Israeli claims on Naksa killings need to be questioned

The Israeli government is in spin mode over yesterday’s events in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, when hundreds of protesters calling for the right of return marched and were met with Israeli gunfire.  If the repression inflicted on unarmed protesters three weeks ago during the Nakba protests are any guide, a heavy dose of skepticism and questioning of official Israeli claims is needed.

A number of people were reportedly killed yesterday in the Golan Heights, and scores were injured in unarmed demonstrations across the West Bank quashed by Israel.

Israeli officials are busy pushing this story:  the protesters in the Golan Heights yesterday were pawns used by the Syrian regime to deflect attention from Syria’s own internal uprising, and besides, Israeli troops didn’t kill the demonstrators. Instead, according to the Israeli Defense Forces, “Soldiers fired ‘with precision’ at the bottom half of the bodies of the protesters…an initial IDF inquiry into Sunday’s events found that up to ten Syrian protesters had been killed when Molotov cocktails which the protesters had been throwing set off an anti-tank minefield.”

Of course, one should take the Syrian regime’s claims lightly as well, but the Israeli claims shouldn’t be taken at face value, either.  Max Blumenthal documents the Israeli spin here:

In the hours following the bloodshed, the Israeli response grew increasingly contorted. Army spokespeople claimed the demonstrators “were responsible for their own deaths,” claiming they stepped on landmines. No evidence of landmine deaths was provided by the unnamed military sources, only conjecture. Next, Israel turned to its favorite Syrian cut-out in Washington, Farid Ghadry, an AIPAC member and discredited “serial entrepreneur” who is widely regarded as the Syrian version of Ahmed Chalabi — Ghadry actually met Chalabi in Richard Perle’s living room. In a statement published on the website of his astro-turfed Reform Party of Syria, Ghadry claimed that the protesters at Quneitra were not actual Palestinian refugees, but impoverished “Syrian farmers” who had been paid $1000 each by the Assad regime just to show up, and $10,000 to die. Ghadry claimed he gleaned the information from “intelligence sources close to the Assad regime in Lebanon.”

Israeli military spokespeople appear to be pushing Ghadry’s press release, because the canard immediately showed up in a report by Yediot Aharnoth’s Hanan Greenberg, one of the many military correspondents in the Israeli media who dutifully report any claim by any flack in an olive uniform as though it were a substantiated fact. “Syrian Opposition: Anti-Israel Rioters paid $1000,” read the Yediot headline. But the story has not graduated beyond the pro-Israel blogosphere, probably because Ghadry and his shell of an opposition group — it is quite clearly a neocon front organization — have no credibility in Syria or anywhere else.

We also have the documented record of what Israel did on May 15, killing unarmed protesters demanding their right of return.  A Human Rights Watch report I highlighted here shows that Israeli snipers–the very same ones we are supposed to believe fired “with precision” yesterday–killed unarmed protesters along the Lebanon-Israel border.

The wild stories Israel is pushing that Blumenthal reports on, and the history of the Israeli response to unarmed Palestinian resistance, should make this clear at the very least:  the official Israeli story is one not to be trusted.  Videos posted by Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada here and here also show the violence Israel meted out yesterday.  In addition, as Abunimah put it, the Israeli Army’s chief of staff recently outlined a “new, more brutal doctrine against nonviolent protests.” But tell that to the U.S. media.

Bucking Obama and Netanyahu, Palestinian refugees assert their centrality

When President Barack Obama delivered his much awaited speech on the “Arab Spring” last Thursday, outlining his administration’s policy on the Arab revolts and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he proposed a negotiations process that would delay discussions on Palestinian refugees.

“These principles provide a foundation for negotiations.  Palestinians should know the territorial outlines of their state; Israelis should know that their basic security concerns will be met,” he said at the State Department.  “I’m aware that these steps alone will not resolve the conflict, because two wrenching and emotional issues will remain:  the future of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees.  But moving forward now on the basis of territory and security provides a foundation to resolve those two issues in a way that is just and fair.”

Obama didn’t even mention refugees once during his May 22 speech to the annual conference of the powerful pro-Israel lobby, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.

But Palestinian refugees themselves are not having any of that, despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow that Palestinians’ insistence on returning is “not going to happen,” as he told President Obama at the White House May 20.  As the Nakba day protests that erupted on May 15 show, the fate of Palestinian refugees, and their demands to return to their homeland in what is now Israel, remain a core issue in the conflict.

