How to See Palestine: An ABC of Colonialism

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Critical Inquiry, November 28, 2016

Acknowledgements

I visited accompanying the art activist group MTL and with the generous support of many Palestinians, especially Habshe Yossef. I would also like to acknowledge the decolonial activist group Zochrot for arranging my meeting at al-Aqarib. The full web project is still being worked on by techs at USC for security. When available it will be  here. For the time being I have made a PDF of the project that you can access, with either the full text or just the introduction.

That said, all the opinions expressed here are mine alone.

Visiting Palestine was astonishing for the sheer intensity of the oppression. It was clarifying to see how the occupation operates and how little it cares what others think of it. It was humbling to see what being an activist really means and how privileged academic activism seems compared to the daily litany of harm to which any person in Palestine is exposed.

I saw elements of many different visual regimes struggling to cohere into what might become a new form. Surveillance is universal, but it’s not a panopticon because the jailers are all too visible. Religion is the justification for settlement, as it was under high imperialism, but there is no desire to convert the unbelievers. Counterinsurgency seeks “full spectrum dominance” but expects the insurgency to be permanent unless its conditions of possibility are removed.

The one thing everyone on all sides agrees on is that it’s all about land—who owns it, who can farm it, live on it, use the rainwater that falls on it, mine the minerals below—and so on. Whatever this is, it’s patently a form of colonialism. So, I decided to use my impressions to create an ABC of occupation. Unlike Nicolai Bukharin’s classic ABC of Communism, this is not a program. It is a report back on the heart of visuality’s own contradiction. That is to say, Palestine is an actually existing possibility for the general condition of social life in the twenty-first century.

Perhaps the election of Donald Trump clarifies this issue somewhat. The complicated ways in which someone willing to discuss Palestine gets produced as anti-Semitic surely pale by comparison with the insertion of Stephen Bannon, an old-fashioned Jew hater into the White House.

Perhaps the success of a campaign based on the promise of a “beautiful” wall, xenophobia, hatred of Islam and Muslims and a willingness to separate existing populations will help people understand why Palestine is an example not an exception.

Perhaps.

A is for Area A

The regime covers the territory with signs, expressing its intent (fig. 1). These signs are posted wherever Area A, under the nominal control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), borders with what the regime considers to be the state of Israel. Apparently, the Hebrew and Arabic versions are at variance. The English message is clear: Palestinians are dangerous. Red alert. Less obvious is that Area A covers only 18 percent of what is still referred to as the “West Bank” in a series of increasingly isolated pockets, centered on the Palestinian cities like Ramallah and Nablus. No functional state can be made from these islands. The “two-state solution” is visibly impossible.

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Although Area A signs are quite common, there are no others. Where do you enter Area B (largely considered defunct on the ground) and Area C, now considered to be some 63 percent of the West Bank? There are no signs other than the change of rules of engagement and the appearance of settlements, settler buses and the settlers themselves. Palestinians seem to know, as do the settlers and the Israeli Defense Force. So the Area A signs are really for people like me, or Israeli leftists, venturing into the West Bank. I don’t think they work. I hadn’t been there long before the sight of an Area A sign made me relax and feel safe.

B is for Benjamin

Here is a sign of colonialism if there ever was one (fig. 2). It depicts the wolf emblem of the tribe of Benjamin, one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Massive in size and posted high above the ground, it is positioned on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, notionally running through Area C but extensively used by tourists going to the Dead Sea. However, according to legend, Joshua assigned this area to Benjamin. So what the sign indicates is that Oslo may have designated the land for Palestinians, but God had already given it to the Jews. Posted signs indicate that the area is officially known to the regime as Judea and Samaria. Benjamin’s land.

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The Benjamin sign is only in Hebrew, a message for the colonists alone. But its visual message is clear enough. The howling wolf arcs his body over a cluster of white houses with red roofs, set against green grass and trees. The imperial echo of the Roman wolf cannot be missed. The empire protects. The houses are recognizably those of the illegal settlements that cover every hilltop in the West Bank, which all have such red roofs, in part to make them visible to the Israeli air force as settlements.

The grass and trees transform the scene into an evocation of American suburbia, the picket-fence view of the world. When I took this picture, the temperature was 115 farenheit (45 celsius). Any greenery in a Dead Sea settlement—and there is plenty—is both an ideological production and an environmental fabrication that relies on appropriated water. 10,000 settlers living in the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea area use one-third of the water accessible to the entire Palestinian population in the West Bank (estimated at over 2.5 million).

C is for City.

Cities are the testing ground for what is now in formation. Hebron, a notionally Palestinian city, has become the front line of settler colonialism in Palestine. The settlers are expanding, street by street, using their mix of the carceral state, religion and military force. To visit Shuhada Street, formerly a shopping hub of the Palestinian neighborhood, you have to pass through a forbidding checkpoint. The street is closed, all Palestinian shops barred and sealed. Settlers and soldiers patrol to make sure you know who’s in charge.

Although the street has been closed for years, it was nonetheless disturbing to see Stars of David painted on the closed doors, as if in active forgetfulness of those other times and places where such stars were painted on Jewish shops to different ends (fig. 3). More disturbing yet was the thought that perhaps the ends were not that different after all.

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At that moment, a settler started to film us from the other side of the street. Losing my temper, I walked towards him, holding my phone so as to film him. He retreated, only to return with a soldier a few moments later. Nothing was said, but the point was made: we were photographing on their sufferance. We left in short order.

D is for Desert

In the Naqab desert (called the Negev by the regime and within what Palestinians call the forty-eight, meaning the 1948 border), Bedouins at the village of al-Aqarib told us how their village had been destroyed ninty-eight times by Israeli police (over one hundred times as of October 2016). Their crops have been sprayed with Round Up from the air. The Jewish National Foundation plants millions of trees over as much of the Bedouin land as they can, aided by well-meaning environmentally inspired donations from the United States and elsewhere.

The Bedouin’s animals are arrested as they graze by the Green Patrol—an ecological unit of the regime—and the Bedouin are forced to pay heavy fines to retrieve them. How so? The regime has declared 85 percent of the Naqab to be state land or environmental reserves, so any person or animal setting foot in these areas is trespassing. The camels are arrested just like anyone else. Despite these conditions, we were treated to a lavish and delicious meal at al-Aqarib, according to the dictates of hospitality. A week after we left, the structures were demolished yet again.

G is for Giraffe

The Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi has called Israel a “carceral state.” A metonym of this condition, and its complications, can be found at Qalqilya zoo. Qalqilya is almost entirely surrounded by the Separation Wall, as a result of its involvement in the first Intifada. Despite this embattled status, it has within it a zoo, one of the few functioning public leisure spaces I saw.

