PALESTINE IS STILL THE ISSUE

JOHN PILGER - Photo from Wikipedia

Palestine is still the issue

Last October, in the early hours of the morning, a young expectant mother called Fatima Abed-Rabo awoke with intense labour pains; and she and her husband Nasser set out in a friend's car for the hospital in Bethlehem, in Israeli occupied Palestine.

The couple had been trying for a second child for three years and had undergone fertility treatment. "The news of the pregnancy had made us so happy," said Nasser, "that we celebrated by replacing the tin sheeting on our home with a concrete roof."

The couple were stopped at the Israeli military roadblock just outside their village. The soldiers turned them back, even though Fatima was now haemorrhaging. They got a taxi, hoping that would be allowed through. Again, they were turned back. No explanation was given; one soldier mimicked Fatima's moans.

Fatima gave birth to her baby in the taxi. She remembers the soldiers hurling her husband's ID into the blood on the floor.

"We cut the umbilical cord with a razor blade," she said. "My husband wrapped the tiny boy in his jacket, and eventually one of his relatives found a back route."

Barely three pounds in weight, blue and in a critical condition, the baby was dead by the time they arrived at the hospital.

We don't know why they did this to us," she told me in my film on ITV tonight. "It wasn't personal. This is how they treat all Palestinians. I'm sorry to say this, but they would rather help an animal than an Arab."

Stories like Fatima's are rarely news in Britain, yet they are typical of the everyday treatment of the Palestinians. Human rights groups run by Israelis have recorded hundreds of instances of pregnant and seriously ill Palestinians being turned back at Israeli checkpoints, including ambulances.

"We don't know how many have died like this," said a spokeswoman for the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights, "because many people don't even bother to set out for hospital, knowing the soldiers will stop them. "These people offer no threat to Israel. Those who do, like the suicide bombers, of course never go through roadblocks, which exist only to control, subjugate and humiliate ordinary people. It is like a routine terrorism."

Fatima's remark about being treated worse than an animal is apposite. It is always easier to harm or kill people who, in the eyes of the powerful, do not matter: be it in Afghanistan or occupied Palestine.

Israeli soldiers enforcing the illegal occupation of Palestinian land can cause the death of babies and other innocents, or kill them outright, and words such as murder and terrorism are almost never used. The same immunity has been enjoyed by those politicians who design and permit this "routine terrorism," which is the product of a form of colonialism.

Indeed, to understand both the roots and the double standards of Bush's "war on terror," whose propaganda the Israeli regime of Ariel Sharon has adopted almost word for word, you need to come to Palestine, where one of the longest military occupations in modern times is now in its 36th year.

When I was passing through Israeli checkpoints last May, there were several of these routine murders. A nurse was one of them. Nine-tenths of Palestinians killed by the Israelis are civilians; 45 per cent are teenagers and children. In Gaza, five years ago, an amusement park opened beside the sea. It was the only one in a deeply impoverished place populated mainly by refugees whose families were forced off their land or out of their villages by the Israelis.

"At first, it was very successful," said Walid Al Dirawi, who looks after the deserted ruin of rusting rides and dodgem cars. "Then the shooting started from across the road. The Israeli settlers and soldiers shot it up every weekend, and of course people stayed away." Behind the dodgems is a wall pock-marked with bullet holes, like a shooting gallery.

The "settlers" are mostly religious Israelis or immigrants from Russia, America and elsewhere, who are subsidised by the government to live in what are colonial fortresses in the midst of Palestinian communities, guarded by the Israeli army.

They have no right to be there under international law, and the United Nations says they should get out. Their justification is usually Biblical.

For the Israeli state, they serve a practical purpose; they occupy and encroach upon more and more Palestinian land, while allowing the military to control the Palestinians with more and more roadblocks and restrictions. Many Palestinian villages are surrounded by barbed wire, and people require a special permit even to travel to the next one. Gaza, where 800,000 are trapped, is surrounded by an electrified fence.

When Archbishop Desmond Tutu came here recently, he said: "The way the Palestinians are treated is the way we were treated in apartheid South Africa."

