A Settler Attack at Izhar (Burin) Checkpoint

31st March, 2008
A settler tried to run over and then attacked human rights activist at the Izhar (Burin) checkpoint. The settler gave orders to the soldiers at the checkpoint and ignored a police officer who tried to call him in for questioning. Despite witnessing the entire incidence, the soldiers who were present chose not to intervene.

Filmed by Merav Amir, Machsom Watch
www.machsomwatch.org

Settlers attack Palestinians and Israelis at Kfar Qadum

2nd April, 2008

Settlers attack Palestinians and Israeli supporters in Kfar Qaddum. The attack took place at a Palestinian house on land which is recognized as private Palestinian land even by the Israeli army. The settlers have invaded the house and renamed the place Shvut Ami. After settlers were evacuated by the army the Palestinian owners of the
land along with Israeli supporters attempted to take hold of the house. In no time, dozens of settlers arrived and soon began attacking the Palestinians and their supporters.

After making a token effort to prevent the settlers from returning to the house the border police stood by and watched as the attacks continued. Only hours earlier the border police had about 100 troops available but when it was time to protect Palestinians from settler attack less than 10 soldiers were assigned to the place. Those present did not even make a serious attempt to carry out the stated goal of evacuating the settlers from the house.

Al Jazeera English: Jerusalem's new housing plans

March 12, 2008
Jerusalem remains a bone of contention between Israelis and Palestinians.

Now, new moves to consolidate the Jewish presence there are increasing tensions.

For the first time since 1967, Jewish owned buildings and properties in the Old City are being officially registered by the state.

At-Tuwani - Israeli Soldiers and Border Police Assault Palestinian Shepherds

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cpthebron/message/1084

14 March 2008

While Palestinian shepherds grazed their sheep and worked in their olive groves in Khoruba valley, near the Palestinian village of At-Tuwani, Israeli police threatened them with arrest and assaulted them. A border police officer twisted the wrist of one shepherd and pushed him to the ground. Police grabbed another by his collar and pushed several other Palestinians. Palestinians were attempting to graze their sheep and repair olives trees damaged by Israeli settlers over the last month. Police also pushed and assaulted international volunteers accompanying the Palestinians, threatening them with arrest. No one was seriously injured.

Around 10 am, two border police jeeps, two army jeeps, and an Israeli civilian police vehicle arrived and spoke with Israeli settlers from the Havot Ma'on settlement outpost. When international volunteers approached the police and invited them to observe the damaged olive trees, an officer of the District Coordinating Office [a branch of the Israeli military that deals with civilian affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories] told them that the area was a closed military zone.

Police threatened to arrest two shepherds and assaulted two more. Police also threatened to arrest international volunteers and shoved and grabbed them as they attempted to leave the area. Police stomped on the feet of five internationals, calling one of them a whore, and twisted the wrists of two volunteers in an attempt to grab their video cameras. They also pushed another international into a rock.

Palestinians and international volunteers left the area and proceeded to the grove of olive trees where the village men prayed. Over the past month, Palestinians have found broken branches on a total of twelve trees. They believe that Israeli settlers are responsible for the damage, as settlers have destroyed trees in the past.

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Christian Peacemaker Teams is an ecumenical initiative to support violence reduction efforts around the world. To learn more about CPT's peacemaking work, visit our website www.cpt.org Photos of our projects are at www.cpt.org/gallery

A map of the center of Hebron is at http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/fullMaps_Sa.nsf/0/5618737E38C0B3DE8525708C004BA584/$File/ocha_OTS_hebron_oPt010805.pdf?OpenElement

The same map is the last page of this report on closures in Hebron:
www.humanitarianinfo.org/opt/docs/UN/OCHA/ochaHU0705_En.pdf

VIDEO: Israel's settlement expansion - Making Maskiot

20 February, 2008

Video: Settlers demonstrate to keep Israeli settlements

9 December, 2007

Hebron: settler attacks tour guide for human rights

Children of Abraham (Bnei Avraham) is a Jewish direct action group, active in Hebron. In one of the tours they give, they were assaulted by an extreme settler (Noam Federman). This file is the evidence used by the police.