Like most zoos, its containment of animals is grim. A brown bear paced in his cage relentlessly, as if wanting the Palestinian visitors to see his confinement as their own. Most dramatic is the separate museum that contains a number of stuffed animals. They died in the Intifada, as in the case of the giraffe, who lay down in fear during gunfire, causing her to die from her own blood pressure (fig. 4).

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It transpired that she was twelve months pregnant (out of fifteen), and so the zoo director, Sami Khader, turned taxidermist to preserve them. Their spindly bodies are perhaps indicative of his emergent skills or maybe testify to the emaciated condition of the animals under siege. You might see them as martyrs, nonhuman victims of the occupation, or as surrogates, waiting until Palestine is free to welcome other giraffes. It’s a poignant story, and there’s a film being made called Waiting for Giraffes and a published book called The Zoo On the Road to Nablus.

But there were very few visitors other than us to the museum, not least because there was an additional charge for admission. And then there’s always the occupation. During the Intifada the animals that did survive were forced to eat leaves from the trees and other local plants. At some point later, Dr. Sami (as he is known) decided to take animal food and other equipment from Israeli zoos. To do so is to break the boycott of Israel. Palestinians condemn his action.

Is sustaining a public resource and keeping animals alive a reasonable cause? Or is a boycott a boycott? Palestinians demonstrate time and again a long-term steadfast resistance, known as sumud in Arabic, to their own material and physical detriment. There is no simple and painless answer to this dilemma, which is the condition of being under occupation. The proper solution is, of course, an end to that occupation.

S is for Settlement

Perhaps the strongest impression that a visitor to Palestine receives is how many settlements there are in the West Bank. No one should imagine that they all can be removed in some future two-state solution. That’s why I initially put West Bank in quotation marks: there is no West Bank. As we were driving, we once went into a valley where there was no settlement. Surprised, I glanced at my watch. It was twenty-five seconds before the next settlement became visible.

Settlement landscape in Palestine is not hard to read because it is intended to dominate and intimidate (fig. 5). The settlements occupy hilltops to command a dominant viewpoint all around. The windows of the buildings face out to have as many eyes engaged in this monitoring as possible. They are close together for supposed safety, built behind defensive walls on land cleared of trees. There’s little left to tell you that Palestinians once farmed the land. Even the slow-growing olive trees have been cleared to make way for fast-growing pines.

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The pines are cultivated for timber, but they also serve to make the settlements look established. And they remove a resource from Palestinians. Locals told us that the Israelis had sedated and removed even the local wildlife, like deer and eagles. I have not been able to independently verify this account, but the absence of wildlife was notable.

In this valley, though, one farmer has kept a foothold. Using Ottoman-era documents to demonstrate ownership, the family has been able to cling to their land. Their goat pen is visible at bottom left. Thousands more were not so “lucky.” Their land is gone, appropriated or made useless. The Bedouin at al-Aqarib have similar documents that have not helped them.

T is for Tell es Sultan

A ‘tell’ is the name for an archaeological mound created by an abandoned human occupation (fig. 6). In Tell es Sultan, just outside Jericho, the British architect Kathleen M. Kenyon excavated human settlements reaching back to 10,000 BCE. That’s the very beginning of the Holocene, the now concluded window in which stable climatic conditions allowed for settled agriculture and what we call civilization.

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Kenyon’s signature “stratigraphic” style allows us to see the unfolding of human possibility from that early period, via the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages to the Romans. Her vertical method emphasizes these changes over time, rather than allowing for a horizontal exploration of how people lived in any one epoch. The discoveries of tombs on the north side of the site were in fact made by Palestinians from the ‘Ein-as-Sultan camp that held 20,000 refugees after 1948. In 1967, all but a thousand or so were expelled into Jordan. The British Museum where some of Kenyon’s objects are now housed makes no reference to the Palestinian role in discovering the tombs or to the camp, which is visible if you know where to look in the site photograph provided. No one does, they all rush past to get to the Egyptian “mummies,” human remains on display for tourist consumption.

Everything changes. An urban civilization fell circa 2530 BCE. It was not restored until 1900 BCE. The big white tourist buses arrive and take a look at what they incorrectly believe to be the fallen walls of Jericho and leave. When you look up at the mountains above you realize what a mote in the eye of geological time these little ripples have been.

Q is for Qalqilya

Everywhere you look in Palestine, there’s detritus—discarded packaging, demolished housing, unfinished settlements, abandoned cars, electrical components, and trash and waste of all kinds. In Area C, most of the West Bank, no one is authorized to pick up trash—the PA has no authority, and the IDF could care less. In the refugee camps the United Nations steps in. Elsewhere, it piles up or people burn it, contributing to the omnipresent smog.

At the Qalqilya checkpoint at the end of the day, after the last few workers have returned around 7:30 at night, crossing back into Palestine from Israel where they work, no one hangs around (fig. 7). To be sure of getting through in time for work, people will begin queuing again at 2 a.m. to be well-placed when the checkpoint opens at six. It processes one person at a time. Around four thousand will go through.

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And so coffee cups, soft drink bottles, bus tickets, and candy wrappers pile up, signs of lives lived in transit (fig. 8). As they sediment into the ground, the impermeable plastics and metals will await some future archaeologist, one who will note with surprise the sudden collapse of a short-lived but apparently consumer-oriented society. They will puzzle over the fences and walls; what purpose could they have served? Perhaps a new legend, like that of Joshua and the walls of Jericho will have been created. It’ll be a long wait for these new investigators; evolution takes place in deep time. The plastics, metals, and rocks won’t mind.

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No fires or inciting politicians can destroy our shared society

Samah Salaime, +972, November 26, 2016

The wildfire that struck Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam left our Jewish-Arab village more resilient than ever before. We invite Israel’s politicians to learn from us on how to heal our society’s wounds.

Fire fighters try to extinguish a forest fire in the forest near Neve Shalom and Latrun, outside Jerusalem, November 22, 2016. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)Fire fighters try to extinguish a forest fire in the forest near Neve Shalom and Latrun, outside Jerusalem, November 22, 2016. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

Our country has been up in flames this past week. Hundreds of fires have broken out in various areas resulting in tens of thousands of people being evacuated from their homes. The first fire started last Tuesday at Neve Shalom-Wahat al Salam, a unique community between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv where Jews and Arabs live together in equality, which struggled to quell the flames and bring peace to the region. My husband and two children and I were evacuated from with 300 others, fearing of our lives and the destruction of our homes.

