Statement by Neturei Karta: How long will Jewish and non-Jewish leaders who claim the mantle of civilization and morality remain silent in the face of the ongoing state terrorism practiced by the Zionist state against the Palestinian People, most visibly today in Gaza, where the Zionists believe they can starve the
Palestinians into submission in violation of all tenets of international law, all religious values in general, INCLUDING the values of the Jewish faith???!!
Friday, 28 November 2008
Tuesday, 28 October 2008
Jewish settler violence leads to the arrest of peace activists
From Neve Gordon:
At dawn the activists arrived. Around 30 Ta’ayush (Arab-Jewish Partnership) and international volunteers came to the Palestinian groves adjacent to the Jewish settlement in Tel-Rumeida, Hebron, to help the landowners pick their olives. Previous attempts by the Palestinian farmers – who live behind fences and are subjected to daily violence – to reach their olive trees had been blocked by the residents of Tel Rumeida, a stronghold of the most militant and extremist Jewish settlers. Even the Israeli police are afraid of these settlers while the military routinely bows down to their commands.
A few days earlier, the activists had been informed that the settlers had entered the groves and had stolen olives from their rightful owners. Complaints to the police were ignored, while the military decided to deny Palestinians all access to the trees.
After meeting their Palestinian partners, the activists began picking the olives. They worked fast and were making considerable progress when four settlers arrived on the scene, and, without warning began beating an international activist and a press photographer, while breaking their cameras.
The settlers had come to the site accompanied by Israeli soldiers, whose job is to protect the settlers from Palestinians. It is therefore not surprising that the soldiers did nothing to prevent the violent attack, did not detain the settlers and even told the settlers that they would do well to hide before the police arrived.
The Ta’ayush activists had already called the police, informing them that the settlers were attacking the olive pickers. This time, the police arrived at the scene fairly quickly, but instead of arresting the belligerent settlers they notified the Palestinians, Israelis and Internationals that they had to leave the area since it was declared a “closed military zone.” Once again the violent oppressors had triumphed.
The activists, however, refused to accept the unjust decision, claiming that it was implemented to stop the Palestinian landowners from reaching their olives. This time the police officers and military thought it appropriate to use force and started evacuating the activists.
Three Ta’ayush activists were arrested, and were taken to a jail, where the police planned to keep them overnight. After midnight, following a request for an urgent hearing their case was brought to court and they were released. Again, the settlers had won the day and managed to prevent the harvest, only this time the event was covered by the press, and the true face of the settlers, police, and military was exposed. Usually, the world is left ignorant of the violence.
Help Ta’ayush (Arab-Jewish Partnership) continue its activities
Ta’ayush Jerusalem has been active since 2001. Over the years we worked together with Palestinian communities in the southern part of the West Bank, including the Palestinians cave-dwellers in the south Hebron hills, with Palestinians living in the city of Hebron, with groups of Palestinians in the Bethlehem area and in East Jerusalem. All these Palestinians are subjected to ongoing violence, including house demolitions, the threat of expulsion, and the confiscation of land. They are living in extreme poverty due to the military siege and Israel’s draconic restriction of their movement.
In order to maintain their weekly activities with the Palestinians, Ta’ayush needs your help.
1. The cost of weekly activities to south Hebron is approximately 1000 Israeli shekels (about $250) for a group of 20 volunteers.
2. The cost for larger-scale activities, which requires renting buses, is 5000 shekels ($1250).
3. Monthly costs for petrol and telephones for Israeli and Palestinian activists – roughly 3000 shekels ($750).
Click here to help.
Ta'ayush – Arab-Jewish Partnership
To read about Neve Gordon’s book (Israel’s Occupation) and more click here.
A few days earlier, the activists had been informed that the settlers had entered the groves and had stolen olives from their rightful owners. Complaints to the police were ignored, while the military decided to deny Palestinians all access to the trees.
After meeting their Palestinian partners, the activists began picking the olives. They worked fast and were making considerable progress when four settlers arrived on the scene, and, without warning began beating an international activist and a press photographer, while breaking their cameras.
The settlers had come to the site accompanied by Israeli soldiers, whose job is to protect the settlers from Palestinians. It is therefore not surprising that the soldiers did nothing to prevent the violent attack, did not detain the settlers and even told the settlers that they would do well to hide before the police arrived.
The Ta’ayush activists had already called the police, informing them that the settlers were attacking the olive pickers. This time, the police arrived at the scene fairly quickly, but instead of arresting the belligerent settlers they notified the Palestinians, Israelis and Internationals that they had to leave the area since it was declared a “closed military zone.” Once again the violent oppressors had triumphed.
The activists, however, refused to accept the unjust decision, claiming that it was implemented to stop the Palestinian landowners from reaching their olives. This time the police officers and military thought it appropriate to use force and started evacuating the activists.
Three Ta’ayush activists were arrested, and were taken to a jail, where the police planned to keep them overnight. After midnight, following a request for an urgent hearing their case was brought to court and they were released. Again, the settlers had won the day and managed to prevent the harvest, only this time the event was covered by the press, and the true face of the settlers, police, and military was exposed. Usually, the world is left ignorant of the violence.
Help Ta’ayush (Arab-Jewish Partnership) continue its activities
Ta’ayush Jerusalem has been active since 2001. Over the years we worked together with Palestinian communities in the southern part of the West Bank, including the Palestinians cave-dwellers in the south Hebron hills, with Palestinians living in the city of Hebron, with groups of Palestinians in the Bethlehem area and in East Jerusalem. All these Palestinians are subjected to ongoing violence, including house demolitions, the threat of expulsion, and the confiscation of land. They are living in extreme poverty due to the military siege and Israel’s draconic restriction of their movement.
In order to maintain their weekly activities with the Palestinians, Ta’ayush needs your help.
1. The cost of weekly activities to south Hebron is approximately 1000 Israeli shekels (about $250) for a group of 20 volunteers.
2. The cost for larger-scale activities, which requires renting buses, is 5000 shekels ($1250).
3. Monthly costs for petrol and telephones for Israeli and Palestinian activists – roughly 3000 shekels ($750).
Click here to help.
Ta'ayush – Arab-Jewish Partnership
To read about Neve Gordon’s book (Israel’s Occupation) and more click here.
Monday, 27 October 2008
Video: A day in the life of a Gazan fisherman
Seaborne Israeli terrorists fire on and try to sink a Palestinian fishing boat well inside Palestinian territorial waters.
This footage was taken from one Gazan fishing boat on 5 October 2008 as it fished in Gazan waters. The furthest it ventured from shore was approximately 4 miles.
