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Why Israel Imprisoned My Best Friend
When I was a boy I was still
allowed to travel in Israel. I went to the beach and swam in the sea,
something that most Palestinian children living in the West Bank today
can only dream of. Israel has been restricting movement more and more
over the years. We Palestinians were banned from traveling to Israel,
the land where many of our parents were born. And now I find I cannot
leave the West Bank. I was stopped from leaving the country on 4 August
when I tried to cross the Allenby Bridge and reach Jordan in order to
fly to Europe.
And just as Israel has gradually increased restrictions of where we can
go, the boundaries of what is permissible to do as a Palestinian have
narrowed markedly. We have reached a point where peaceful protest is
unacceptable to the Israeli state and military legislation has been
constructed to criminalize and throw in jail anyone who dares to
publicly voice dissent.
Abdallah Abu Rahmah, coordinator of the Bilin Popular Committee and my
best friend, is one such man. He made the international news after the
EU's foreign policy chief issued a statement condemning his conviction
in an Israeli military court on 24 August. He was convicted of
"incitement" -- an intentionally vague charge that criminalizes freedom
of speech -- and of organizing "illegal" demonstrations. Direct
negotiation between Israel and Palestinians may be restarting, but on
the ground, Israel's military occupation continues: oppression as usual.
Abdallah, a school teacher and father of three, has been imprisoned at
the Ofer military prison since 10 December 2009 -- International Human
Rights Day, no less. Israeli soldiers raided his occupied West Bank home
in the middle of the night, and dragged him from his bed in front of
his wife, Majida, and their three children, Luma (7), Lian (5) and
eight-month-old baby Laith.
The protests that Abdallah was convicted of organizing began on 16
December 2004, the day Israeli military bulldozers first came to uproot
olive trees on our village's lands and plant a wall in their stead.
Since that day we have held hundreds of demonstrations in which Israelis
and internationals joined Palestinians to say no to Israeli apartheid
and yes to partnership and peace based on justice. In Bilin we believe
that creativity and hope are our most effective tools to break the
shackles of occupation and realize our rights as enshrined in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and guaranteed to us by
international law.
In July 2004, months before the construction of Israel's barrier on
Bilin's lands began, the International Court of Justice in the Hague
ruled that the wall Israel is constructing in the occupied Palestinian
territory is illegal and must be dismantled. The ruling also reiterated
that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are also illegal
under international law.
Israel however continued constructing the wall and the settlements
unabated. The impunity Israel enjoys regarding these violations erodes
our people's faith that international law and human rights are relevant
to our lives. Many of us feel that human rights are something the West
enjoys speaking of, but are reserved for others. We believe that for
things to change there must be a price for Israel's flouting of
international law and that this price can best be drawn through
nonviolent means.
Every day, more and more Palestinians choose to oppose injustice and
occupation with grassroots unarmed resistance, challenging Israeli
hegemony. Threatened by our movement's growth, Israel has launched a
campaign of repression, targeting activists and members of popular
committees -- the bodies mobilizing protesters -- across the West Bank
with arrests and violence.
Last March, in another draconian attack on free speech, the lands of
Bilin and the neighboring village of Nilin, where regular weekly
protests against the theft of their land are also held, were declared a
permanent closed military zones for a period of six months.
Between February 2004 and June 2009, twenty unarmed demonstrators have
been killed, hundreds imprisoned and thousands injured. The soldiers and
settlers who regularly violate international law do so with almost
complete impunity. Meanwhile, Palestinian civilians who organize protest
are charged with incitement and organizing illegal demonstrations.
In fact, it is only by coincidence that I myself am not imprisoned in
Ofer prison together with Abdallah. Like Abdallah, I have been arrested
by soldiers who broke into my home at the middle of the night. I too was
charged with incitement and organizing demonstrations. Like they did
with Abdallah, the military also claimed that I had been throwing
stones.