It was frightening for all of us. However what was even more frightening was the reaction of some of the countries journalists and politicians who used the opportunity to ignite and inflame hatred, claiming that arson was the cause of the wildfires. Israel’s Education Minister Naftali Bennett posted an unfortunate and irresponsible Facebook status, in which he wrote that “The only ones capable of setting the land on fire are people to whom it does not belong.” Rather than unifying and reassuring Israeli citizens — if only slightly — Bennett incited against an entire public and inflamed the public atmosphere.

Following the elections in the United States, the world has become a dangerous place, as sparks have begun to fly in all directions, igniting hatred and fear. We have seen this over the past decade in Europe with new immigrants, and we now see it in the U.S., as white supremacists begin to cheer on Trump’s victory as a victory for the ‘white race,’ while graffiting swastikas on walls.

The fire at Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam was clearly an unfortunate accident, as was the one in the neighboring town of Nataf. One reporter, an expert in arson, deemed the fire an “inspiration” to other supposed pyromaniacs, giving second and third-rate politicians carte blanche to do what they are best at: incite. But perhaps the journalist was right; since the fire in my community was an inspiration. We made it through the freezing night together in the fields below our homes, where we realized that our community can teach this country’s leadership a thing or two about humane behavior in times of crisis.

Cohesion and unity in the face of fire is not so surprising in our community – the first and only Jewish-Arab community in the Middle East. It is what makes us feel that 40 years of living together through wars, intifadas, crises, military “campaigns,” and lots of pain has been worthwhile. They have been years of valuable teaching and learning; investment in people rather than stones; investment in one another, rather than in fences and barriers.

Pro-annexation Jewish Home ministers Ayelet Shaked and Naftali Bennett during a preliminary vote on the ‘Regulation Law’ to legalize ‘illegal’ settlement outposts, November 16, 2016. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)Jewish Home ministers Ayelet Shaked and Naftali Bennett in the Knesset, November 16, 2016. Bennett hinted this past week that Arabs were responsible for the spate of wildfires across Israel. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Our hearts were open as we waited in the fields below, where a protective ring circled our community as the rescue forces fought to safeguard our life’s project, built on a hilltop surrounded by fires that raged on every side. (Those of us who are dedicated to living together in peace have felt this way often.) Meanwhile our neighbors, Kibbutz Nachshon, Bekoa, and Tel Shahar, opened their gates to us. At 6 a.m. they took us in; Arab and Jewish men, women and children and offered us a warm and cozy place to recover, without checking our identity cards to check which nation we belonged to.

If the world is looking for inspiration, and our minister of education is looking to bring our people together instead of pulling us apart, we invite you to join the Arab and Jewish families who send their children to our bilingual school. On the day after the fire, the pupils and teachers got together and cleaned up the school grounds, where for more than 30 years Jewish and Arab children have studied together every day — through war and through peace as equals, promoting peace and shared society. We invite him to observe how this week we set out with 40 up-and-coming politicians from Israel and Palestine to seek new solutions together and open avenues of communication. We invite him to learn from us how to struggle to bind a shared society together, not to pull it apart.

Students from Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam clean up the school grounds following a wildfire at the Jewish-Arab village. (Lindsay Stanek)Students from Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam clean up the school grounds following a wildfire at the Jewish-Arab village. (Lindsay Stanek)

The attempt to sabotage the humanity of any people who share a common space in order to survive politically is a highly dangerous experiment —one that places the lives of millions all over the world. We have seen the results in the past, we see it happening all over the world today. This is truly playing with fire. If a burned forest takes years to rehabilitate, the work required to heal the wounds of hatred and fear is far more difficult.

Although it is hard to imagine that the voices we are hearing today, even from your political leaders, will lead us to a better society, I urge you, dear readers, for the health of your minds and your sanity, not to listen to the voices of malice or be carried away in the cold, dry winds of hatred and fear. Since inside that fear lies an unsustainable fire that eventually leads to hell. Look around and see that people, irrespective of religion, race and gender, are afraid of the fire and other disasters, just like you are. It is best to learn how to survive it together, or else we will burn together.

Palestinians Blamed for Forest Fires Across Palestine

Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, November 25, 2016

But fires are raging across Western Asia

Middle East Fires, Past Week (Global Forest Watch, Washington, DC)

Over 200 forest fires are raging in Palestine (now renamed the Jewish State of Israel, including its occupied Palestinian territories). Many countries are helping put out the fires, including four teams of Palestinian firefighters (nobody helped Gaza when it was being fire-bombed by white phosphorous).

But the fascist, racist government of “Israel” blamed the Palestinians for the fires! Even some decent Israelis pointed out that fires are raging across Western Asia (aka the “Middle East”).

Perhaps coincidentally or otherwise, right after war criminal Netanyahu blamed Palestinians, new fires erupted near Palestinian communities. If you really want to know who is to blame for the damage, it is clearly Zionism, as I wrote in many articles and books before.

In 1901 at the World Zionist Congress, and despite objections of conscientious Jews, a Jewish National Fund (Keren Keyemet Li’Israel, or KKL) was established to further “Jewish colonization” (the term they used) of Palestine.

One of the tasks was to raise money, and they used the gimmick of collecting money for trees. Indeed they did plant trees, but it was unfortunately the highly flammable European pine tree.

After 1948-1949 when some 500 Palestinian villages and towns were depopulated, their lands (cultivated with figs, almonds, olives and other trees) were razed to the ground, and again resinous and inflammable pine trees were planted.

The same happened after 1967 when here Palestinian villages were demolished and their village lands planted with the same European pines; one of those villages is the biblical Imwas (see photos before and after here: freepaly.wordpress.com/tag/environmental-racism.

Palestinian village of ‘Imwas, 1958

Palestinian village of ‘Imwas after destruction by Israeli army, 1968

Ruins of Palestinian village of ‘Imwas, site of Jewish National Fund’s ‘Canada Park’, 1978

The choice of European pine trees was because a) they grow fast, b) they give a European look to the otherwise “Arab” landscape, and c) their leaves on the ground make it acidic, preventing growth or regrowth of endogenous trees. In total, KKL boasts that it planted 240 million pine trees.

Resinous pine is like petrol and burns with a ferocity. This was not the only environmentally catastrophic decision by the Zionist movement in Palestine: others include draining the Hula Wetlands and the diversion of the water of the river Jordan and now the Red Sea-Dead Sea Canal.

