Jerusalem’s municipal planning committee ratified today the plan to built 1,600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo neighborhood in the “eastern” part of the city (Ramat Shlomo is actually in north Jerusalem, but still in the part of the city which Israel occupied and unilaterally annexed in 1967).
Three months ago, the initial decision on the project caused a major crisis between Washington and Jerusalem. According to a report in Haaretz, the committee approved today the protocol of the meeting that dealt with Ramat Shlomo. This is a procedural act, which will enable the city council to move the project to its next stage.
Committee member Yair Gabay told Haaretz that Prime Minister Netanyahu prevented the protocol from being ratified on the committee’s last meeting, due to the visit of U.S. special envoy George Mitchell.
“Each Friday, there are at least 10 demonstrations involving Israelis and internationals in the West Bank,” tells me Didi Remez, as we drive to Nabi Saleh, the tiny village that has been fighting for months to regain access to a small spring that was taken over by settlers from nearby Halamish. Dozens of Israelis come to these protests, not counting the hundreds who arrive each Friday to Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem.
Not much is going on when we arrive at Nabi Saleh. As we wait for the protesters to gather, we are offered lunch and cold water in a local house. Around 1.00 pm we join a small march down the village’s main street. Suddenly, three army jeeps appear and block the street, and about a dozen soldiers come out. About 25 protesters, most of them children and young girls, go all the way down to the soldiers, singing and shouting, accompanied by the photographers and the internationals. This goes on for about half an hour.
Then someone throws a stone. The soldiers respond with tear gas, lots of it. Together with a few other Israelis, I find shelter behind a local house. The wind carried the gas into the house and the old woman who lived there is now seating outside, tears running down her face. She signals me not to try and wash my face and instead just wait for the effect of the gas to fade.
The soldiers are chasing protesters into the village. Some of them occupy one of the houses, while the others fire tear gas from the street. Some of the nearby houses fill with gas, as their windows are broken from previous demonstrations. The Palestinians move to the upper part of the village, while the Israelis and internationals – who don’t take part in the stone throwing – are looking for safe corners, trying to avoid both the gas and the (very few) flying stones. Every now and then, the wind carries another cloud of gas towards our way.
The soldiers are shooting the gas cans directly at the protesters, and not in an arch, like I remember we were taught to do it in the army (you can see this in a these videos from a previous demonstration). Later, a Palestinian is injured after suffering a direct hit in his face.
After a couple of hours, we decide to leave the village (though the protest will go on almost till dusk). On the way back to the car, I see several boys, around the age of ten, falling to the ground, gasping for air after inhaling too much gas. Their faces are red and one of them is hardly breathing, but in a few minutes he recovers and rejoins the protesters.
A woman whose house was hit by tear gas (p: Didi Remez)
By the time we get to Jerusalem, the protest on Shikh Jarrah is already on its way. The turnout is the best I’ve seen here: between 300 to 400 people. Without PR or money for busing, and after no less 30 protesters were arrested last week – somehow, it seemed that the protest is just getting bigger and bigger.
As Lisa Goldman notes, after Nabi Saleh, Jerusalem seems like a peaceful afternoon get-together. But for me it’s just as important, and I feel more at home here. Supporting the protest in the West Bank villages is crucial, but I find it emotionally hard to bear. After the last time I took part in it, it took me a full month to mount the strength to come again. To have soldiers point guns at me and fire tear gas is not only scary, but extremely strange. There is something in this experience that shakes my world. After all, I’m still an Israeli, and a reserve captain in the IDF for that matter!
I don’t take part in the stone throwing, but I definitely understand it and support the villagers in their struggle. Yet today in Nabi Saleh I asked myself from time to time what happens if the demonstration becomes more violent. What would I do – or feel – if a Molotov Cocktail is thrown?
I don’t have a good answer.