Trapped by checkpoints and arbitrary curfews the Palestinian economy is in ruins. According to a US government survey, more than half of all Palestinian children suffer from malnutrition, including chronic malnutrition defined as stunted growth.

People struggle to live on less than £1 a day. One of the most moving sights I have seen are the kites that reach for the sky every dusk, displaying the colours of the Palestinian flag, flown by terribly thin children from their open prison in refugee camps.

Cutting a swathe through this poverty and despair are the Israeli "settlements": surreal, middle class suburbs that are armed fortresses with watchtowers. From here, the "settlers" shot up the amusement park. I visited one of these fortresses. What struck me was the lushness: the constant sound of running water: sprinklers nourishing hothouse crops and manicured gardens. On the other side of what looks like the Berlin Wall, in impoverished Gaza, standpipes trickle and often run dry.

These illegal, provocative enclaves, and their surrounding security areas, control almost 42 per cent of occupied Palestine - a fact that, on its own, makes mockery of the popular myth that two years ago the Israelis made a "generous" offer to return 90 per cent of the occupied territories, which the Palestinian Authority rejected.

The truth is very different. Following peace negotiations in America in 2000, President Clinton's National Security Adviser Robert Malley, who was there with Clinton, revealed that, although the Palestinians rejected certain Israeli proposals, "it could also be said that Israel rejected the unprecedented two-state solution put to them by the Palestinians, including the following provisions: a state of Israel incorporating some land captured in 1967 and including a very large majority of its settlers; the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the city's history (and) security guaranteed by a US-led international presence."

Shortly after it was founded in 1948, Israel controlled, mostly as a result of a United Nations partition and partly by force, a total of 78 per cent of historic Palestine. The Palestinians, who were the majority, fled in an orchestrated campaign of fear and terror, or they were expelled. These days, this would be known as "ethnic cleansing".

When he retired, General Moshe Dayan, Israel's military hero, said: "Jewish places were built in the place of Arab villages. There is not one single place in the country that did not have a former Arab population."

During the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israelis occupied the remaining 22 per cent of Palestine. Today, the Palestinians, seeking to form their own independent state, want only that 22 per cent back.

Little of this background is known or understood widely in Britain, even though the region is constantly in the news. Last May, the Glasgow University Media Group, famous for its pioneering media analysis, published a study that found TV viewers in particular were rarely told that Palestinians were the victims of an illegal and brutal military occupation. Only nine per cent of those interviewed were aware that the Israelis were the occupiers. For years, representing the Israelis as oppressors has been a taboo with always the threat of slurs of anti-Semitism (a bleak irony, as Palestinians are Semites, too).

This has been manipulated by the Israeli government and its foreign lobbies, especially in the United States where the lobby commands most of the Congress and the White House.

Many Israelis, like many Jews in Britain and other counties, condemn this intimidation, just as they condemn the occupation and are fearful of its deeply corrupting effect on Israeli society. Recently, the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, said he had long believed that Israel should give back the Occupied Territories. When I was in Israel in May, some 50,000 Israelis crowded central Tel Aviv, demanding that the government of Ariel Sharon made peace.

They are still a minority. The Palestinian suicide bombers and their mass murder of innocents have hardened Israeli public opinion, but what is seldom reported is that they are a relatively recent phenomenon.

For much of their resistance, the Palestinians have fought back courageously with slingshots - against a modern army, equipped with tanks, fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships.

Britain has a historic responsibility towards the Palestinians. The 1917 "Balfour Declaration" promised Jews a homeland provided it would not prejudice the rights of the non-Jewish communities. The British famously reneged on this. Britain administered the League of Nations" Mandate for Palestine until the partition that created Israel in 1948, which the Palestinians call al-Nakba, "the catastrophe."

As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, successive British governments have pledged to support the resolutions that have called upon Israel to end its occupation.