Tuesday, 7 October 2008
Israel’s Occupation
Chris Spannos interviews Neve Gordon about his new book
(1) Where did your book Israel's Occupation come from?
The book has two distinct sources. First and foremost, it is a product of many years of activism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. My understanding of the forms of control deployed in the Gaza Strip and West Bank began during the first Intifada, initially as a member of the Gaza Team for Human Rights and later as the director of Physicians for Human Rights, Israel. During the second Intifada, I became an active member of Ta'ayush (Arab-Jewish Partnership) and spent much time in the Occupied Territories resisting, together with Palestinians, Israel's abusive policies. This kind of first-hand experience is invaluable and cannot be replaced by books and reports. The book is also the outcome of discussions and research carried out by a group of Israeli and Palestinian students and scholars that I was fortunate to join a few years ago. The aim of this group was to try and theorize Israel's particular form of colonization.
(2) What would you say makes your book different than other books on the occupation?
There is, to be sure, a whole slew of books about Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, (one might even call it an industry) but surprisingly there is not a single book that provides an overview of four decades of Israeli military rule.
One can find excellent books about the history of Israel's settlement project, Palestinian resistance, primarily during the first and second Intifada, the history of the military courts, the Palestinian women's movement, the labor movements, the diplomatic initiatives, and human rights abuses. I am familiar with five different books that deal with the separation barrier, also known as the wall. While these studies are crucial for understanding certain features of the occupation, Geoffrey Aronson's 1987 Facts on the Ground was the last book that attempted to provide an overview of the occupation, but his superb book appeared before the eruption of the first intifada. On the one hand, then, this is the only book that offers an extensive history of the occupation.
On the other hand, most of the books that exist are descriptive. My book, by contrast, aims to theorize the occupation and Israel's control of the Palestinian population. It aims to offer an explanation for the changes that have taken place in the Occupied Territories over the years. If in 1968 Israel helped Palestinians in the Gaza Strip plant some 618,000 trees and provided farmers with improved varieties of seeds for vegetables and field crops, during the first three years of the second Intifada Israel destroyed more than ten percent of Gaza's agricultural land and uprooted over 226,000 trees. How can one explain this shift?
(3) The book focuses on the four decades since 1967. What about the decades before, and particularly the war of 1948?
The objective of my book is to show and analyze how Israel has controlled the population it occupied in 1967. I am not writing the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the history of the mechanisms of control employed to control the Palestinian people in the most general sense. I think, for instance, that the modes of control deployed to control Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have diverged from the ones deployed inside Israel after the 1948 war in large part because Israel never wanted to integrate the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories into its citizenry. Israel, as I point out, wanted the "dowry" (the land it occupied in 1967) without the "bride" (the Palestinian inhabitants of this land) and therefore it had to introduce different forms of control.
This is not to say, however, that one can understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without looking back at 1948. 1948 is crucial both for understanding the conflict and for any just peace agreement. Indeed, I do not think there will be peace without first addressing the ethnic cleansing carried out during that war. However, discussing these issues is not the objective of my book; moreover, many excellent books have already been written on 1948.
(4) Your book provides a "Genealogy of Control." What is this and why is it important?
By genealogy of control I mean a history that describes the forms of control used to manage the population through the regulation of their daily practices. It refers to a certain kind of history from below. In the Occupied Territories the controlling apparatuses have manifested themselves in legal regulations and permits, military procedures and practices, spatial divisions and architectural edifices, as well as bureaucratic edicts and normative fiats dictating forms of correct conduct in homes, schools, medical centers, workshops, agricultural fields, and so forth. A single book does not suffice to create an inventory of these apparatuses, considering that the military orders issued over the years in the West Bank and Gaza Strip alone fill thousands of pages and deal with anything and everything, from business transactions involving land or property and the installation of water pumps to the planting of citrus trees and the structure of the governing body. Each one of these orders can be analyzed in depth so as to uncover both the processes that led to its creation as well as the effects that it generated. Why, for example, did Israel prevent Palestinians from installing water pumps? Which practices did the military introduce to enforce this regulation, and how did the lack of water pumps affect the inhabitants' daily lives? Instead of offering a meticulous interrogation of a single controlling apparatus, as some commentators have done, my book provides a bird's-eye view of the means of control so as to explain the changes that have taken place over the past four decades in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
(5) Your preface mentions changes you experienced growing up. What were some of these changes and what do you attribute them to?
When I was a teenager my friends in high school took driving lessons in the middle of Rafah, a city located at the southern tip of the Strip which today is considered by almost all Israeli Jews to be a terrorist nest riddled with tunnels used to smuggle weapons from Egypt -- weapons that are subsequently used against Israeli targets. I mention that until the early 1990s Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza were part of the Israeli landscape, primarily as cheap laborers who built houses, cleaned streets, and worked in agriculture, but that today they have literately disappeared.
Israel's inability to quell the Palestinian emancipatory drive has led it to transform the Occupied Territories into a kind of open air prison. In the early years of the occupation Israel spent a lot of energy trying to manage the occupied population and to normalize the occupation. It monitored every aspect of Palestinian life. The number of televisions, refrigerators, and gas stoves were counted, as were the livestock, orchards and tractors. Letters sent to and from the different regions were checked, registered and examined. School textbooks, novels, movies, newspapers and political leaflets were inspected and frequently censored. There were detailed inventories of Palestinian workshops for furniture, soap, textiles, olive products and sweets. Even eating habits were scrutinized as was the nutritional value of the Palestinian food basket. Today, Israel is no longer interested in the Palestinian inhabitants as subjects that need to be managed (except perhaps in the seam zones near the borders and at the checkpoints) and this, as I show, has led to a very precarious situation, one which is much more violent.
(6) How has violence and death among Palestinians and Israelis changed over the years of occupation and how does this inform our analysis or vice versa?
While the changes in the OT have manifested themselves in all areas of life, they are particularly conspicuous when counting bodies. Between the six-year period of 2001- 2007, Israel, on average, killed 674 Palestinians per year, which is more than it killed throughout the first 20 years of occupation. Moreover, since the eruption of the second Intifada, Israel has killed almost twice as many Palestinians as in the preceding 34 years. The number of Israelis killed has also dramatically increased over the years. During the thirteen-year period between December 1987 and September 2000, 422 Israeli were killed by Palestinians, but during the six-year period from the eruption of the second intifada until the end of 2006, 1,019 Israelis were killed. One of the questions I address in the book is how to make sense of the increasing violence. I want to look beyond the straightforward, and, in my mind, simplistic answer that assumes each side has altered its methods of violence, deploying, as it were, much more lethal force. This, no doubt, is true, but the question still stands: why are more lethal repertoires of violence deployed?