Environmentally, the current fires are deadly to all living creatures regardless of their origins, and they do spread to the remaining few indigenous forests and to human dwellings (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Atheist without distinction).

We environmentalists (Palestinian and Israeli) have long warned of the catastrophic consequences of politically driven decisions, guided by colonial ideology but devastating to native animals and plants.

So here we are: the remaining native Palestinians watching our lands go up in flames and being blamed for it. This is not unusual and we are the victims of others from long ago. We even paid the price of what happened in WWII (by Europeans to fellow Europeans).

I am thinking now if a meteor hits the Earth, we Palestinians will also pay a disproportionate price. 7 million of us are refugees or displaced people.

We in the Palestine Museum of Natural History and Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability (http://palestinenature.org) urge protection of our nature. Environmental conservation is a priority for all decent human beings, including guarding biodiversity (and human diversity).

Mazin Qumsiyeh
A bedouin in cyberspace, a villager at home
Professor and (volunteer) Director
Palestine Museum of Natural History
Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability
Bethlehem University
Occupied Palestine
http://qumsiyeh.org
http://palestinenature.org/

A letter from Gaza to the Natives of Standing Rock

Israa Suliman, WE ARE NOT NUMBERS, November 15, 2016

Dear Native Americans,

Although we are of different color, religion, culture and place, I have learned, as I read about the protests at Standing Rock, that we have much more in common than differences. When I read your history, I can see myself and my people reflected in yours. I feel in my core that your fight is my fight, and that I am not alone in the battle against injustice.

My ancestors were not the only ones who lived in Palestine. Jews, Christians and Arabs all lived side by side in my country. But my ancestors—including my grandparents and great-grandparents—were the indigenous people, just like you. And they suffered the same fate as your people. America's policy of occupation and displacement through forced marches like the Trail of Tears, and the gradual transfer of so many of your people to massive, impoverished reservations, hurts me deeply because it is so similar to the ethnic cleansing of my ancestors by the Israeli military occupation in what we call “al-Nakba” (the catastrophe). We know what you know: that our land is sacred.

In 1948, my ancestors—along with nearly a million other Palestinians—were frightened away or forced off their lands, in some cases at gunpoint. More than 10,000 others were massacred. Hundreds of our villages and cities were completely destroyed in a systemic plan to erase our identity—just as yours has been under continuing assault.

Native Americans' Trail of Tears
Trail of Tears

Palestine today is just 22 percent of our original homeland. Like you, some of my people (an estimated 1.5 million) must live in degrading “camps” (our word for reservations), where living conditions are "comparable to the Third World." Like your reservations, they are characterized by high rates of unemployment, poverty and suicide.

Many other Palestinians (about 6 million)—now including descendants of the original residents—are scattered elsewhere around the world, just as yours are around the United States. Today, not only has the military occupation taken over our land and declared it "the state of Israel," but it continues to carry on a policy of expulsion, demolishing Palestinian houses in the little bit of land we retain, building illegal settlements and preventing free movement with a network of “security checkpoints.”

Nakba
The Palestinian Nakba

Like you, we don’t control our natural resources. Just as you were not consulted about the Dakota Access Pipeline that will traverse your land and contaminate your water supply if installed, we are not consulted by Israel, which wants to mine the gas supply in our harbor for its own use and monopolizes the water supply in the West Bank for the green lawns of its own residents—leaving Palestinians parched and dry. In Gaza, where I live, only 10 percent of our water supply is drinkable due to the conditions in which we must live. We too know that “water is life.”

When I was young, I saw how the media portrays negative images of you, especially in Hollywood films—depicting you as uncivilized, savage, racist and drug abusers. Likewise, my people are portrayed as terrorists, “backward,” misogynists and anti-Semitic. And yet no one regards whites as all the same.

Like yours, our resistance has been labeled as acts of terrorism and violence rather than as a fight for survival and dignity. That's not surprising, since this is the policy of every oppressor who seeks to criminalize others to justify its acts. It is the oppressor's way to create its own version of reality to rationalize its behavior and brainwash the masses. And it is the oppressor's plan to make the colonized feel weak and alone. But you are proving they won’t succeed and I want you to know that my people are with you.

Seeing your women, elders and youth stand together to protest the pipeline and your exclusion from decision making is so inspiring! It gives us strength to go on with our own struggle.

As a Palestinian in Gaza, I have grown up feeling detached from the rest of the world as Israel tightens its decade-long blockade. I am sure many of you feel the same way. But we are not isolated. We are “soulmates” in the way that counts.

Mentor: Pam Bailey

Third Palestinian Submission to the International Criminal Court on Gaza Closure

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, November 22, 2016

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dsc_0068Raji Sourani, Director of PCHR, and Issam Younis, Director of Al Mezan.

Palestinian human rights organizations (Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and Aldameer) held today, 22 November 2016, a press conference to announce presenting the third legal submission to the International Criminal Court (ICC) titled as “Gaza Illegal Closure: Persecution and Other Inhumane Acts Committed against Civilians as a Crime Against Humanity“. The conference was held in PCHR’s head office based in Gaza City and was attended by a large number of journalists.

shawanShawan Jabareen, Director of Al-Haq, and Prosecutor of the ICC, Ms Fatou Bensouda.

Both of lawyer Raji Sourani, Director of PCHR, and Issam Younis, Director of Al Mezan, delivered speeches during the conference while Shawan Jabareen, Director of Al-Haq, held a meeting in the Hague with Prosecutor of the ICC, Ms Fatou Bensouda, to deliver the legal submission on behalf of the Palestinian human rights organizations. It should be noted this is the third legal submission of its kind to the ICC by the Palestinian human rights organizations.

Sourani stressed that the human rights organizations has pledged on behalf of the victims to neither forget nor forgive and to proceed with the prosecution of Israeli war criminals for all their crimes, including the Israeli closure imposed for nearly a decade that has turned the Gaza Strip into the world’s largest open-air prison and resulted in a man-made disaster.

Sourani added that the human rights organizations’ role before the ICC will not end here, however, there are further submissions on settlement activities and the harvest of human rights organizations’ legal work before the Israeli judiciary.

Issam Younis added that today is a big day in the context of seeking justice for Palestinian victims in light of long-standing denial of justice within the Israeli judiciary.  He considered resorting to the ICC as an indispensable step after the State of Palestine had acceded to the international conventions and ICC’s Rome Statute.

Younis also said that the human rights organizations consider the ICC as a resort to grant justice. He hoped that ICC would seriously investigate the Israeli crimes and then move to the most important step that is starting the court proceedings.  He said, “Where to achieve justice if not in the ICC?”