In the General Assembly, there have been an estimated 450 resolutions calling, in one form or another, for justice for the Palestinians. This is a world record. No country has incurred the opprobrium of the world community as often as Israel and no country has been excused its "rogue" behaviour so consistently, thanks to its backer, America.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, it was ordered to withdraw by the United Nations Security Council. When the Iraqis failed to comply, they were attacked with such force that tens of thousands were slaughtered. When Israel seized the West Bank of the Jordan and Gaza, it was ordered to withdraw by the same UN Security Council. That was 35 years ago, and the occupation goes on.

On the contrary, Israel has since been rewarded with billions of dollars worth of aid and armaments, principally by the United States, which has helped it develop nuclear weapons and other so-called weapons of mass destruction.

Britain has nurtured the hypocrisy that reached its apogee in the United Nations General Assembly last week when George Bush, speaking and postulating like a Mafia don, and with the full support of Tony Blair, threatened the very existence of the UN unless it provided him with a figleaf from behind which he could attack Iraq.

But it was Israel's flouting of UN resolutions on Palestine that was the spectre in the General Assembly. Every delegate knew it, especially the British who are fully aware of the enduring destabilising effect of the illegal occupation.

They also know that it is being intensified by Ariel Sharon, a man whom a commission of his own parliament found indirectly but "personally responsible" for the massacre of more than 800 Palestinians in 1982 and who once boasted: "They (the Arabs) have the numbers. We have the matches."

With Bush and Blair about to ignite another war in the Middle East, justice for the Palestinians remains key to peace.

John Pilger for zmag
16 September 2002

John Richard Pilger (born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist and documentary maker. One of only two to win Britain's Journalist of the Year Award twice, his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US.[1][2] Based in London, he is known for his polemical campaigning style: "Secretive power loathes journalists who do their job, who push back screens, peer behind façades, lift rocks. Opprobrium from on high is their badge of honour."

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PALESTINIAN REFUGEES

Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) are one of the largest and longest-standing displaced populations in the world today. Approximately three-quarters of the Palestinian people are displaced.Approximately one in three refugees worldwide is Palestinian.


FACTS & FIGURES Excerpt from Badil Resource Centre

Who are Palestinian refugees?

There are five primary groups of Palestinian refugees and displaced persons. The largest group is comprised of those Palestinians displaced/expelled from their places of origin in 1948. This includes Palestinian refugees who receive international assistance from the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), i.e., ‘registered refugees’; and Palestinian refugees not eligible for international assistance.

The second major group of Palestinian refugees is comprised of those Palestinians displaced for the first time from their places of origin in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip (often referred to as ‘1967 displaced persons’).

The third category of refugees includes those Palestinian refugees who are neither 1948 or 1967 refugees and are outside the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967 and unable due to revocation of residency, denial of family reunification, deportation, etc., or unwilling to return there owing to a well-founded fear of persecution.

In addition, there are two groups of internally displaced Palestinians. The first includes internally displaced Palestinians who remained in the area that became the state of Israel in 1948. The second group of internally displaced Palestinians includes Palestinians internally displaced in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

How many refugees are there?

Available data on the Palestinian refugee and displaced population is characterized by uneven quality and uncertainty primarily due to the absence of a comprehensive registration system, frequent migration for political and economic reasons, and the lack of a uniform definition of a Palestine refugee. Generally, most Palestinian refugees are considered to be prima facie refugees (i.e., in the absence of evidence to the contrary).

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) administers the only registration system for Palestinian refugees. UNRWA records, however, only include those refugees displaced in 1948 (and their descendents) in need of assistance and located in UNRWA areas of operation - West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Estimates of the refugee and displaced population may also be derived from statistics maintained by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); census data from host countries and Israel; and, population growth projections.

It is estimated that there were more than 7 million Palestinian refugees and displaced persons at the beginning of 2003. This includes Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 and registered for assistance with the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) (3.97 million); Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 but not registered for assistance (1.54 million); Palestinian refugees displaced for the first time in 1967 (753,000); 1948 internally displaced Palestinians (274,000); and, 1967 internally displaced Palestinians (150,000).

Where do refugees live?

