This smuggling tunnel was built 8 years ago. (Photo Propa Images)

By Hiyam Noir and Fady Adwan - Gaza

The smuggling of goods through tunnels beneath the surface of Rafah in Gaza Strip continues, in the eighth day of the tattered ceasefire between the Palestinian armed resistance and the Israeli occupant.

The Israelis have closed the crossings for legal imported goods,amidst exchange of accusations of who first violated the truce agreement. Mahmoud Zahar prominent leader of Hamas said in a public statement on Saturday that “Hamas will arrest anyone who make an attempt to break the cease-fire with the Israelis, and will confiscate their weapons. The Israelis have breached the cease fire throughout the Gaza Strip seven times, some of the shootings have seriously injured Palestinian farmers. In retaliation operations the Palestinian resistance fired a barrel of rockets across the border into Israel.

Since September 2000, the smuggling tunnels has functioned as an import of a significant amount of basic supplies, including medicine, food, clothes, auto -spare-parts, medical equipment, electronic items, foreign currency, cigarettes and weapons.

The Palestinians still have to rely on smuggled victualled from Egypt, food, medicine and other basic supplies through the underground tunnels, the life-nerves, which are stretching from Gaza Strip to the inside of the Egyptian border. The smuggling tunnel featured in our reportage, was built 8 years ago, in the beginning of the second Palestinian Intifada, the cost of building this tunnel is estimated to over $50.000. While working in this environment, in the cold, sometimes trapped, suffocating under water or collapsing walls of dirt and concrete, 82 people have died. It took three months to finish a hard and dangerous, 24 hours make shift work.

The excavation of smuggling tunnels in the Rafah area began in 1982, subsequent to the division of the Rafah city between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. The average smuggling tunnel is approximately 500 meters in length, and 20 to 25 meters deep. The tunnels may be equipped with wood-paneling, electrical infrastructure, communications gear, and rudimentary elevators in vertical shaft, to transport people or the freight of goods. The openings of the tunnels are often located within private Egyptian homes or other buildings, near or next to the border with Egypt.

The Oslo Accords of 1994-95, granted the Palestinian Authority control over the majority of the Gaza Strip. However, the Accords stipulated that the Israelis would retain control of a narrow strip of land (known as the “Philadelphi Route”) between the area under Palestinian control, and the border with Egypt. The route is 11 km (6.5 miles) long and approximately 100 metres (330 feet) wide. In the Israelis “peace agreement” with Egypt, the Egyptians signed a granted security control over Egyptian territorial land, running 70 meters east of the Philadelphi Road.

In August 2004, the Egyptians had knowledge what type of weapons being smuggled and could have prevented the smuggling of RPG’s into the Gaza Strip. It is also believed that Egypt wanted..Katyusha rockets to be smuggled in via the tunnels. The Israelis accused Egypt to use the weapons smuggling as a measure against the Israelis. In September 2004, the Israelis concluded that the Egyptians is supporting the Palestinian resistance against the Israelis which has enabled Hamas and other Palestinian political organizations to use Sinai as a logistic rear miles away from the fighting front. However it is also believed that the Israelis have used the Rafah tunnels as a pretext to create a depopulated ‘buffer zone’ along the Gaza-Egyptian border,which resulted in the destruction of 1,600 homes by September 2004.

In August 2005, the Israelis said that the Egyptians deployment of its forces along the border with Gaza Strip to halt smuggling, was a strategic Trojan Horse. The Israelis said that Egypt paved the way for a complete dismissal of the 1978 peace treaty with Cairo. The Cairo treaty stipulates that only one division of Egyptian armed forces, is allowed to be stationed in the Sinai peninsula, and only up to 50 km east of the Suez Canal.

Civil Egyptian police equipped with light weapons, were permitted along the Egyptian side to a depth of 40 km of the border with the Israelis. The Israelis said that it does not matter the small force, but they made a strategic mistake. The Israelis did not have any strategic depth,150 kilometers from the border or 15 km would be significant in an opening shot of a war.

In October 2006, Egypt threatened to increase its military presence by 5,000 troops along the Gaza Strip border. The additional Egyptian security members of the police central security force, were slated to join approximately 750 border guards. An Egyptian official, claimed that the deployment would occur in anticipation of a possible Israeli counter-terrorist operation that could include, bombing of the weapons smuggling tunnels.

In February 2007,Yuval Diskin the Shin Bet Chief, determined that Egyptian security forces were failing to stop the smuggling of weapons from the Sinai Desert to the Gaza Strip. Discin said that” If Egypt starts to thwart the transfer of weapons, then that will slow down the resistance buildup in Gaza Strip and delay a military operation there. The Egyptians have a key in their hands and they know it.”!

The Israelis constructed a wall of 7-9 meter along the Philadelphi Route. In addition,the IOF detonated explosives along the route to cause collapse of tunnels in the area. Canals were also dugged in an attempt to flood the tunnels, with sea water. In addition, the IOF integrated “several sophisticated systems”, inserted explosive material into the ground, including sensor systems that defined the depth of the tunnels. In January 23, 2008, the Palestinian resistance destroyed several parts of the Israeli built wall, dividing Gaza Strip and Egypt in the town of Rafah. Thousands of starving Gazans moved across the Philadelphi Route into Egypt, in search of food and basic supplies.

Hamas has excavated tunnels for operations against Israeli posts and population centers close to the Gaza Strip border fence. The tunnels allow the Palestinian resistance to infiltrate into Israeli territory and then return to the Gaza Strip. In June 25, 2006, members of the Palestinian resistance utilized an “infiltration” tunnel to carry out an operation against a Israeli post near the Sufa Crossing. Two Israelis were killed in this operation and Gilad Shalit was captured.

There are also designed military tunnels as safe passages for operatives in the Palestinian resistance in battle zones. Such tunnels are typically located between buildings. Hamas has also populated “ambush” tunnels with camouflaged IEDs and utilized underground (concrete) firing positions and offensive capabilities, hidden rocket launch sites which is activated via a delay system concealed in vegetation or between buildings.

Back in November 2000, the Israeli Radio reported that weapons and ammunition were smuggled into Gaza Strip and the President Yasser Arafat’s airport, via Arafat’s private air plane. The weapons and ammunition were distributed to Fatah Tanzim in Gaza Strip. Worth notice, even when the Israelis bombed the Gaza airport, and it was closed for traffic, the Israelis continued to permit the air plane to land and take off, and no inspection was done by the Israelis.

- Hiyam Noir and Fady Adwan contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Gaza’s imprisonment has stopped being a metaphor and become a daily reality

By Jonathan Cook

In 1895 Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s chief prophet, confided in his diary that he did not favour sharing Palestine with the natives. Better, he wrote, to “try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country … Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

He was proposing a programme of Palestinian emigration enforced through a policy of strict separation between Jewish immigrants and the indigenous population. In simple terms, he hoped that, once Zionist organisations had bought up large areas of Palestine and owned the main sectors of the economy, Palestinians could be made to leave by denying them rights to work the land or labour in the Jewish-run economy. His vision was one of transfer, or ethnic cleansing, through ethnic separation.

Herzl was suggesting that two possible Zionist solutions to the problem of a Palestinian majority living in Palestine — separation and transfer — were not necessarily alternatives but rather could be mutually reinforcing. Not only that: he believed, if they were used together, the process of ethnic cleansing could be made to appear voluntary, the choice of the victims. It may be that this was both his most enduring legacy and his major innovation to settler colonialism.

In recent years, with the Palestinian population under Israeli rule about to reach parity with the Jewish population, the threat of a Palestinian majority has loomed large again for the Zionists. Not suprisingly, debates about which of these two Zionist solutions to pursue, separation or transfer, have resurfaced.

Today these solutions are ostensibly promoted by two ideological camps loosely associated with Israel’s centre-left (Labor and Kadima) and right (Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu). The modern political arguments between them turn on differing visions of the nature of a Jewish state orginally put forward by Labor and Revisionist Zionists.

To make sense of the current political debates, and the events taking place inside Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza, let us first examine the history of these two principles in Zionist thinking.

During the early waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the dominant Labor Zionist movement and its leader David Ben Gurion advanced policies much in line with Herzl’s goal. In particular, they promoted the twin principles of “Redemption of the Land” and “Hebrew Labor”, which took as their premise the idea that Jews needed to separate themselves from the native population in working the land and employing only other Jews. By being entirely self-reliant in Palestine, Jews could both “cure” themselves of their tainted Diaspora natures and deprive the Palestinians of the opportunity to subsist in their own homeland.

At the forefront of this drive was the Zionist trade union federation, the Histadrut, which denied membership to Palestinians — and, for many years after the establishment of the Jewish state, even to the remants of the Palestinian population who became Israeli citizens.

But if separation was the official policy of Labor Zionism, behind the scenes Ben Gurion and his officials increasingly appreciated that it would not be enough in itself to achieve their goal of a pure ethnic state. Land sales remained low, at about 6 per cent of the territory, and the Jewish-owned parts of the economy relied on cheap Palestinian labour.

Instead, the Labor Zionists secretly began working on a programme of ethnic cleansing. After 1937 and Britain’s Peel Report proposing partition of Palestine, Ben Gurion was more open about transfer, recognising that a Jewish state would be impossible unless most of the indigenous population was cleared from within its borders.

Israel’s new historians have acknowledged Ben Gurion’s commitment to transfer. As Benny Morris notes, for example, Ben Gurion “understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst.” The Israeli leadership therefore developed a plan for ethnic cleansing under cover of war, compiling detailed dossiers on the communities that needed to be driven out and then passing on the order, in Plan Dalet, to commanders in the field. During the 1948 war the new state of Israel was emptied of at least 80 per cent of its indigenous population.