(7) You write that the Occupation operated according to the "colonization principle" but over time gave way to the "separation principle." What do you mean?
By the colonization principle I mean a form of government whereby the colonizer attempts to manage the lives of the colonized inhabitants while exploiting the captured territory's resources (in our case, this would mean land, water, and cheap labor). Colonial powers do not conquer for the sake of imposing administrative rule on the indigenous population, but they end up managing the conquered inhabitants in order to facilitate the extraction of resources. The military perceived its role very differently when the colonization principle was dominant than it does today. For instance, for several years, the Israeli Military Government published annual reports entitled "Accountability," suggesting that Israel felt a need to provide an account of the social and economic developments taking place in the regions that it had captured. The thrust of the claims made in the reports can be summed up in the following way: Due to our interventions, the Palestinian economy, industry, education, health-care and civilian infrastructure have significantly developed. The point I would like to stress here is not that the development of these sectors was frequently actually obstructed, but rather that Israel considered itself responsible for these sectors, for the administration of the population. The Israeli objective was to normalize the occupation.
At a certain point during the first Intifada, Israel realized that the colonization principle wasn't working, and began looking for a new principle that would allow it to uphold the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The desire to normalize the occupation and successfully annihilate Palestinian nationalism proved to be unrealistic. It took a few years before a clear policy was shaped, but eventually the separation principle was adopted. As opposed to the colonization principle which was rarely discussed, the separation principle has been talked about incessantly. The paradigmatic sentence describing this principle is "We are here, they are there." The "we" refers to Israelis, and the "they" to Palestinians.
The second principle does not, however, aim to end the occupation, but rather to alter its logic. In other words, "We are here, they are there," does not signify a withdrawal of Israeli power from the Occupied Territories (even though that is how it is understood among the Israeli public), but is used to blur the fact that Israel has been reorganizing its power in the territories in order to continue its control over their resources. Thus, the Oslo Accords, which were the direct result of the first Intifada as well as the changing political and economic circumstances in the international realm, signified the reorganization of power rather than its withdrawal, and should be understood as the continuation of the occupation by other means. As Meron Benvenisti observed early on, Oslo was a form of "occupation by remote control."
The major difference then between the colonization and the separation principles is that under the first principle there is an effort to manage the population and its resources, even though the two are separated. With the adoption of the separation principle Israel looses all interest in the lives of the Palestinian inhabitants and focuses solely on the occupied resources. Highlighting this reorganization of power helps explain the change in the repertoires of violence and the dramatic increase in the number of Palestinian deaths.
(8) How much have the forms of Israel's control over Gaza and the West Bank changed over the years and what does it tell us about Israel's control over the region?
The separation principle produces a totally different controlling logic from the logic produced by the colonial principle. If during the first decade of the occupation Israel tried to decrease Palestinian unemployment in order to manage the population, following the new millennium Israel intentionally produced unemployment in the Occupied Territories. Whereas in 1992 some 30 percent of the Palestinian workforce was employed in Israel, in 1996 that figure had fallen to seven percent and the average rate of unemployment in the territories reached 32.6 percent, rising twelve fold from the 3 percent unemployment in 1992. Thus, during one period employment is used to manage the population, while in a later period unemployment is used as a form of control.
Along similar lines, if during the first years of the occupation Israel provided immunization for cattle and poultry, in 2006 it created conditions that prevented people from receiving immunization. The World Bank reports that acute malnutrition currently affects more than 9 percent of Palestinian children in the territories, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated that in 2003 almost 40 percent of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories suffer from food insecurity. Almost half of the children between 6 and 9 months and women of child-bearing age are anemic. There has been a 58 percent increase in the number of stillbirths due to poor prenatal care and child mortality increased substantially in 2002 to become the leading cause of death for children under 5, and the second leading cause of death overall. It is not only that the Palestinian inhabitants are no longer considered to be important objects of management and that Israel has abandoned its objective of exploiting the population for economic purposes, but that it has adopted a series of policies which in effect weaken and destroy the Palestinian residents.
Indeed, under the separation principle the Palestinian is no longer conceived to be an object that needs to be meddled with and shaped. The military's policy during the second Intifada, whereby soldiers shot more than one million bullets within the first month, is poles apart from the policies of the first years of the occupation and even from Defense Minister Yitzchak Rabin's directive "to break their bones," given to soldiers during the first Intifada. The difference between beating the body and killing the body reflects the difference between the colonial principle and the separation principle, between shaping the body and crushing it.
(9) What is the difference between understanding the Occupation through the lens of policy vs. the lens of structure? Where might each lead the person who holds that perspective? And how is one better than another?
The question we need to always ask ourselves is where policy originates from. We tend to think of policy as the creation of a person or a small group of people. People commonly talk about the Eisenhower doctrine, the Bush doctrine, Ariel Sharon's doctrine, etc. as if certain doctrines originated from political leaders. I, by contrast, think that politics work differently. I think, for example, that politicians, military commanders, judges, and the like are constrained and in many respects shaped by the existing social, economic and political structures.
Let me give an example that is closer to home. The US is now undergoing an economic crisis and, as a result, Bush just passed a 700 billion dollar bailout bill. Michael Moore characterized the bill as the biggest robbery in the history of the United States. I tend to agree with this characterization, but the question I ask myself is whether this bill simply originated from President Bush and his advisors or whether it is a product of the crisis and certain political, economic and social structures in the US. I do not think one can fully make sense of the bill without taking into account certain credit structures in the US, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the intricate relationship between big business and the US electoral system, to name a few of the political processes and structures that helped shape the policies that aim to address the crisis. Moreover, it is the excesses and contradictions that are, in fact, integral to the credit structures, the wars and the influence of business on the electoral systems that led to the crisis to begin with, which then led to the policy change.
The same is true about Israel's occupation. The mechanisms of control produced their own contradictions and excesses, which led, in turn, to policy changes.
(10) You write that the changes taking place in the Occupied Territories are not the effects of policy decisions or Palestinian Resistance. What guides your thinking here?
This is not precise. The changes are, no doubt, the effect of Israel's policy choices and Palestinian resistance, but what, I ask, are the underlying causes leading to the shifts in Israel's policy choices and to the augmentation or changes in Palestinian resistance. My claim is that the policy choices and indeed the resistance were shaped by the contradictions and excesses of the mechanisms of control that Israel deployed. A curfew restricts and confines the population, but also produces antagonism; the establishment of a Jewish settlement on a hilltop is used to confiscate land, partition space, and monitor the Palestinian villages below but also underscores that the occupation is not temporary. There are scores of examples like these in the book. The crux of the matter is that the contradictions facilitated the awakening of a Palestinian national consciousness, altered the population's social stratification and played a crucial role in weakening the influence of the traditional elites, undermined the claim that the occupation was temporary and would end in the near future, revealed the logic behind Israel's so-called arbitrary processes and decrees, and helped bind together an otherwise fragmented society. Palestinian resistance, in turn, led Israel to alter its policies.
