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BEWARE - WOUNDED LION!
The Other Israel - Nr. 4 -
Tel Aviv 21.11.98
Unterdrücke nicht und bedränge nicht!
After having exhausted all possible
delaying tactics, Prime Minister Netanyahu had no choice but to carry out
the first installment of the obligations which he took in the Wye River
Memorandum, and hand over a sizable slice of the northern West Bank - an
area where tens of thousands of Palestinians live in thirty-four towns and
villages. Until last Thursday, the Israeli army was able to enter these
villages at any time, day or night, imposing curfews, knock on the door and
arrest whoever they wanted. As of Friday morning, such a visitation by the
Israeli military would be an act of war. Yet the whole area remains an
enclave, surrounded on all sides by still-occupied territory...
On the morning of Thursday, November 18 - one
day before this internationally-hailed withdrawal - Israeli peace
activist Salim Abbas happened to visit a more remote and obscure part of
the West Bank, the Jiftlic area of the Jordan Vally. He had come to
visit the Da'is extended Beduin family, living with the owner's consent
on a plot of privately-owned Palestinian land - and arrived just in time
to witness a massive raid by the army and the semi-military Border
Guards, who went on a rampage of destruction: demolishing the Beduins'
tents and confiscating them as well as the inhabitants' meager
belongings; ruining the cattle-pen and confiscating the goats;
confiscating also the Beduins' single truck; and to cap it all,
destroying the water tank and spilling its contents into the sands.
Sixty people - men, women and children - were left under the open
sky, with literally nothing left to them.
On the same day, Prime Minister Netanyahu
arrived at a spot not far from there, to address a gathering of the
Jordan Valley settlers and assure them that the region "will remain
Israel's forever". In pursuit of that purpose, it seems that an effort
is being made to "cleanse" the Jordan Valley of Arab presence...
The honeymoon which never really began is
definitely over. Netanyahu reluctantly resigned himself to the Wye
Agreement, whose full implementation will leave the Palestinians with
about 40% of the West Bank - but he seems all the more determined to
hold on at any cost to the other 60%. "Move, run and grab as many
hilltops as you can. What we take now will stay ours, what we don't grab
will go to them" was Foreign Minister Sharon's exhortation to the
settlers.
In a backhanded way, the same speech also
acknowleged that a Palestinian state is inevitable - but according to
Sharon, such a state will consist of no more than than these 40%, a
series of disconnected enclaves, and will be denied any share of
Jerusalem. The Palestinian position about such a "solution" was clearly
expressed in Arafat's "Rifle Speech": faced with this possibility, the
Palestinians will have no choice but to use their guns.
Arafat's speech, as well as Sharon's,
reverberated throughout the country and the world - until Big Brother
intervened from Washington, to restore a temporary calm. And so the
process continues - but in an atmosphere of utter distrust. Netanyahu's
reluctant piecemeal handing over of territory fails to build any
confidence among the Palestinians. And Arafat's issuing of decrees
"against incitement" and for "the confiscation of illegal weapons" -
which he is obliged to do according to Wye - does not arouse a strong
feeling of trust on the Israeli side.
Peace organizations in Israel are nowadays
virtually flooded with reports and requests for help from Palestinians
targeted in one way or another.
At the beginning of this week, activists of
the Committee Against House Demolitions rushed to the village of
El-Khader, where military bulldozers destroyed hundreds of olive trees
in creating a new "by-pass road" for settler use and provoked a major
confrontation in which tear gas and "rubber bullets" were fired at the
villagers. At the moment, work at El-Khader was halted by an appeal to
the Supreme Court lodged by LAW, the Palestinian Human Rights
Association - but judging by past precedent, this would be a stricktly
temporary halt (Details halper@iol.co.il).
The twelve "by-pass roads" planned to be
constructed in the near future throughout the West Bank are a direct
threat to many villages, especially since military law and practice
requires a "sterile corridor" of 350 metres, all along the road - which
means not only that Palestinians would not be allowed to build there,
but even existing houses, built long before anybody planned a road
there, may get demolished.
An ever-present "hot spot" is East Jerusalem.
Today, (Sunday, Nov.22), is the deadline set to the family of Riad
Gozlan at Silwan Village, just south of the Old City Wall, to vacate
their home; the enlightened courts of the state of Israel had awarded
ownership of the house to the KKL (Jewish National Fund) on the basis of
a title-deed from the 1920's (of course, Arab title-deeds from before
1948 are considered invalid by the same courts); for its part, the KKL
intends to appoint the religious-nationalist settler association "Elad",
which for years covets the Gozlan home, as "caretakers" on its behalf.
The Gozlan Family is determined to hold on to
their home. Peace Now activists intend to hold a solidarity
demonstration at the spot this very afternoon (rendezvous at 4.00 PM at
the parking lot opposite the Dung Gate). After the demonstration ,
people who are interested will be welcomed to stay at the Rozlan's
house.
This afternoon, some fifty Peace Now
protesters, together with many Palestinians headed by Feisal Huisseini,
held a demonstration in front of the threatened house. So far, no
settler or police arrived to carry out the eviction order and the Gozlan
Family - ten adults and eighteen children - are determined to resist.
Other inhabitants of Silwan are ready to rush to the scene
instantly at need, as are Israeli and Palestinian activists from further
afield. (American Friends of Peace Now -
apndc@peacenow.org - have launched a call upon donors to avoid
giving to the Jewish National Fund because of its involvement in
the affair.)