Younis believes that the human rights organizations do not consider resorting to the ICC as a political conflict with the Israeli occupation, because the ICC was founded so that the victim and the criminal can square off.  The liability and accountability are missing in this part of the world.

Update from Anees in Rafah

November 21, 2016

Dear Friends, 

Alsalam Alaykum, I hope my email finds you well.

I’m writing to keep you posted about the situation here at the moment, so I have good news and bad news, and I will start with the good news.

Good News: 
1. The Palestinian guy I mentioned in my previous update who was kidnapped while he was swimming in Rafah was finally released by the Egyptian authority.

2. My team has worked with another 300 Palestinian girls at the UNRWA school.
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2. Our Children begin rebuilding the city of hope. It’s one of our activities with the children. 
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3. Our Children begin practicing the play show. 
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​4. Warm Clothes project: We have raised about 1370 of 1700 British Pounds to support the kids within a few days. Will keep you posted once we start to deliver those gifts for the kids. There is a chance for those who didn’t support the project yet to visit the link again at: https://www.gofundme.com/childrenofgaza11.

​Bad News: 
1. A Palestinian young man has been shot to death and 2 were injured by the Israelis in Gaza, I didn’t upload the picture to protect your feelings.

Finally, I want to thank you all for your support, which always allows me to keep up this great work with the kids. 

Greetings from Gaza
Anees

November 30, 2016
Living in Limbo: East Jerusalem Behind the Separation Wall

Wednesday, Nov. 30 Online
Livestreaming at The Jerusalem Fund
12:00 – 1:00 pm CST

A presentation by Moien Odeh, Attorney at Law and Visiting Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

This talk will focus on the East Jerusalem neighborhoods behind the separation barrier, where approximately 120,000 Palestinians reside but the Palestinian Authority is not permitted by Israel to operate.

Although located within the Jerusalem municipal boundaries, these neighborhoods receive almost no service from the Israeli authorities: no garbage disposal, road construction or repair, or adequate water supply. This creates living conditions that would be unacceptable anywhere else.

These Palestinian neighborhoods present an extreme form of the problems for all Palestinians in East Jerusalem and Israel’s attitude toward Palestinians in the city.

More info: http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/events/upcoming/living-limbo-east-jerusalems-neighborhoods-behind-separation-barrier

Update November 29, 2016
The Gaza Kitchen with Laila El-Haddad in Madison

The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey is a cookbook and a documentary portrait of the Gaza Strip by Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt, published by Just World Books.

The Crossing
1127 University Avenue
Madison [Map]

4:30 pm: Gaza, From Blogging to Cooking and Everything In Between
A Conversation with Laila El-Haddad based on topics raised in her book, Gaza Mom, led by Prof. Nevine El Nossery
6:00 pm: Laila’s Table, A Celebration of Palestinian Food and Culture
Reflections by Laila El-Haddad on her book The Gaza Kitchen, followed by a short cooking demonstration and a potluck social featuring samples of Palestinian food, including dishes inspired by recipes from the book. RSVP’s to dwallbaum at gmail.com by Nov. 22 are encouraged for this part of the evening. Please bring a dish to pass if you can.  If you are interested in trying a recipe from the book, include that in your RSVP; we can either get you a recipe, or we do have books available for advance purchase ($30).

Laila El-Haddad is a talented blogger, political analyst, engaging public speaker, and parent-of-three from Gaza City. She is the author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between (2010); the co-editor of the anthology Gaza Unsilenced (2015); and co-author of The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey (2nd Ed. 2016). All three books will be available for sale and signing at both events. If you want to purchase a book in advance, please contact rafahsistercity at yahoo.com.

Co-sponsored by: Madison-Rafah Sister City Project; Middle East Studies Program; Playgrounds for Palestine-Madison; Students for Justice in Palestine-UW Madison; WUD Cuisine; and WUD Distinguished Lecture Series. Additional support provided by Friends of Sabeel-North America.

  • Laila El-Haddad
  • The Gaza Kitchen, A culinary journey through the Gaza Strip:
  • The Gaza Kitchen is a cookbook which collects recipes from the culinary tradition of the Gaza Strip.  This is a rich cuisine which mixes Levantine and Egyptian influences, and is notably distinct from that of other parts of Palestine, reflecting the tortured political history of the Gaza Strip as well as the migratory patterns it has seen. 

    Food and cooking always exist in a particular context, and all the more so in a context as vexed as that of Gaza.  Thus we will also situate the cuisine in its context by exploring the lives of those who make these recipes and the sources of the ingredients they use.  This will provide us an opportunity to present a rich portrait of the social and cultural life of Gaza, as well as the dire situation of the Gazan economy under siege.

    Keep Gaza Children Warm

    Anees Mansour, gofundme, November 5, 2016 

    We are about to enter the winter season in Gaza. The houses can’t handle the weather as they are not insulated properly and we only get about eight hours of electricity a day. The conditions are extremely difficult.

    We’ve been working with children from some of the most marginalized communities for over a year now putting together summer camps and educational workshops which has resulted in terrific participation and results.

    But now we need to deal with the absolute basics: we just need to keep the children warm.

    Public response and support of our work has been tremendous in the past and we’ve raised enough money for many activities. So now we’re looking for help to provide warm Jackets to the children here in Rafah.

    Rafah is one of the poorest areas in Gaza, which, of course, is suffering from a prolonged brutal siege. All and any help is appreciated. Each jacket costs $20. The more money we can raise together, the more children we can keep warm.

    Winter is close and we expect it will be harsh so we are aiming to raise this money in just a few days.

    You can see photos of our previous work in the last year here:

    For any further information, don’t hesitate to contact me:

      Anees Mansour  
      anemansour at gmail.com
      phone 009705986990

    EU recognizes right to boycott Israel

    Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada
    Activism and BDS Beat
    28 October 2016

    EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, left, has affirmed that boycotting Israel is a protected free speech right. (European External Action Service)

    The European Union recognizes the right of its citizens to boycott Israel, its top foreign policy official has said.

    “The EU stands firm in protecting freedom of expression and freedom of association in line with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which is applicable on EU member states’ territory, including with regard to BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] actions carried out on this territory,” Federica Mogherini told the European Parliament in answer to a written question in late September.

    Mogherini noted that the European Court of Human Rights has affirmed that freedom of expression applies to ideas “that offend, shock or disturb the state or any sector of the population.”

    She also reaffirmed that the 28-member bloc “rejects the BDS campaign’s attempts to isolate Israel and is opposed to any boycott of Israel.”