Palestinian refugees have tended to remain as close as possible to their homes and villages of origin based on the assumption that they will return with the cessation of conflict. In 1948 an estimated 65 percent of Palestinian refugees remained in areas of Palestine not under Israeli control – i.e., the West Bank and Gaza Strip. During the 1967 war the majority of Palestinian refugees found refuge in Jordan. Information on the distribution of Palestinians displaced within and from the occupied territories since 1967 is less well documented.

Despite the changes in the pattern of distribution of Palestinian refugees over the last fifty years, however, the majority of the refugees still live within 100 km of the borders of Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip where their homes of origin are located. Palestinian refugees residing in host states in the region comprise approximately the same percentage of the total combined population (6 percent) of the area as they did following the first wave of massive displacement in 1948. Palestinian refugees have also been displaced within and from host countries.

More than one and a quarter million Palestinian refugees reside in 59 official refugee camps located in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. There are a smaller number of unofficial refugee camps. The large number of Palestinians remaining in camps after more than five decades of exile can be explained by several factors: family and village support structure in the camp; lack of resources to rent or buy alternative accommodation outside the camp; lack of living space outside the camp due to overcrowding; legal, political, and social obstacles which compel refugees to remain in the camp; physical safety; and, the refugee camp as a symbol of the temporary nature of exile and the demand to exercise the right of return.

How did Palestinians become refugees?

The majority of Palestinians became refugees during armed conflict and war in Palestine. Sources of flight include indiscriminate attacks on civilians, massacres, looting, destruction of property (including entire villages), and forced expulsion. Israeli military forces adopted 'shoot to kill' policies along the armistice lines to prevent the return of refugees. In some cases refugees were forced to sign papers that they were leaving voluntarily. In 1948, it is estimated that more than fifty percent fled under direct military assault. Sixty percent of refugees displaced to Jordan in 1967 fled as a result of direct military assault.

In 1948 eighty-five percent of the Palestinians living in the areas that became the state of Israel became refugees. More than 500 Palestinian villages were depopulated and later destroyed to prevent the return of the refugees. These comprised three-quarters of the Palestinian villages inside the areas held by Israeli forces after the end of the war. In the districts of Jaffa, Ramla and Bir Saba' not one Palestinian village was left standing. Approximately thirty-five percent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip were expelled during the 1967 war. Two percent of villages were destroyed, as well as several refugee camps.

A smaller number of Palestinians have become refugees due to policies and practices akin to low-intensity transfer. These include expulsion, deportation, revocation of residency rights, denial of family reunification, land confiscation, and house demolition. Between 1948 and the mid-1950s Israel expelled around fifteen percent of the Palestinian population that remained after the war. By 1967 it had expropriated half of the land owned by Palestinian citizens of the state. Israel deported more than 6,000 Palestinians from 1967 occupied Palestine between 1967 and the early 1990s, revoked the residency rights of some 100,000, demolished 20,000 homes and refugee shelters, and confiscated several thousand square kilometers of land.

Why are Palestinians still refugees after 50 years?

Palestinian refugees are still refugees because they are unable to exercise their basic human right to return to their homes of origin. Israel refuses to allow the refugees to return to villages, towns and cities inside Israel due to the ethnic, national and religious origin of the refugees. Israel defines itself as a Jewish state and not a state of all its citizens. This self-definition emphasizes the need for a permanent Jewish majority, Jewish control of key resources like land, and the link between Israel and the Jewish diaspora. Jewish citizens, residents and the Jewish diaspora are therefore granted special preferences to citizenship and land ownership.

Israel's laws prevent Palestinian refugees and IDPs from returning to their homes of origin. Palestinians must be able to prove that they were in the state of Israel on or after 14 July 1952, or the offspring of a Palestinian who meets this condition. Due to the fact that most Palestinian refugees were displaced outside the territory of the state of Israel on or after this date, they are unable to resume domicile in their homeland. Israel's longstanding occupation of the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip and related military orders and administrative procedures prevents refugees from returning to these areas. Emergency regulations, abandoned property laws, military orders and other administrative measures alienate refugees from their land which has been transferred to the state of Israel and the Jewish National Fund as the inalienable property of the Jewish people.