For more videos of settlers' violence in Hebron, and for activities and study-tours, please visit our website, or email us to: tours2hebron [@] gmail.com

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Jerry Haber - Tuesday, October 23, 2007
More Settler Harrassment of Human Rights Activists

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http://groups.google.com/group/bnei-avraham/

Bnei Avraham is an activity based group born out of the desperate situation in the city of Hebron. The group has been active for more then a year now and is composed of Israeli activists from various backgrounds. Our main focus is on-the-ground joint Palestinian-Israeli activity in the city of Hebron, Targeted to disturbing the occupation, disrupting the segregation and apartheid regime, creating a basis for understanding and cooperation among all the members.

Update from Hebron and call for action in the field and at home - Disturbances to tours
In the last few weeks the settlers started hassling our tours, partly
because of our successful attempt to prevent them from taking over a
house in Tel Rumeide, and our cooperation with Gaabri family where the
settlers try to take over land. They didn’t like our tours, but now
they feel we make a difference on the ground. These days it in
important to concentrate efforts and continue the tours. See the last
video in our google group:

http://groups.google.com/group/bnei-avraham/web/video-from-hebron

Settler attacks local Palestinians, Hebron 4th October 2007

The Israeli Right Has a Peace Plan

The Israeli Right Has a Peace Plan
Ran HaCohen, October 16, 2007
It's important to monitor the Israeli far Right. The settlers' ideology is usually shared by the Israeli military, and the military is the central political agent in Israel, much more important than any short-lived government or prime minister.

This is why plans, demands, and suggestions of the Israeli far Right, no matter how lunatic they sound when launched, are often the best prediction for future reality, which usually lags just a few years behind.

Palestinian olive farmers face threat of attack by settlers

22 October 2007

Al Jazeera's David Chater meets the Palestinian olive farmers who can only reach their crop with the protection of peace activists.

B'Tselem: Settlers harrassing Palestinians in Hebron

Videos from B'Tselem - September 2007

New settlement in Hebron - settler kids throwing stones
Settler kids throwing stones from road.


Hebron - Settlers at the door of a Palestinian house
Settlers stand in front of a Palestinian house opposite the new settlement, annoying the inhabitants.


Hebron - Children throwing stones from a window
Children throwing stones from a window of the new settlement.


Hebron - Palestinians attacked by settler kids
Palestinians on their way home attacked by settler kids in Tel Rumeida.


==========================

Nigel Parry's Hebron diary
17-18 January 1997
"A closer look at Hebron's 'Jewish community' "

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VIDEO: Settlers attack the Abu Eisha family in Tel Rumeida, Hebron
In the center of the city of Hebron lies the "Tel Rumeida" neighborhood. In 1986, a new settlement was established at the heart of the neighborhood. The settlers of Tel Rumieda, who known as particularly extreme, live on one side of a dead-end street... The Abu Eisha family lives on the other side.

New UN report highlights conflict over resources in West Bank

HEBRON HILLS, WEST BANK, 11 September 2007 (IRIN)
Israeli settlements in the West Bank are having a severe humanitarian impact on rural Palestinian areas, according to a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on 30 August.

-------------------------------

The Humanitarian Impact on Palestinians of Israeli Settlements and Other Infrastructure in the West Bank
The report examines the humanitarian impact on Palestinians from the ongoing settlements in the West Bank and other Israeli infrastructure, such as the Barrier and the roads that accompany them.

The analysis shows that more than 38% of the West Bank is now taken up by Israeli infrastructure.

Roads linking settlements and other infrastructure to Israel – in conjunction with an extensive system of checkpoints and roadblocks – have fragmented the West Bank into a series of enclaves separating Palestinian communities from each other. The socio-economic impact has been profound.

Palestinian Human Rights Worker Arrested at Qurtuba School in Hebron

ISM, September 12th, 2007: Tel Rumeida, Hebron
At 7.25pm 11.9.07 ISM activists received a phone call saying there was a disturbance outside Qurtuba school. The school is in Tel Rumeida, Hebron opposite the Beit Hadassah settlement.

A group of 10 settler girls were on the school pathway having a BBQ with a gas cylinder and a burner. A Palestinian Human Rights Worker was filming the situation to gain evidence of settler trespass on school land. The police turned up and told the HRW to stop filming. The HRW was then arrested at 7.30pm on a claim of assaulting a police officer. The police confiscated the HRW’s phone and bundled him into the back of a police van. He was taken to Kiryat Arba police station.