Obama is “now attempting to parse away the negotiations by turning it into a very piecemeal negotiation, where first you focus on borders and security, and then leave all of the other issues to a later date,” Diana Buttu, a former spokesperson of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Negotiations Support Unit, told the Institute for Palestine Studies.  “This is the policy the Israelis have been pushing for a very long period of time.”

But Palestinian refugees are not waiting on a U.S. president to show them the way forward.  Through the kinds of unarmed, popular resistance that have overthrown the regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali–and that Palestinian themselves first used during their intifadas–they are reinserting themselves into the discourse on Israel/Palestine.

The next big event for refugees and their supporters will be June 5, a date that marks the start of the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel captured and occupied the Golan Heights in Syria, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt–all of which remain in Israel’s hands, save for the Sinai.

The Ma’an News Agency reported May 21 that “masses of Palestinian refugees will march to Israel’s borders and ceasefire lines again on June 5, organizers of the May 15 ‘return rally’ said…The committee organizing the ‘return rallies’ said Saturday that the May 15 protests were ‘just the beginning.’  In a statement, the group called on all Palestinian refugees living in exile to march peacefully to the borders of historic Palestine on June 5.”

The “right to return” rallies represent the clearest sign yet that Palestinian refugees are done waiting for a peace process that has done nothing for their rights.  The rallies could be looked at as a wholesale rejection of a negotiations process that has systematically shut refugees and the whole Palestinian diaspora out.  And it represents a rejection of the Obama/Netanyahu line on refugees.

Report: Israeli snipers picked off unarmed protesters at Lebanon-Israel border

A May 20 report from Human Rights Watch alleges that Israeli snipers may have picked off unarmed demonstrators at the Nakba protest last Sunday in the Lebanese village of Maroun al-Rass.  10 protesters were killed in Lebanon as tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees approached the Lebanon-Israel border, demanding the right of return.

Human Rights Watch reports (my emphasis):

An estimated 50,000 people gathered in Maroun al-Rass for a planned commemoration of Nakba Day, according to four participants. A Human Rights Watch researcher was also present to monitor the demonstration. The witnesses told Human Rights Watch that at 10:45 a.m., a group of protesters tried to move toward the nearby border fence, but that Lebanese anti-riot police, crowd-control officials with clubs, and Lebanese military pushed them back. Ibrahim Dirani, a photojournalist who was near the border, said that “when they [Lebanese army] fired in the air to push the protesters back, the protesters got excited and started throwing rocks at the [Lebanese] army.” At around noon, a group of several hundred people, primarily young men, overwhelmed the security forces and ran toward the fence.

A second witness who was close to the fence told Human Rights Watch:

When they reached the fence, they started throwing rocks toward the Israeli side. There were some Israeli soldiers but you could not see them that well. They were hidden behind the trees… Suddenly, we heard two shots from the Israeli side and saw one protester fall dead.

But the protesters would not be deterred. They continued throwing rocks. At around 2:30 to 3 p.m. a Merkava tank came and released white smoke. Behind the tank and the smoke, more Israeli soldiers arrived. And at that point, we heard a lot more gunfire. It was intermittent fire, as if shot by snipers.

Human Rights Watch observed the Israeli tank as well as what appeared to be a sniper outpost consisting of a small earth mound with a window on the side. Demonstrators close to the fence said they saw more than a dozen Israeli soldiers, many of them behind a row of trees, and a military jeep. “I heard Israeli soldiers shoot every few minutes,” the photojournalist said. “It was like the shooting was done by snipers, because after each shot we would see a wounded person fall.” Human Rights Watch saw the crowd carrying the apparently dead body of a boy or youth away from the fence, and saw another man, 22-year-old Munib al-Masri, who was shot in the abdomen and taken to a hospital. A third protester was shot in the head and killed.

Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have called for investigations into the Israeli military’s conduct on May 15, when thousands of Palestinian protesters from Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan demanded their right to return to villages in what is now Israel.