The protests in Jerusalem don’t carry such ideological and emotional problems. Ironically, the political message here is much more radical, since many Israelis who think we have nothing to do in Bilin or Nabi Saleh won’t like the idea of handing Sheikh Jarrah to the Palestinians, but the difference between the two events is unmistakable. Shikh Jarrah is an Israeli demonstration (with some Palestinians present); in the West Bank’s villages it’s the Palestinians who lead the action, and we are just guests. I find it fitting. I don’t expect many Israelis to come to Nabi Saleh to protest, but I do hope many will continue to take part in the demonstrations in Jerusalem, and that many others would join them.
Driving back from Jerusalem, this time with my mother, I was a bit encouraged. Recently, I’ve come to realize that Fridays in Sheikh Jarrah don’t feel like any other leftist event I’ve been to – and I had my share of them. Over the years, we had much bigger demonstrations, on much bigger issues – but something feels more real here, something even feels better. As if for the first time in years we are really doing exactly the right thing, and for the right reasons.
Protesters in Sheikh Jarrah
I forgot my camera today, so excuse the crappy photos taken on my phone. When I get better ones from one of the photographers who were with us, I will post them.
UPDATE: read Amitai Sandy’s account of the day’s protest in village of Maasra on comment #2.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a response to a post on Jewlicious.com which dealt with the renovations of the Hurva synagogue in Jerusalem’s old city. This was a unilateral move by Israel, which brought some protest from the Palestinian side, and I’ve used this opportunity to criticize Israeli policies in the occupied parts of the city.
Last week, the author of the original post, which uses the nick “TheMiddle”, posted his reply. It’s worth reading, also because TM sums up pretty well the “pragmatic” Israeli view of city and its future: a unified capitol now, which will probably be divided later.
TM objects to expelling Palestinians from their houses (on the condition that they settled there before 1967), but supports Israel’s actions in the Old City and on the nearby neighborhood of Silwan. Though he doesn’t say it in so many words, I conclude that he also supports the construction of new neighborhoods for Jews on the eastern (occupied) parts of the city. I gather this from article 9 in his post, where he states that building houses for Jews on purchased land is OK.
I’d like to use this post to argue that Jerusalem is not a unified city, that its Arab residents are discriminated both de-facto and de-jure, that Israel is doing almost everything in its power to colonize the city and to push Palestinians out of it, and that from a legal perspective, there is not such a big difference between building in the Old City of Jerusalem to having Jews enter houses in Sheikh Jerrah (which TM opposes). The international community is right in not recognizing Israeli control over the so-called unified city.
If one wants to understand the nature of Israeli occupation, its pseudo-legal system and all its absurdities, all you have to do is look closely at what’s going on in Jerusalem.
————————–
The Israeli government decided to annex the eastern parts of the Jerusalem two weeks after the Six Days war, on June 26 1967. Seven years ago, Haaretz published some parts of this cabinet meeting’s protocol. The ministers took great effort to portray this as an administrative order, and to avoid public attention as much as they could. They even contacted the Israeli Censor involved for this purpose.
After the war, the government also formed a secret administrative unit called Igum who was in charge of purchasing land from Arab citizens of Jerusalem and turning it over to Jews. This unit was also involved in “encouraging” Arabs to leave the city. Israel also took immediate unilateral moves to evacuate the Jewish part of the Old City from its Arab residents. Luckily, an offer by IDF chief Rabbi to blow up the mosques on Temple Mountain was rejected.
There are two very important issues that must be understood and considered when discussing Jerusalem:
1. Israel annexed in East Jerusalem an area more than 10 times bigger than the original Jordanian city – 71,000 dunams (71 sq. km.) as opposed to 6,000 dunams of Jordanian Jerusalem (see map above). This area includes 28 Palestinian towns and villages which were never part of historic Jerusalem. Since than, more than one third of the annexed land was confiscated by the state and used for the construction of Jewish neighborhoods. They house now around 250,000 Jews. Israel also confiscated land to build its government offices in the east side of town, including in the controversial Sheikh Jerrah neighborhood.