The arrest was caught on film by ISM activists. Attempts were made by adult settlers to prevent filming of the incident. One activist was spat at by a 10 year old settler girl. Four soldiers watched over the group of settler girls, who were making access for Palestinians to their homes difficult.

The army have consistently failed to prevent settler children from from stoning Palestinian kids as they use the pathway. A large presense of international HRW’s is needed daily to insure safe passage to the school. The school was attacked and set on fire on the 6th of August.

The spurious charges against the Palestinian HRW were dropped and he was released at 11pm. The trespass of land by settler girls and their protection by the army and police is further evidence of settlers advance onto Palestinian property and land in Tel Rumeida district, Hebron.

===========================

On Patrol at Qurtuba Girls School, Hebron
Christina Gibb, January 2006
Usually, it is members of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) who patrol for this school, which takes more people and more time than any other, but sometimes CPT is involved too. To make sure that both teachers and girls are getting through unharmed, there need to be internationals stationed at the top of the road down from the Tel Rumeida settlement, by the metal detector checkpoint, at the foot of the steps, on the track and at the school, for the hour before school and the half hour at the end of school.

Teachers (including pregnant ones) were hit by stones, thrown by settlers who had scrambled up onto the path, before term had even started. This led to all the international groups mustering about 10 people to patrol at the beginning of term. The settlers were outraged at this large non-violent quiet-spoken presence, and the army and police declared a ‘closed military zone’.

EAPPI negotiated with the army and police, who said that they themselves will protect the girls and teachers on their way to and from school every day. But they are not always there at the right times. So EAPPI with help from the rest of us internationals, maintain about four people there, to keep them to their word.

Those in sight of Beit Hadassah settlement need to be fairly inconspicuous, as the settlers consider our presence ‘provocative’. Sometimes the police, conspicuously armed of course, park their jeep at the foot of the steps, so the girls have to almost squeeze past. Soldiers stand on the upper track, weapons at the ready, so the girls look down the barrel of a gun as they walk by.

When I tried to talk to one young soldier – he had no English, and I no Hebrew, but finally I talked to a junior officer in French – he was quite oblivious of what this looked like from a child’s point of view. Though the girls are protected, it makes for a very scary scene.

===========================

Hebron's Theater of the Absurd
by: Kathleen Kern
January - March 1996
The Link - Volume 29, Issue 1

Children Under Siege: Assaults, Bottles, Garbage, and the Flag

September 10 was the first day of school for Palestinian students throughout the West Bank. Since the Israelis had handed over responsibilities for education to the Palestinian Authority over the summer, thousands of schools raised the Palestinian flag for the first time. Two hundred and twenty-one schools in Hebron did so without incident.

But when the flag was raised over Qurtuba school, settlers from Beit Hadassah charged onto the school grounds, seized the flag and burned it. They then attacked the school headmistress, Fariel Abu Haikel, striking her in the chest.

A half hour later, Abu Haikel, several teachers and about 150 students from the school marched to the Palestinian Education Department to make a complaint. As they passed Beit Hadassah, the settlers attacked again. One of the aggressors, an adult male, seized a Palestinian flag from the girls, swung it around and then ran at them with it. A female settler threw glass liter bottles at the girls.

Ten girls were taken in ambulances to the hospital and treated for minor injuries. Many others fainted. The newspaper the next day printed pictures of the girls with eyes rolled up in their heads lying limp in the arms of the men who had rushed to help them.

I thought of the many times I had seen settler boys making slashing motions across their throats when Palestinian children walked past them. I thought of the "Death to the Arabs" graffiti I had seen spray painted in dozens of places around the area of the school. And I concluded that the girls who had fainted thought that the settlers from Beit Hadassah were finally making good on their threats.

Jewish Hebron Market Heir Opposes Settlers

The Jerusalem Post, Tovah Lazaroff, August 26, 2007
The descendent of the Jewish owner of Hebron’s disputed marketplace is left wing, secular and lives in Tel Aviv.

Unlike the Hebron Jews who were forcibly evicted from the marketplace on August 7, retired journalist Haim Hanegbi, 72, does not dream of returning to the city where his family lived for more than 200 years.

