I'm busy with work and have taken a few days (weeks?) off from the blog. I'm not going to be able to do much over the next two weeks either but when I can, I'll post articles or thoughts about recent happenings...
One thing that caught my eye today while reading Ma'an was the recent death of Jihad al Shaer, a twenty year old from the West Bank. Al Shaer was killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces at a checkpoint outside of Bethlehem near a village called Tuqu'. The Hospital that took al Shaer says he died after receiving multiple blows to the head from a baton.
This is a brief story - one highlighted in part because of the outrage expressed by Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian Politician - but an important story nonetheless. If you've read the Economist article that I posted earlier, you'll have a better understanding of why checkpoints exist: to harass, to intimidate, and to generally make life as difficult as possible for the indigenous population of the Occupied Territories.
What could highlight the raw brutality of the Israeli Army more than beating a 20 year old to death? This boy did not have a suicide bomb belt on him - why would they choose to beat him then? This boy was not armed with an AK47 - why would they choose to beat him then? No the likely story is that he did something disobedient. Something that upset the soldiers but obviously not threatened enough to just shoot him. Instead they chose to pull out their batons and crush his skull. And they probably continue to inspect Palestinian ID cards at the same checkpoint today. Until a few months form now when they will be released from the military to return to their life of freedom on the beaches of Tel Aviv. I hope they never forget the life they took. Al Shaer's family, his younger brothers and sisters, his parent never will.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Sunday, July 08, 2007
READ THIS ARTICLE!...
This is a MUST READ article. Not since coming home from the West Bank have I found such an apt summation of just what life is ACTUALLY like there. It is these daily "inconveniences" that are often completely lost in reporting here in the West. The fact that it's been written up in the Economist - not exactly a left-wing rag - should only highlight the absence of these details in our mainstream media. Oh, and by the way, there are references in this article to certain practices and LAWS that are at the root of the use of the word "Apartheid" when describing Israel. I challenge anyone to argue that rules like the one that prevents Palestinians from driving in cars with Israeli license plates is not a form of separation BASED ON RACE. If you've ever been to the Occupied Territories, especially of course the West Bank, you'll know just how many Israeli plated-cars are on the roads there. Most of the taxis bear those yellow plates.
So if you can, please pass this article along to everyone you know! ...
The Palestinians
It's the little things that make an occupation
Jan 18th 2007 JERUSALEM AND RAMALLAH
From The Economist print edition
Those seemingly minor inconveniences that make life hellish
DURING 2006, according to B'tselem, an Israeli human-rights group, Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians, almost half of them innocent bystanders, among them 141 children. In the same period, Palestinians killed 17 Israeli civilians and six soldiers. It is such figures, as well as events like shellings, house demolitions, arrest raids and land expropriations, that make the headlines in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What rarely get into the media but make up the staple of Palestinian daily conversation are the countless little restrictions that slow down most people's lives, strangle the economy and provide constant fuel for extremists.
Arbitrariness is one of the most crippling features of these rules. No one can predict how a trip will go. Many of the main West Bank roads, for the sake of the security of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, are off-limits to Palestinian vehicles—only one road connecting the north and south West Bank, for instance, is open to them—and these restrictions change frequently. So do the rules on who can pass the checkpoints that in effect divide the West Bank into a number of semi-connected regions (see map).
A new order due to come into force this week would have banned most West Bankers from riding in cars with Israeli licence plates, and thus from getting lifts from friends and relatives among the 1.6m Palestinians who live as citizens in Israel, as well as from aid workers, journalists and other foreigners. The army decided to suspend the order after protests from human-rights groups that it would give soldiers enormous arbitrary powers—but it has not revoked it.
Large parts of the population of the northern West Bank, and of individual cities like Nablus and Jericho, simply cannot leave their home areas without special permits, which are not always forthcoming. If they can travel, how long they spend waiting at checkpoints, from minutes to hours, depends on the time of day and the humour of the soldiers. Several checkpoints may punctuate a journey between cities that would otherwise be less than an hour's drive apart. These checkpoints move and shift every day, and army jeeps add to the unpredictability and annoyance by stopping and creating ad hoc mobile checkpoints at various spots.