2. When Israel annexed East Jerusalem and the towns and villages surrounding it, it gave Palestinians living there a status of “residents” and not citizens. This is a major point. Residents cannot vote in the general elections, they are not issued Israeli Passports; they cannot buy apartments or houses on state land (which makes most of the land in Israel and almost all the land in Jerusalem). If they leave Jerusalem for more than 7 years they lose their residency permit, and are left without any civil status; and because of the new citizenship order, they cannot live in East Jerusalem with partners who are not residents as well. If a Jerusalem Palestinian marries a woman from nearby Ramallah or Bethlehem, he can’t bring his wife to live at his home. Read the rest of this entry »
Jerusalem – about 200 people took part in the weekly protest against the Jewish colonization of Sheikh Jerrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Among them were chairmen of NIF Naomi Hazan, former Knesset speaker Avrum Burg and author David Grossman.
During the protest, several activists, among them Grossman, marched near the area of the four houses already occupied by settlers. Four protesters were arrested. Throughout the rest of the demonstration activists occasionally tried to break into the closed area and were pushed back, somewhat violently, by police and border police forces.
There have been numerous arrests of protesters in recent weeks in Sheikh Jerrah. Two weeks ago the police arrested one of the protest organizers on Friday evening at his home. He was later released without charges, after the police failed to present any evidence against him. In a different incident the head of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Hagai El-Ad, was also arrested, only to be released without charges as well.
I just ran across this post on Jewlicious.com site, which demonstrates so much of what is so absurd about the Israeli policy in East Jerusalem. It also teaches something about the people defending these policies.
The article deals with a Synagogue in occupied old Jerusalem and how Jews finally managed to reconstruct it in spite of Palestinian protest. The anonymous author praises the synagogue as “a symbol of return for the Jewish people to Jerusalem”.
Read the core of his argument:
The Hurva Synagogue has been rebuilt in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Old City is part of what is meant by “east Jerusalem” when people claim it belongs to the Palestinians. The Old City was all of Jerusalem until the mid-1800s and it had a Jewish majority at the time. As the population grew and Zionists from Europe funded growth of other neighborhoods, Jerusalem expanded beyond the Old City. However, a Jewish population remained there until 1948, when, in Israel’s War of Independence all of the Jews were evicted by the Jordanians and their allies, the local Arab forces (nee, Palestinians). In that war, Jordan, with its British trained forces, conquered east Jerusalem as well as the area west of the Jordan River which they promptly renamed “West Bank.”
When signing a cease fire agreement with Israel, the Jordanians refused to consider the cease fire lines as borders. Indeed, those borders have never been drawn and in a complex dance, when peace was signed with Jordan, the question of the “West Bank” was still incomplete because in 1988 the Jordanians renounced all rights to the territory. When people demand that Israel go back to 1967 lines, what they mean is that Israel should return to 1949 armistice lines. The problem with those lines, however, is that the Old City, with its Jewish Quarter and the Temple Mount and its Western Wall are on the non-Israel side because they fell into Jordanian hands.
(…)
Rebuilding the Hurva Synagogue is a symbol of return for the Jewish people to Jerusalem.
Now, this is the same logic that the supporters of the Jewish settlements in Sheikh Jerrah and Silwan follow: that this land belonged to Jews before 1948, and that by building there unilaterally and ignoring all Palestinian claims, Jews are not colonizing the land, but rather returning to it.
But this is actually the worst arguments Israelis can raise! If it’s in someone’s interest to recognize ownership of land according to the situation prior to 1948, it’s obviously the Palestinians. Palestinians have legitimate claims to houses and land inside Israel, most of them well documented by the British and the Ottomanians. Some families even hold the keys to the houses they abandoned (and in many cases, expelled from) in 1948. And If Israel was to return to the 1947 partition lines rather than the armistice lines, it would actually lose much more land that it would gain. This is the reason Israel’s first condition is to base all negotiations on the situation in 1949, not 1947.