In physically expelling the Palestinian population, Ben Gurion responded to the political opportunities of the day and recalibrated the Labor Zionism of Herzl. In particular he achieved the goal of displacement desired by Herzl while also largely persuading the world through a campaign of propaganda that the exodus of the refugees was mostly voluntary. In one of the most enduring Zionist myths, convincingly rebutted by modern historians, we are still told that the refugees left because they were told to do so by the Arab leadership.

The other camp, the Revisionists, had a far more ambivalent attitude to the native Palestinian population. Paradoxically, given their uncompromising claim to a Greater Israel embracing both banks of the Jordan River (thereby including not only Palestine but also the modern state of Jordan), they were more prepared than the Labor Zionists to allow the natives to remain where they were.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionism, observed in 1938 — possibly in a rebuff to Ben Gurion’s espousal of transfer — that “it must be hateful for any Jew to think that the rebirth of a Jewish state should ever be linked with such an odious suggestion as the removal of non-Jewish citizens”. The Revisionists, it seems, were resigned to the fact that the enlarged territory they desired would inevitably include a majority of Arabs. They were therefore less concerned with removing the natives than finding a way to make them accept Jewish rule.

In 1923, Jabotinsky formulated his answer, one that implicitly included the notion of separation but not necessarily transfer: an “iron wall” of unremitting force to cow the natives into submission. In his words, the agreement of the Palestinians to their subjugation could be reached only “through the iron wall, that is to say, the establishment in Palestine of a force that will in no way be influenced by Arab pressure”.

An enthusiast of British imperial rule, Jabotinsky envisioned the future Jewish state in simple colonial terms, as a European elite ruling over the native population.

Inside Revisionism, however, there was a shift from the idea of separation to transfer that mirrored developments inside Labor Zionism. This change was perhaps more opportunistic than ideological, and was particularly apparent as the Revisionists sensed Ben Gurion’s success in forging a Jewish state through transfer.

One of Jabotinsky disciples, Menachem Begin, who would later become a Likud prime minister, was leader in 1948 of the Irgun militia that committed one of the worst atrocities of the war. He led his fighters into the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin where they massacred over 100 inhabitants, including women and children.

Savage enough though these events were, Begin and his followers consciously inflated the death toll to more than 250 through the pages of the New York Times. Their goal was to spread terror among the wider Palestinian population and encourage them to flee. He later happily noted: “Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of ‘Irgun butchery’, were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede.”

Subsequently, other prominent figures on the right openly espoused ethnic cleansing, including the late General Rehavam Ze’evi, whose Moledet party campaigned in elections under the symbol of the Hebrew character “tet”, for transfer. His successor, Benny Elon, a settler leader and rabbi, adopted a similar platform: “Only population transfer can bring peace”.

The intensity of the separation vs transfer debate subsided after 1948 and the ethnic cleansing campaign that removed most of the native Palestinian population from the Jewish state. The Palestinian minority left behind — a fifth of the population but a group, it was widely assumed, that would soon be swamped by Jewish immigration — was seen as an irritation but not yet as a threat. It was placed under a military government for nearly two decades, a system designed to enforce separation between Palestinians and Jews inside Israel. Such separation — in education, employment and residence — exists to this day, even if in a less extreme form.

The separation-transfer debate was chiefly revived by Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. With Israel’s erasure of the Green Line, and the effective erosion of the distinction between Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, the problem of a Palestinian majority again loomed large for the Zionists.

Cabinet debates from 1967 show the quandary faced by the government. Almost alone, Moshe Dayan favoured annexation of both the newly captured territories and the Palestinian population there. Others believed that such a move would be seen as transparently colonialist and rapidly degenerate into an apartheid system of Jewish citizens and Palestinian non-citizens. In their minds, Jabotinsky’s solution of an iron wall was no longer viable.

But equally, in a more media-saturated era, which at least paid lip-service to human rights, the government could see no way to expel the Palestinian population on a large scale and annex the land, as Ben Gurion had done earlier. Also possibly, they could see no way of persuading the world that such expulsions should be characterised as voluntary.

Israel therefore declined to move decisively in either direction, neither fully carrying out a transfer programme nor enforcing strict separation. Instead it opted for an apartheid model that accommodated Dayan’s suggestion of a “creeping annexation” of the occupied territories that he rightly believed would go largely unnoticed by the West.

The separation embodied in South African apartheid differed from Herzl’s notion of separation in one important respect: in apartheid, the “other” population was a necessary, even if much abused, component of the political arrangement. As the exiled Palestinian thinker Azmi Bishara has noted, in South Africa “racial segregation was not absolute. It took place within a framework of political unity. The racist regime saw blacks as part of the system, an ingredient of the whole. The whites created a racist hierarchy within the unity.”

In other words, the self-reliance, or unilateralism, implicit in Herzl’s concept of separation was ignored for many years of Israel’s occupation. The Palestinian labour force was exploited by Israel just as black workers were by South Africa. This view of the Palestinians was formalised in the Oslo accords, which were predicated on the kind of separation needed to create a captive labour force.

However, Yitzhak Rabin’s version of apartheid embodied by the Oslo process, and Binyamin Netanyahu’s opposition in upholding Jabotinsky’s vision of Greater Israel, both deviated from Herzl’s model of transfer through separation. This is largely why each political current has been subsumed within the recent but more powerful trend towards “unilateral separation”.

Not surprisingly, the policy of “unilateral separation” emerged from among the Labor Zionists, advocated primarily by Ehud Barak. However, it was soon adopted by many members of Likud too. Ultimately its success derived from the conversion to its cause of Greater Israel’s arch-exponent, Ariel Sharon. He realised the chief manifestations of unilateral separation, the West Bank wall and the Gaza disengagement, as well breaking up Israel’s rightwing to create a new consensus party, Kadima.

In the new consensus, the transfer of Palestinians could be achieved through imposed and absolute separation — just as Herzl had once hoped. After the Gaza disengagement, the next stage was promoted by Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert. His plan for convergence, limited withdrawals from the West Bank in which most settlers would remain in place, has been dropped, but its infrastructure — the separation wall — continues to be built.

How will modern Zionists convert unilateral separation into transfer? How will Herzl’s original vision of ethnic cleansing enforced through strict ethnic separation be realised in today’s world?

The current siege of Gaza offers the template. After disengagement, Israel has been able to cut off at will Gazans’ access to aid, food, fuel and humanitarian services. Normality has been further eroded by sonic booms, random Israeli air attacks, and repeated small-scale invasions that have inflicted a large toll of casualties, particularly among civilians.

Gaza’s imprisonment has stopped being a metaphor and become a daily reality. In fact, Gaza’s condition is far worse than imprisonment: prisoners, even of war, expect to have their humanity respected, and be properly sheltered, cared for, fed and clothed. Gazans can no longer rely on these staples of life.

The ultimate goal of this extreme form of separation is patently clear: transfer. By depriving Palestinians of the basic conditions of a normal life, it is assumed that they will eventually choose to leave — in what can once again be sold to the world as a voluntary exodus. And if Palestinians choose to abandon their homeland, then in Zionist thinking they have forfeited their right to it — just as earlier generations of Zionists believed the Palestinian refugees had done by supposedly fleeing during the 1948 and 1967 wars.

Is this process of transfer inevitable? I think not. The success of a modern policy of “transfer through separation” faces severe limitations.

First, it depends on continuing US global hegemony and blind support for Israel. Such support is likely to be undermined by the current American misadventures in the Middle East, and a gradual shift in the balance of power to China, Russia and India.

Second, it requires a Zionist worldview that departs starkly not only from international law but also from the values upheld by most societies and ideologies. The nature of Zionist ambitions is likely to be ever harder to conceal, as is evident from the tide of opinion polls showing that Western publics, if not their governments, believe Israel to be one of the biggest threats to world order.

And third, it assumes that the Palestinians will remain passive during their slow eradication. The historical evidence most certainly shows that they will not.

- Jonathan Cook is a journalist and writer based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest book, ‘Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East’, is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

‘I never leave this place, I live here and I play here.’ (Photo: PalestineFreeVoice)

By Hiyam Noir and Fady Adwan in Gaza

Amid all levels of infrastructural devastation in the Gaza Strip, many families are hit by increasing poverty, and many are forgotten, living absolute marginalized.

In the heart of Gaza City is an old cemetery, where some families have found shelter, and where they live their lives among the dead. One family we meet have lived on the old Gaza City graveyard, for over five decades. Others have become poor and dispossessed during the last decade. Because of the many difficult conditions and the hardship under occupation, many have lost their employment or a business, and without income there is very little money over to pay for the rent, or to build or buy a new home.

“I came here, to live between the tombs, with my husband and children, 50 years ago,” says Um Suhail Jilo, 72. Her family was forced out from their village in the 1948 expulsion, the Al Nakba, this is the time of disaster for the Palestinians. The time when the Jews on Arab Palestinian land erected the illusory state, that became the Zionist state of Israel. Jewish armed gangs like Irgun, the Stern - gang, and the terrorist organizations Palmack and Haganah terrorized and brutalized hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, forcing the inhabitants to flee their homeland and leave their possessions, to search for safe shelters abroad, in other countries.

“In that time, so long ago, no one helped us to build for us a simple house… so we found no other choice, but to find a roof over our heads here inside the Gaza City old graveyard. We bought tin plates to build a house for our family. The house became impaired and corroded by time or wear, so a few years later, we made some small improvements and added cement onto the walls “. Um Suhail tell us, she lives here with 16 of her family members, her sons and daughters, her in-law’s and grandchildren, in a house consisting of three bedrooms.

Um Suhail’s husband, as so many other husband’s and family- supporters were forced to move outside Gaza Strip to work, to be able to support the family. “Now I have not heard from him in tens of years,” Um Suhail says with a sad voice. “I do not know what happened to him.” Mean while she is making food using a wood burning stove, Um Suhail says: “We have got used to live among the graves of the dead… we are like them, depending on charities and handouts.”