Their mistake was, that unlike in Abdallah's case, they tried to use not
only unlawfully extracted testimonies of minors, but they also provided
a falsified picture of me with a stone in my hand. But I was lucky. I
was abroad on the date that the picture was taken and could prove that I
was not the man in the picture. When the fraud became evident, the
judge had no choice but to order my release. Otherwise, like Abdallah
and many other Palestinian organizers and activists, I would have been
considered dangerous and held at least until the end of my trial, which
is still ongoing.
If what Abdallah has done is illegal, then we are all proud offenders.
Israel better round us up and throw us to its jails and prisons by the
hundreds, as the perverse reality Israel has created on the ground means
that we must defy Israeli military law in order to uphold international
law and achieve our human rights.
The EU's statement denouncing Abdallah's conviction is an important
first step. But it must be followed by serious action to ensure that
Israel does not use the resumption of negotiations as a smokescreen to
hide behind while entrenching the occupation. Until such steps are
taken, no one who dares to protest and challenge Israel's occupation is
safe.
- Posted in
13 Comments so far
Show AllIt's almost as if Israel is some kind of "Groundhog Day" for channeling the Nazis, who feared non-violent protests, too. This time, they have learned from their mistake in 1943, when they let a non-violent protest succeed.
From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website:
"In what has become known as the Rosenstraße Protest, a group of non-Jewish Germans defied the Third Reich and saved their spouses or “Mischling” children from deportation through a weeklong, non-violent demonstration.
"Before dawn on Saturday, February 27, 1943, the Gestapo began a massive action to arrest and deport the last Jews remaining in Berlin. ... After the initial collection, the Nazis weeded out one group selected to be housed at a separate location: Jews married to non-Jews and children from these intermarriages (“Mischlinge”). They were separated in an attempt to mislead their families into believing that they would not suffer the same fate as the others.
"As word spread that their spouses and children had been arrested, many Germans, mostly women, rushed to the holding site at Rosenstraße 2-4, a local Jewish community center. The small crowd quickly grew into a throng of family members demanding to speak to or see their loved ones. Determined to prevent their deportation, the protesters yelled, chanted, or simply kept their presence on the street, even in the face of threatened gunfire. As a day of protest lengthened to a week and the crowd on Rosenstraße expanded to the thousands, news of the demonstration spread throughout the country and eventually, to the international press.
"In an effort to alleviate this public relations nightmare and to prevent further protest, Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister, ordered the release of the prisoners at
Rosenstraße on March 6, promising, however, to resume the deportations in a few weeks. This declaration proved only partially true. Though the roundup of Jews continued and Goebbels declared Berlin “Jew free” in May 1943, intermarried Jews were permitted to remain with their families. Goebbels even initiated the return of a group of thirty-five intermarried Jews who had previously been deported to Auschwitz. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler’s deputy in charge of the Reich Security Main Office, followed this with an order not to deport intermarried Jews at all and to release those in custody not held on criminal charges.
"The Rosenstraße Protest aroused the kind of public unrest and turmoil that tested the tenuous wartime morale in Germany, a risk the Nazi regime was not willing to take again. Although actions against intermarried Jews returned periodically, and some fell victim to the “Final Solution,” thousands did survive, including those released from Rosenstraße. The protest there remained, however, the first and only open demonstration to prevent mass deportations from Germany."
There is a memorial, "Block der Frauen" (Block of Women), in a park not far from the site of the protest. The sculpture shows protesting and mourning women, and an inscription on the back reads: "The strength of civil disobedience, the vigor of love overcomes the violence of dictatorship; Give us our men back; Women were standing here, defeating death; Jewish men were free."
And under these conditions:
1. The Wall running deep into the west bank, enclosing its best land and water resources; and,
2. Settlement constructon reaching a frenzy pace;
3. Popular nonviolent protest violently repressed
does ANYONE beleive that Isreal will allow a viable Palestian nation to exist in good faith? Should any agreement be reached between Isreal and the traitor Abbas, it will be rejected by the Palestinian people.