(11) The book pays particular focus to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Why are these areas important to Israel?
This book concentrates on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the areas where most of the Palestinians who were occupied in 1967 reside. Israel was, from the beginning, unwilling to withdraw from these two regions and hoped to integrate the land or at least parts of it into its own territory at some future date. My objective was to try and understand how a particular kind of colonialism works and how and why it changes over time. Israel's colonial enterprise in East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights works slightly differently and since I could not address all the differences in one book I decided to concentrate on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This does not mean that they are more important to Israel; indeed I think that Gaza Strip is less important and considered by many Israeli policy makers more of a liability than an asset. The West Bank is considered, on the one hand, a military asset. It is perceived as necessary for defending Israel's borders against external attacks, while the water reservoirs in the West Bank are considered a vital security resource due to Israel's scant water supplies. On the other hand, the West Bank fulfills a messianic aspiration. From a messianic perspective, this region is seen as part of the biblical land of Israel and therefore it belongs to the Jews and should never be returned to the Palestinians. These strains of thought often converge to create a united front.
(12) How do Palestinians and Israelis as conscious agents of change fit into your analysis?
They don't. It is, however, important to emphasize that even though my focus is on the different structures and mechanisms of control, I do not want to suggest that one should ignore or dismiss the agency of political actors. Indeed, any attempt to portray both Israelis and Palestinians as objects rather than subjects of history would be misleading. Israelis are responsible for creating and maintaining the occupation as well as its consequences, while Palestinians are responsible for their resistance and its effects. And yet the decisions of Israelis and Palestinians, as well as their comportment, are produced, at least in part, by a multiplicity of forms of control.
Since almost all the books that I am familiar with emphasize the human agency of Israelis and Palestinians, I decided to focus on the structures and forms of control. I think the two genres complement each other; indeed one cannot understand the occupation without taking into account both the agency and the structure - since most authors until now focused on the agency I decided to tell another story.
(13) What are your hopes for the book?
Like every person who writes a book I hope that it will be widely read, that at the end of the day the people who read it feel that they have learnt something, that it is taught in classes, and that it will help activists make better sense of Israel's occupation.
While the book, and particularly the introduction, employs theory in order to make sense of the occupation, I think that non-academic readers will find the book accessible and benefit from such a theorization, since it will not only improve their ability to detect the lies and transcend the political smokescreen that characterize most discussions about Israel's occupation, but also provide some tools for understanding how power ticks. I hope that people from all political stripes read it, and not only those on the left or those interested in Israel/Palestine, but also people who want to improve their understanding of how modern forms of colonization operate and how our lives are managed.
--
Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and is the author of Israel's Occupation. Visit his website at www.israelsoccupation.info
Chris Spannos works for Z.
(1) Where did your book Israel's Occupation come from?
The book has two distinct sources. First and foremost, it is a product of many years of activism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. My understanding of the forms of control deployed in the Gaza Strip and West Bank began during the first Intifada, initially as a member of the Gaza Team for Human Rights and later as the director of Physicians for Human Rights, Israel. During the second Intifada, I became an active member of Ta'ayush (Arab-Jewish Partnership) and spent much time in the Occupied Territories resisting, together with Palestinians, Israel's abusive policies. This kind of first-hand experience is invaluable and cannot be replaced by books and reports. The book is also the outcome of discussions and research carried out by a group of Israeli and Palestinian students and scholars that I was fortunate to join a few years ago. The aim of this group was to try and theorize Israel's particular form of colonization.
(2) What would you say makes your book different than other books on the occupation?
There is, to be sure, a whole slew of books about Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, (one might even call it an industry) but surprisingly there is not a single book that provides an overview of four decades of Israeli military rule.
One can find excellent books about the history of Israel's settlement project, Palestinian resistance, primarily during the first and second Intifada, the history of the military courts, the Palestinian women's movement, the labor movements, the diplomatic initiatives, and human rights abuses. I am familiar with five different books that deal with the separation barrier, also known as the wall. While these studies are crucial for understanding certain features of the occupation, Geoffrey Aronson's 1987 Facts on the Ground was the last book that attempted to provide an overview of the occupation, but his superb book appeared before the eruption of the first intifada. On the one hand, then, this is the only book that offers an extensive history of the occupation.
On the other hand, most of the books that exist are descriptive. My book, by contrast, aims to theorize the occupation and Israel's control of the Palestinian population. It aims to offer an explanation for the changes that have taken place in the Occupied Territories over the years. If in 1968 Israel helped Palestinians in the Gaza Strip plant some 618,000 trees and provided farmers with improved varieties of seeds for vegetables and field crops, during the first three years of the second Intifada Israel destroyed more than ten percent of Gaza's agricultural land and uprooted over 226,000 trees. How can one explain this shift?
(3) The book focuses on the four decades since 1967. What about the decades before, and particularly the war of 1948?
The objective of my book is to show and analyze how Israel has controlled the population it occupied in 1967. I am not writing the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the history of the mechanisms of control employed to control the Palestinian people in the most general sense. I think, for instance, that the modes of control deployed to control Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have diverged from the ones deployed inside Israel after the 1948 war in large part because Israel never wanted to integrate the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories into its citizenry. Israel, as I point out, wanted the "dowry" (the land it occupied in 1967) without the "bride" (the Palestinian inhabitants of this land) and therefore it had to introduce different forms of control.
This is not to say, however, that one can understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without looking back at 1948. 1948 is crucial both for understanding the conflict and for any just peace agreement. Indeed, I do not think there will be peace without first addressing the ethnic cleansing carried out during that war. However, discussing these issues is not the objective of my book; moreover, many excellent books have already been written on 1948.
(4) Your book provides a "Genealogy of Control." What is this and why is it important?