Due to the Israeli-led international siege imposed on Gaza Strip since June last year, the son’s of Um Suhail have lost their jobs, and the family have lost their main source of income. For years, this worn out and exhausted woman has hand washed all the clothes for her large family, until a well doing family bought her a modern washing machine.

Mohammed, a six-year-old boy, born in the home on the graveyard tell us , “I never leave this place, I live here and I play here, and I do not fear ghost’s or the tomb’s.” But in the night, Mohammed fear most the snakes and the spiders, says his grandmother Um Suhail. “Last month, we found and killed, a one and half meter long snake in our house, it was not a pleasant experience, believe me.”

In Sderot, sighs of relief. Children venture out. But the people of the town are angry.

By Uri Avnery

And suddenly: quiet. No Qassams. No mortar shells. The tanks are not rolling. The aircraft are not bombing.

In Sderot, sighs of relief. Children venture out. Inhabitants who have exiled themselves to other towns return home.

And the reaction? An outburst of jubilation? Dancing in the streets? Applause for the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense, who at long last have come to their senses?

Not at all. The expression on the nation’s face is a grimace of disgust. What kind of thing is that? Where is our victorious army?

The people of Sderot are really angry. OK, so there are no Qassams, but this was supposed to happen only after the army had entered Gaza and wiped it out.

Haaretz headed its front page with the mendacious headline: “Israel pays with deeds - and gets promises”.

“It’s fragile,” Ehud Olmert soothes us, it can come to an end any minute. And the other Ehud, Barak, who pushed for the cease-fire, has an excuse: we have to go through the motions before starting the Big Operation in Gaza. For the sake of Israeli and international public opinion.

And nobody says: Thank God, the killing has stopped!

Why? What causes this almost unanimous reaction of disappointment? Why is there a general feeling of humiliation, almost of defeat?

It’s because the national ego is hurt. How wonderful it would have been to see the Israeli army in Gaza destroying Hamas, together with the entire city. But, instead of the crushing victory, we have something that smacks of a rout. And that in spite of the assertions of those now rooting for re-occupying the Gaza Strip: that at any minute, with just a little more starvation and closure, the population would have broken and rebelled against Hamas.

From the military point of view, a year of war in the Gaza Strip has ended in a draw. IDF-Hamas 1:1. But the IDF and Hamas are not two football teams of equal standing. Hamas is an armed political-religious movement, what is termed in current Western parlance “a terrorist organization”. When such an organization achieves a draw with one of the mightiest armies in the world, it can justifiably claim victory.

The aim of Olmert’s war was to topple the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip and to destroy the organization itself. This has not been attained. On the contrary, according to all reports, Hamas is stronger than ever, and its hold on the Strip is solid. Even in Israel that is not questioned.

For a year, the Israeli government has maintained a total blockade of the Strip - on land, at sea and in the air. It has enjoyed the unqualified support of Europe, which assisted in starving a population of one and a half million men and women, children and old people. The US was, of course, a full partner in this glorious enterprise. Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, dependent on the US, collaborated, if unwillingly.

All this was not enough to beat poor and crowded Gaza, a narrow strip of land 35 km (22 miles) long and 10 km (6 miles) wide, into submission. Not only did the rockets not stop, but their range increased. Their victims in Israel were few, a child could count them, but their impact on morale was immense.

The Israeli army was helpless against this primitive weapon, which costs next to nothing. The army killed wholesale and in retail, on land and from the air, with missiles, shells and infantry weapons. To no avail.

Hamas has survived, but it, too, did not achieve its aim. It had no answer to the blockade. Only the pressure of international public opinion (as well as the Israeli peace forces) prevented total starvation, but in the Strip there was a shortage of everything. Unemployment was rampant, fuel disappeared, many inhabitants suffered from undernourishment, bordering on starvation.

That is the nature of a draw: neither of the two sides is able to force a decision and impose its will on its opponent.

A ceasefire only comes about when both sides need it. (True, Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military philosopher, has said that in war it is impossible for a situation to be beneficial to both sides at the same time, that something that is good for one side is necessarily bad for the other. But in real war there are exceptions.)

Indeed, the Israeli army needed the ceasefire no less than Hamas. That became clear from the comments of the “military correspondents”, almost all of whom are thinly disguised army spokesmen. Of course, not one of the cabinet members would have agreed to a ceasefire if the army brass had objected.

Usually, the army bosses press for one more action, one more operation, one more war. Have they suddenly turned into doves? Not really. But they knew that they had to choose between two “bad” options: a ceasefire or the “Great Operation” - the re-conquest of the entire Gaza Strip.

The commanders did not like the first option, and that is an understatement. It means admitting failure. But the second option they liked even less - much, much less.

The Great Operation, which a large part of the public yearned for, which almost all the media demanded at the top of their voices, is very problematical. Hamas has had a lot of time to prepare for it. No army likes to fight in a built-up area, among a crowded population. Every alley is a potential trap, every man - and every woman - a potential suicide bomber. Even if the army succeeded in entering and occupying the strip with only “tolerable” casualties, that would just be the beginning of the troubles. Every day soldiers would be killed. The mutual bloodletting would be endless. See: the Iraq war.

Public opinion is fickle. Every dead soldier whose smiling picture is shown on television increases the pressure to get out. Sooner or later the army would be compelled to leave - and the situation would revert to what it was before, only worse.

The army chiefs know this. Olmert and Barak also know this. The lesson of the Second Lebanon War has not been forgotten. There is no mood for war.

The ceasefire has far-reaching political implications. It changes the Palestinian - and perhaps the regional - map.

One can protest from here to eternity, one can shout from the rooftops that “we don’t negotiate with Hamas” and that “we have no agreement with Hamas” - every child understands that we indeed do, and indeed have.

This is an agreement between the Government of Israel and the Gaza authorities. It means a de facto recognition of the Hamas government there. In Gaza, too, every child understands that the Israeli government was compelled to agree because it was unable to break Hamas by force.

In the eyes of the Palestinians, the situation is clear: Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah has not got anything from the Israelis, Hamas has.

Abbas tries by peaceful means. He is the darling of the Americans and the Israelis. But since the great performance in Annapolis, not only has he not achieved any meaningful concessions at all and not freed a single prisoner, but additional prisoners are being taken every night, the settlements are being enlarged and the Israeli government announces grandiose new building projects in East Jerusalem and the entire West Bank. And the Israeli government would not dream of agreeing to a ceasefire there.

While at the same time Hamas, besieged by the whole world, losing fighters every day, has attained a significant military and political achievement: goods will flow into the Strip, cars will again bounce along the potholed roads, the Rafah crossing, which cuts off the Strip from the world, will be opened. In the coming prisoner exchange, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners will be released in return for the captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.

The conclusion? Everybody can ask themselves: if I were a Palestinian, what conclusion would I draw?

The ceasefire affects the balance of power within the Palestinian people. Hamas has proved that it can maintain an orderly government. Now it is proving that it can control the radical organizations, too.

The wisest thing Mahmoud Abbas can do now is to form a Unity Government, based on both Hamas and Fatah.

Will the ceasefire hold? The correspondents report that nobody expects it to.

When Olmert says that it is fragile, he knows what he is talking about.

There is no written agreement. No orderly mechanism for settling disputes. No arbitrator to decide, in case of need, which side is responsible for a violation.

If somebody in Israel wants to break the ceasefire, nothing will be easier: a squad leader opens fire on a group of Palestinians near the border fence, because he suspects that they are about to plant an explosive device. A spy helicopter pilot believes that he is being shot at and launches a missile. The army intelligence chief claims that large quantities of arms are being smuggled into the Strip.

It can be done in other ways, too. The army will kill half a dozen Islamic Jihad militants in the West Bank. In response, the organization will fire a salvo of Qassams at Sderot. The army will announce that this is a violation of the agreement and answer with an incursion into the Gaza Strip. It will even be right formally, since the ceasefire does not cover the West Bank.

Every agreement holds only as long as both sides believe that it serves their interests. If one of them thinks otherwise, it will break it (and assert that the other side broke it first). In this case, the first to break it will most likely be the Israeli side.

A ceasefire is not peace (salaam), and not even an armistice or truce (hudnah). It is no more than an agreement between combatants to stop shooting for some time.

In the nature of things, each side will use the ceasefire to prepare for the next round of fighting - to breathe deeply, to rest, to train, to plan, to obtain more advanced weapons.

But the ceasefire can become more than that. It can lead to Palestinian unity, to Israeli re-thinking, to a practical advance towards a peaceful solution. At the very least, every day of the ceasefire saves human lives.

And in the meantime the Hebrew and the international dictionaries have acquired another Arabic word: Tahdiyeh, calm.

-Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom.

An Israeli soldier walks alongside a group of Israeli settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron, 24 July 2007. (Mamoun Wazwaz/MaanImages)

By Khalid Amayreh

Last week, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem released video clips showing masked Jewish settlers ganging up on and severely beating elderly Palestinian peasants near the town of Yatta, southwest of Hebron. At least three Palestinians were wounded in the unprovoked assault, including a man and his wife, both in their early sixties.

The latest act of settler terror was not an isolated incident, as official Israeli spokespersons would often claim. It represents a disturbing and persistent phenomenon as young and usually heavily armed settlers continue to attack Palestinian farmers, peasants and shepherds and vandalize their property in an effort to drive them away from their lands and villages.

We who live in the West Bank know too well what it means to live next to a Jewish settlement. It means constant harassment, unending vandalism and perpetual terrorism, both psychological and physical.

What is even more disturbing is the often brazen collusion between the army and the settlers. Ask any conscientious Israeli or Palestinian and he or she will tell you that the settlers couldn’t do what they are doing without at least a “yellow light” from the government and army.

Israel claims to be a state where the rule of law prevails. However, it is abundantly clear that when it comes to settler savagery in particular, and Israel’s overall violations of Palestinian rights in general, the rule of law is suspended.