There, settlers have placed a large white banner over the empty shops in which they demand: “Return the stolen property.”

They believe that because this marketplace was once owned by Hanegbi’s grandfather, Haim Bejayo, and used by the city’s Jewish community, they have a right to settle the area situated at the entryway to their Avraham Avinu neighborhood.

It’s a claim Hanegbi rejects.

“I have more rights than the settlers and the army,” he told The Jerusalem Post last week.

He wants the marketplace to revert to the Palestinians who made use of it from the 1930s to 1994, when Israel forced them to shut down the shops after Baruch Goldstein, from nearby Kiryat Arba, killed 29 Palestinians as they prayed in a mosque attached to Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs.

For Hanegbi, the issue is greater than the shops that have made headlines over the last month.

He is among a group of 27 descendants of the original Jewish community who believe the government should evacuate all 800 Jewish settlers from Hebron.

“We have to throw them out of Hebron down to the last one,” said Hanegbi.

==============================

Descendants of Hebron’s Jews Say Settlers Don’t Represent Them
WRMEA, 1997
Children and grandchildren of Jews who lived in Hebron before 1948 met with Arab officials in Hebron on Nov. 10 and expressed their solidarity with the estimated 120,000 Arabs who live there. During a meeting with Hebron Mayor Mustafa Natshe, the group’s spokesman, Yosef Ben Yacov Ben Ezra, accused the 450 fanatical settlers in the West Bank city of “smearing the name of the Jews of Hebron” and “harming our relations with our Palestinian neighbors.”

Another member of the group, Haim Hanegbi, whose grandfather was rabbi of the Jewish community in Hebron in 1932, declared that “authentic Hebron Jews have nothing to do with the fanatic settlers who are anti-Arab and anti-peace....We, the Jews of Hebron, declare that only through the people of Hebron, the municipal council and a future Palestinian state, will we be able to recover our rights and reclaim our property in Hebron,” Hanegbi said.

Israel's oppressive architecture of occupation

Eyal Weizman interview: Israel's oppressive architecture of occupation
Socialist Worker 2065 Anindya Bhattacharyya, 21 August 2007

Dissident architect Eyal Weizman explains the mechanics of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
The occupied West Bank, 1999. A group of Israeli settlers complain that their mobile phone reception cuts out on a bend in a road from Jerusalem to their settlements.

The mobile phone company Orange agrees to put up an antenna on a hill overlooking the bend.

The hill happens to be owned by Palestinian farmers, but since mobile phone reception is a “security issue”, the mast construction can go ahead without the farmers’ permission.

Other companies agree to supply electricity and water to the construction site on the hill.

In May 2001 an Israeli security guard moves on to the site and connects his cabin to the water and electricity mains. Then his wife and children move in with him.

In March 2002 five more families join him to create the settler outpost of Migron. The Israeli ministry for construction and housing builds a nursery, while donations from abroad build a synagogue.

By mid-2006 Migron is a fully fledged illegal settlement comprising 60 trailers on a hilltop around the antenna, overlooking the Palestinian lands below.

This blow-by-blow account of just one example of the ongoing Israeli colonisation of Palestine appears in the opening pages of a fascinating new book by Eyal Weizman, the dissident Israeli architect.

Called Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, it is an extraordinarily detailed account of exactly how the occupation works in practice, focusing on the physical organisation of space and the political dynamics that shape it.

The 300 page book is packed with fascinating diagrams and photographs that shed a revealing light on almost every aspect of the occupation.

Housing

It explains the way that housing projects in Jerusalem are clad with a specific kind of stone to give the houses a “Biblical” look, and the use of one-way mirrors at border posts in the West Bank.

Eyal Weizman started work on the book in 2001 when he was commissioned by B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, to help document how Palestinian rights were being violated through the planning of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

This work was later turned into an exhibition and book called A Civilian Occupation. The Israeli Association of Architects commissioned the project – only to prevent the exhibition from being shown and then destroy 5,000 copies of the book.

Today Eyal Weizman lives and works in London as director of the Centre for Architectural Research at Goldsmiths College.

His students work on a variety of similar projects that combine architectural and political analysis, including studies of Dubai, Beirut and United Nations protectorates in the former Yugoslavia.

I asked Eyal what had prompted him to write the book – and what the significance was of its subtitle referring to the “architecture of occupation”.