According to the UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the number of such obstacles had increased to 534 by mid-December from 376 in August 2005, when OCHA and the Israeli army completed a joint count. When Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, agreed last month to ease restrictions at a few of these checkpoints as a concession to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, human-rights people reported that not only did many of the checkpoints go on working as before; near the ones that had eased up, mobile ones were now operating instead, causing worse disruption and pain.
It is sometimes hard to fathom the logic of the checkpoint regime. One route from Ramallah, the Palestinian administrative capital, to Jerusalem, involves a careful inspection of documents, while on another the soldiers—if they are at their posts—just glance at cars' occupants to see if they look Arab. Israeli law strictly forbids Israeli citizens from visiting the main Palestinian cities, but they can drive straight into Ramallah and Hebron without being challenged, while other cities, such as Jericho and Nablus, remain impermeable. In many places the barrier that Israel is building through the West Bank for security purposes (though in Palestinian eyes to grab more land) is monitored with all the care of an international border, while around Jerusalem the army turns a blind eye to hundreds of people who slip through cracks in the wall as part of their daily commute.
Because of the internal travel restrictions, people who want to move from one Palestinian city to another for work or study must register a change of address to make sure they can stay there. But they cannot. Israel's population registry, which issues Palestinian identity cards as well as Israeli ones, has issued almost no new Palestinian cards since the start of the second intifada in 2000. And that means no address changes either. This also makes it virtually impossible for Palestinians from abroad to get residency in the occupied territories, which are supposed to be their future state, never mind in Israel.
No-through-roads galore
On top of that, in the past year several thousand Palestinians who had applied for residency in the West Bank and were living there on renewable six-month visitor permits have become illegal residents too, liable to be stopped and deported at any checkpoint, not because of anything they have done but because Israel has stopped renewing permits since Hamas, the Islamist movement, took control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) a year ago. (Israel says it is because the PA isn't handing over the requests.)
Like Israelis, Palestinians who commit a traffic offence on the West Bank's highways have to pay the fine at an Israeli post office or a police station. But in the West Bank the only post offices and police stations are on Israeli settlements that most West Bank Palestinians cannot visit without a rare permit. If they do not pay, however, they lose their driving licences the next time the police stop them. They also get a criminal record—which then makes an Israeli entry permit quite impossible.
Some of the regulations stray into the realm of the absurd. A year ago a military order, for no obvious reason, expanded the list of protected wild plants in the West Bank to include za'atar (hyssop), an abundant herb and Palestinian staple. For a while, soldiers at checkpoints confiscated bunches of it from bewildered Palestinians who had merely wanted something to liven up their salads. Lately there have been no reports of za'atar confiscation, but, says Michael Sfard, the legal adviser for Yesh Din, another Israeli human-rights body, the order is still in force. As he tells the story, he cannot help laughing. There is not much else to do.
http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8571800
Friday, July 06, 2007
You, from now on, are not yourself!
Did we have to fall from a tremendous height so as to see our blood on ourhands... to realize that we are no angels... as we thought? Did we also have to expose our flaws before the world so that our truth would no longer stay virgin?
How much we lied when we said: we are the exception!
To believe oneself is worse than to lie to the other!
To be friendly with those who hate us and harsh on those who love us -- that is the lowness of the arrogant and the arrogance of the low!
O past: Do not change us whenever we stepped away from you!
O future: do not ask us: who are you? and what do you want from me? Because we too, do not know.
O present! Bear with us a little because we are nothing but insufferable passersby.
The identity is: what we bequeath and not what we inherit. What we invent and not what we remember. The identity is the corruption of the mirror that we must break whenever we liked the image!
He masked himself and pulled up his courage and killed his mother... because she was the easiest of prey... and because a female soldier stopped him and exposed her bosoms to him saying:
Does your mother have ones like these?
Had it not been for shame and darkness, I would have visited Gaza without knowing the way to the home of the new Abu Sufian* or the name of the new prophet!
Had Muhammad not been the last of the prophets, every gang would have had a prophet and every apostle had a militia!
June astonished us in its fortieth anniversary: if we do not find someone to defeat us again, we defeat ourselves with our hands so as not to forget!
No matter how long you look in my eyes, you will not find my gaze there. It was kidnapped by a scandal!
My heart is not mine and not for anyone. It became independent of me without turning into a stone.
Does the one chanting on the body of his victim-brother: "Allahu Akbar" know that he is an infidel since he sees God in his image: smaller than any perfectly created human. The prisoner who seeks to inherit the prison hid the smile of victory from the camera, but he could not succeed in curbing the happiness that cascaded from his eyes.