A further Peace Now protest is scheduled for
Tuesday, Dec. 1 at 11.00 - when government officials are to show
building contractors around the confiscated Palestinian land at Har
Homa/Jebl Abu Ghneim, in preparation for construction of a "Jews only"
neighborhood there. (Info 02-5660648, 050-331726,
peacenow@actcom.co.il).
Meanwhile, a group of young people in
Jerualem and Tel-Aviv started collecting cloths and toys for the
AL-Atrash family, which is living - father, mother and ten children - in
a tent ercted on the ruins of their house south of Hebron, which was
declared "illegally built" and demolished for three consecutive times
(Details: Moran, 02-6222790, morac@netvision.net.il).
For all that Netayahu promises and allows the
settlers, an increasing number of them come to see that they have no
future on the West Bank; that implementation of Wye will make their
settlements into enclaves at the end of long and narrow corridors
(Israeli enclaves within Palestinian enclaves, but that is no
consolation to either side...). Formidable fortifications would be
erected around each settlement (anti-tank trenches, electric fences,
guard towers and projectors were just a few of the items mentioned by
the army as indispensable). Moreover, though Netanyahu promises that
Wye will be "the very last concession", many settlers who were quoted in
the press last week don't believe him - and would rather go away right
now, provided they could get enough compensations to let them get
started anew inside Israel. Labor Knesset Member Yossi Katz tabled again
this week his "Compensation for Voluntarily Evacuating Settlers" bill;
it was greeted by howls of anger from the settler leaders - but perhaps
not from all of their followers...
In fact, most settlers have not come to live
there for ideological reasons, but simply because of the
government-subsidised housing which they could not get elsewhere. The
present circumstances make such housing less and less atrractive - which
could lead to a rift among the settlers, eventually isolating the
religious-nationalist hardcore.
The curious and alarming theology/ideology
motivating this group was deeply explored by Sefi Rechlevski in his
controversial book "Messiah's Donkey" (named for Rabbi Kook's doctrine
that the "sinner" secular Israelis have the God-given task of building
up a state which will then be taken over by the Elect and be transformed
into a pure theocratic-nationalist polity). Rechlevski will expound his
theories in person at a meeting organised by Gush Shalom, to take place
this Tuesday (Nov. 24) at 8.30 PM, in Tel-Aviv's Tzavta Hall (details
03-5221732, info@gush-shalom.org).
At the moment, the settlements seem doomed to
remain for still a long time a source of endless friction, confrontation
and bloodshed - until an Israeli government with real vision and courage
will dismantle them or until circumstances force this step upon the
Israeli side. The same seems true also for the entirely futile Israeli
occupation of South Lebanon and the endless guerrilla war, which gets
attention only when Israeli soldiers get killed. This grim cycle
repeated itself once again last week. The death of three more young
soldiers aroused protests by soldiers' parents, ranging from politically
articulated statements and demonstrations by organised groups such as
the Four Mothers movement (lindabz@post.tau.ac.il),
to the purely personal outcry of newly-bereaved families visited by
President Weitzmann, and to the desperate mother who tried to commit
suicide on the day her soldier son was sent to Lebanon. And still, of
the two options available - unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon or
negotiation with Syria about the Golan which will also include Damascus'
Lebanese sattelite, the government chooses neither one and maintains the
status quo....
Twice within twenty-four hours a
demonstration was held outside the defence ministry in Tel-Aviv: on
Tuesday the mourning vigil by the Four Mothers movement, upon hearing
the news from Lebanon; on the following day, a solidarity vigil with the
imprisoned 28-year old conscientious objector Yehuda Igos. (An
anarcho-pacifist who objects to armies and nations in general and to the
oppression of the Palestinians in particular, Igos was rejected by the
army's Commission on Exemptions on Grounds of Conscience, and sent off
to military prison 4). (Yehuda Igos Solidarity Committee -
morac@netvision.net.il)
The two vigils were different in their
slogans and in the ages of their participants (mostly middle-aged to
elderly in the first, teen-aged radicals predominating in the second).
Yet they both constitute part of what a columnist called "the
de-militarization of Israeli society". In Ha'ir of this week, socilogist
Danny Bartal predicted a massive movement of refusal to military
service, should Netayahu's policies lead to war; and this was curiously
echoed on the other side of the political spectrum, with Yisrael
Zeira of the National Religious Party stating: "We have lost the
struggle for the hearts of the people. The Palestinian state is coming,
and to deny it is like denying the sunrise. Netanyahu had no choice - he
was afraid that in the next war half the people will desert him"
(Ha'aretz, Nov.6).
Adam Keller Beate
Zilversmidt
 
 
P.S. Please send the following message (or
anything else you want to make up) to Prime Minister Netanyahu, and if
you have access to fax - also to the military addresses, for which no
e-mail is available.
To ... ... ... ...
I would like to protest in the strongest possible terms your
persecution of the West Bank Beduins in general, and in particular the
brutal attack on the members of the Da'is family at the Jiftlic on
Novemeber 18, 1998. I demand that you immediately restore to the family
their confiscated property, compensate them for what was destroyed, and
let them live in peace on their meager land. I also call upon you, with
relation to the Jahalin Beduins uprooted for the extention of the
Maa'leh Adumim settlement, to let them have reasonable conditions on the
Abu-Dis hilltop which your government designated for them - including
registered ownership of their plots of land, building permits, and
financial support to build dwellings instead of those demolished by
Israeli forces.
Fax Numbers
- Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai
972 3 6976218.
- Head of the Military Government's Civil
Administration Dov Tzadaka: 972 2 9977341
- Coordinator of Activities in the Occupied
Territories
General Ya'akov Or 972 2 9977356
E-Mail:
Please send us a copy of any answer which you
get: otherisr@actcom.co.il.
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