For example, when a Palestinian files a complaint against settlers, he or she is asked to produce nearly impossible evidence, like the names of the perpetrators, their identity card numbers and their places of residence. Eventually, the complaint is registered against “anonymous” and consigned to oblivion. Such was the fate of thousands of complaints filed by desperate Palestinians seeking redress in Israeli courts.

And whenever serious physical damage to Palestinian property occurs, as happens often, the Israeli police challenge the Palestinian victims to prove beyond doubt that the damage was done by Jews and not self-inflicted. In other words, Jews can do no harm and settlers are innocent even if proven guilty.

The routine and nearly daily attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians and their property throughout the West Bank are not merely mundane acts of vandalism by rogue elements within the settler population. On the contrary, they are part of a larger and well-devised plan aimed at driving Palestinians away from their villages and hamlets and lands in order to make more room for Jewish settlement expansion. It is part and parcel of Israel’s ethnic cleansing schemes against non-Jews in Palestine.

Besides, it is well known that whenever a terrorist settler is detained, and this happens rarely, dozens of politicians, Knesset members, retired army commanders and of course, rabbis, are mobilized to free “an innocent Jew whose only guilt is defending Jewish rights and showing loyalty to the Land of Israel.”

This proves, if any proof were needed, that the entire Israeli Jewish society is accomplice and guilty in this shame, not only by keeping silent but also by always covering up for settler crimes.

To be sure, there are some Israeli Jewish and international groups, such as B’Tselem, the Christian Peace-making Teams (CPT) and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) that monitor settler crimes against Palestinians. On this occasion and on behalf of the Palestinian people, I would like to salute these conscientious people and thank them for their dedication and laborious efforts on behalf of humanity and justice.

Nonetheless, settler crimes in the West Bank are so rampant and pervasive that greater efforts are required to monitor and expose them, especially in light of the obvious collusion between the occupation army and the settlers.

Hence, young men and women from around the world including Jews, Christians and Muslims and others, are encouraged to come to the West Bank to be a voice for the voiceless and lend a helping hand to those helpless Palestinians for whom daily life has become a formidable challenge due to settler harassment, vandalism and terrorism.

In addition to physical assaults on Palestinian villagers, settler terrorists routinely burn down fields, orchards and olive groves, often in full view of Israeli soldiers who look on nonchalantly, if not satisfactorily. Moreover, the settlers close Palestinian roads, even roads to one’s home, break water pipes, power and telephone cables. They also often throw poisonous or contaminated substances in Palestinian water wells.

Again, when Palestinians complain to the police, they are made to feel as if they were talking to a wall.

The criminal behavior of the settlers reflects a virulent ideological indoctrination whereby non-Jews in general and Palestinians in particular are viewed as “not fully human.”

For example, Rabbi Abraham Kook, the spiritual Godfather of religious Zionism, e.g. the settler movement, claimed that “the difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”

I know that some religious-Zionist pundits would indulge in all sorts of metaphorical interpretations to make Kook’s Jewish supremacy doctrine look innocuous.

However, the behavior of his followers in the West Bank should leave no doubt as to the virulent nature of his teachings.

Today, the vast majority of settlers in the West Bank believe that non-Jews living in Israel-Palestine ought to be either exterminated, enslaved or expelled. To enforce their racist ideas, prominent rabbis often cite the most extremist biblical and Talmudic passages pertaining to treatment of non-Jews living among Jews.

A few months ago, a settler leader in the Hebron region told me, “you have to choose between death, enslavement and expulsion from the Land of Israel.”

Obviously, with such a mindset, there can be no peace and coexistence between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land.

Indeed, how can you coexist, let alone coexist amicably, with someone who believes that you are not equal to him and that God created you to be enslaved by him as a wood-hewer or water-carrier?

Finally, a few words to the Israeli government. During the Nazi era, the German authorities gave Nazi vigilantes, such as the Hitler Youth organization, free rein to attack Jews and their property. Now, you are effectively doing the same by giving these settler hoodlums a free rein to terrorize and assault innocent Palestinians. So, take note of what you are doing.

Related Article : Israeli settlers wage campaign of intimidation on Palestinians and internationals alike

Senator John McCain is greeted by an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish man as he arrives at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, March 19, 2008. (Photo: AP)

By Ramzy Baroud

Abstract: A study of the political, religious and cultural factors underlying the pro-Israeli bias apparent in the Western media today, as depicted in the mainstream news and television programmes.

As Palestinians hurriedly buried their loved ones in the Gaza Strip following a deadly Israeli onslaught, which further contributed to Gaza’s worst humanitarian crisis since 1967 [1], US and Israeli celebrities rallied at a Los Angeles benefit concert for the Israeli town of Sderot, located near the border of Gaza. [2] Hollywood movie stars Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight, Valerie Harper and comedian Larry Miller mingled with Israeli celebrities such as singer Ninet Tayeb and others. Children from the Israeli town of Sderot, which received the lion’s share of homemade Palestinian rockets, were cheerful nonetheless. Song and dance, interrupted occasionally by solemn messages of support delivered via satellite by both Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates, replaced the cries of sirens the images of huddling families in the town’s shelters. It was a bittersweet moment, that of solidarity, a renewal of the vow made too often, that Israel’s plight is that of America, and Israel’s security is an American priority, and, indeed, ‘God loves those who love Israel’.

Welcome to America’s parallel reality on Israel and Palestine, barefaced in its defying of the notions of commonsense, equality and justice, ever-insistent on peeking at the Arab-Israeli conflict from a looking glass manufactured jointly in the church, in the Congress and in the news room, where the world is reduced to characters interacting in a Hollywood-like movie set: good guys, well groomed and often white-skinned vs. bad guys bearing opposite qualities.

One may become accustomed to watching, reading and listening to the chorus of support that America – its politicians, most of its mainstream media and a large conglomerate of its churches and clergies – tirelessly offer Israel. But one must never dismiss such support, as typical, expected or, as some of Israel’s supporters would put it, ‘special’ and ‘historic’. As simplistic and naïve in its articulation as the so-called pro-Israeli sentiment in the United States may be, in actuality, its intricate manifestation of political, religious, and cultural factors are as old, in some way, as the United States itself. To understand these factors, some deconstruction is in order. This article merely aims at shedding light at some of these factors and the history behind them.

Religion Meets Politics – Old and New

“They own the [Holy] land, just the mere land, and that’s all they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven’t any business to be there defiling it. It’s a shame and we ought not to stand it a minute. We ought to march against them and take it away from them.” — Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894.

Americans are commonly accepted for being more religious than their Western counterparts, whether in Canada or in Europe. After all, the American Dream was largely initiated by what is widely interpreted as a religious pilgrimage on board the Mayflower in 1620. The history of colonization of the American continent, of course, goes back to earlier years; nonetheless, it was that particular ‘pilgrimage’, in cultural consciousness, that defined the historic relationship between the immigrants from Europe and the so-called New World. One rather significant omission which often occurs is the recognition of the many nations in the new physical landscape, which in fact existed.

Although the Native Americans’ plight has received a somewhat fair share of deserved analysis, I mean to emphasize here an important component that makes their story most relevant to my argument. Native Americans were dismissed as non-existent, were seen as an obstacle to the harbingers of civilizations, and, when they were recognized as an entity, political or cultural, it was meant merely to juxtapose their backwardness, their irrelevance, their savageness, with the progressiveness, the relevance and the civility of the newcomers.

They too, the immaterial ‘Indians’ may have merely owned the land (although Native Americans didn’t believe in such a concept to start with), but it’s “our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy.” The religious aspect of colonization is significant in the sense that it validates the cruelty of the physical uprooting, the massacring and the dismissal of entire races. “Where a command and a faith are present, in certain historical situations conquest need not be robbery,” Martin Buber wrote once. [3] If God, particularly the American God, justifies such acts, who are we, mere mortals, to defy His will? America was and remains in the minds of some, a Holy Land, with many of its towns bearing the name Salem, just like city of Jerusalem, occupied and illegally annexed by Israel. Such notions as legality and illegality might be relevant to the United Nations (itself rendered irrelevant once by US President George W. Bush himself) [4], but among large circles of American religious institutions, these notions are extraneous to the point of ridicule.

But there is more, of course, to the ‘special relationship’ that justified Israel’s robbery of Palestinian land in an American religious, political and intellectual landscape than their combined search for a holy land and their textual, often selective interpretations of the Old Testament.

In 1879, a scale model of the Holy Land known as the Palestine Park was constructed on Lake Chautauqua, New York by Reverend John Heyl Vincent. J. A. Miller explains, Palestine Park was a “visual aid for the legions of Sunday school teachers who flocked to the Chautauqua Institute to bone up on biblical history and geography.” It was the “first ever example of a theme park, a quintessential American construct.” [5] It featured: “…a life-size Tabernacle built to the specifications given in Exodus, a pyramid, a model of Jerusalem, and a small scale replica of the biblical Holy Land itself - complete with a ten-foot-long Dead Sea, a smaller Sea of Galilee, and markers for important biblical sites - landscaped into the rocky terrain of the shoreline …which serves as the Mediterranean Sea.” [6]

The Chautauqua Institute was established five years before the Park, and “spawned hundreds of ‘assemblies’, throughout America, their popularity lasting until radio and cinema decimated their customer base.” That customer base was not only large, but influential, for it included such luminaries as “Amelia Earhart, Helen Keller, Thomas Edison, George Gershwin and at least nine presidents. Ida Tarbell, famed muckraker of Standard Oil, happily recollected cavorting on Palestine Park’s Mount Hermon as a girl.” [7]

Miller argues, that although there were many smaller precursors on American church grounds, “Palestine Park is the iconic example of what geographer John Kirtland Wright called geopiety, ‘a deep religious devotion to a vision of the Holy Land concocted from a ‘curious mix of romantic imagination, historical rectitude, and attachment to physical space’.” [8] He proceeds, “Geopiety is a particularly Protestant obsession originating in England in the 16th century and culminating in the Balfour Declaration. Long before Herzl revved up the Jewish branch of geopiety, the Archbishop of York pugnaciously encapsulated the concept in 1875: “Our reason for turning to Palestine is that Palestine is our country. I have used that expression before and I refuse to adopt any other”. [9]

