Palestinians suffer as the world fails Gaza

Michael Shaik - The Age - January 28, 2008
Talking is not enough to halt the colonisation of the West Bank.
ZIONIST colonisation, wrote the Zionist thinker Ze'ev Jabotinsky in 1923, can develop only "under the protection of a force independent of the local population — an iron wall which the native population cannot break through".

Before its "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army decided to implement Jabotinsky's idea literally by erecting a six-metre-high concrete and steel wall across the Gaza's border with Egypt.

To prevent Palestinians from tunnelling under the wall, about 1800 houses in the Palestinian refugee camps alongside the wall were demolished. When American peace activist Rachel Corrie tried to save one such house, she was crushed under the blade of an Israeli bulldozer.

For the people of Rafah, the wall has been an ever-present reminder of Israeli power and the futility of resistance — a 21st century Berlin Wall amid the rubble of their ruined homes.

For Israel, the wall is the means by which it maintained control over Gaza Strip without having to garrison troops inside it. Since the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip in June, Israel has used this control to place Gaza under siege. Imports and exports have been suspended.

The supply of food, medicine and fuel for cooking, transport and electricity generation has been alternately reduced to a trickle or cut off altogether.

According to the UN, 80% of Gaza's population now lives in a state of extreme poverty — 72 Gazans have died because they were unable to leave Gaza for medical treatment.

While cautiously criticising the more draconian aspects of the siege, the West has lent its consent to its underlying premise: that the people of the Gaza Strip would rid themselves of Hamas when they realised how much worse off they were than their compatriots in other parts the occupied territories.

Over the past weeks this premise has collapsed. The Palestinian militants' success in puncturing Israel's blockade of Gaza has underscored the value of armed resistance as a way to improve Palestinian welfare, and contrasts sharply with the Annapolis peace summit's failure to halt Israel's deepening colonisation of the West Bank.

This month the UN reported that, despite its promises, Israel had increased the number of checkpoints and roadblocks throughout the West Bank to 563. Last week Israel announced that it would build 2461 new housing units for Jewish settlers on confiscated Palestinian lands in East Jerusalem.

The collapse of its iron wall in Gaza presents Israel with an embarrassing dilemma. Invading Rafah again to rebuild the wall would belie its claim that it no longer occupies Gaza, and probably prove ineffective unless it leaves behind a permanent garrison. Now it is insisting that the Egyptians close the border, but the Egyptian Government's willingness to abet the collective punishment of Gaza's people is doubtful, to say the least.

Accepting Hamas' offer of a ceasefire to end Palestinian missile attacks on Sderot would seem its most promising alternative, but this is unlikely for a number of reasons.

First, having spent the past two years insisting that Hamas is a terrorist organisation with which it cannot negotiate, Israel's Government would find it difficult to explain the sudden change of policy. Second, the illusion that the intelligent application of punitive measures is the only lasting solution to Arab resistance is so prevalent among both Israel's leadership and public that it is unlikely to be dislodged by the mundane reality of failure.

Finally, diplomatic pressure to moderate its actions in the occupied territories is almost non-existent.

After hesitantly voicing their "concern" over Israel's post-Annapolis decision to expand Jewish settlements throughout East Jerusalem, both the United States and the European Union have lapsed into an embarrassed silence.

All the frontrunners in this year's US presidential campaign — Clinton, Obama, McCain, Giuliani — have expressed their uncritical support for Israel as they compete for Jewish campaign funding.

And Australia? In December 2006, Melbourne mining magnate Rabbi Joe Gutnick declared that members of Australia's Jewish community could not help but support John Howard unless they saw "something amazing from Kevin Rudd".

Over the following months, Rudd ran four pro-Israeli Labor candidates in the federal election, and declared to a private function of Melbourne's Jewish leaders that his support for Israel was "in his DNA".

This month, the Australian Government voted against funding the 2009 Durban Conference to review the UN's progress in combating racism, discrimination and xenophobia. No official reason was given, but the vote follows an Israeli campaign to de-fund the conference, which it expects will criticise what Noble laureates Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu have described as its regime of apartheid in the occupied territories.

"Israel," Henry Kissinger once quipped, "has no foreign policy, only domestic policy." In this respect, as in many others, it is certainly not alone.

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/01/27/1201368941248.html

Michael Shaik is the public advocate for Australians for Palestine

Banksy on festive mission in Bethlehem

Reuters, ABC News - Tuesday December 4, 2007
British graffiti artist Banksy is trying to bring cheer and boost tourism in Bethlehem this Christmas with a series of subversive murals in the town revered as Jesus's birthplace.

The elusive street artist has painted six provocative new images - including a dove of peace strapped with a bulletproof vest and a young girl with pigtails frisking an Israeli soldier - on buildings around the West Bank town.

Banksy, who has achieved cult status for his edgy satirical images, has also converted a fast food shop opposite Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity into an art gallery showing work by artists from the Palestinian territories and abroad.

The artist's images have fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars in auctions and his customers include Hollywood star Angelina Jolie.

But Banksy keeps his real identity secret and almost never gives interviews.

Other artists exhibiting in Bethlehem say they hope the show will draw attention to life in the occupied West Bank and help forge links between local and international artists.