Speaking of Jews married to Germans, Victor Klemperer's diaries are a rich source of information on the Nazi phenomenon and how ordinary people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, dealt with it. He wrote the following in his diary shortly after the Nazis came to power:
We hear a lot about Palestine now; it does not appeal to us. Anyone who goes there exchanges nationalism and narrowness for nationalism and narrowness.
http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~rar4619/klemperer.html
http://www.amazon.com/Will-Bear-Witness-1933-1941-Paperbacks/dp/0375753788
----
Here's a recent news story from Israel:
A single mother of a 4-year old child was handed a prison sentence on Wednesday after the Magistrates’ Court in Rehovot found her to be unfit for community service.
The woman, who is blind and diabetic, was sentenced to community service when she was found guilty of harboring a Palestinian man without a residency permit.
When the Palestinian was caught in her home a few months ago the woman claimed he was the father of her child, but on the witness stand she admitted to two counts of harboring of an illegal alien.
“He’s the only person who helps me and I have no one else,” she told the judge. “I didn’t know he was an illegal resident, he has been in Israel for many years.”
The woman was sentenced to six months of community service and three years probation, but was later found by the community service supervisor to be unfit to carry out her sentence, due to her physical condition.
The woman’s attorney and legal guardian, Gil Gabay, appealed to the court on her behalf. “She takes care of a 4-year old girl and she doesn’t have any help…if a second opinion still finds her unfit for community service then the court should examine other means of punishment,” he said.
But Judge Yaron Levy determined that “because the woman has been found unfit for community service following the two interviews granted to her, and after hearing both sides, I believe there is no escaping a prison term.”
The court has postponed the sentence in order to allow the woman to appeal to the District Court.
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3611727,00.html
The evil that is Israel rolls forward, carried forward by its own momentum, its flanks protected by the U.S. The plan (let's call it Plan D) has been clear to all from day one: expel by any means the indigenous Palestinian population and reclaim land held in trust for them by their god.
"We must expel Arabs and take their places." - David Ben-Gurion, 1937, from "Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs" Oxford University Press, 1985.
"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." - David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff, from "Ben-Gurion, A Biography" by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978
"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country." - David Ben-Gurion, quoted on pp91-2 of Chomsky's "Fateful Triangle" which appears in Simha Flapan's "Zionism and the Palestinians" pp141-2 citing a 1938 speech.
"This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy." - Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971.
"[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat." - Yitzhak Rabin (according to Clinton a "Prince of Peace"), explaining his method of ethnically cleansing the occupied land without stirring a world outcry. (Quoted in David Shipler in The New York Times, 4 April 1983 citing Meir Cohen's remarks to the Knesset's foreign affairs and defense committee on 16 March.)
"[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs." - Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in a speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk’s "Begin and the 'Beasts'", in New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it -- And for Ever." - Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine.
"The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple." - Yitzhak Shamir, quoted in Maariv, 21 February 1997.
"[The Palestinians] would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." - Yitzhak Shamir as Israeli Prime Minister in a speech to Jewish settlers, reported in The New York Times 1 April 1988
And then Benyamin Netanyahu on the repression of the Palestinian people:
"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories." - Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, 24 November 1989.
"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more…" - Ehud Barak, as Prime Minister, 28 August 2000, reported in The Jerusalem Post 30 August 2000.
"If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke, we would use much more force..." - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, quoted in Associated Press, 16 November 2000.
"I would have joined a terrorist organization." - Ehud Barak's response to Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Ha'aretz newspaper, when Barak was asked what he would have done if he had been born a Palestinian.
Meanwhile, NPR and other corporate press machines praise
Netanyahu for meeting face-to-face with Mahmoud Abbas (who only represents the West Bank and, therefore, cannot sign off on anything as the representative of the Palestinians) without pointing out the Israelis have done this often in the past: my left hand is talking while my right hand is driving a Caterpiller bulldozer, tearing through Palestinian orchards, fields, and neighborhoods, shooting at anyone who runs.
"no gods, no masters" --m. sanger
God bless Mohammed Khatib and his struggles for the freedom of his people.
Let me nonviolently throw this nonviolent rock into your head. My nonviolence will nonviolently kill you and your children. Then I will nonviolently celebrate.
Oh, and I nonviolently shoot pregnant women.