While these roots continued to be firmly planted, newer religious phenomena helped contribute to that construct, thus widening the parameters of the Park to include a larger segment of American society, using television as the new and relentless platform. Welcome to the Armageddon-seeking American Evangelicals. While the advocacy for Israel by various evangelical churches is both bizarre – since the ultimate objective of this crowed is the annihilation of most Jews and the conversion of some as prerequisites for the Rapture – and widely acknowledged, their influence on the political culture of America is not equally recognized. Pastor John Hagee, for example, a “televangelist to 99 million viewers and pastor of the 18,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, established Christians United for Israel (CUFI) in 2005 following the publication of his book, ‘The Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World.’ Hagee envisions CUFI as the Christian version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby whose political clout has significant influence on US foreign policy in the Middle East.” [10]

Journalist Max Blumenthal took his cameras to the CUFI’s Washington-Israel Summit held in July 2007, in Washington DC. The result was a documentary entitled, “Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour.” It opens with a dialogue with former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay, who was asked how important is the Second Coming is in his support of Israel. “Obviously, it is what I live for. Really, I hope it comes tomorrow. Obviously, we need to be connected to Israel to enjoy the Second Coming of Christ.” [11]

Robert Weitzel reports, “John Hagee is not without fawning friends in Washington. Presidential hopeful John McCain made a campaign stop at the Summit and admitted to the audience that, ‘It’s very hard trying to do the Lord’s work in the city of Satan . . .’ House Minority Whip Roy Blunt followed McCain to the podium and assured the faithful that ‘This is a mission, this is a vision that I believe is a vision for God’s time.’ Senator Joe Lieberman was there and described Pastor Hagee as an “Ish Elokim,” a man of God. Never one to be left out of a well-attended Christian Right convocation, President Bush sent his best wishes, ‘I appreciate CUFI members . . . for your passion and dedication to enhancing the relationship between the United States and Israel. Your efforts set a shining example for others . . .’ [12]

Popular Culture

To examine the relationship between political and religious cultures and the popular culture in America is not an easy task, since the relationship is neither one-way nor linier. However, those preaching their version of God, aspiring to hold on to their political powers, understood well how to communicate their messages to the general public. Pop cultures are hardly shaped by polemics, reason and dialectics but by rather seemingly simple and indirect gestures that overtime ingrain lasting impressions. Combined with an already existing bias regarding Palestine, as disseminated by religious and political institutions, popular culture is constantly bombarded with positive imagery and language depicting Israel, and negative representations of Palestinians.

In popular sitcoms such as Friends, Malcolm in the Middle and others, references are quite often made of Israel. One of Friends’ main characters, Chandler, had an Israeli girl friend, attractive and funny. When it was time to break up, he feared that her fighting skills, obtained during her service in the Israeli army would make such a task too difficult. That image of Israel, and the Israelis, being funny, attractive and fearsome is recurring in American television. Palestinians on the other hand are mentioned, sporadically (outside the evening news), and almost always in a negative light. I was up for a big surprise watching an episode of American Dad, one of the most watched animation programs following the Simpsons. The show comes across as progressive, in a roundabout sort of way. A young boy, one of the show’s main characters, was frustrated by the fact that he couldn’t figure out how to operate a homemade rocket. “If a five year old Palestinian boy can do this, so could I.” In another segment, another reference was made to the “anti-Zionist Aryan brotherhood,” an imaginary group that equates an anti-Zionist affiliation to white supremacy. Many such references are made on American television as well as the big screen. However, I will focus the remaining part of the article on media language and its contribution to the manufacturing of an alternative, convenient reality regarding the Middle East, but Israel and Palestine in particular.

Media Language

In the competitive world of media today, swift and conveniently selective reporting is of prime importance. GoogleNews, for example, claims to scan 4,500 news sources, of which only a few are highlighted as main stories. There are thousands of similar services, all competing to produce a story in the fastest time. Thorough - and thus slower - reporting is relegated and crucial information often appears too little too late.

The corporate media’s depiction of the Gaza story, following Hamas’ election victory in January 2006, and which culminated in the clashes between Fatah and Hamas and the latter’s capture of Gaza in June 2007, was reduced to a few typical headlines, depicting Palestinians as unruly, uncivilized, criminal and unpredictable (thus incapable of being a trustworthy peace partner, as often parroted by Israel.)

The imprisonment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza – where a humanitarian crisis, unemployment and poverty are still underway – should have been depicted first and foremost as a humanitarian disaster compelled by an Israeli siege. The dates related to the successive stages of the siege should follow a line of political, not ‘security’ logic. Any reasonable timeline of recent events could easily verify that (the formation of the Hamas government in March 2006, the ousting of the pro-Israeli Palestinian security apparatus in June 2007 and so on being followed by dramatic Israeli moves to tighten the siege on Gaza, Hamas’ stronghold).

But little of that seemed relevant to the way the Gaza story was amply reported. Like the Iraq story, where the two main trusted sources are the occupation and its puppet Iraqi government, any story of relevance to Israel and Palestine has to be validated by the official Israeli source and to a lesser but growing extent by their allies among Palestinians. The rest are ‘extremist’, radical and hell-bent on the destruction of the ‘Jewish state.’ Note how the Jewishness of Israel is often emphasised whenever the word ‘destruction’ or similar words are infused.

This is what Bridget Johnson wrote in the Los Angeles Daily News, chastising the United Nations’ Human Rights Council for its condemnation of Israel’s siege on Gaza: “There was zero mention of Hamas’ continued rocket attacks on Israel — which preceded the cut-off of supplies that has caused such an uproar — or Hamas’ refusal to renounce violence against and attempted destruction of the Jewish state.” [13] The claims were preposterous – especially that of a small group’s ‘attempted destruction’ of a country saturated with nuclear arms. The words ‘destruction’ and ‘Jewish state’ are simply passed as an innocent ‘opinion’, read by millions of Americans. There are many notable omissions as well. Hamas has repeatedly called for a mutual ceasefire, that was also repeatedly rejected or simply ignored by Israel. The siege followed the democratic election of Hamas, not the rocket attacks. Also conveniently missed is the disparity between the numbers of Israelis killed as a result of the Palestinian rockets – 10 in six years of violence – and Palestinians killed by Israeli ‘retaliation’ - over 120 Palestinians in Gaza alone within 9 days, starting February 27. [14] The killing of any civilian anywhere is tragic, but the facts are rarely contextualised by the media. This is only the tip of the iceberg since human suffering cannot only be measured by those who die, but also those who continue to live in perpetual torment. For Johnson, this is irrelevant, since this is not about right and wrong, but a war of language. To win the war, one must have command over language – and the way it’s manipulated – and access to platforms that reach the largest number of readers. An easy recipe to victory in this non-conventional war is an intentional mix of terms as Islamic extremism, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Jewish state, security, existential threats, right to exist, juxtaposed with images or clips of angry Palestinian youth burning Israeli and American flags, ‘side-by-side’, and you will have an American public and government standing in eternal solidarity with Israel.

While most US politicians are self-seeking, power hungry and would do whatever it takes to be elected, the average American, unlike what it may seem, is not born ‘pro-Israel’, and ‘anti-Palestinian.’ Most Americans are pro-the-manufactured, yet misleading images of Israel reach their homes through television, wait at their doorsteps in the morning and confront them through the web. Israel has mastery over the language of the Western media, which, again, helped create a parallel reality that has little correlation to the real world, that of facts, numbers and actual events. That alternative universe only exists on the pages of New York Times, the images of CNN, and the blabber of Fox News ‘experts’. According to that narrative, Palestinians, are irrational, suicidal, demonic, mad, extremists, self hating, and all the rest.

Conclusion

There is no serious, equitable debate regarding Palestine and Israel in the US media, nor any other cultural, political and religious circles. If the existing narrative is to be called a debate, then it’s one with an imagined, not real, language, almost entirely irrelevant to the realities in Palestine and Israel. It’s one that is largely predicated on a narrow minded, apocalyptic religious discourse which for decades has found itself an accepted point of departure for most politicians, even those who falsely pose as liberals. Between the two discourses, that of misguided religious fantasies and pandering politicians, there exists enough room for alternative narratives. Unfortunately, that space is too overwhelmed by cultural misconceptions, institutional bias and deliberate confusion, introduced and instilled deliberately by media producers, pundits and the other manufactures of American popular culture. Until the gatekeepers of pop culture in America are seriously challenged, Palestine will continue to reside in the American imagination as a battle between good and evil, a ‘Holy Land’ that must be wrestled from the hands of those who might have owned the land, at one point, but now, they “haven’t any business to be there defiling it.”

-Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London).

(This article was first published in the Palestine Internationalist Journal, Volume 3 Issue 3, Apr 2008 – South Africa)

Bibliography

[1] Gaza humanitarian Crisis ‘Worst Since 1967′, MSNBC. www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23497420/
[2]) U.S., Israeli Stars Rally at L.A. Benefit Concert for Sderot. www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959308.html
[3] Martin Buber, On Zion:The History of an Idea, 1974, p. 146
[4] Matthew Rothschild, Bush Trashes the United Nations. The Progressive, April 2003. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1295/is_4_67/ai_99818480
[5] J. A Miller, Palestine Park, The Palestine Chronicle, http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=13390, Jan 8, 2008
[6] Timothy Beal, Roadside Religion, 2005, p. 28
[7] J. A Miller, Palestine Park, The Palestine Chronicle, http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=13390, Jan 8, 2008
[8] Timothy Beal, Roadside Religion, 2005, p. 28
[9] Issam Nassar, “In Their Image”, Jerusalem Quarterly, October 2003 www.jerusalemquarterly.org/details.php?cat=4&id=185
[10] Robert Weitzel, Children of Palestine and Israel: Cannon Fodder for the Rapture, The Palestine Chronicle, http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=13592
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
[13] Bridget Johnson, The U.N. can learn something from Rambo. The Los Angeles Daily News. www.dailynews.com/columnists/ci_8102360
[14] Aljazeera, Hamas sets terms for Israeli truce. http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/B09F81FA-14D9-4BCA-A7BD-AF2E52693830.htm; and Amnesty International, Children and civilian bystanders in Gaza death toll: www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/children-and-civilian-bystanders-gaza-death-toll-20080303

Two eight year old girls have been killed by the IOF in the Gaza Strip in less than a week.
Aya Hamdan Al-Najjar (above) was killed by a rocket fired from an Israeli helicopter.