In Ajami and Mas’ha, Evidence of the Continuing Nakba

Ramallah, West Bank–The Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba of 1948, never really ended.  What happened since then, as Yehouda Shenhav, an Israeli sociologist and the author of Bounded by the Green Line, puts it, is a “continuation of the [1948] war by other means.”  There are continuous efforts by Israel to displace Palestinians of their land all over the occupied territories and inside Israel.

Two such efforts are evident in recently hearing the stories of Hani Amer, a Palestinian resident of the West Bank village of Mas’ha, and of the Palestinians living in Ajami, a neighborhood in Jaffa.

Amer sits down in his living room, talking with passion and at times smiling, despite his home being surrounded by the illegal separation barrier and Jewish-only settlements.  For seven years, Amer and his family have been struggling against the barrier, which restricts their freedom of movement and ability to farm their surrounding land.  As he explains, “until now, we’re being displaced”–a microcosm of Israeli efforts to confiscate Palestinian land and to push Palestinians out.  “The situation we’re living in is horrible,” Amer says.

But Amer’s story of displacement did not begin in 2003.  Instead, it began in 1948, the year that Israel declared its independence in the midst of an ethnic cleansing campaign that expelled about 750,000 Palestinians.  Amer is a refugee from Kafr Qassem, a Palestinian city east of Tel Aviv.  If he had the chance, he says, he would return.

Hani Amer stands in the doorway of his home, which is completely surrounded by the separation barrier and illegal settlements. Photo: Alex Kane

Amer is responsible for collecting water from his well.  When he wants to go to the well, he has to make sure the Israeli army gate that leads to his land is open.

Amer tells of how he can only access his land at specific times in the day, and of the Israeli occupation’s harassment.  For instance, at times Amer is forced to wait for what can be up to seven hours until the Israeli army lets him access his land.

“We are simple people facing a big entity,” he says.  “The reason why we keep doing this is because we want to sustain our land.”

What Amer is up against is an individual family’s example of what the barrier and settlements are doing to Palestinians across the West Bank.  In the village of al-Walajah, for example, the wall has surrounded “most of the village, with the side of the wall facing the Har Gilo settlement covered by Jerusalem stone and the side facing al-Walajah being exposed concrete,” according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

The same story of displacement—albeit a different chapter—is unfolding in the Palestinian neighborhood of Ajami.  There, the combination of gentrification and discrimination against Palestinians has led to a deteriorating situation, according to Sami Abushhadeh, a PhD student at Tel Aviv University who is writing a thesis on Jaffa as a center of Arab culture during Mandate Palestine.

After the 1948 war, Ajami became a Palestinian ghetto when Israeli forces “surrounded [the Palestinians there] by a barbed wire fence for a number of months,” according to the Israeli organization Zochrot.  But currently, real estate developers looking to make Ajami into a hot-spot for Jewish families are displacing some of the residents and threatening others with eviction.

Isabelle Humphries, writing in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, explains:

Walking around Jaffa, our local Palestinian guide pointed out new exclusive building developments built upon the sites of recently demolished homes and buildings. Eviction orders are issued by Amidar, the housing company owned and operated by the Israeli government. Amidar claims to offer subsidized and rent-controlled housing in Israel, but the fact that its major stockholders are the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund—two institutions openly mandated to support the Jewish population only—shows that it is not simply financial gain that authorities are pursuing. Indeed, since 1948 Palestinian representatives have been excluded from all stages of the urban planning process. Ben-Gurion’s vow that “Jaffa will be a Jewish city” remains the guiding principle.

As the cases of Mas’ha and Ajami show, Ben-Gurion’s vision of an ethnically exclusive state for Jews only remains the vision for the Israeli government today.

The Real Yitzhak Rabin

Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of when former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli extremist for Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords with Yasir Arafat.  With the anniversary comes the obligatory mourning of Rabin as a “man of peace,” as the Israeli leader who, had he survived, might have been the one who brought lasting peace to Israel and Palestine.

While that’s the conventional wisdom of Rabin, it’s based on a total erasure of his sordid role in the Israeli military establishment as well as a fundamental misreading of what the Oslo accords were intended to do.  The only way that wisdom holds is if you shut out Palestinian views of Rabin, which is what happens in U.S. media and political discourse.