By genealogy of control I mean a history that describes the forms of control used to manage the population through the regulation of their daily practices. It refers to a certain kind of history from below. In the Occupied Territories the controlling apparatuses have manifested themselves in legal regulations and permits, military procedures and practices, spatial divisions and architectural edifices, as well as bureaucratic edicts and normative fiats dictating forms of correct conduct in homes, schools, medical centers, workshops, agricultural fields, and so forth. A single book does not suffice to create an inventory of these apparatuses, considering that the military orders issued over the years in the West Bank and Gaza Strip alone fill thousands of pages and deal with anything and everything, from business transactions involving land or property and the installation of water pumps to the planting of citrus trees and the structure of the governing body. Each one of these orders can be analyzed in depth so as to uncover both the processes that led to its creation as well as the effects that it generated. Why, for example, did Israel prevent Palestinians from installing water pumps? Which practices did the military introduce to enforce this regulation, and how did the lack of water pumps affect the inhabitants' daily lives? Instead of offering a meticulous interrogation of a single controlling apparatus, as some commentators have done, my book provides a bird's-eye view of the means of control so as to explain the changes that have taken place over the past four decades in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
(5) Your preface mentions changes you experienced growing up. What were some of these changes and what do you attribute them to?
When I was a teenager my friends in high school took driving lessons in the middle of Rafah, a city located at the southern tip of the Strip which today is considered by almost all Israeli Jews to be a terrorist nest riddled with tunnels used to smuggle weapons from Egypt -- weapons that are subsequently used against Israeli targets. I mention that until the early 1990s Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza were part of the Israeli landscape, primarily as cheap laborers who built houses, cleaned streets, and worked in agriculture, but that today they have literately disappeared.
Israel's inability to quell the Palestinian emancipatory drive has led it to transform the Occupied Territories into a kind of open air prison. In the early years of the occupation Israel spent a lot of energy trying to manage the occupied population and to normalize the occupation. It monitored every aspect of Palestinian life. The number of televisions, refrigerators, and gas stoves were counted, as were the livestock, orchards and tractors. Letters sent to and from the different regions were checked, registered and examined. School textbooks, novels, movies, newspapers and political leaflets were inspected and frequently censored. There were detailed inventories of Palestinian workshops for furniture, soap, textiles, olive products and sweets. Even eating habits were scrutinized as was the nutritional value of the Palestinian food basket. Today, Israel is no longer interested in the Palestinian inhabitants as subjects that need to be managed (except perhaps in the seam zones near the borders and at the checkpoints) and this, as I show, has led to a very precarious situation, one which is much more violent.
(6) How has violence and death among Palestinians and Israelis changed over the years of occupation and how does this inform our analysis or vice versa?
While the changes in the OT have manifested themselves in all areas of life, they are particularly conspicuous when counting bodies. Between the six-year period of 2001- 2007, Israel, on average, killed 674 Palestinians per year, which is more than it killed throughout the first 20 years of occupation. Moreover, since the eruption of the second Intifada, Israel has killed almost twice as many Palestinians as in the preceding 34 years. The number of Israelis killed has also dramatically increased over the years. During the thirteen-year period between December 1987 and September 2000, 422 Israeli were killed by Palestinians, but during the six-year period from the eruption of the second intifada until the end of 2006, 1,019 Israelis were killed. One of the questions I address in the book is how to make sense of the increasing violence. I want to look beyond the straightforward, and, in my mind, simplistic answer that assumes each side has altered its methods of violence, deploying, as it were, much more lethal force. This, no doubt, is true, but the question still stands: why are more lethal repertoires of violence deployed?
(7) You write that the Occupation operated according to the "colonization principle" but over time gave way to the "separation principle." What do you mean?
By the colonization principle I mean a form of government whereby the colonizer attempts to manage the lives of the colonized inhabitants while exploiting the captured territory's resources (in our case, this would mean land, water, and cheap labor). Colonial powers do not conquer for the sake of imposing administrative rule on the indigenous population, but they end up managing the conquered inhabitants in order to facilitate the extraction of resources. The military perceived its role very differently when the colonization principle was dominant than it does today. For instance, for several years, the Israeli Military Government published annual reports entitled "Accountability," suggesting that Israel felt a need to provide an account of the social and economic developments taking place in the regions that it had captured. The thrust of the claims made in the reports can be summed up in the following way: Due to our interventions, the Palestinian economy, industry, education, health-care and civilian infrastructure have significantly developed. The point I would like to stress here is not that the development of these sectors was frequently actually obstructed, but rather that Israel considered itself responsible for these sectors, for the administration of the population. The Israeli objective was to normalize the occupation.
At a certain point during the first Intifada, Israel realized that the colonization principle wasn't working, and began looking for a new principle that would allow it to uphold the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The desire to normalize the occupation and successfully annihilate Palestinian nationalism proved to be unrealistic. It took a few years before a clear policy was shaped, but eventually the separation principle was adopted. As opposed to the colonization principle which was rarely discussed, the separation principle has been talked about incessantly. The paradigmatic sentence describing this principle is "We are here, they are there." The "we" refers to Israelis, and the "they" to Palestinians.
The second principle does not, however, aim to end the occupation, but rather to alter its logic. In other words, "We are here, they are there," does not signify a withdrawal of Israeli power from the Occupied Territories (even though that is how it is understood among the Israeli public), but is used to blur the fact that Israel has been reorganizing its power in the territories in order to continue its control over their resources. Thus, the Oslo Accords, which were the direct result of the first Intifada as well as the changing political and economic circumstances in the international realm, signified the reorganization of power rather than its withdrawal, and should be understood as the continuation of the occupation by other means. As Meron Benvenisti observed early on, Oslo was a form of "occupation by remote control."
The major difference then between the colonization and the separation principles is that under the first principle there is an effort to manage the population and its resources, even though the two are separated. With the adoption of the separation principle Israel looses all interest in the lives of the Palestinian inhabitants and focuses solely on the occupied resources. Highlighting this reorganization of power helps explain the change in the repertoires of violence and the dramatic increase in the number of Palestinian deaths.
(8) How much have the forms of Israel's control over Gaza and the West Bank changed over the years and what does it tell us about Israel's control over the region?
The separation principle produces a totally different controlling logic from the logic produced by the colonial principle. If during the first decade of the occupation Israel tried to decrease Palestinian unemployment in order to manage the population, following the new millennium Israel intentionally produced unemployment in the Occupied Territories. Whereas in 1992 some 30 percent of the Palestinian workforce was employed in Israel, in 1996 that figure had fallen to seven percent and the average rate of unemployment in the territories reached 32.6 percent, rising twelve fold from the 3 percent unemployment in 1992. Thus, during one period employment is used to manage the population, while in a later period unemployment is used as a form of control.