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR)

15 June 2008

On June 11, eight year old Hadeel Al-Sumairi was killed when her home in south eastern Gaza was shelled by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). Less than a week earlier, eight year old Aya Hamdan Al-Najjar was killed by a rocket fired from an IOF helicopter. These two young girls had been living just a few kilometers apart, in villages in south eastern Gaza, near the border with Israel. Their violent deaths highlight both the continual dangers facing families who live anywhere near the Israeli border – and the grim and rising child death toll in the Gaza Strip. Sixty two children have been killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip this year - almost double the number of children who were killed by the IOF in Gaza during the whole of last year. [1]

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) is still investigating the circumstances of Hadeel Al-Sumairi’s death. Her uncle, Amin Suleiman Ahmad Al-Sumairi, has given PCHR an eye-witness account of the IOF invasion of Al-Qarara village near Khan Yunis, where Hadeel was killed. “I was at home when I heard a huge explosion. I ran from my house and saw fire coming from the home of my brother, Abdul Karim” he told PCHR. “As I ran towards the house I could smell burning flesh.” The IOF had just fired two tank shells into Al-Qarara village, and both shells struck the house where Abdul Karim Al-Sumairi and his family lived. His daughter, Hadeel, was killed instantly, her small body dismembered.

Six days earlier, On June 5, Zahra Ibrahim Al-Najjar, was at her in home in nearby Khizaa village with her young daughter, Aya. “My daughter had finished school just one week earlier and was waiting for her friends to come and join her” says Zahra Al-Najjar. “At about 2pm I heard the sound of [Israeli] drones and helicopters. I went to the window to see what was happening, but I didn’t see anyone outside. I thought Aya was inside our building, or with a neighbour. Then there was a loud explosion.”

The helicopter had just fired a rocket, which, with pinpoint accuracy, hit eight year old Aya as she stood just three or four metres from her own house. Zahra Al-Najjar, who was struck in the head by shrapnel from the rocket, did not know her daughter had just been killed. It was the neighbours who found a small hand in the rubble outside. After collecting the other parts of Aya’s body, which were scattered over a distance of more than 150 metres, they then had the grim task of telling Zahra and her husband, Hamdan Hamdan Al-Najjar, that their daughter was dead.

Zahra and Hamdan Al-Najjar believe that Aya was deliberately targeted by the IOF in retaliation for the death of an Israeli civilian earlier the same day. The Israeli man was killed between 11-12 am, by mortar shells fired from inside the Gaza Strip that struck the Nir Oz kibbutz near south eastern Gaza. “The mortars [that killed the Israeli] had been fired at least two hours before Aya was killed” says Hamdan Al-Najjar. “But those mortars were not fired from here, there was no shooting in our village, and there was no-one outside our house except for my daughter. She was not carrying a gun and she did not fire a rocket. They wanted revenge for the death of the Israeli.”

Parents of other children that have been killed by the IOF in Gaza this year have also consistently alleged that their children were deliberately targeted by the IOF. On 20 May, twelve year Majde Ziyad Abu Oukal was killed in Jabalia, northern Gaza, by a missile fired from an IOF drone that dismembered him. His parents, Ziyad and Tahariya Abu Oukal, believe he was deliberately targeted in order to pressurize local parents to stop rockets being launched towards Israel.

The deliberate targeting of civilians is illegal under international human rights law, and constitutes a gross violation of human rights amounting to a war crime. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights is investigating these allegations in depth, and this summer will publish its findings in a report on child killings committed by the Israeli Occupying Forces in the Gaza Strip.

Driving along the eastern border of the Gaza Strip is a sinister experience. In between villages like Al-Qarara and Khizaa are vast tracts of empty land and hundreds of boarded up and abandoned houses. The IOF make frequent incursions here, and local Palestinian villagers are fleeing in fear of their lives, and the lives of their children.

“The Israelis can see everything from their planes” says Hamdan Al-Najjar. “They could see Aya was alone outside - and they could see she was just a small child. When we finally saw [the remains of] our daughter, there was almost nothing left of her. We could not even bury her properly, because her body had been completely destroyed.” All that Aya’s parents have left of their daughter now is one small, grainy photograph.

Also visit: Photo Gallery of IOF attacks in Gaza Strip since Feb 29 ,2008

Seth Freedman, The Guardian

Scrambling up the rock-strewn hillside in the baking midday sun, we stumbled across two middle-aged men taking shade under an olive tree. As they bade my guide “Salaam aleikum”, their eyes scanned my face for a hint of recognition. Finding none, one of the men ventured a tentative greeting in English and, when I responded in kind, proffered two items in my direction.

One was a surgeon’s mask; the other a strip of alcohol-saturated prep pads: “You’ll need them for where you’re going”, he assured me. As we edged closer to our destination, it was clear we had been well-advised. Plumes of tear gas crisscrossed the air, trailing the canisters fired by the border police toward the scores of demonstrators. The pungent, acrid fumes filled our nostrils and mouths, while our ears resonated to the sporadic bursts of rubber bullets being shot in our direction.

From our vantage point atop the hill, we had a perfect view of the operating table that lay beneath us, and our surgical accessories added to the sense of theater that we were witnessing. As we looked on, we watched the obligatory rocks flung at the troops from youths wielding slingshots; the equally standard opening of fire by the police in response and the all-too familiar sight of wounded protesters being rushed by stretcher to waiting ambulances. There was nothing we onlookers and reporters could do but record the events in our notebooks and cameras; our roles no different to that of medical staff witnessing the slow deaths of terminally ill patients. In this case, the patients were the villagers of Nilin, the disease they were vainly fighting was the ever-spreading cancer of Israeli settlements across the corpus of their ancestral land.

In 1948, the first symptoms of Nilin’s impending malaise took the form of an expropriation of 40,000 dunams of land by the newly formed Israeli Army. While crushed by the weight this blow dealt to their livelihoods, the townspeople believed the tumor had gone into remission, only for a second attack to strike during the Six-Day War, when several thousand more dunams were invaded.

Since then, they have realized that the malignant growth is spreading further: yet more of their land has been sequestered by the Israeli authorities and the detested security wall erected in the midst of their olive groves.

Attempts to halt the cancer’s progress have failed; the Israeli government appearing resistant to any of the balm which the villagers have fought to apply, whether in the form of legal action, international pressure, or the intervention of local peace activists. Faced with what could well prove a fatal blow to the entire town, the residents have been forced to take drastic measures to try to keep the tide at bay. Now, on an almost daily basis, dozens of youths take to the hills to impede the wall’s construction; their medieval arsenal of sticks and stones no match for the heavily armed, heavily fortified troops who surround them on every side.

Talking to the locals is akin to visiting the terminally ill in a hospice; all one can do is offer words of comfort and try to placate them as the inevitable decline continues. “In the end, they will win —- and we know it,” said Khaled Mesleh, a 58-year-old grandfather whose family has lived in Nilin for more than 800 years. “We might succeed in holding up the building of the wall for a matter of days or weeks, but ultimately they will achieve their aims.”

Those aims, according to Mesleh, are to crush the villagers into submission once and for all. “The Israelis take our land, refuse us permission to expand the village, prevent us being able to work inside Israel … so that eventually we will simply say ‘we’ve had enough’ and leave. There are 6,000 residents of Nilin and none of them are happy; it’s impossible to be happy in such conditions.”

As the border police continued to pick off protesters with rubber bullets and live ammunition, we returned to his modest house to continue our discussion out of the line of fire. Children and grandchildren swarmed round the living room and kitchen; “They all live with me,” said Mesleh. “Where else can they go?” With the town’s borders continually narrowing, those of his offspring who have married and had children of their own are forced to continue living in the family home, or else to leave the village for good.

In the meantime, Hindi, one of his sons, has taken it upon himself to help organize the protests against the wall’s erection. Breathless and bathed in sweat, he returned to the house enraged by what he’d seen. A freelance photographer and camera operator by trade, he had plenty of evidence of the scale of the injustices being dealt to his fellow villagers. He showed us footage of a border police officer letting off rapid-fire bursts of rubber bullets in random directions, as well as clips of the wounded being rushed away from the scene by panicked medics. Hindi is just as resigned to the reality as his father: “At least by protesting we can try to prevent them taking even more of our land, but we [are in no doubt] that the wall will still be built.” All that the locals can do is keep placing themselves in the firing line, in the vain hope that their actions will do more good in the long run than the harm caused by the tear gas and rubber-coated missiles fired into their bodies.

In Nilin specifically as well as in the West Bank as a whole, one thing is certain: the drugs don’t work. The idea of international intervention is laughed at sorrowfully by Khaled and his peers. Similarly, the aid of the Israeli courts: “An Israeli judge banned them from continuing to build the wall here,” said Khaled, “but they [the army] couldn’t care less. They’re still here — and if the courts can’t stop them, who can?”

The answer — as he, his son and the rest of the villagers know all too well — is that no one can. The eyes of the world look on either benevolently (in the case of Israel’s backers in the US and elsewhere), or impotently; too cowed to act, too diplomatic to intervene. Time is not on the Palestinians’ side. Just as Nilin appears in its death throes today, so too will another village tomorrow, then another, then another. As the life of the Palestinian nation ebbs away, the best treatment on offer is merely palliative; and even that is proving too weak to soothe their never-ending anguish.