Former President Bill Clinton’s Op-Ed in today’s New York Times is emblematic of the narrative about Rabin in the United States.  Clinton says Rabin had a “vision for freedom, tolerance, cooperation, security and peace”; that had he lived, “I am confident a new era of enduring partnership and economic prosperity would have emerged”; and that the “the cause for which Yitzhak Rabin gave his life” was “building a shared future in which our common humanity is more important than our interesting differences.”

The reality of Rabin is that he was a key player in the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians during the 1947-49 war that led to Israel’s founding, which Palestinians refer to as al-Nakba, or the Catastrophe.  During the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, Rabin infamously gave orders to “break the bones” of Palestinians participating in the uprising against the then-twenty year old Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.  And the Oslo accords were never really about peace; it was a successful attempt to “subcontract” the occupation out to the newly formed Palestinian Authority, as Israeli professor Neve Gordon puts it in his excellent book Israel’s Occupation.

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe writes:

Israel’s ‘peace’ axioms were re-articulated during the days of Yitzhak Rabin, the same Yitzhak Rabin who, as a young officer, had taken an active part in the 1948 cleansing but who had now been elected as prime minister on a platform that promised the resumption of the peace effort. Rabin’s death – he was assassinated by one of his own people on 4 November 1995 came too soon for anyone to assess how much he had really changed from his 1948 days: as recently as 1987, as minister of defence, he had ordered his troops to break the bones of Palestinians who confronted his tanks with stones in the first Intifada; he had deported hundreds of Palestinians as prime minister prior to the Oslo Agreement, and he had pushed for the 1994 Oslo B agreement that effectively caged the Palestinians in the West Bank into several Bantustans.

Ha’aretz columnist Amira Hass gave voice to what Palestinians think of Rabin in this article:

Before the handshake on the White House lawn, before the Nobel Prize and before the murder, when Palestinians were asked about Rabin, this is what they remember: One thinks of his hands, scarred by soldiers’ beatings; another remembers a friend who flitted between life and death in the hospital for 12 days, after he was beaten by soldiers who caught him drawing a slogan on a wall during a curfew. Yet another remembers the Al-Amari refugee camp; during the first intifada, all its young men were hopping on crutches or were in casts because they had thrown stones at soldiers, who in turn chased after them and carried out Rabin’s order.

As for the goals of the Oslo accords, here’s what Gordon writes:

The Oslo process was, to a large extent, the result of Israel’s failure to crush the intifada, and Israel’s major goal in the process was to find a way of managing the Palestinian population while continuing to hold on to their land.  As Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and several others pointed out from the outset, Oslo was not an instrument of decolonization but rather a framework that changed the means of Israel’s control in order to perpetuate the occupation.  It constituted a move from direct military rule over the Palestinians in the OT to a more indirect or neocolonial form of domination.

And what has the creation of the Palestinian Authority, perhaps the most lasting legacy of the tenure of Rabin, brought to the Palestinian people?  Collaboration with Israel and repression of dissent.

Let’s save the lauding of Rabin as a “man of peace” for someone who is really working towards peace and justice in Israel and Palestine.

Michael Oren’s Rhetorical Erasure of 1948 Palestinians

Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren’s column in today’s New York Times is part of what the Zionist project has attempted to do for the last 60-plus years: erase the Palestinian narrative out of existence and deny that the Nakba ever occured.

Oren’s Op-Ed piece urges the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people” because affirming Israel’s “Jewishness” is the “very foundation of peace, its DNA.  Just as Israel recognizes the existence of a Palestinian people with an inalienable right to self-determination in its homeland, so, too, must the Palestinians accede to the Jewish people’s 3,000-year connection to our homeland and our right to sovereignty there.”

The ambassador states that Palestinians won’t do that because “Palestinian identity as a people has coalesced” around denying Israel’s rightful place as Jewish state, and that it would mean throwing away the Palestinian right of return.  Oren is right about the Palestinians not wanting to recognize Israel as a Jewish state because it would negate the right of return, but he’s silent about the other core reason:  Israel is emphatically not a Jewish state, because twenty percent of their population are Palestinian citizens of Israel, survivors or descendants of survivors of the Nakba, or the catastrophe, which refers to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from their land during the fighting that began in 1947.

Oren’s rhetorical erasure of the existence of Palestinian citizens of Israel is purposeful, because bringing their existence up would demolish any exclusive Jewish claim to the land of Israel.  It would also bring up uncomfortable questions like:  If Israel is a Jewish state, how come there are 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel who are not Jewish?  Where did they come from?  What would declaring Israel as a Jewish state mean to them?  Were they there before Israel was created?  What happened to them?