“As I was working, it seemed to me more and more that the entire occupation, the entire formation of the terrain itself, could be thought of in the same way as you think of the structure of a building,” he says.

“This first occurred to me while reading the Oslo Accords of 1993. The partition of the territory put forward there is not two dimensional but three dimensional – it partitions a volume, rather than a land, giving Palestinians some bits of land while maintaining the subterranean water reservoirs and airspace for Israel.

“As soon as you imagine geopolitics operating in a volume like that, architecture comes into play.”

This analogy led him to consider how architectural analysis could be applied to a military and political situation: “For instance, what’s the most basic analytic tool you use if you’re an architecture student and you want to understand a building? You draw a cross-section through it.

“In fact, the book Hollow Land is structured as a cross-section through the entire Occupied Territories. The first chapter is about the underground water reservoirs.

“Then it looks at the archaeology, then the valleys, the hills and finally the airspace. It’s a series of episodes that make up a volume, layer by layer, chapter by chapter.

“So you can think of the entire occupation as if it was some kind of complex building, such as an airport or a shopping mall, with security corridors inbound and outbound, and movement through it.”

This focus on the material organisation of Israel’s encroachment into the West Bank might sound rather dry – but in fact Hollow Land’s relentless and patient accumulation of details throws the human catastrophe of the occupation into even starker light.

One particularly chilling section of the book discusses Israeli military techniques for sending assassination squads into the dense urban sprawl of Palestinian settlements.

Rather than use the alleyways and paths of the settlement – and risk ambush – the Israeli soldiers simply blast their way in a straight line through to their target. They cut holes in the walls of residential buildings and literally march straight through people’s living rooms.

To train the occupation troops the Israelis have built a fake Palestinian settlement in the Negev desert – whose buildings are ready equipped with holes cuts into their walls. The US has now started building similar fake villages to train its troops for the occupation of Iraq.

Hollow Land does not just document the shape of the Israeli occupation – it also looks into the dynamics that created that shape in the first place. “It’s about the way in which politics, culture and other formative forces register themselves in the organisational form of the landscape,” says Eyal.

“The idea is that you look at a piece of architecture, or any piece of design, and study it as a consequence of conflicts, forces, practices and so on. So form becomes a kind of diagram of the forces that create it – process is frozen into form.”

One example of this is the Migron settlement described at the beginning of the book, which arises out of the interplay of a whole host of actors – Israeli settlers, mobile phone companies, utility firms, state institutions, the army and so on.

Eyal is keen to stress how “settlements emerge out of organisational chaos”. The very nature of the occupation is one of “uncoordinated coordination”, where the government allows degrees of freedom to rough elements and then denies its involvement. He says this is characterised by “micro-processes that become wheels in larger processes”.

The wall

A key example of this is the construction of the “separation wall” in the Occupied Territories – a huge barrier designed to wall off the Palestinians into tiny enclaves while annexing vast portions of the West Bank for Israel.

The wall is fiercely controversial even within Israel, and its precise route is constantly being contested. As a result the wall snakes through the West Bank in a curiously fluid manner, sometimes swinging out east to take in an illegal Israeli settlement, at other times being pushed back west again.

“The trick is to understand how the wall is flexible without justifying it as benign – it’s a dangerous flexibility!” says Eyal.

“But what the course of the wall registers the most is opposition to it – the constant petitions of Israeli NGOs to the Israeli high court of justice and the weekly demonstrations by Israeli human rights groups, for instance.”

In a striking analogy, Eyal suggests that the space of possible routes of the wall maps the spectrum of official Israeli politics – the doves seeking a wall to as close to Israel’s pre-1967 borders as possible, the hawks wanting to push the wall out towards Jordan.

The wall’s route reflects the dynamic between these two forces.

But for Eyal the problem is that fierce battles over the precise route of the wall can fail to challenge the wall’s very existence.

“These micro-political acts of resistance are paradoxical because by pursuing the lesser evil they allow the greater evil of the wall to exist and function,” he says. “The opposition to the wall becomes part of what designs it – it becomes complicit in the wall.”

Eyal argues that this paradox is part of a larger pattern whereby the occupation has absorbed and incorporated the views of the human rights organisations and NGOs at work in the Occupied Territories.