In their typical rush to defend everything Israel is doing, the Jewish hipsters of Jewlicious are actually backing the most radical Palestinian claim – the one for a full right of return. Read the rest of this entry »
JERUSALEM – Around 300 people gathered in an unusually cold and rainy afternoon today for the weekly protest in Sheikh Jarrah, the Arab neighborhood in Jerusalem which is the recent target of Jewish colonization. Four Arab families in Sheikh Jarrah have been already evicted to the street with settlers moving to their homes. This week it was announced that 20 more housing unites for Jews are about to be built at the site of the old Shepherds Hotel in the neighborhood.
The attempts to colonize the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem are backed by the city mayor, Nir Barkat, and by the Israeli government. Earlier this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused president Obama’s demand to halt construction in East Jerusalem until the city’s final statues is decided.
It is important to note that while Israelis are claiming that both Jews and Arabs can live anywhere they like in the so-called unified city, Jerusalem’s Arabs are in fact forbidden from buying houses in most Jewish neighborhoods of the city, due to legal matters concerning their statues is residents, rather than citizens of Israel. You can read a full explanation for this here, and see an extremely well-prepared Sky interviewer pushing Mayor Barkat on this issue in this video:
Among the protesters today were MK Dov Khenin of left wing party Hadash, former Knesset speaker Avrum Burg, and author David Grossman. “[Political] reality has changed dramatically after Netanyahu’s meeting with Obama,” Grossman told Ynet today. “Obama has done at last what he and the US should have done a long time ago.” Read the rest of this entry »
Fareed Zakaria describes the future image of Israel, while Ambassador Oren rejects the notion of an American peace plan
Israel opposes the idea of an American Peace settlement that will lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. According to Ambassador Michael Oren, who was interviewed on PBS, trying to force a solution from the outside will be like “forcing somebody to fall in love.”
Asked if Israel wanted the Washington to present its own peace plan, Oren said:
“No. I think peace has to be made between two people sitting opposite a table. America can help facilitate that interaction. But at the end of the day, no one can force parties in any conflict in the world to make peace. It’s like forcing somebody to fall in love. We have to sit down and thresh it out between us.”
Oren added: “If we arrive at points where we can’t agree, we can’t close the gap between us, then we – both the Israelis and the Palestinians as well – are willing to look at various bridging formulas.”
“But America is not in a position where it’s going to come in and impose a plan. I don’t think that’s to anybody’s benefit. And I’m sure parties on all sides of this conflict understand that.”
The problem is that, left on its own, Israel would never leave the west bank. Even in the aftermath of the confrontation with the US administration last week, Netanyahu insisted that Israel will go on building Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. It is clear that all of Israel’s actions – as opposed to some of its declarations – are aimed at strengthening its control over the West Bank. This led even a realist and usually pro-Israeli person like Fareed Zakaria to saying that “this government has probably been the least responsive to concerns from Washington on the issue of the peace process in 20 years.”
“The central problem persists: Israel rules more than 3 million Palestinians who will never become citizens of Israel and yet do not have their own state. As they multiply, Israel’s status as a democracy becomes more and more complex; the country looks more and more like an island of rich Israelis set in a sea of Palestinian serfs.”
Notice the language Ambassador Oren uses to reject even the idea of an American offer. “It will be like forcing somebody to fall in love,” he says. It’s again this idea that the sole goal of the process is peace and security (the so-called “love”) for Israelis. But as I wrote before, and as Fareed Zakaria notes, the heart of the issue is the occupation, which holds 3 million Palestinians without basic rights for more than four decades. This is something Israelis simply don’t have in mind.