Along similar lines, if during the first years of the occupation Israel provided immunization for cattle and poultry, in 2006 it created conditions that prevented people from receiving immunization. The World Bank reports that acute malnutrition currently affects more than 9 percent of Palestinian children in the territories, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated that in 2003 almost 40 percent of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories suffer from food insecurity. Almost half of the children between 6 and 9 months and women of child-bearing age are anemic. There has been a 58 percent increase in the number of stillbirths due to poor prenatal care and child mortality increased substantially in 2002 to become the leading cause of death for children under 5, and the second leading cause of death overall. It is not only that the Palestinian inhabitants are no longer considered to be important objects of management and that Israel has abandoned its objective of exploiting the population for economic purposes, but that it has adopted a series of policies which in effect weaken and destroy the Palestinian residents.
Indeed, under the separation principle the Palestinian is no longer conceived to be an object that needs to be meddled with and shaped. The military's policy during the second Intifada, whereby soldiers shot more than one million bullets within the first month, is poles apart from the policies of the first years of the occupation and even from Defense Minister Yitzchak Rabin's directive "to break their bones," given to soldiers during the first Intifada. The difference between beating the body and killing the body reflects the difference between the colonial principle and the separation principle, between shaping the body and crushing it.
(9) What is the difference between understanding the Occupation through the lens of policy vs. the lens of structure? Where might each lead the person who holds that perspective? And how is one better than another?
The question we need to always ask ourselves is where policy originates from. We tend to think of policy as the creation of a person or a small group of people. People commonly talk about the Eisenhower doctrine, the Bush doctrine, Ariel Sharon's doctrine, etc. as if certain doctrines originated from political leaders. I, by contrast, think that politics work differently. I think, for example, that politicians, military commanders, judges, and the like are constrained and in many respects shaped by the existing social, economic and political structures.
Let me give an example that is closer to home. The US is now undergoing an economic crisis and, as a result, Bush just passed a 700 billion dollar bailout bill. Michael Moore characterized the bill as the biggest robbery in the history of the United States. I tend to agree with this characterization, but the question I ask myself is whether this bill simply originated from President Bush and his advisors or whether it is a product of the crisis and certain political, economic and social structures in the US. I do not think one can fully make sense of the bill without taking into account certain credit structures in the US, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the intricate relationship between big business and the US electoral system, to name a few of the political processes and structures that helped shape the policies that aim to address the crisis. Moreover, it is the excesses and contradictions that are, in fact, integral to the credit structures, the wars and the influence of business on the electoral systems that led to the crisis to begin with, which then led to the policy change.
The same is true about Israel's occupation. The mechanisms of control produced their own contradictions and excesses, which led, in turn, to policy changes.
(10) You write that the changes taking place in the Occupied Territories are not the effects of policy decisions or Palestinian Resistance. What guides your thinking here?
This is not precise. The changes are, no doubt, the effect of Israel's policy choices and Palestinian resistance, but what, I ask, are the underlying causes leading to the shifts in Israel's policy choices and to the augmentation or changes in Palestinian resistance. My claim is that the policy choices and indeed the resistance were shaped by the contradictions and excesses of the mechanisms of control that Israel deployed. A curfew restricts and confines the population, but also produces antagonism; the establishment of a Jewish settlement on a hilltop is used to confiscate land, partition space, and monitor the Palestinian villages below but also underscores that the occupation is not temporary. There are scores of examples like these in the book. The crux of the matter is that the contradictions facilitated the awakening of a Palestinian national consciousness, altered the population's social stratification and played a crucial role in weakening the influence of the traditional elites, undermined the claim that the occupation was temporary and would end in the near future, revealed the logic behind Israel's so-called arbitrary processes and decrees, and helped bind together an otherwise fragmented society. Palestinian resistance, in turn, led Israel to alter its policies.
(11) The book pays particular focus to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Why are these areas important to Israel?
This book concentrates on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the areas where most of the Palestinians who were occupied in 1967 reside. Israel was, from the beginning, unwilling to withdraw from these two regions and hoped to integrate the land or at least parts of it into its own territory at some future date. My objective was to try and understand how a particular kind of colonialism works and how and why it changes over time. Israel's colonial enterprise in East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights works slightly differently and since I could not address all the differences in one book I decided to concentrate on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This does not mean that they are more important to Israel; indeed I think that Gaza Strip is less important and considered by many Israeli policy makers more of a liability than an asset. The West Bank is considered, on the one hand, a military asset. It is perceived as necessary for defending Israel's borders against external attacks, while the water reservoirs in the West Bank are considered a vital security resource due to Israel's scant water supplies. On the other hand, the West Bank fulfills a messianic aspiration. From a messianic perspective, this region is seen as part of the biblical land of Israel and therefore it belongs to the Jews and should never be returned to the Palestinians. These strains of thought often converge to create a united front.
(12) How do Palestinians and Israelis as conscious agents of change fit into your analysis?
They don't. It is, however, important to emphasize that even though my focus is on the different structures and mechanisms of control, I do not want to suggest that one should ignore or dismiss the agency of political actors. Indeed, any attempt to portray both Israelis and Palestinians as objects rather than subjects of history would be misleading. Israelis are responsible for creating and maintaining the occupation as well as its consequences, while Palestinians are responsible for their resistance and its effects. And yet the decisions of Israelis and Palestinians, as well as their comportment, are produced, at least in part, by a multiplicity of forms of control.
Since almost all the books that I am familiar with emphasize the human agency of Israelis and Palestinians, I decided to focus on the structures and forms of control. I think the two genres complement each other; indeed one cannot understand the occupation without taking into account both the agency and the structure - since most authors until now focused on the agency I decided to tell another story.
(13) What are your hopes for the book?
Like every person who writes a book I hope that it will be widely read, that at the end of the day the people who read it feel that they have learnt something, that it is taught in classes, and that it will help activists make better sense of Israel's occupation.
While the book, and particularly the introduction, employs theory in order to make sense of the occupation, I think that non-academic readers will find the book accessible and benefit from such a theorization, since it will not only improve their ability to detect the lies and transcend the political smokescreen that characterize most discussions about Israel's occupation, but also provide some tools for understanding how power ticks. I hope that people from all political stripes read it, and not only those on the left or those interested in Israel/Palestine, but also people who want to improve their understanding of how modern forms of colonization operate and how our lives are managed.
--
Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and is the author of Israel's Occupation. Visit his website at www.israelsoccupation.info
Chris Spannos works for Z.
Sunday, 28 September 2008
Israeli settlers threaten to kill British film crew, curse Jesus
Video of an Israeli settler threatening a British film crew. The video shows the settler cursing Jesus ("You and you're fucking Jesus can kiss my ass... We killed Jesus and we're proud of it"), threatening to kill the film crew and the Palestinians on whose land the settlers are trespassing.