Answering those questions truthfully would blow a giant hole through the Zionist narrative of denying the Nakba ever occurred and affirming Israel’s exclusive Jewish character.  Oren’s job is to further that narrative.

 

 

The daily Nakba for Palestinians

Beneath the official rhetoric that defines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–the “peace process,” “negotiations,” “conditions” and “settlement freezes”–lies the unspoken reality that every day for Palestinians is a catastrophe.  For Palestinians, the daily grind of occupation, settlement building, home demolitions and displacement mean that the Nakba of 1948 never really ceased.  There isn’t one week that goes by without the State of Israel taking steps that continue to destroy not only any Palestinian hope for an independent state but their basic human rights.

If you only read the Western corporate press on Israel/Palestine, you would never know that Israel breaks international law every single day in the occupied territories by entrenching an illegal settlement system, by razing Palestinian homes and by violently suppressing civil disobedience actions against the “separation barrier.”

The Palestinian Ma’an news agency reports today on two such examples that illustrate the reality on the ground for Palestinians that is often not talked about:

Official: 3 more homes destroyed in Negev

Israeli authorities demolished three houses in the western Negev on Monday, local officials said.

The houses in Abda village belonged to the At-Tantawi family, the Abda regional council said.

Ibrahim Al-Waqeely, head of the council, condemned the timing of the demolitions during a heatwave and a few days before the holy month of Ramadan, as families prepare to fast.

Villagers will remain on their land, Al-Waqeely said, despite “continuous provocations” by Israeli forces.

An Israeli police spokesman said he was not familiar with such an incident.

A Bedouin village which Israel considered unrecognized was destroyed in late July.

These most recent home demolitions in the Negev follow the July 28 destruction of another Bedouin village in the Negev, all in the name of “Judaizing” the Negev.

And then there’s another story from Ma’an:

Jordan Valley demolitions continue

TUBAS (Ma’an) — Israel’s Civil Administration began razing housing units Monday in the Ein Hilwa area of the northern Jordan Valley, campaign officials said.

Save the Jordan Valley campaign coordinator Fathi Ikhdeirat said Israeli authorities, accompanied by border guards, began tearing down structures and handing down stop-work orders to residents.

He described the move as an attempt “to clear the area of its indigenous people and include it into Israel and called on international human rights groups to intervene to bring the demolitions to a halt.

A spokesman for Israel’s Civil Administration did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

The Jordan Valley has been a target for demolitions by Israel’s Civil Administration, with several structures in villages across the area being torn down.

On Sunday, dozens of Palestinians as well as foreign activists rebuilt areas in the nearby Al-Farisiya village that were recently bulldozed by Israel’s Civil Administration.

Over the past 10 days, several shacks, homes and agricultural structures were torn down in the village by the administration, which has complete planning and building control over Area C. Last Thursday, the Civil Administration returned to the valley to demolish 23 structures rebuilt by residents and farmers.

Meanwhile, in the nearby Bardala village, locals said the Civil Administration distributed several stop-work orders to residents in late July.

The orders, known locally as “demolition orders,” demand that homeowners appear before a magistrates court to defend allegations. Because legal action at the court rarely succeeds, the stop-work orders essentially constitute a demolition order.

According to a report in the Israeli daily Haaretz in July, the Civil Administration has received government orders to increase enforcement against Palestinian construction in Area C, according to a deposition by an administration official to the High Court.

The deposition, by the head of the administration’s infrastructure authority, Colonel Zvika Cohen, came in response to a petition by Regavim – a group seeking the destruction of illegal Palestinian construction at six West Bank sites, citing a security threat, the daily reported.

A recent UN report said 86 structures in the Jordan Valley were demolished two weeks ago, and 17 others were demolished in other areas of the West Bank the week after.

“The spate of demolitions raises concerns over whether Israeli authorities could further escalate demolitions throughout Area C,” a UN report said, noting more than 3,000 demolition orders handed down by Israeli officials to locals were still outstanding.

“Currently, it is nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits to maintain, repair or construct homes, animal shelters or necessary infrastructure in Area C,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in its latest report on Area C.