"It's important for people to come to Bethlehem and actually see what's happening rather than just doing the usual art collector thing and making a deal over the phone," British artist Peter Kennard told Reuters.

Bethlehem residents say military checkpoints and Israel's West Bank barrier, which cuts into Palestinian land, is stifling tourism and damaging Bethlehem's economy.

Eye-catching

Banksy made headlines in 2005 by painting a series of playful images on the Palestinian side of the barrier, which Israel says it built to keep out suicide bombers.

The new images are more eye-catching.

Pilgrims arriving in Bethlehem for Christmas will see a huge mural of a dove on the side of a house riddled with bullet holes. The dove faces an Israeli military watchtower and is wearing a bullet-proof vest.

Around the corner, one of Banksy's trademark stencilled rats is pictured poised with a catapult aimed at another watchtower.

At the exhibition, he is showing a sculpture of a Christmas cherub with a rock piercing its stomach and blood frothing from the wound.

All pieces at the exhibition will be sold to the highest bidder and the proceeds donated to local charities.

Ironic or offensive?

The irony behind one mural of an Israeli soldier asking a donkey for his identity papers has been lost on some locals, who find it offensive.

But Salem Salman, who runs a souvenir shop opposite, thinks it is funny, and makes a neat political point.

"I like it," said Mr Salman, who sells Virgin Mary miniatures to pilgrims on daytrips from Jerusalem.

"It describes the situation here, the occupation. It shows how the Israeli soldiers treat us like animals."

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Yesterday in parliament
Press Association
Wednesday December 5, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

BANKSY
Notorious graffiti artist Banksy received the stamp of approval from the establishment after his latest work was praised by MPs. Banksy recently targeted the Holy Land with a series of stencilled works on the security wall in Bethlehem.

Veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman (Manchester Gorton) tabled a motion saying that his depictions were a far more accurate portrayal of life in the Holy Land than the images presented by the Israeli government.

VIDEO: I am a Bethlehemite

Open Bethlehem
Open Bethlehem is an international campaign to save the city of Bethlehem.

Our endorsers include:

The Mayor of Bethlehem, Dr. Victor Batarseh
Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Churches Together in Britain and Ireland
Cardinal McCarrick, Head of the Catholic Church in the US
President Jimmy Carter

VIDEO: Walls of Shame: West Bank

November 20, 2007
A look at the most controversial wall in the world today. We look at the plight of Palestinian farmers whose land became inaccessible because of the wall, and the real intention of those who first drew its outlines.
Part 1

Part 2


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Arnon Soffer

Bil’in Celebrates Victorious Court Decision

Bil'in 4/09/2007 - Celebrating Court Victory


Bil’in Celebrates Victorious Court Decision
September 6th, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

On Friday, September 7th, the villagers of Bil’in will be celebrating the victorious court decision made on September 5th concerning the Apartheid Wall on their land. Bil’in has been holding weekly demonstrations for the last two and a half years against the theft of over 50% of their land by the Apartheid Wall.

The Israeli Supreme Court recently decided the wall must be moved off the majority of village land in a reasonable amount of time, for now villagers are allowed access through a military-manned gate between the hours of 6am and 8pm.

The Israeli High Court decided on the same day that the Matityahu-East settlement, half built but recently squatted by settlers and illegal under the fourth Geneva Convention, should remain but that the state, the settlers, and the construction company must pay villager’s court costs.

Of the more than 120 cases brought to Israeli court about the Apartheid wall only four have been successful. Three of the four victorious cases (Budrus, Biddu, and Bil’in) have used joint non-violent struggle to help accomplish this.

The celebration on Friday will be held in full knowledge of the rarity of such a victory, and will keep in mind the villages who have had their cases rejected. The fact that the wall is still there, that it is still occupying Palestinian land, and that the illegal settlement will remain on Palestinian land also will not be forgotten. But this is still a victory for the village, and for the joint non-violent resistance to celebrate.

People will meet at the international house near the village mosque at 1pm.

Tear Gas and Sound Grenades replaced with Music and Dancing: Bilin Celebrates…
On Friday, September 7th, the villagers of Bil’in were joined by international and Israeli comrades. Normally they come together every Friday to express their outrage of the unacceptable Apartheid Wall. Normally the day is filled with military violence, tear gas, sound bombs, and billy clubs are common. Once the military begins to fire gas into the crowds, the non-violent protesters tend to back off eventually leaving only the Palestinian children throwing rocks in anger. A mild response in comparison to the rubber coated steel bullets used against them.

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.”

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

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Al Jazeera: Israel's wall divides Arab East Jerusalem

It's been described as a violation of human rights, now it's prompting dire economic consequences.

The effects of Israel's so-called security wall are sharply felt in the communities of Arab East Jerusalem.

Three Years Later: The Humanitarian Impact of the Barrier Since the International Court of Justice Opinion

Special Focus The Humanitarian Impact of the Barrier since the International Court of Justice Opinion July 2007
Three years ago today, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion stating that the route of Israel's Barrier in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and its associated permit and gate regime, constitute a serious breach of international law.

In this Special Focus, OCHA looks at several communities in the northern West Bank that have been severed by the Barrier from their neighbouring communities, from agricultural lands and livelihoods.