Friday, 5 September 2008
Don't buy or stock Israeli products
New call to shoppers to stop buying Israeli goods, especially from illegal Israeli settlements, and to supermarkets to stop stocking such goods
In July this year TV channel More4 and several national newspapers featured graphic reports about British supermarkets selling goods exported from illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank. This was a stark reminder of the continued apartheid policies of the Israeli state.
At the same time genuine Palestinian producers are deliberately prevented from producing and exporting goods by the drastic conditions of Israeli occupation, and insuperable clamp-downs on trade’. On August 23rd 44 peace activists sailed to Gaza to challenge the siege, and to show the world that the Palestinians are trapped.
Kim Howells the Minister responsible for relations with Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has stated that it “is essential to [ensure] that customers can make an informed choice between Palestinian produce and produce from Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law”.
After 60 years of oppression, dispossession and occupation for the Palestinian people, and no justice from the international community, the BOYCOTT ISRAELI GOODS CAMPAIGN (BIG) is now launching a new campaign:
The emphasis on settlement exports spearheads the general case for the boycott of Israeli goods.
A campaign spokesperson said, 'We are calling for a boycott of all Israeli goods, but also especially drawing attention to settlement goods. At present Israel exports fruit and vegetables grown in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and Britain is one of the largest importers. These settlements are illegal under international law. To be complicit in this crime is also a crime in English law. These goods are often inaccurately labelled 'Produce of Israel', or misleadingly as ‘West Bank’, causing customers to believe they are Palestinian goods. These goods also benefit, illicitly, from the preferential rates of customs duty under the EC-Israeli Preferential Trade Agreement, thereby costing the British taxpayer millions of pounds in unpaid customs duty.’
There are plentiful alternative sources of supply for all Israeli goods stocked by supermarkets – such as fresh herbs and medjoul dates and other fruit and vegetables. Many supermarkets claim to have ethical trading policies. They should now prove it.
Notes to Editors
1. Israel militarily controls every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza , the West Bank and East Jerusalem , occupied since 1967
2. “The establishment of settlements in the West Bank violates international humanitarian law which establishes principles that apply during war and occupation. Moreover, the settlements lead to the infringement of international human rights law.
The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory (Article 49). The Hague Regulations prohibit an occupying power from undertaking permanent changes in the occupied area unless these are due to military needs in the narrow sense of the term, or unless they are undertaken for the benefit of the local population.
The establishment of settlements results in the violation of the rights of Palestinians as enshrined in international human rights law. Among other violations, the settlements infringe the right to self-determination, equality, property, an adequate standard of living, and freedom of movement.” (http://www.btselem.org/english/Settlements/International_Law.asp)
3. Aid agencies report a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza because of the Israeli imposed siege ("The Gaza Strip: A Humanitarian Implosion", Oxfam, Amnesty International, CAFOD, Trocaire, Save the Children, Care International, March 2008)
4. Israel 's racist housing policy has resulted in the demolition of 18,000 Palestinian homes since 1967. (The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) www.18000homes.org)
5. Israel restricts the movement of Palestinians with more than 609 obstacles to movement including checkpoints and roadblocks all over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem , and operates a segregated road system. ("Report No.65 Implementation of the Agreement on Movement and Access and Update on Gaza Crossing (30 April – 13 May 2008)", United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, August 2008)
6. According to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, Israel has killed 4,815 Palestinians, 951 of them minors in the last eight years alone.
7. Israel profits from exporting to the UK fruit and vegetables grown on illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land, and misleadingly labeled 'West Bank' ("'Illicit' settler food sold in UK stores", Observer, July 2008).
8. Israel continues to expropriate Palestinian land to build its apartheid wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice. ("Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory ", International Court of Justice, July 2004).
9. A call for boycott has been issued by Palestinians in the Occupied Territories . (Palestine BDS Campaign).
10. Israeli farms and companies prosper by exploiting stolen land and water, while impoverished Palestinian farmers are denied access to their own fields, orchards and wells and cannot market the few goods they manage to produce.
11. By stocking their shelves with Israeli goods, such as Carmel , Coral and Jaffa brands, supermarkets are supporting companies which benefit from the dispossession of Palestinian families.
12. For information about the Free Gaza Movement boat trip mentioned above please see http://www.freegaza.org/.
============================
Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Box BM PSA
London
WC1N 3XX
Email: info@palestinecampaign.org
Tel: 020 7700 6192
Fax: 020 7609 7779
Web: www.palestinecampaign.org
In July this year TV channel More4 and several national newspapers featured graphic reports about British supermarkets selling goods exported from illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank. This was a stark reminder of the continued apartheid policies of the Israeli state.
At the same time genuine Palestinian producers are deliberately prevented from producing and exporting goods by the drastic conditions of Israeli occupation, and insuperable clamp-downs on trade’. On August 23rd 44 peace activists sailed to Gaza to challenge the siege, and to show the world that the Palestinians are trapped.
Kim Howells the Minister responsible for relations with Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has stated that it “is essential to [ensure] that customers can make an informed choice between Palestinian produce and produce from Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law”.
After 60 years of oppression, dispossession and occupation for the Palestinian people, and no justice from the international community, the BOYCOTT ISRAELI GOODS CAMPAIGN (BIG) is now launching a new campaign:
- To call on shoppers not to buy Israeli goods, and especially goods from the settlements – often misleadingly labelled ‘West Bank.’
- To call on the supermarkets to stop selling Israeli goods, and to stop colluding with Israel’s export of goods from the illegal settlements.
The emphasis on settlement exports spearheads the general case for the boycott of Israeli goods.
- Israel militarily controls every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
- Israel’s racist housing policy has resulted in the demolition of 18,000 Palestinian homes since 1967.
- Israel restricts the movement of Palestinians with more than 600 roadblocks.
- Israel continues to expropriate Palestinian land to build its apartheid wall, declared illegal by the International court of justice in 2004.
A campaign spokesperson said, 'We are calling for a boycott of all Israeli goods, but also especially drawing attention to settlement goods. At present Israel exports fruit and vegetables grown in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and Britain is one of the largest importers. These settlements are illegal under international law. To be complicit in this crime is also a crime in English law. These goods are often inaccurately labelled 'Produce of Israel', or misleadingly as ‘West Bank’, causing customers to believe they are Palestinian goods. These goods also benefit, illicitly, from the preferential rates of customs duty under the EC-Israeli Preferential Trade Agreement, thereby costing the British taxpayer millions of pounds in unpaid customs duty.’
There are plentiful alternative sources of supply for all Israeli goods stocked by supermarkets – such as fresh herbs and medjoul dates and other fruit and vegetables. Many supermarkets claim to have ethical trading policies. They should now prove it.