You'll enjoy this report, Ptips, especially the part about the IDF t-shirt featuring a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bulls-eye across her belly and the slogan, "1 shot, 2 kills."
http://firedoglake.com/2009/03/21/idf-fashion
-report-t-shirts-are-in-ethics-are-out/
Earlier this week, Ha’aretz began a series of reports on the behavior of Israeli Defense Force soldiers in Gaza based on accounts from the soldiers themselves.
These reports confirm many of the stories that were reported in the Palestinian media – and also in international press reports, as well as in our coverage. The reports were shocking, and the testimonies given by the soldiers involved adds to the shock since soldiers appear to see nothing wrong with things like this:
"There was a house with a family inside …. We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it, and a few days after that there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sniper position on the roof," the soldier said.
"The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn’t understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was okay, and he should hold his fire and he … he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders."
According to the squad leader: "The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him, closer than the lines he was told no one should pass. He shot them straight away. In any case, what happened is that in the end he killed them.
The squad leader later says:
“To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It’s what I’ll remember the most."
Today, another story in Ha’aretz makes it very clear how very far from “the realm of ethics” the IDF really is. In Israel, when IDF units finish their training or a mission, they have t-shirts printed up to wear at home and on their bases. These t-shirts are designed and drawn by the soldiers, and approved by their officers. And what is on those t-shirts?
A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills."
And this:
For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, "Bet you got raped!"
And this:
What is the idea behind the shirt from July 2007, which has an image of a child with the slogan "Smaller – harder!"?
"It’s a kid, so you’ve got a little more of a problem, morally, and also the target is smaller."
The IDF has now announced that they will investigate the reports in the soldiers’ accounts (a transcript of some of these can be found at haaretz.com), though they received a full report on the discussion two weeks ago. They have known about the t-shirts all along.
In fact, search at haaretz.com (the website of an Israeli newspaper) for "pregnant Palestinian woman" and you will find many accounts of pregnant Palestinian women being shot by the IDF.
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank defend their land, their livelihood and their rights by protesting and by reaching out (through conferences, speaking tours, legal action) to the world outside. Israelis and Internationals walk with them to this illegal wall that steals Palestinian land so that illegal settlements can grow.
That lies at the core of the struggle.
As for the violence Israel likes to talk about, there is plenty of it. Protesters are confronted by fully armed occupation soldiers, whose weapons have killed and disabled so many demonstrators.
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/12724-arresting-gandhi-violent-clashes-and-the-arrest-of-abdullah-abu-rahma.html
Thank you, CommonDreams, for posting this. Americans are the ones who fund and protect Israeli practices of dispossessing Palestinians of their land, their livelihoods, and even their lives. It is important that Americans have a chance to read about what they are doing to other people on the other side of the planet.
Why the U.S. government, imprisoned for 22 years my friend Rafil Dhafir, who was innocent of any criminal intent, when he helped suffering and dying people, during economic sanctions against Iraq.
The Israel government uses guns and tanks to oppress Palestinians.
American government uses lies to oppress Americans including preventing most Americans from knowing the truth about Israel's apartheid against Palestinians.
I have never understood why when people disagree with Israel, that they are then called Anti-Semites by Israel, and the American press.
Palestinians are Semites too. Does that then make Israel the home of Anti-Semite Semites? The acronym for that you know, Israel, would be" ASS," and that sadly, makes sense to me.
Norman Finklestein provides you the answers in two MUST-READ books: "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering" (2000), in which he logically and with superb documentation argues that Elie Wiesel and others exploit the memory of the Holocaust as an "ideological weapon" and that Israel, "one of the world's most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, [can] cast itself as a victim state" in order to garner "immunity to criticism."
The second book is "Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History" (2008). I highly recommend both. After reading them, you will be able to eviscerate those smarmy liberal (D)s who shake their heads, shrug their shoulders, and propagate the bullshit that "it's just such a complicated issue."
If ever there was a case of an indigenous people being dry-fu%#ed by the first world, it is the Palestinians.
Unrelated but taking up room in my head: I'm really getting pissed about Obomber and Hillary demanding that any Palestinian state be an unarmed state.
"no gods, no masters" --m. sanger