C., a publicly-traded subsidiary of the Arab Palestinian Investment Company in which he took from concept to operations.  The Arab Palestinian Shopping Centers is building the first of a chain of modern shopping centers in Palestine - the first, the PLAZA Shopping Center, opened in July 2003 in Al-Bireh in the midst of the most difficult economic times Palestine has ever faced under Israeli occupation.

Sam also serves as a Board of Trustees member at Birzeit University and is the Board's treasurer.  He is also a Director at the Arab Islamic Bank and writes frequently on Palestinian affairs and has been widely published [Google contains a long list of Sam’s writings. D].  Sam is co-editor of HOMELAND: Oral History of Palestine and Palestinians.

Sam may be reached at sbahour@palnet.com.

Here is one of Sam Bahour's Essays, more can be found on Google:

October 1, 2002

Wake Up and Smell the Occupation

by SAM BAHOUR

As Israel jumps from one self-made crisis to the next, the State of Israel itself is in an alarming condition.

The peace and security that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised during his year 2001 election campaign have vanished in the dust of Israeli tanks rampaging Palestinian cities. Israel's economy is declining at a record pace. The right-wing Sharon government has sparked a national debate in Israel that questions the legal right to citizenship for over 1.1 million of its Palestinian citizens. Israeli families across the social strata are sending their children to study abroad and emigrating at a pace that was not thought possible only a few years ago. Over 400 Israeli conscripts, soldiers, or reservists are refusing to serve in the occupied Palestinian areas and some are now imprisoned in Israeli jails as consciousness objectors. The moral fabric of Israeli society is tearing apart at the seams as the Israeli military proudly reverts to a policy of assassination, imprisonment, demolition of homes, deportation, and collective punishment.

Israel's unrelenting military onslaught against every Palestinian city, village and refugee camp in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has put the Israeli economy at serious risk. As Palestinians living (if you can call it that) under Israeli military occupation for the past thirty-six years and Israeli military curfew for the last five months, our first concern is hardly for the welfare of Israel and its economy. On the other hand, I, as most Palestinians, fear that the threatening socio- economic collapse of Israel may bring even more death and destruction upon us.

Only last week the price of flour in Israel rose 6 percent and gas 14 percent. Flagship Israeli companies are reporting cuts in their workforce by the thousands. One high-tech firm just cut twenty-five percent of its workforce in one day. Rochard Fox, senior director of sovereign ratings, from the international ratings agency, Fitch, told Reuters this week, "There's a greater than 50% chance the [Israel's] rating will go down based on current trends." Israel's other credit rating has taken a pounding lately as the Israeli currency, the New Israeli Shekel (NIS), declined against the US dollar after Standard and Poor's lowered its rating for two of Israel's top banks to BBB+ from their previous A- rating.

Additionally, this week the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said that Israel faces negative growth and rising unemployment, which the IMF said would hit 10.7 percent this year and 10.9 percent next year. The IMF report predicted that Israel's gross domestic product would contract by 1.5 percent this year. The IMF also forecasts for Israel an inflation rate of 6.2 percent this year and 3.0 percent in 2003. Combined with the bleak global economic scene and the growing strains of continuing its three-decade old occupation, these numbers should be ringing many bells within Israel.

Another arena that may further damage the Israeli economy is the global divesture campaign that was launched by Professor Francis Boyle, professor of international law at The University of Illinois College of Law. Already, groups at over fifty US university campuses have signed on to help organize the campaign and many other campuses and professors around the world are joining in. This effort recalls the successful divesture campaign against South African Apartheid that contributed to Apartheid's abrupt end.

As Israel continues to refuse to implement dozens of United Nations resolutions, the latest calling for an end to the siege of Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah, it can only be expected that increasing numbers of communities will bypass governmental paralysis in taking action against Israeli and look for other means, such as economic sanctions, to pressure Israel into ending the occupation. Alternatively, Israelis do not have to wait while the US forces Sharon to end the siege of Arafat. Israeli citizens have the power to step back from yet another embarrassing political scenario on their own, today.

Israel's occupation of Palestinians is destroying Israel from within and ultimately only Israeli citizens have the power to reverse the current trend of self-destruction. After two years of watching Israel spiral downwards, the world no longer believes that the current Israeli administration is interested in addressing its sad state of affairs. As a matter of fact, all efforts, even those by Israel's strongest allies, are falling on deaf ears. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon instead chooses to continue his wildly irresponsible (many would say criminal) foreign and domestic policies while being cheered on by the current US administration and the more powerful elements of American Jewry and Christian fundamentalism.

It is no longer sufficient for Israelis to pay lip service to their intent to end the occupation. It is in Israel's immediate best interest to set aside the political spin that aims at demonizing the Palestinian leadership and people and swiftly, even unilaterally if need be, beg the international community to assume responsibility for the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. By doing so, Israel can finally end the long drain of military occupation. There will be many years after the end of occupation to discuss the details of a final status political agreement with the Palestinians. But holding 3.5 million Palestinians hostage until a final status agreement can be reached will only destroy Israel from within.

Israeli voters taking back their country from those bent on forever persecuting Palestinians is the final hope for Israel to save itself from its own ill-advised, three-decade policy of occupation. The fact remains that there exists only one policy that Israel, to date, has refused to even attempt to employ: actually ending the occupation. This action has the best chance of relieving Israel of the prisoner's ball and chain that it has been dragging around for the last fifty-five years.

As many Palestinians are anxiously waiting for the US to gallop across the Atlantic on a white horse to solve our woes, I prefer to appeal to my Israeli neighbors to wake up and smell the occupation, for their sake and for ours.

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American businessman living in the besieged Palestinian City of Al-Bireh in the West Bank, He is co-editor of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994). He can be reached at sbahour@palnet.com.