Perhaps because the fast-paced script was stronger than the actor. What is our need for Narcissus so long as we are Palestinians. As long as we do not know the difference between the mosque and the university because they are derived from the same linguistic root, what is our need for a state so long as it and the day are facing one fate?
A large sign on the door of a nightclub: we welcome the Palestinians returning from the battle. Entry is free! And our wine does not intoxicate!
I cannot defend my right to work; a shoe shiner on the pavement. Because my customers have the right to consider me a shoe thief - a university professor told me!
"The stranger and I are against my cousin. My cousin and I are against my brother... and my sheik and I are against myself." This is the first lesson in the new national education in the dungeons of darkness.
Who enters paradise first? The one who died by the bullets of the enemy or the one who died by the bullets of the brother? Some theologians say: Many an enemy of yours that your mother gave birth to!
The fundamentalists do not exasperate me because they are believers in their special way.
But, their secular supporters do and their atheist supporters, too, who only believe in one religion: their images on television!
He asked me: does a hungry guard defend a house whose owner traveled to spend his summer vacation at the French or the Italian Riviera... no difference?
I said: he does not defend!
He asked me: do I + I = two?
I said: you and you are less than one!
I am not ashamed of my identity because it is still in the process of being written.
But I am ashamed of parts of the Prolegomenon of Ibn Khaldoun.
You, from now on, are not yourself!
* Abu Sufian was the leader of Mecca when the Muslims took over; Meccans who entered his home were given sanctuary.
- Mahmoud Darwish
Thursday, July 05, 2007
The Time is Now...
British Academics call for a boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions.
Just as I campaigned for boycotts against apartheid in South Africa many years ago, now I shall do so against Israeli apartheid, says Colin Green
Monday June 11, 2007
The strong and hostile response from pro-Israeli groups, as well as the UK government fearful of offending Israel, to a recent motion carried by a two thirds majority at the University and College Union (UCU) congress is in marked contrast to the joyful response of Palestinians, which has been almost totally supportive.
Perhaps the former have misunderstood that motion. After an open and very serious debate, one outcome upon which all agreed was that Israel is an oppressive state, illegally occupying territory for 40 years while ignoring numerous UN resolutions, international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Disagreement centred entirely on what the trade union movement could or should do about it. More specifically, we discussed the role of academic boycotts, which to all academics is normally an anathema. Free exchange of ideas and debate, however fierce, is central to our life. However, after 40 years without resolution, many of us believe that the Israel-Palestine conflict is the epicentre of a global conflagration so dangerous for all of us that abnormal responses have become an urgent, indeed desperate, moral imperative.
Even then, urgency notwithstanding, the motion passed was not calling for a boycott, but for a 12-month debate about an academic boycott. I suggest that that is in the best tradition of academic freedom and free speech. We will encourage Israeli academics to visit us, as indeed they did for weeks before the recent debate, and put their case for or against.
There are, after all, many Israeli humanitarian organisations and many Israeli individuals who believe that boycotts, sanctions and disinvestment are the only non-violent ways to force Israel to escape its descent into a pariah and rogue state.
In all this response to the UCU motion, or indeed the call for action against Israeli policies from the National Union of Journalists, architects, artists and doctors, the opinion of the Palestinians is little mentioned.
As one in daily communication with them at all levels, from government ministers, university presidents, professors, teachers, doctors, nurses and many involved in further education, not least the students, I can assure you that they are overwhelmingly in favour of the call for a debate, preferring that to a straight call for a boycott without debate. At last they will have the opportunity to travel outside the occupied territories and describe to the world the almost complete lack of academic freedom they endure.
Israeli apologists frequently quote the opinion against boycotts of a tiny handful of Palestinians, but these have no credibility whatsoever across campuses in the occupied territories.
This motion was tabled because of a call of desperation from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) as long ago as 2004. PACBI is not some fringe, lunatic or radical university group, but a confederation of more than 50 organisations from across Palestinian civil society. The boycott called for by PACBI and supported by the British Committee for Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), which tabled this motion, is institutional. We are not targeting individuals, in some McCarthyite programme, but organisations that have political aims and collude in the occupation, however loudly they protest their innocence.