Human rights

“In some cases human rights organisations end up influencing the design plans for checkpoints,” he notes.

“They end up sustaining the occupation. They go to the military and plead for certain things. Governance always needs carrots and sticks – it operates not just on the basis of threats, but by absorbing the opposition into a governing system.”

One example of this is the fact that Palestinians in Gaza are dependent on food aid from international donors.

“If humanitarian organisations did not feed Palestinians in Gaza there would be a crisis – some 1.8 million Palestinians live off international aid,” he says.

“Consequently a significant part of Israeli intelligence is to monitor the levels of hunger in Gaza and keep it just at the level that the world will tolerate. This level changes – a level of hunger that would not have been tolerated in the 1990s is tolerated now.”

Eyal is aware that this might sound “anti-humanitarian” but he insists he is not suggesting that NGOs should simply down tools and leave the Palestinians to their fate.

Rather it’s a matter of a clear sighted acknowledgement that even the best intentioned and most benign of humanitarian organisations operating in the Occupied Territories is to a certain extent complicit, and, to a certain extent, part of the problem.

Ultimately Eyal says he is pessimistic over the current prospects for Palestinians. He believes the madness and terror of the occupation stem out of the paradoxes of trying to partition the land in the first place into separate “Israeli” and “Palestinian” territories.

“You have to understand the idea that guides the Israeli occupation, which is how to resolve the paradox of maintaining overall control while ensuring separation,” he says.

“It’s very different from other kinds of colonial geography – for instance, the ‘bantustans’ in apartheid South Africa were special designated zones, but with Israel and Palestine you get overlapping claims over the same sites woven together into mutually exclusive separate networks that try to never cross.”

This pattern of settlements and camps arranged in space, connected by bridges and tunnels, has a long history. “This is something you get from the very first attempt to divide Israel and Palestine,” Eyal notes.

“If you look at plans from the 1920s and 1930s prepared for the League of Nations during the mandate period by diplomats and mapmakers, you’ll see that nobody could find a line that separates Israel from Palestine – it was always a matter of building bridges or tunnels over or under the other’s territory to maintain continuity.

“So my critique throughout the book is against the politics of partition. I want to show how paradoxical partition is – and that it just cannot operate physically.”

---

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman is published by Verso

© Copyright Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original and leave this notice in place.

The Hebron tactic

Amira Hass - Ha'aretz - 8th August 2007
For about 25 minutes, they behaved liked lords of the land: One man, followed later by a young guy, descended from Mitzpeh Yair, one of the unauthorized outposts in the southern Mt. Hebron area, and prevented a United Nations jeep from traveling. UN directives prohibit leaving the vehicle in such cases, in order to avoid an escalation of friction. And so we, three Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) staffers and two Haaretz journalists, were forced to watch them demonstrate their lordliness from inside the car: The older one blocked the vehicle, in the middle of the unpaved road, with his body. Using hand movements, he ordered the engine shut down. When that didn’t happen, he jumped on the hood and then on the roof and back on the hood, and finally lay back on the windshield and played with the wipers, taking them apart. The driver progressed slowly down the track, and the man leaned back on the windshield with force, until it broke and shards went into the driver’s eyes.

In the meantime, the younger guy appeared. He tried opening the doors of the jeep, screaming, “show me your identity cards” and placing big rocks in front of the wheels. By the time the army and police drove up, the older man yelled at Haaretz photographer Alex Levac: “Go back to where you came from.” When he realized that Levac was a Jew and born in this country, he shouted: “Traitor, going with the UN.” Both the older man and younger guy living at the outpost were born abroad. The younger man, a British citizen, has not yet been given new-immigrant status.

But what does that matter? It also didn’t matter that the soldier described them as “problematic” and that the police are familiar with the older man from previous incidents of harassment. Nor did it matter that the police officers did not believe their absurd story that we had been in their olive grove and that we had tried to run the older man over. The tactic is one that is well-known from Hebron, the same tactic that helped to cleanse the Old City of most of its Palestinian residents: Jews harass and bully and then threaten to lodge complaints against their victims with the Israeli police.