The occupation’s guiding principle has produced the conditions that are now impeding a peace agreement.

By Neve Gordon

Israel has decided to alter its methods of upholding the occupation, replacing a politics of life, which aimed to secure the existence and livelihood of the Palestinian inhabitants, with a politics of death.

On June 8, 1967, just a few hours after the Israeli military captured Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Haram al Sharif, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan visited the site. Noticing that troops had hung an Israeli flag on the cap of the Al-Aqsa shrine, Dayan asked one of the soldiers to remove it, adding that displaying the Israeli national symbol for all to see was an unnecessarily provocative act.

Those who have visited the Occupied Territories in the past years have no doubt noticed Israeli flags fluttering over almost every building Israel occupies as well as above every Jewish settlement. Ariel Sharon’s highly publicized visit to the Al-Aqsa compound in September 2000 – an act that served as the trigger for the second Intifada – could be considered the final step in a process that has ultimately undone Dayan’s strategic legacy of trying to normalize the occupation by concealing Israel’s presence. “Don’t rule them,” Dayan once said, “let them lead their own lives.”

Another significant change that has transpired over the past 41 years involves the Israeli government’s relationship to trees, the symbol of life. If in 1968 Israel helped Palestinians in the Gaza Strip plant some 618,000 trees and provided farmers with improved varieties of seeds for vegetables and field crops, during the first three years of the second Intifada Israel destroyed more than ten percent of Gaza’s agricultural land and uprooted over 226,000 trees.

The appearance and proliferation of the flag on the one hand, and the razing of trees on the other, signify a fundamental transformation in Israel’s attempts to control the occupied Palestinian inhabitants. It appears as if Israel decided to alter its methods of upholding the occupation, replacing a politics of life, which aimed to secure the existence and livelihood of the Palestinian inhabitants, with a politics of death.

This shift manifests itself in numerous ways. During the occupation’s first decade, for example, Israel tried to decrease Palestinian unemployment in order to manage the population, but following the new millennium it intentionally produced unemployment in the Occupied Territories. Israel provided immunization for cattle and poultry during the first years after the 1967, but in 2008 it created conditions that prevented people from receiving immunization.

Changes like these clearly reflect the radical transformation in the repertoires of violence deployed in the Occupied Territories. Whereas an estimated 650 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the first two decades following the 1967 War, during the six-year period between 2001 and 2007, Israel has, on average, killed more than 650 Palestinians per year.

The number of Israelis killed in this conflict has significantly increased as well, and this is not coincidental. Whereas during the thirteen-year period between December 1987 and September 2000, 422 Israeli were killed by Palestinians, during the six-year period from the eruption of the second intifada until the end of 2006, 1,019 Israelis were killed.

Commentators do not usually attempt to make sense of such changes, and, when they do, they almost always underscore the policy choices of the Israeli government or the decisions made by the different Palestinian political factions. Such an approach, while often helpful, elides the significant impact of the occupation’s guiding principle.

By the occupation’s guiding principle, I mean the distinction Israel has made between the land it occupied and the people who inhabit the land. Levi Eshkol, Israel’s prime minister in 1967, clearly articulated this distinction during a Labor Party meeting that took place just three months after the war. Discussing the consequences of Israel’s military victory, he turned to Golda Meir, who was then the party’s general secretary, and said: “I understand… you covet the dowry, but not the bride.”

One cannot fully understand the occupation and the reason it has become more violent without taking into account the separation between the dowry (i.e., the land that Israel occupied in June 1967) and the bride (the Palestinian population). This principle is the propelling force behind the massive settlement project, the by-pass roads, the expropriation of Palestinian water and the erection of the separation barrier deep inside Palestinian territory. And it is precisely these latter Israeli actions that have precipitated the intensification of violence in the Occupied Territories and, one might even argue, the rise of Hamas.

The occupation’s guiding principle has consequently produced the very conditions that are now impeding a peace agreement based on the two-state solution. Recognizing the full ramifications of this principle is crucial since it allows us to see beyond the smoke screen of political proclamations and statements, and to improve our understanding of why the acrimonious conflict has developed in the way that it has. Just as importantly, the principle sheds light on how the conflict can be resolved, since the key to reaching a just and peaceful solution involves reuniting the Palestinian people and their land and offering them full sovereignty over the land. So long as the guiding principle is ignored, blood will continue to be spilled.

The Israelis somehow believe Palestinian education really is threatening to their security.

By Joharah Baker

Since last June, stories of ill patients unable to leave the Gaza Strip, Israeli military invasions and fuel cuts have been streaming out of the coastal strip at a steady pace. The blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza ever since Hamas took over in June 2006 has resulted in hundreds of deaths, skyrocketing unemployment and lack of proper food and water supplies. On May 29, the collective punishment imposed on Gaza’s 1.4 million residents took yet another turn. Seven outstanding students granted the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship for university study in the United States were informed by the US State Department that their scholarships would regrettably be cancelled.

The reason for this sudden decision was completely unrelated to the merits of the seven students – obviously all intelligent and hard working given that they were able to snag the coveted scholarship. Rather, the culprit was, once again, the Israeli occupation, which denied the young adults exit permits from the beleaguered Gaza Strip. Since the blockade, Gaza residents have been virtually caged in the 360 square meter area, not allowed to leave, either into Israel or the West Bank from the Erez Crossing or from the Rafah Crossing into Egypt. This latter crossing has been a serious bone of contention between Palestinians, Israelis and Egyptians, who have occasionally opened the crossing for a few days at a time to let in the hundreds of stranded people on either side.

Given that the Fulbright Scholarship is so prestigious, a relatively “big stink” was made when the letters of apology arrived. One letter received by a Gaza student read, “We are extremely sorry that we are unable to finalize your scholarship at this time, and hope you will reapply next year and be able to complete your studies in the U.S.” Even US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was notified and made to comment. On her way to Iceland on May 30, Rice coolly noted that “Perhaps there are reasons [for the scholarship withdrawal], but I want to look into why this happened.”

“Why it happened” is pretty clear. Israel has had one major goal since its imposed blockade on the Strip, which is to squeeze out Hamas, undermine its political and military power and install a much more malleable Palestinian government in its stead, one which would be more acquiescing to Israel’s constant demands. Hence, its blockade is airtight, only allowing “urgent humanitarian cases” to leave the Strip with permission.

Israeli military spokesman Peter Lerner said Israel’s current policy is to issue permits only in humanitarian cases and “students are not included under the definition of humanitarian aid.”

It is not clear what exactly constitutes humanitarian aid according to the Israelis. Since the blockade was imposed under a year ago, 121 recorded Gazans died after being refused permits to leave the Strip to seek urgent medical attention.

Furthermore, with the constant fuel shortage due to Israel’s blockade on fuel supplies into Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Gazans go days on end without electricity and fresh fruits and vegetables are growing exceedingly scarcer and pricier due to the tight closure on crossings.

Still, even if we only address the issue at hand – the denial of these students to travel to the US for study – this is a gross violation of the intrinsic right to education. How could seven bright, young, ambitious Palestinians seeking only to better themselves and hence their country be a threat to Israel’s security? Even Secretary Rice sounded disturbed at the decision. ”If you cannot engage young people and give complete horizons to their expectations and their dreams, I don’t know that there would be any future for Palestine,” she said.

Furthermore, Israel is hardly playing by its own rules. If students do not constitute a “humanitarian case” it seems even more unlikely that businessmen would. That was not the case last week when 122 businessmen from Gaza were able to reach Bethlehem to attend the Palestine Investment Conference, of course with Israeli facilitation. Hence, it is not really about Israel’s security measures but more about what would serve its interests. Boosting non-Hamas businessmen in Gaza could certainly assist in pumping up parts of the economy there not connected with the Islamic movement.

No doubt, this was no comfort to the seven students who had their hopes pinned on traveling to the US to attend some of the country’s best universities. The State Department said it would defer the scholarships to West Bank students rather than squander the grants altogether, adding that the Gazans would be eligible for Fulbrights next year if Israel insists on refusing them a ticket out.

The Israelis somehow believe Palestinian education really is threatening to their security, judging from past behavior. Since the inception of their illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, every Palestinian university has been closed down by Israeli military order at one time or another. Palestinian universities were shut down from January 1988 to April 1992 after the outbreak of the first Intifada. For Birzeit University, this had been the 15th military closure of the university since 1979.

Since then, all 10 Palestinian universities in the West Bank and Gaza have been intermittently shut down by Israeli authorities, always with the excuse of the campuses being “beds of terrorism”. Of course, universities are representatives of the overall political, social and economic situation of any society, Palestine notwithstanding. So, while political activity is present and factions vie for student council seats in clear representation of the larger political scene, this is no excuse for depriving these students of the education they have a right to receive.

Unfortunately, like all the other dimensions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the international community turns a blind eye to the injustices Israel metes out against the Palestinians. The closing of educational institutions by a military power is an atrocity under any circumstance, much less when it is done repeatedly, disrupting the educational process for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Luckily for the seven Fulbright recipients in Gaza,Israel had a change of heart. The Israeli human rights organization Gisha reported late on Sunday that “The U.S. Consulate tonight told Fulbright candidates from Gaza that it is restoring funding for the prestigious scholarship program and is ‘working closely’ with the government of Israel to secure permits for the students to leave Gaza in order to attend visa interviews at the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem and thereafter to leave Gaza for travel to the United States”. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the U.S. reversal came on orders from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who first heard about the scholarship fiasco on Friday. This goes to show that when the Palestinians play their cards right and embarassment is caused to the United States, all of a sudden Israel finds itself with no choice but to concede.

-Joharah Baker is a Writer for the Media and Information Programme at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH – www.miftah.org), where this article was originally published. She can be contacted at mip@miftah.org.