The international community has not exerted sufficient political will to advance durable solutions consistent with international law and relevant UN resolutions. Refugee rights have been absent from the Middle East Peace Process since it began in Madrid in the early 1990s. Unlike peace agreements elsewhere, agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) are based solely on an agreed-upon political process between the parties. International law does not provide a framework for conflict resolution and the regulation of future relations between the parties. There is no explicit reference to the right of Palestinian refugees and displaced persons to return to their homes of origin. Nor is there explicit reference to the right to housing and property restitution. The agreements only establish fora in which the parties agree to discuss the future status of Palestinian refugees.

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ISRAEL'S SECRET FEARS - Article from The New Statesman
Haim Baram

Published 15 May 2008

The nation that sees itself as the most misunderstood in the world celebrates its 60th birthday with deep apprehension about the future. Haim Baram finds anger and defensiveness among its politicians A deeply hidden diplomatic relationship between Israel and Jordan underpins the history of the search for peace in the Middle East

Israel marks its 60th birthday in a climate of increasing racism, intolerance, corruption and militarism. A nation that has long seen itself as one of the most misunderstood is now almost unable to understand the world beyond its borders. Fear and anxiety provide the mood music of the celebrations.

The past decade has brought a sharp increase in anti-Arab sentiment, which finds many forms of expression, from sordid chants at sporting events ("Death to the Arabs") to blatant racism and attacks on Arab colleagues by right-wing pol iticians in the Knesset. In such an atmosphere, it is almost impossible for Arab citizens (or 1948 Palestinians) to identify with the state of Israel, despite the terms of their legal status. Indeed, it is increasingly difficult for them even to protect their civil rights and express themselves freely in public.

Anyone who doubts the depth of anti-Arab feeling has only to scan the internet. On 8 May, I was commissioned by the popular news site Walla! (associated with the newspaper Haaretz) to write a short column about the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikva" (or Hope). Haaretz had asked another writer to support the anthem. I was commissioned to write against it and to suggest a more suitable one.

My main point of opposition was that the opening words - "As long as deep in the heart/A Jewish soul yearns . . . towards Zion" - excluded the more than one million Arab citizens of Israel. Walla! debates are allocated some two hours' airtime and previous ones, for example on economic issues or the evacuation of the Jewish settlements in Gaza, have generated talkback that was overwhelmingly right-wing. However, the anthem debate exceeded even my pessimistic ex pectations.

Within an hour 481 comments had appeared, 472 of which were vehemently anti-Arab and abusive of "bleeding-heart leftists". Some of the comments were simply racist, but the majority were nationalistic, betraying deep hatred of Israel's Arab citizens.

Such expressions are now commonplace. If an Arab member of the Knesset (MK) expresses solidarity with Palestinians in the besieged Gaza area, the comment will be scrutinised minutely by Jewish politicians and journalists. Accusations of high treason are commonplace. Proposed parliamentary bills single out Arab MKs for clearly discriminatory treatment. One right-wing former minister, Avigdor Liberman, regularly threatens his fellow MK Ahmad Tibi in tones that are becoming increasingly brutal. Liberman himself faces serious accusations of corruption and bribery and, as his indictment becomes virtually inevitable, he has resorted to lurid and vociferous language said to go down well in his largely Russian-speaking constituency.

Amid intensifying hostility and even derision, the Jewish left and a handful of liberals from the political centre try to voice their protest. Centrist Zionists dissociate themselves from anti-Arab sentiment and claim there is no contradiction between Israel's claim to be a liberal democracy and the view that the Zionist nature of Israel is paramount and transcends norms of equality and democracy. Others claim anti-Arab feeling stems from misguided nationalism rather than racism. A reputable economist in Tel Aviv compared "the fervent patriotism in Israel, accompanied by lurid hostility against Arabs" with anti-German sentiment in Britain before the Great War.

"It is not 'racist' in the sense of generalising the entire Arab population or regarding them as inferior to us," he told me. "If the Israelis and the Palestinians were to reach a peace agreement, the hatred would evaporate." Depressing as it may seem, that was one of the most optimistic statements I heard during the anniversary celebrations.