Harassment and sabotage of a much more serious nature than what we experienced has become routine for the Palestinian shepherds and farmers in the area. As a result, about 850 of the 3,500 or so inhabitants of the area known as Masafer Yatta (Yatta’s periphery) have left their habitations, in caves and tent encampments. Sometimes it is their access to water sources that is damaged, sometimes their herds, other times themselves. They have piles of papers attesting to the police complaints they have submitted. Until they stopped filing complaints.

It is easy to blame the two men, or those like them. But they practice terrorizing Palestinians because Israeli authorities let them do so.

In their own way, they do the same thing the “legitimate” occupation authorities do: They drive the Palestinians off their land to make room for Jews. In other words, they are following orders.

About 10 days ago, a Civil Administration inspector impounded a tractor and water tanker belonging to the Hadidyah, a community of farmers and herders in the northern Jordan Valley, as a pressure tactic aimed at getting them to leave their tent encampment on the grounds that it is located in a closed military area. They are one of dozens of communities that have been living in the valley for many decades. Since 1967 the Hadidyah have been displaced four times. Using all sorts of inventive tactics, the occupation authorities have turned these communities into unauthorized residents on their own land.

The springs and wells they used were turned over to the Mekorot Water Company: The water from the national company’s drilling nearby is used by the “legitimate” settlers and its use by the Hadidyah is prohibited. As a result, they have to truck in water from a distant spring. The army has declared large areas of the valley firing zones. They end at the boundaries of the settlements.

The Israeli authorities have refused to rezone land to enable the community to live in the place the elders remember as their childhood home. But the adjacent land has been rezoned for the residence of Jews, Israeli citizens. Now the Civil Administration is hoping that thirst will drive them out of the piece of land allotted to them, which no longer has any land suitable for agriculture or grazing. That is Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians in a nutshell, and talk of peace has not stopped it. The residents of the unauthorized outposts are merely imitating it and receiving both inspiration and protection from it.

Hebron store owner: Eviction was a façade

Ali Waked - YNet - 8th August, 2007
Owner of one of stores in city's wholesale market invaded by Jewish families tells Ynet evacuation will not change a thing: 'Everything that took place there was mainly meant for the cameras, but there were no clashes. The army and the settlers have the same goal'

"The so-called clashes between the IDF and the settlers are one big façade," Ziad Sarsur, the owner of one of the two stores taken over by Jewish families in Hebron's wholesale market, told Ynet on Wednesday.

The evacuation of the two families and hundreds of right-wing activists was completed by large police and Border Guard forces on Tuesday morning.

"Yesterday the merchants and I saw the commotion on television and laughed. What a poor and unsuccessful façade," Sarsur said. "Everyone knows that the army and the State of Israel and the settlers all do the same thing.

"One settler walks down the street accompanied by two jeeps, so how will they suddenly clash? The settlers are also much stronger and more influential than the army and I have no doubt that they will reinvade our businesses."

In 1993, after the massacre carried out by Baruch Goldstein against Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs, Sarsur and hundreds of other Palestinian merchants were removed from their businesses and stores in the wholesale market.

Now, as far as he is concerned, the evacuation of Jewish families from the areas is meaningless.

"Whether the settlers are inside the market or were evacuated from it – I don't see a difference, because I cannot return to my business and my store. I have been expelled for more than 13 years. In order to enter the street where the business is located – not the business itself, but only the street – I have to coordinate with the Israeli side, and even then they don't give us permits."

According to Sarsur, before the settlers invaded the market he had approached the army and asked to take some of his belongings, but was turned down.

A day after the eviction, Sarsur recalled how he and his friends were evicted after the 1992 massacre.

"I was evacuated from a business which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, from which I would distribute fruit and vegetables to many stores in Hebron," he said.

"No one thought about providing us with an alternative or compensating us. The family lives of dozens of people depended on this business, and in one day we found ourselves on the street without any livelihood."

A number of High Court discussions did not convince the State to let the Palestinian merchants return to their businesses and homes in the wholesale market area.

Months after he was evacuated from his business, Sarsur paid 86,000 Jordanian dinars (about $120,000) and opened a store in the alternative market built by the Hebron municipality. He is still there, waiting for the day he will be allowed to return to the old market.

Soldiers and settlers together, on same road

"The funniest thing is the talks about large army and police forces arriving to prevent the settlers from reaching the confrontation area," Sarsur said, in reference to Tuesday's evacuation. "Whoever says that is either lying or did not see what went on here.