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Where was the democratic nature of your state when your soldiers killed my daughter?

By Bassam Aramin

Honorable General Ehud Barak, you don’t know me personally. I am a seeker of peace, and I struggle with all my strength and ability for the realization of a just peace that will bring calm and prosperity to Palestinians and Israelis together. I have suffered personally from your criminal occupation and I have paid a heavy price. Firstly, I was imprisoned when I was 17 years old and wasted seven years of my life in your barbaric prisons. Secondly, have you perhaps read or heard about what happened to the young girl Abir Aramin? She was a ten-year-old whom your soldiers killed with a rubber bullet from a distance of 15 feet on January 16, 2007 in front of her eleven-year-old sister Areen. Despite this I, the father of Abir — may she rest in peace — believe in the right of the Israeli person, as in the right of all people, to exist and to live in peace and security. So why do you not believe in our right to enjoy these same things, sir?

Where was the democratic nature of your state when your heroic soldiers killed my daughter before the eyes of her friends at the entrance to her school in Anata? Where were your democratic ideals when you closed the investigation file into Abir’s murder for lack of sufficient evidence, this despite the fact that the crime is clear and was committed in front of more than ten witnesses? Was Abir really a threat to your soldiers, sir?

I carry in my possession the weapons with which Abir threatened those soldiers. I have in my hand her school backpack, reinforced and armored, of course — the mechanical pencil she had, laden with dangerous lead cartridges, and her math book in which class she had a test the same day, which of course included detailed instructions on how to prepare chemical weapons. In addition to all this, she had a sharp ruler, which could for sure be used as a weapon to stab someone. Lastly, I found in her possession two pieces of chocolate that perhaps contained a bit of enriched uranium that would have certainly brought devastation upon your state, if she hadn’t been tempted to take them in her hand for a taste seconds before she was shot.

Here I have to give your soldiers credit in their incredible ability to incapacitate and kill with such deadly accuracy. The bullet hit Abir exactly one centimeter from her hypothalamus—this caused her to immediately enter a coma and she died thereafter and went to dwell in the presence of God, sparing her the continuing pain and heartache herein expressed.

Thus, Abir Aramin can be added to the list of great successes and security accomplishments in the name of the state of Israel. But I request, Minister and General, in that I am the father of this young girl, at the very least an admission of responsibility for this murder, or its cause. It is your duty to bring the soldier who murdered Abir to court so he may be tried and judged a murderer and criminal.

I believe that there is no military solution to the conflict and when those cowards murdered my daughter, I announced that I did not want revenge, I wanted justice, even though revenge is much easier. The real fighter is one who chooses the harder path of the two for the sake of peace, and revenge is the path of the coward.

Sir, the Palestinian people cannot forever pay the price of the fear and suspicion of the Israeli people. Free my people from this abominable occupation so that your people may live in prosperity and be free from fear.

For sixty years, the Palestinian people have paid the price of the Israeli military occupation an occupation which, in celebration of the Israeli state’s inception, carries out acts of outright antagonism that spill the blood of Palestinian fighters, women, children and elders indiscriminately. It is the Palestinian general public that provides a target for your war machine that does not protect the small from the grown. Our people has faced the same murderer since Gaza in 1956 — and the never-ending series continues.

I will not remind you now of the massacres that your government committed against my people; you know them far better than I. I read about them, heard about them — but you took part in them.

The question I pose to you is this: in light of your rich military experience, and as someone who himself has seen sixty years of conflict go by, when will Israel have the strength to finish the conflict militarily and realize a complete victory over the Palestinian people? Do you continue to believe that what cannot be done by might may be done by more might? Does the occupation conceal in its bag of tricks additional methods of killing that the Palestinian people have not yet had the misfortune to know?

If this is the case, perhaps it is a good idea for the Israeli government to try and use those methods. And perhaps they will be able to accomplish that tantalizingly complete victory…in another 60 years.

Sir, when will you understand that the conflict between us cannot be ended with an army? For despite all the effort and conceit of the occupation, it could not stop the stones of our children from hitting your occupying soldiers. How will you be able to stop the Palestinian uprising? This is a dream that will never come true, even in another 1000 years. Why are you not telling this truth to the residents of Ashkelon and Sderot, that there is no solution that will stop the Qassam missiles flying at them from a destroyed and blockaded Gaza except if there would be an end to the occupation?

This is the truth you’ve been running from for a long time.

Believe me, sir, that you will gain nothing out of continuing to detain people. More than 750,000 Palestinians have been detained from 1967 until today. What result has been achieved except an increased determination on our part for confrontation and resistance?

The policy of occupation only creates more and more people who rise up to fight occupation and refuse to accept its burden. The Palestinian prisoners who sit in your jails are among the most learned and erudite of our people, those are the most sensitive and humanistic. They have become educated in the tradition of liberty and democracy—and for this reason they will never agree to accept the occupation and subjugation. It is these men and women who will fight for peace, and if you want to realize peace you have no option but to set free these soldiers of peace first and foremost.

How much have you really benefited from your strategy of home demolitions, uprooting of trees, confiscating lands for questionable reasons and then establishing illegal settlements on those same lands? How much has it helped you to set up disgraceful checkpoints in every corner and every road of the West Bank and Gaza and at each intersection for the purpose of humiliating the residents of those areas, among them workers, students and political leaders. What is the expediency of all this, sir?

When will the bloodthirsty bullets of your soldiers be sated by the blood of our children? When will you be satisfied with our blood that you have already spilled and leave us? When will you leave our waters and our heavens? Do you not see the helmets upon which your soldiers write, “I was born to kill”? Do you not see your brave men killing children every day? How can you decide to prevent the people of Gaza from acquiring cooking gas and at the same time send them teargas and tanks and warplanes?

Only now do I understand the will of an Israeli woman in Italy — my colleague Eidan and I met her when we participated in a peace march from Perugia to Assisi as representatives of Combatants for Peace. When I asked her, “You aren’t planning to return to Israel?” She answered me: “I swore that if Ehud Barak won the election, I will leave Israel forever.” She continues to live there because you act according to a policy that says there is no Palestinian partner.

I cannot begin to express in this short letter the enormity of the moral failures that have harmed Israeli society. The newspaper Yediot Ahronot said that 40 per cent of new recruits to the IDF have criminal records and this may go a long way in explaining the long list of acts against Palestinian civilians that they commit during their service. This is supposed to be the most distinguished, moral army in the entire world, no? Is this why we find that 25 per cent of the soldiers of the army of the occupation took part in instances of torture and punishment of innocent civilians or were witnesses to such acts?

Sir, I want to submit that I have read the shameful report that every person of conscience should be horrified by, that talks of the torture of children in Hebron. And this — the strangling of Palestinian children by soldiers to test how much time they can stand without breathing, incidents that were committed by captains in your army, the most moral army in the world, this is the crown of shame on the brow of the occupation.

Sir, how do you justify your soldier’s use of children aged 10 as personal shields that they tie to the front of your patrols when they search for wanted persons or break up a demonstration? Where does international law permit this? I am trying to understand if this use of children as human shields is in some way related to the science of modern warfare, for the accusation that I hear in all instances of the killing of children in particular and in the killing of Palestinian citizens in general is that the Palestinians fighters use citizens for human shields to hide behind. How can there be a legal justification and distinction even in the Israeli terminology, but not in the international terminology, between Israelis and Palestinians?

How can you justify the deaths of those innocents just trying to peacefully pass though the checkpoints that your soldiers put up at all entrances to villages, cities or camps that prevent pregnant women from walking to hospitals to deliver? Would you ever agree to let this happen to your wife? What would you do then?

There are, however, military men, Israeli soldiers that used to do battle with the Palestinian people who at the moment of truth found that they are no more than pawns in the hands of the occupation. They had the courage and the valor to announce unanimously that they refuse to be occupiers. They exposed the falsehoods of their leaders who claim that Israel is reaching out her hand for peace but she has no partner on the Palestinian side. They discovered that they had never met a real Palestinian fighter face-to-face in combat, and that instead their day-to-day work was chasing schoolchildren, enforcing closures, destroying houses and putting up checkpoints and roadblocks to stop children who aren’t even 13 years old. They took a moral and courageous stance and without any difficulty found themselves a Palestinian partner from within the heart of the Palestinian movement, people who wasted the spring of their youth in the prisons of your occupation. Together they founded the organization Combatants for Peace. The name itself exposes the false promises and the policy that says there is no partner for peace. This organization, united in courageousness and and morality, is made up of people from both sides who understand that there is only one shared enemy that conceals the path of realization of peace and life together as two nations. This enemy is the illegal and immoral Israeli occupation. I am a member of this organization, and I call upon all who are searching for a true peace to join us.

We tell our peoples the truth, only the truth. We are committed to nonviolent resistance to the occupation, and I call here, in this very missive, to the people of our Palestinian nation that have been inscribed in the pages of history as the epitome of resilience, that have had the humanity to withstand decades of abuse and occupation with the purest steadfastness. I call also upon the people in Israel to accept moral and historic responsibility for the establishment of these two states together, and for a national, humanistic, peaceful Intifada, a rising up against this unjust occupation that has transformed your children into war criminals and to abject murderers. You Israelis — stop sending your soldiers — your sons — to kill our children, because the blood of our children and the blood of all those Palestinian innocents will chase your soldiers and the generals of your army to judgment in international courts as the rest of the war criminals in the world. You must learn this lesson. The honorable general must surely be aware that the majority of captains and generals in the Israeli army are forbidden from entering any European state for they will be wanted persons there, to be arrested and taken to court as war criminals and for crimes against humanity?

One last word – the blood of Abir will remain as a black crown on the brow of every Israeli and every Jew in the world until her murderer is brought to justice and passes the remainder of his days in jail, among the murderers and the criminals.

-Bassam Aramin is co-founder of Combatants for Peace. Translation by Mimi Asnes.