If Michael Oren or the Israeli government had a serious plan as how to solve this issue – not just vague lip service – it should have been heard a long time ago. Since all we get from Jerusalem is the usual rhetoric on why we can’t leave the West Bank, stop settling it or hand the Palestinians any rights, the world is right in offering it’s own solutions, and in applying more and more pressure on Israel.
The neo-con Jewish magazine Commentary features an article by law professor David Phillips, under the title The Illegal-Settlements Myth. Basically, it argues against the commonly accepted view, that the Israeli settlements in the West Bank violate international law, and most notably, the 4th Geneva Convention.
Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention forbids an occupying force from transferring his own population to the occupied territory. Prof. Phillips claim that (a) it is not clear whether the West Bank can be seen as “occupied land”, and (b) “transfer” only refers to the active, even forceful, move of civilians, which is not the case with the settlements.
I’m not a big fan of legalism when it comes to international relations. I think that legal debates, more often than not, tend to miss the point, and I believe the tendency of lawyers to cherry pick the cases that suit their claim can be very harmful when it comes to questions of power and justice, as most issues in international politics are. A good example of legalistic cherry-picking was Lawrence Siskinds attack on the Goldstone report which I wrote about a few weeks ago.
Prof. Phillips’ article – which has been since quoted by several bloggers and referred to in the Examiner – is even worse: it presents a new reading of the Forth Geneva Convention, but then it fails to follow through with its own logic. I will try to show here how. I won’t however go into the historical “facts” Prof. Phillips presents – many of them debatable at best – except when it is necessary to make my point. Here is such a case:
Phillips’ theory is based on the unique position of the West Bank as “unallocated territory,” i.e. land that was never recognized as belonging to a sovereign state. While describing the historical development that led to this state of affairs, Prof. Phillips casually notes that:
Over the course of the years to come, there was little dispute about Egypt’s sovereign right to the Sinai, and it was eventually returned after Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat broke the Arab consensus and made peace with Israel. Though the rulers of Syria have, to date, preferred the continuance of belligerency to a similar decision to end the conflict, the question of their right to the return of the Golan in the event of peace seems to hinge more on the nature of the regime in Damascus than any dispute about the provenance of Syria’s title to the land.
Really? “The rulers of Syria have, to date, preferred the continuance of belligerency?” If there is something which is not disputed, it’s the fact that since the mid 90’s, the Syrians have been offering peace in exchange for full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan – a deal that no Israeli PM was willing to accept. They are offering it right now by the way, but like his predecessors, PM Netanyahu promised, just before the elections, that Israel will not leave the Golan.
But even if you don’t believe all this, how could a legal scholar such as Prof. Phillips miss the simple fact that Israel annexed the occupied Golan in December 1981? So much for the “provenance of Syria’s title to the land.” Was it his rush to blame everything on Arab rejectionism that led him to state that “the question of their right to the return of the Golan in the event of peace seems to hinge more on the nature of the regime in Damascus?”
Than Prof. Phillips gets to his main point, the ownerless statues of the West bank. He notes that since the 80’s, settlements haven’t been built on private Arab land:
After the Elon Moreh case [a famous Supreme Court ruling from 1979], all Israeli settlements legally authorized by the Israeli Military Administration (a category that, by definition, excludes “illegal outposts” constructed without prior authorization or subsequent acceptance) have been constructed either on lands that Israel characterizes as state-owned or “public” or, in a small minority of cases, on land purchased by Jews from Arabs after 1967.
Later he adds that:
Even settlement opponents concede that many settlements closest to Palestinian population areas, on the central mountain range of the West Bank, were built without government permission and often contrary to governmental policy; their continued existence forced the government to recognize the settlement as an existing fact. Given this history, it is questionable to claim that Israel “transferred” those settlers.
This is where I’m starting to get confused. If the settlements are “legally authorized”, and properly built on public land, how come they are, at the same time, “without permission” and “contrary to governmental policy?” could the settlers have colonized the West Bank only on locations authorized by the state to begin with, and at the same time, act against its policy?