"Soldiers and settlers walked down the same road and street together. Everything that happened there was mainly for the cameras, but in practice there were no clashes. Both the army and the settlers have the same goal, which is to rob the Palestinians of their property.

Abdel Hadi Hantash of the Palestinian Land Defense Committee in Hebron said that disagreement is over the identity of the houses' rightful owners.

"The truth is that all these houses and stores are Palestinian property with documents, and therefore what happened yesterday is ridiculous. Two thieves arguing over who the property belongs to. This is an argument which is a façade, and by no means an evacuation, because the settlers' presence is illegal," he said.

Palestinians sources reported that not far from the scene of Tuesday's clashes there were at least another 10 Jewish families living in stores and houses they had taken over in the area.

"One or two places are enough for a façade. They don't need a set around every 10 stores, although I know there are at least 30 such stores and houses," a local Palestinian activist said.

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Jacky Rowland from Al Jazeera English reports on the eviction of some settlers in Hebron - August 7, 2007


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Hebron: Reflection on Reportage of an Eviction in Hebron
Kathie Uhler, 10 August 2007
What is profoundly unsettling for me is the exaggeration of the need for military and other security personnel, of the numbers of such personnel reputedly present, aswell as of the numbers of activists and protestors, and of their reputed violence.

What is to be gained by all this hype?

What is even more disturbing, however, is the minimizing in the Israeli and other presses of the real violence of Israeli citizens, both settlers and security personnel, against Palestinians and internationals, that I and other CPTers have witnessed and endured each day, and increasingly so in recent days.

Ten masked teenaged Israelis attacked one Palestinian in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood of Hebron on 5 August, for example. Again, Israeli settlers beat two international volunteers at the Palestinian house illegally occupied by squatters in March 2007 that they named, "Beit Shalom," on 6 August while Israeli soldiers stood and watched.

The ongoing violence of squatting in a Palestinian neighborhood is itself another egregious example of Israeli minimizing and supporting crimes against humanity justified under the banner of self-produced security needs in an occupation that has gone bad.

The reportage of an event, like the eviction of the Israeli settlers in the market place, leads one to believe that the Israeli government staged it for political purposes.

John Pilger: Freedom Next Time

The title of this talk is Freedom Next Time, which is the title of my book, and the book is meant as an antidote to the propaganda that is so often disguised as journalism. So I thought I would talk today about journalism, about war by journalism, propaganda, and silence, and how that silence might be broken. Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote about an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media. That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate journalism was invented. It is a history few journalist talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate advertising. As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called "professional journalism" was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment—objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, "entirely bogus".

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The BBC began in 1922, just before the corporate press began in America. Its founder was Lord John Reith, who believed that impartiality and objectivity were the essence of professionalism. In the same year the British establishment was under siege. The unions had called a general strike and the Tories were terrified that a revolution was on the way. The new BBC came to their rescue. In high secrecy, Lord Reith wrote anti-union speeches for the Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and broadcast them to the nation, while refusing to allow the labor leaders to put their side until the strike was over.

So, a pattern was set. Impartiality was a principle certainly: a principle to be suspended whenever the establishment was under threat. And that principle has been upheld ever since.

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The enduring tragedy of Palestine is due in great part to the silence and compliance of the so-called liberal left. Hamas is described repeatedly as sworn to the destruction of Israel. The New York Times, the Associated Press, the Boston Globe—take your pick. They all use this line as a standard disclaimer, and it is false. That Hamas has called for a ten-year ceasefire is almost never reported. Even more important, that Hamas has undergone an historic ideological shift in the last few years, which amounts to a recognition of what it calls the reality of Israel, is virtually unknown; and that Israel is sworn to the destruction of Palestine is unspeakable.

There is a pioneering study by Glasgow University on the reporting of Palestine. They interviewed young people who watch TV news in Britain. More than 90 percent thought the illegal settlers were Palestinian. The more they watched, the less they knew—Danny Schecter's famous phrase.

Speech delivered at the Chicago Socialism 2007 Conference on Saturday June 16 2007

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John Pilger on Al Jazeera:

Settler youth curses Internationals

Video: Settler youth curses Internationals, saying things such as, "We killed Jesus and we're proud.", "God gave me this land, and F**K YOU!" [18 November, 2006]