To celebrate Independence Day this year, Israeli television screened a documentary about the 1948 war veterans. The normally alienated and cosmopolitan television producers and directors had flooded our screens with sickening, even embarrassing, bits of nostalgia. This documentary, however, was a gem. The veterans in the film, some approaching their nineties and therefore somewhat frail, were taken to the southernmost Israeli city of Eilat, on the shores of the Red Sea.

All had taken part in the bloodless capture of Eilat and had become famous 60 years earlier for raising, in the beautiful bay, a handmade Israeli flag painted in ink, thus securing Israel's access to the Red Sea.

At one important moment in the film, they were requested to state their views on Israel today. Had it met the expectations they had had back in 1948? Were they pleased with the way Israel had evolved? All expressed bitter disappointment, pointing to rampant corruption, the accusations of bribery laid against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and the nation's collective failure to secure a peace agreement with its Arab neighbours, including the Palestinians.

The most articulate of the veterans was Major General Avraham Adan, chief commander during the occupation of Eilat and the only senior officer, apart from Ariel Sharon, to emerge from the disastrous 1973 Yom Kippur War with flying colours. Adan masterminded the crossing of the Suez Canal in that traumatic war and has felt ever since that Sharon stole the glory which rightly belonged to him. Clear and lucid at 89, Adan was blatant in his criticism.

"Israel has changed for the worse," said the general. "Corruption gnaws at our fabric and threatens our very existence. We dreamed about a different, more egalitarian and more moral society."

Undoubtedly, Adan was expressing the feelings of most Israelis. Successive polls in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's most popular daily newspaper, show that the vast majority of Israelis do not trust the Establishment and are deeply wary of Olmert. Accusations of bribery are rife and it is almost certain that the prime minister will be indicted.

Uneasy conformists

Israel's Jews are conformist in their attitudes to institutions such as the anthem or the army, but they have become more aware of the impotence of their government and, at times, of its malevolence. The failure of the Israel Defence Forces in the Second Lebanon War of 2006 undermined the confidence of ordinary Israelis: the beneficiary of the crisis has been the right-wing Likud Party.

On 2 May, Haaretz carried an interview with Yaakov Weinroth, a respected barrister and self-professed Marxist. The paper's intelligent readership was treated to a breathtaking tour de force from this anti-corruption orator (who is, nevertheless, the legal adviser of most of Israel's corrupt politicians and of the settlers). Weinroth spoke at length in favour of social justice, yet expressed his support for the neoliberal Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. Such contradictions confuse public opinion, and enhance Netanyahu's status not only in intellectual circles, but even among the direct victims of his social policies. False consciousness is not unique to Israel, but the geopolitical isolation of the country exacerbates the situation.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the nation's fear and distrust of the world outside came in the recent reaction to criticism levelled at the Chelsea Football Club coach Avram Grant in England. Grant has become an unlikely cult hero in his native Israel. Aviad Pohoryles, a sports commentator for Maariv, a popular Hebrew-language newspaper, found in Chelsea's unexpected win over Liverpool an opportunity to berate the British for their supposed anti-Israel attitude. England, he claimed, had always conducted a blatantly anti-Israel foreign policy: "Some of Grant's lack of legitimacy derives from this negative attitude towards Israel. Grant's presence at Stamford Bridge constitutes a certain answer to these heartless people."

Pohoryles is a reputed writer from the very mainstream, neither a settler nor a vehement right-winger. His deep suspicion of the British media, and his castigation of a journalist who happened to be critical of Grant's coaching style, hinting that the journalist's criticism was founded in anti-Semitism, are typical of an antipathy towards the British. There is a widely held belief that when the west criticises Israel, or when human rights organisations worldwide protest against the occupation, they are revealing deeply held, "traditional, Christian anti-Semitism".

Many Israelis, even liberals and left-wingers, hold Europeans morally responsible for the Holocaust either by participating in, or being indifferent to, the annihilation of the Jews during the Second World War. It would be a mistake to underestimate the profound influence such attitudes continue to wield on Israeli politics.

Haim Baram is a writer based in Jerusalem