    “We welcome the EU’s belated defense of the right of European and other citizens to stand in solidarity with Palestinian rights, including through BDS tactics,” Riya Hassan, Europe campaigns officer for the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), said in reaction to Mogherini’s statement.

    Threats

    The EU declaration comes after Israel or entities aligned with it have launched secret “black ops” aimed at sabotaging the Palestine solidarity movement.

    This sabotage campaign has been linked to threats and harassment targeting human rights lawyers working with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, under investigation by Dutch police.

    Israel has also pressured governments and legislatures to adopt laws and policies aimed at restricting BDS.

    Mogherini’s statement may be viewed as a correction to EU policy.

    Earlier this year Lars Faaborg-Andersen, the EU envoy in Tel Aviv, participated in an anti-BDS conference at which Israeli ministers made explicit threats against Palestinian human rights defenders.

    The statements caused such alarm that Amnesty International expressed its fears for the “safety and liberty of Palestinian human rights defender Omar Barghouti, and other boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activists, following calls alluding to threats, including of physical harm and deprivation of basic rights, made by Israeli ministers.”

    Faaborg-Andersen adamantly defended his participation in the anti-BDS conference and dismissed concerns over the Israeli threats.

    Making good on those threats, Israel subjected Barghouti, a co-founder of the BDS movement, to a travel ban.

    Growing consensus

    Mogherini’s citation of a European Court of Human Rights precedent will send an encouraging message to BDS campaigners in France, who are facing harsh legal repression of their rights.

    The EU bureaucracy’s tardy recognition of its citizens’ free speech rights comes after three member governments, Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands, already explicitly recognized the right to boycott Israel.

    Hundreds of European trade unions, church groups and political parties have called on the EU to defend the right to boycott Israel in response to its occupation and violations of Palestinian rights.

    While welcoming Mogherini’s statement, the BNC says it still falls far short of where the EU should be.

    “Palestinian civil society expects the EU to respect its obligations under international law and its own principles and laws by, at the very least, imposing a military embargo on Israel, banning products of companies that do business in Israel’s illegal colonies and suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement until Israel fully complies with the human rights clause of the agreement,” Riya Hassan said.

    Why Israel Still Refuses to Choose

    It’s easier to leave Palestinians in limbo waiting for a “peace process” that goes nowhere

    ROGER COHEN, The New York Times, October 28, 2016

    One of the largest Israeli settlements on the West Bank, Maale Adumim, rising in the distance over the Palestinian village of Zaim (Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times)

    TEL AVIV — There is agreement on very little in the fractious Holy Land, but on one issue there is near unanimity these days: A two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more distant than ever, so unimaginable that it appears little more than an illusion sustained by lazy thinking, interest in the status quo or plain exhaustion.

    From Tel Aviv to Ramallah in the West Bank, from the largely Arab city of Nazareth to Jerusalem, I found virtually nobody on either side prepared to offer anything but a negative assessment of the two-state idea. Diagnoses ranged from moribund to clinically dead. Next year it will be a half-century since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began. More than 370,000 settlers now live there, excluding in East Jerusalem, up from about 249,000 in 2005. The incorporation of all the biblical Land of Israel has advanced too far, for too long, to be reversed now.

    Greater Israel is what Israelis know; the smaller Israel west of the Green Line that emerged from the 1947-49 war of independence is a fading memory. The right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with its contempt for Palestinians and dissenting voices in general, prefers things that way, as the steady expansion of settlements demonstrates. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, headed by President Mahmoud Abbas, has lost the legitimacy, the cohesion and the will to do much about it. The cancellation of municipal elections in the West Bank and Gaza that had been set for this month was another sign of paralyzing Palestinian infighting.

    “Two states are not achievable in the foreseeable future,” the former Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, told me. “It has become a process about a process, and not real.”

    The Obama administration has reached a point of acute exasperation. The Israeli announcement this month of a new West Bank settlement was the final straw, coming just weeks after the United States concluded a $38 billion, 10-year military aid deal. Israel’s explanation that the settlement was a “satellite” of another did not wash; its actions were viewed as egregious. Seldom has Moshe Dayan’s old dictum — “Our American friends offer us money, arms and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice” — been more vividly illustrated. Yet it’s uncertain if the United States is prepared to calibrate its ironclad support in order to pressure Israel into change.

    Within Israel, where Netanyahu has now amassed more than a decade in power, the political and cultural drift is toward ever more assertive and intolerant nationalism. Criticism is increasingly equated with treason. Groups like B’Tselem, which focuses on allegations of human rights violations against Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territories, are under withering attack. The Messianic religious Zionism that holds all the West Bank to be Israel’s by biblical decree is ascendant. The left is in feeble disarray.

    It is sobering to note that Netanyahu probably represents the more moderate wing of his government. The most credible challenge to him may eventually come from his own spot on the political spectrum, the center-right, in the form of the telegenic Yair Lapid, who told me that Netanyahu “won’t merit even a page in Israeli history books.” Lapid believes he can conjure up some two-state magic, but he began his first political campaign in the large settlement of Ariel, and the notion that he can reverse the settler movement seems far-fetched.

    I drove down to Ramallah, through a clogged checkpoint, always a startling transition from the efficient developed-world hum of Israel to the dust and haphazardness of the West Bank. On the way, I stopped to see Walid Batrawi, the director of BBC Media Action, a charity that mentors journalists and promotes an independent press. He was despondent, describing a “lack of confidence and faith in anything.” Palestinian statehood was “more distant than ever.” Abbas was distracted, he suggested, embroiled in the conflicts of his Fatah party, worried about Hamas, providing no direction. “Something has been lost,” he said. “A special feeling of patriotism, of belonging, is vanishing.”

    In Ramallah, I heard similar sentiments, talk of a more individualistic Palestinian society, with less sense of community, where people were focused on taking care of themselves and doing the best they could with the current situation. Two states had become a bad joke. Young people had more faith in nonviolent resistance leading eventually to equal rights within a single state than in yet another aborted international peace initiative or aborted uprising.

    Palestinians — whether in Israel proper, where the 1.5 million Arab citizens make up about 17 percent of a population of 8.5 million, or in the West Bank, where they number about 2.6 million — are tired of the humiliations, big and small, that Israel dishes out. How, they wonder, can anything resembling a state ever be fashioned from their countless little self-administering enclaves on the West Bank broken up by Israeli settlements?

    In a sense, then, Israel has won. David Ben-Gurion was right when he observed in 1949 that, “When the matter is dragged out — it brings us benefits.” Policy since then has been pretty consistent: Create facts on the ground; break the Arabs’ will through force; push for as much of the biblical Land of Israel between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as possible.