Since starting academic work in the occupied territories during the first intifada in 1987, I have travelled a trajectory of hope to near despair. From a naïve optimism for a just and lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians 20 years ago, in which I welcomed with great enthusiasm Israeli postgraduates to my institute for specialist surgical training and research, I now refuse any collaboration with any Israeli university or research institution because of the violations of human rights I have seen over the past two decades and in which they collude.
As in the past, I still work with Israeli humanitarian organisations genuinely seeking justice for the Palestinians. I am no longer prepared to stand idly by and not come out publicly against the level of oppression I have seen, including ethnic cleansing and the establishment of a brutal apartheid regime, a terrible injustice against the indigenous population of the occupied territories.
What experiences can have brought about this revolution in attitude? In 1987, I was buoyed by the gentle, non-bigoted, optimistic attitude toward the Israelis of virtually all the Palestinians I met.
Even in the face of the violence and killings in the first intifada carried out by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), they believed that reason and good will would prevail and the international community would come to their rescue. I was amazed how tolerant academics were toward their oppressors. None of them did, or could have, forecast the descent into hell which the Palestinians would endure in the next two decades, nor believe that a people who themselves had known such a hell could possibly descend to the level of barbarity we are now witnessing.
Just as film documentary images of British soldiers opening the gates of Belsen in 1945 was a defining moment in my life, so the immediate aftermath of the Jenin massacre and the terror of overwhelming military force in the destruction of Rafah, in Gaza, which I have witnessed in recent years have had the most profound effect on my opinions. You have to see it for yourself. We cannot go on muttering platitudes about academic freedom and exchange of ideas. What freedom?
In those two decades, the wretched suppression of academic freedom has been so obvious and overt that the wonder was that international academe did so little to stop it or even to comment on it.
The list of restrictions is too long to detail. Examples include: the closure of Birzeit University for four years; refusal of entry to that and all other universities for teaching faculty and students on the whim of heavily armed Israeli teenagers in uniform at checkpoints; refusal to allow passage to medical students to their teaching hospitals; raiding of campuses in the middle of freezing winter nights forcing women undergraduates to stand for five or six hours outside in their nightdresses simply to humiliate them while their dormitories were ransacked; refusal to allow doctors to attend their clinics and teach students on the ludicrous claim that their ID cards (valid for the previous 15 years) were fake; refusal to allow UK academics entry to Ben-Gurion airport and forced return on the grounds they were engaged in subversive acts simply coming to be medical teachers.
Then has been the refusal to allow a final-year student to attend his graduation ceremony and to add to his humiliation and torment by being forced at gunpoint to stand and watch the proceedings from only 400 metres away; refusal or long delays in granting exit permits for Palestinian research workers and teachers travelling abroad to conferences; the threat that if they travel overseas (especially if they have a Jerusalem ID) they may not be allowed back into their own homes again; endless restrictions on travel within the occupied territories so that attendance at lectures or important exams are a daily nightmare; the forced return of Gaza students "illegally" studying in the West Bank, some after seven years of separation from their families and in their final year of medical training; the deliberate shooting at school buses carrying six to 10-year-old children by Israeli snipers; recently, the kidnapping and imprisonment without charge of five senior university lecturers in Nablus; the killing of a young female medical student by CN gas. All of this I have witnessed at first hand.
My outrage is not fuelled by bigotry or racism, but by what I have seen. I am consumed with anger that I have not come out of the closet many years ago to protest publicly the wickedness I knew full well was going on in the occupied territories.
Without inquiring my opinion about China and Tibet, or Russia and Chechnya, or Darfur and Sudan, critics demand to know why I feel so strongly about Israel. First, it is what I know first hand, initially as sympathiser now bitter critic; second, because Israel does not even pretend to be part of the Orient, but is the one lingering outpost of European colonialism that participates in Euro song contests, football cups, preferential trade agreements, and EU and NATO research grants, and, therefore, has to carry the same human rights obligations and responsibilities we Europeans recently demanded of Serbia; and most important, the Levant has long been historically, and even more urgently so now, the epicentre of world conflict.
Just as I campaigned for boycotts against apartheid in South Africa many years ago, now I shall do so against Israeli apartheid. I strongly support the motion carried by a two third majority by my trade union, the UCU. Now, at last, we can actually have a robust, honest and fearless debate and engage with all shades of opinion on the conflict.
· Colin Green is professor of surgical science at the University of London
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