Notes to Editors
1. Israel militarily controls every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza , the West Bank and East Jerusalem , occupied since 1967
2. “The establishment of settlements in the West Bank violates international humanitarian law which establishes principles that apply during war and occupation. Moreover, the settlements lead to the infringement of international human rights law.
The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory (Article 49). The Hague Regulations prohibit an occupying power from undertaking permanent changes in the occupied area unless these are due to military needs in the narrow sense of the term, or unless they are undertaken for the benefit of the local population.
The establishment of settlements results in the violation of the rights of Palestinians as enshrined in international human rights law. Among other violations, the settlements infringe the right to self-determination, equality, property, an adequate standard of living, and freedom of movement.” (http://www.btselem.org/english/Settlements/International_Law.asp)
3. Aid agencies report a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza because of the Israeli imposed siege ("The Gaza Strip: A Humanitarian Implosion", Oxfam, Amnesty International, CAFOD, Trocaire, Save the Children, Care International, March 2008)
4. Israel 's racist housing policy has resulted in the demolition of 18,000 Palestinian homes since 1967. (The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) www.18000homes.org)
5. Israel restricts the movement of Palestinians with more than 609 obstacles to movement including checkpoints and roadblocks all over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem , and operates a segregated road system. ("Report No.65 Implementation of the Agreement on Movement and Access and Update on Gaza Crossing (30 April – 13 May 2008)", United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, August 2008)
6. According to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, Israel has killed 4,815 Palestinians, 951 of them minors in the last eight years alone.
7. Israel profits from exporting to the UK fruit and vegetables grown on illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land, and misleadingly labeled 'West Bank' ("'Illicit' settler food sold in UK stores", Observer, July 2008).
8. Israel continues to expropriate Palestinian land to build its apartheid wall, declared illegal by the International Court of Justice. ("Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory ", International Court of Justice, July 2004).
9. A call for boycott has been issued by Palestinians in the Occupied Territories . (Palestine BDS Campaign).
10. Israeli farms and companies prosper by exploiting stolen land and water, while impoverished Palestinian farmers are denied access to their own fields, orchards and wells and cannot market the few goods they manage to produce.
11. By stocking their shelves with Israeli goods, such as Carmel , Coral and Jaffa brands, supermarkets are supporting companies which benefit from the dispossession of Palestinian families.
12. For information about the Free Gaza Movement boat trip mentioned above please see http://www.freegaza.org/.
============================
Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Box BM PSA
London
WC1N 3XX
Email: info@palestinecampaign.org
Tel: 020 7700 6192
Fax: 020 7609 7779
Web: www.palestinecampaign.org
Monday, 1 September 2008
Israeli navy fires on unarmed fishing boats and human rights workers
(OFF THE COAST OF GAZA) 1 September 2008: Israeli Naval vessels are currently firing on unamrmed Palestinian fishing boats and international human rights workers off the coast of the Gaza Strip. The fishing boats are several miles off the coast of Gaza City, in Palestinian territorial waters. As of 11am (4am EST) no one had been injured, but live ammunition is still being fired in the direction of the civilian boats.
The unarmed boats went to sea at dawn this morning, in an attempt to fish in their own water. Six international human rights workers from five different countries accompanied the fishermen in the hopes that their presence would deter the Israeli military from firing on the fishermen. In the past the Israeli military has shot and killed unarmed Palestinian fishermen for trying to fish in their own waters.
CALL:
For more information, please contact:
"When at a distance, estimated by our fishing boat’s captain, of 7 nautical miles from the coast, we dropped our fishing nets and started fishing the Israeli warships rushed to reach our position.
"One of the warships positioned at a distance less than 200 metres alongside of our fishing boat, opened fire in our direction at least 4 times during the day. It was intimidating fire directed into the water, but some bursts almost touched the hull of our boat. A cannon shot almost reached us. Making attempt of obtaining a radio contact was useless. Soldiers on the Israeli warship ordered, with the use of megaphones, the area evacuation. And after that they were shooting. Sometimes they were shooting before having ordered. Once they shooted to our fishing nets and tried to damaged it sailing directly on them.
"Unfortunetely our big mistake was not having with us neither cameras nor video cameras that, together with megaphones to be used exactly like they do, I consider essential for our next fishing missions.
"Despite these intimidations the fishing was rich and profitable, we brought ashore quantity of fish ten times bigger than the usual Palestinians fishers standard."
01/09/2008
Vittorio Arrigoni
The unarmed boats went to sea at dawn this morning, in an attempt to fish in their own water. Six international human rights workers from five different countries accompanied the fishermen in the hopes that their presence would deter the Israeli military from firing on the fishermen. In the past the Israeli military has shot and killed unarmed Palestinian fishermen for trying to fish in their own waters.
- Accompanying the fishermen are:
- Vittorio Arrigoni, Italy
- Georgios Karatzas, Greece
- Adam Qvist, Denmark
- Andrew Muncie, Scotland
- Donna Wallach, USA
- Darlene Wallach, USA
CALL:
- The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
- Tel. +972 2 530 3111
- The British Embassy in Tel Aviv
- +972 3 725 1222
- The US Embassy in Tel Aviv
- +972 2 625 5755
For more information, please contact:
- (at sea, off Gaza coast) Vittorio Arrigoni, +972 598 826 516
- (at sea, off Gaza coast) Donna Wallach, +972598 836 420
- (Cyprus) Greta Berlin, +357 99 081 767 / iristulip@gmail.com
- (Cyprus) Osama Qashoo, +357 97 793 595
"When at a distance, estimated by our fishing boat’s captain, of 7 nautical miles from the coast, we dropped our fishing nets and started fishing the Israeli warships rushed to reach our position.
"One of the warships positioned at a distance less than 200 metres alongside of our fishing boat, opened fire in our direction at least 4 times during the day. It was intimidating fire directed into the water, but some bursts almost touched the hull of our boat. A cannon shot almost reached us. Making attempt of obtaining a radio contact was useless. Soldiers on the Israeli warship ordered, with the use of megaphones, the area evacuation. And after that they were shooting. Sometimes they were shooting before having ordered. Once they shooted to our fishing nets and tried to damaged it sailing directly on them.
"Unfortunetely our big mistake was not having with us neither cameras nor video cameras that, together with megaphones to be used exactly like they do, I consider essential for our next fishing missions.
"Despite these intimidations the fishing was rich and profitable, we brought ashore quantity of fish ten times bigger than the usual Palestinians fishers standard."
01/09/2008
Vittorio Arrigoni
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