    If the maximalist camp was tempered, it was chiefly through the knowledge that with all the land came people, specifically millions more Palestinians, and a 50-50 state was not what the Zionist dream was about. Hence Israel’s improvised 49-year occupation — in effect dominion over Palestinians without enfranchisement of Palestinians. Hence, too, the periodic stabs at a two-state peace, most conspicuously the Oslo accords of 1993: Running the lives of subjugated others is exhausting, corrupting and inherently violent, as well as incompatible with a true democracy.

    “Israel needs to be democratic more than Jewish,” says Reem Younis, an Arab Israeli. (Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times)

    Back in Tel Aviv, I had dinner with Gil Friedlander. He’s an Israeli patriot who served in the air force for many years, before creating and selling a tech company. But his country, so dynamic on the economic front, fertile soil for start-ups, finds itself at a terrible political impasse.

    “The great victorious war of 1967 had an impact that is eating us from the inside,” he told me. “I would be more than happy to get out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and build a country with a morality I believe in. I will fight for peace, but I will not fight to maintain the status quo.” He described feeling more and more confined, living in “smaller and smaller areas where I find people who think like me,” and feeling a stranger in the Jerusalem where he grew up.

    I have long been a strong advocate of a two-state outcome myself. But there is no point beating a dead horse. It is time for incremental steps instead. Israel could find lots of ways to ease humiliations and economic hardship for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, without compromising its security. It could take down some roadblocks, curtail the formalities for movement in and out of Gaza, and grant more building permits in the West Bank, as it just has in quietly authorizing some Palestinian development plans in West Bank areas under exclusive Israeli control. It could even, without saying so, stop settlement expansion.

    The worst thing would be for Western leaders to come up with some new “peace initiative” that would offer a convenient diversion from political responsibility. Netanyahu will one day have to tell Israelis if he wants a big binational state or a smaller Jewish-majority state side by side with a Palestinian state. He is trying his best to avoid making the choice, keeping millions of Palestinians in limbo; the West helps him with a “peace process” that goes nowhere. Abbas also owes his people clarity and accountability — as well as a political destination. He is marking time.

    After the election but before he leaves office, President Obama may present America’s principles for a two-state outcome in a Security Council resolution that sets out how Israel and Palestine would look in their “final status.” Israel is strongly opposed. That is the best reason for doing it. As long as Israel has a blank check from Washington and an effective Security Council veto through the United States, nothing will change. And something has to.

    Israel is now a modern society. Its per capita income is higher than Spain’s. But behind the sheen of economic success, the shadow of undefined borders and violence always lurks. I was a guest at a dinner on a penthouse terrace hosted by a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and attended by a former head of military intelligence, a tough Israeli lawyer and an Arab Israeli couple with a high-tech neuroscience business, among other luminaries. Tensions rose.

    Reem Younis, one of the Arab entrepreneurs, was saying that the father of her husband, Imad, in his will had identified property lost to Israel in 1948 that his sons might try to recover, whereupon an Israeli woman, alluding to property her family had lost in Austria in the Holocaust, said, “You have to move forward, you cannot go back.” Whereupon the lawyer pressed the Younises, demanding to know if they saw themselves as Israelis, or Palestinians, or Muslims, or Arabs, or what.

    “You cannot force me to choose!” Imad Younis exclaimed. “I’m an Israeli. I’m a Palestinian. I’m an Arab. I’m a Christian, as it happens. I am all of these identities. I identify with the people in what amounts to an Israeli prison in Jenin or Nablus on the West Bank.”

    Reem said, “I can tell you this, on the day that I say I’m an Israeli, we should all be very proud.”

    That solemn little sentence, with its implicit admonition to Israel to extend equal rights to all its citizens, induced a solemn little silence.

    A few days later, I went to see the couple at the headquarters of their company, Alpha Omega, in Nazareth. Theirs is an inspiring story — an Arab couple in Israel who sold a car and four gold coins to start a business that now employs 65 people and is a world leader in machinery and software for helping surgeons navigate the brain. Such Arab start-ups have been rare.

    “How can you feel equal when you are not?” Reem said, mentioning that she had found it impossible to buy a house in a nearby town because she is an Arab. “Israel needs to be democratic more than Jewish.”

    Imad believes the personal trumps the political. “One state or two states? Who cares?” he told me. “What matters is human dignity and equality under the same law. Palestinian kids want to live well. That’s what they want.”

    You can follow me on Twitter (@NYTimesCohen) or join me on Facebook.

    Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

    A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 30, 2016, on page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Israel Still Refuses to Choose.

    Update October 22, 2016
    Wisconsin Book Festival: The Way to the Spring

    C-SPAN video link: c-span.org/video/?416995-3/ben-ehrenreich-discusses-way-spring

    Wisconsin Book Festival

    The Way to the Spring - Ben Ehrenreich - <span class="date-display-single">10/22/2016 - 12:00pm</span>

    The Way to the Spring
    Ben Ehrenreich
    10/22/2016 – 12:00pm
    Central Library – Community Rooms 301 & 302

    Ben Ehrenreich first started reporting from the West Bank in 2011, on an assignment for Harper’s Magazine. He went back again for the New York Times the following year, which resulted in a powerful, much talked-about cover-story for the magazine. Palestine, it seemed, had gotten under Ehrenreich’s skin.

    Eventually he moved to Ramallah, and started writing what would become The Way to The Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. Ehrenreich was moved by the injustices that he witnessed, and by the general silence about them in most U.S. media. As well informed as he was on the Arab-Israeli conflict, he nonetheless was consistently shocked by what he saw, and by how little the vast majority of people in the U.S. (and even in Israel, just few miles away) understood about the lived realities of the occupation. He felt strongly that he wanted to write to break through those silences.

    In cities and small villages alike, men and women, young and old, a group of unforgettable characters shared their lives with Ehrenreich and made their own case for resistance and resilience in the face of life under occupation. Blending political and historical context with deeply human stories, The Way to the Spring makes clear that conditions on the ground are changing–and getting worse, in an accelerating dynamic that should provoke the conscience of us all. In a great act of bravery, empathy and understanding, Ben Ehrenreich, by placing us in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians and telling their story with surpassing literary power and grace, makes it impossible for us to turn away.

    Presented in partnership with the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project.

    Ben EhrenreichAbout Presenter Ben Ehrenreich

    Ben Ehrenreich is the author of two novels, Ether and The Suitors. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books, among others. A recipient of the National Magazine Award, Ehrenreich lives in Los Angeles.

    Free speech triumphs over pro-Israel bullies in US universities

    Nora Barrows-Friedman, The Electronic Intifada, 20 October 2016

    Students constructed a mock wall on the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor campus to protest Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights. (SAFE-UMich Facebook)

    Students have won major victories for free speech on US campuses lately as attempts by Israel lobby groups to suppress Palestine solidarity activism continue to fall flat.

    “Israel advocacy organizations driving the suppression cannot succeed in manufacturing facts, even if they try,”
    Liz Jackson, an attorney with the organization Palestine Legal, told The Electronic Intifada.

    Last week, the president of the University of Michigan defended Palestine solidarity activism on campus after student organizers were attacked for holding a protest against Israeli policies on the same day as a Jewish holiday.

    In response to accusations that the protest was an affront to Jewish students, the protest’s organizers, Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE) stated that the charges fall “under the much larger wave of speech suppression that seeks to derail any valid criticism of Israeli state policy of oppression against Palestinians as a false claim of anti-Semitism.”

    University president Mark Schlissel told The Michigan Daily, a campus newspaper, that SAFE “did what we want advocacy groups to do, and to me, they were advocating a political point of view.”

    Schlissel’s statement follows a similar defense of student activism in New York City.

    There, Israel-aligned groups and elected officials lost a long-waged battle to censor Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) after a six-month independent investigation yielded results that did not support their claims.

    The groups and pro-Israel lawmakers steadily pressured administrators at the City University of New York to censure SJP members, accusing them of being responsible for anti-Semitism on campuses.

    In February, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), a right-wing lobby group, published a 14-page letter, claiming that SJP “has created a hostile campus environment for many Jewish students.”

    Around the same time, local lawmakers also called for a ban of all SJP chapters on CUNY campuses.

    The accusations against SJP triggered the investigation, which was led by a former federal judge and a federal prosecutor.

    However, the investigation concluded last month that allegations of anti-Semitism on CUNY campuses cannot be attributed to Students for Justice in Palestine.

    “There is a tendency to blame SJP for any act of anti-Semitism on any CUNY campus,” the report of the investigation stated. “That is a mistake.”

    The report also upholds direct actions and protests as constitutionally-protected speech.

    “This represents a strong statement in protection of students’ First Amendment rights,” states the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), “yet at least one New York legislator vows to continue his campaign against students whose views he finds unacceptable.”

    FIRE was referring to Jack Martins, a state senator who has proposed legislation to ban student groups which advocate a boycott of Israel from receiving public funding.

    ZOA, for its part, stated that it was “appalled” by the investigation’s conclusion, which it labeled “outrageous.” In a statement, the group reiterated its bogus claims that SJP is tied to “groups and individuals supporting terrorism” and asserted that SJP should still be banned from CUNY campuses while facing further punishments.

    Morton Klein, the ZOA’s president, was “shocked” and “worse than disappointed” with the outcome of the investigation, the Forward reported.

    “Gimmicks and tricks”

    Students at UCLA say they are relieved that the administration upheld their rights to affiliate with Palestine rights activism despite an orchestrated silencing campaign.

    Milan Chatterjee, then president of UCLA’s Graduate Student Association, was found to have violated university policy on “viewpoint neutrality” last year when he put stipulations on funding for student groups based on their affiliation with Palestinian rights activism.

    Students for Justice in Palestine had urged the administration to launch an investigation into Chatterjee’s actions.

    Israel lobby groups on and off campus then jumped in to protect Chatterjee, using the incident as an opportunity to attack SJP and denigrate the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

    The Forward reported that the American Jewish Committee, a right-wing Israel advocacy group, “had rallied to Chatterjee’s side, connecting him with high-powered lawyers to provide pro bono backing.”

    After providing Chatterjee with legal aid, the AJC gave him an award for “students who have demonstrated unusual courage and moral clarity in standing up to anti-Semitism and the BDS movement.”

    Two months before the university administration found Chatterjee in violation of campus policy, the Graduate Students Association had come to the same conclusion, but decided not to take action against him.

    Chatterjee claimed that SJP members engaged in a smear campaign when they brought the complaints of free speech violations to the university’s Discrimination and Prevention Office.

    Speaking to The Jewish Journal, Chatterjee said he left UCLA’s law school just before the fall semester began because of a perceived “hostile and unsafe” campus climate.

    Yacoub Kureh, chair of the SJP chapter at UCLA, said that these claims are an attempt to further discredit SJP and the university for defending students’ free speech.

    He added that SJP members were “very satisfied” that the administration “wasn’t falling for the gimmicks and the tricks.”

    “At no point were we trying to attack [Chatterjee’s] character,” he told The Electronic Intifada. “We were trying to draw attention to something that was wrong, and now we’ve been cast as bullies.”

    Meanwhile, he added, these kinds of free speech victories are valuable and will strengthen student activism.

    “Otherwise we get trampled on and people think it’s ok to continue to trample on us, and they find more and more ways to do it,” he said.

    “This is one of the times where the university stepped up and said, ‘you can’t go that far, you shouldn’t go down that route.’”

    False allegations

    An independent investigation carried out for administrators at San Francisco State University upheld the right of students to have protested a speech by Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat in April this year.

    After students protested Barkat’s policies of expulsion and violence against Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, they were subsequently accused by right-wing Zionist groups of anti-Semitism and of threatening Jewish students on campus.

    The report of the investigation “finds that our protest was disruptive, but for students of conscience, the real disruption was the mayor of occupied Jerusalem coming to campus,” the General Union of Palestinian Students stated.

    “His explicit agenda is to remove Palestinians from the city and he was given a platform to whitewash and propagate his policies,” the group added. “Not only were we subjected to this hate monger, but we were investigated for months and publicly smeared as violent and anti-Semitic. The report proves that these allegations are false.”

    Palestine Legal has noted assurances that the university “is re-examining speech policies and planning to ensure full implementation for future campus protests.”

    Lawyers say they will continue to monitor how such speech policies are applied, as SFSU president Les Wong has previously criticized the protest against Barkat and complained about the state of “civil discourse” on campus.

    Liz Jackson of Palestine Legal explained that accusations against students involved in Palestine solidarity campaigning at the University of California, Irvine were also found to be meritless in August.

    “In every case where an objective investigator takes a close look at campus events, allegations that SJP engaged in anti-Semitism are exposed as false,” she said.

    “Campus activists are on a winning streak because their speech activity is principled and because it’s protected by law. Investigators see that.”