Tag Archives: Amira Hass

High Court Justices Know Israel Won’t Face Sanctions Over Masafer Yatta Evictions

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The decision was released on the eve of Independence Day, when the Jews celebrate the founding of the State of Israel and Palestinians grieve for the loss of their homeland


Protesters against the evictions at the High Court building in Jerusalem, March. Credit: Emil Salman

Amira Hass, Haaretz, May 5 2022

Starting this morning, at any given moment, the Civil Administration, the Israel Defense Forces, the Border Police and the regular police are allowed to send dozens – and if they need to, even more – of soldiers and police officers into eight villages in Masafer Yatta and with their guns trained on them, put on trucks and buses hundreds of their residents – the elderly, the young, women and infants. And this will be done with a seal of approval from Israel’s High Court of Justice.

From today, subcontractors working for the Civil Administration, accompanied by civil servants and soldiers, are free to destroy not just an odd small hut or animal pen, but dozens of homes, including caves that were hewn out of rock to serve as residences long before the establishment of the State of Israel. All this is made possible under a decision by Justices David Mintz, Isaac Amit and Ofer Grosskopf to reject the petitions filed by the residents of Masafer Yatta against thir permanent displacement.

Starting this morning, at any given moment, the Civil Administration, the Israel Defense Forces, the Border Police and the regular police are allowed to send dozens – and if they need to, even more – of soldiers and police officers into eight villages in Masafer Yatta and with their guns trained on them, put on trucks and buses hundreds of their residents – the elderly, the young, women and infants. And this will be done with a seal of approval from Israel’s High Court of Justice.

From today, subcontractors working for the Civil Administration, accompanied by civil servants and soldiers, are free to destroy not just an odd small hut or animal pen, but dozens of homes, including caves that were hewn out of rock to serve as residences long before the establishment of the State of Israel. All this is made possible under a decision by Justices David Mintz, Isaac Amit and Ofer Grosskopf to reject the petitions filed by the residents of Masafer Yatta against thir permanent displacement.

The decision was released on the Supreme Court website on Memorial Day, the eve of Independence Day, when the Jews celebrate the founding of the State of Israel and Palestinians grieve for the loss of their homeland, their expulsion and being made refugees. The High Court justices couldn’t have timed any better the release of their ruling countenancing an expulsion and ending a way of life for these Palestinians – one that developed over more than 100 years and is characterized by family, economic, social and cultural interconnections and dependencies among the villages and between them and the nearest urban center. The destruction of eight of some 14 villages will destroy the historic and geographical fabric of life in the area.

In the historiographical debate about whether Israel is in its essence and character a colonial-settler entity, the justices have expressed a firm stance: Most certainly, it is. Because the essence of settler colonialism is the taking over of land by an immigrant population while expelling its indigenous (in the most extreme case by committing genocide), denying their linkage to the land and totally excluding them from the new political order that the immigrants have created. In this order, in which the indigenous population has no say or any rights, it’s natural for the new rulers to decide that a particular piece of land is needed for its army. Or maybe more settlers. Or maybe both. Masafer Yatta’s transformation into Firing Zone 918 is but another tier in a process that has been going on between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean for more than a century, and serves as an illustration of the continuity of Israeli policy.

The justices dismissed disparagingly the evidence provided by the residents – oral testimony, documents and physical evidence from the actual area – attesting to their connection to the place, past and present. And indeed, rejection of the historical and family memory of the indigenous population is an essential part of a settler-colonial political order, in which no consideration is given to its voice or past. The justices adopted with enthusiasm the position of the state, which held that the residents of Masafer Yatta had invaded the area only after the army declared it a training zone in 1980. In other words, according to the State Prosecutor’s Office and the High Court, a population of farmers and herders, who lead very simple lives, plotted in bad faith to prevent the area from being turned into a military training ground, choosing to live in a place without running water, electricity or paved access roads, without the right to build.

The justices chose to ignore the ways in which Palestinian villages and hamlets have sprung up and been created over the centuries. When the population grows and the number of sheep and goats multiplies, some of the residents of a village will move to other pastures and water sources, and gradually expand the lands they work, known and accepted to be their village’s. Caves might initially serve as homes and over time, as the population increases in those extensions, and as the needs change, more simple constructions are built – including public ones, such as schools and access roads. The original village becomes a town, or even a city.

After 1967, Israel acted determinedly to put a stop to these evolutionary processes in the West Bank. Declaring areas firing zones was one way to achieve this. Establishing settlements and the grab of more land and water resources was another. The High Court chose to feign ignorance and belittle the historical significance of a document submitted by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel: a recommendation by Ariel Sharon, when he was agriculture minister in 1981 and chairman of the ministerial settlements committee, that the army sought to expand the firing zone declared in Masafer Yatta in order to prevent “the spread of the rural Arabs of the mountain down the side of the mountain facing the desert … and to keep these area in our hands.”

The attorneys representing the villages – Shlomo Lecker and the lawyers for ACRI, Dan Yakir and Roni Pelli – relied on Article 49 of the Geneva Convention: “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

The justices rejected the claims of the plaintiffs that the court must honor this clause. Justice Mintz even asserted that Section 49 applied by “agreement” and not by “custom” – in other words, that it was the result of an agreement between countries and not one that a court inside any one state must necessarily honor. Attorneys Michael Sfard and Netta Amar-Shiff (whose amicus curiae brief she filed at the behest of the Masafer Yatta community council, was rejected by the court) said on Thursday that Mintz’s arguments were unfounded; as Sfard said, “This is nothing less than an embarrassing basic legal error.”

The original petitions submitted by Lecker and ACRI attorneys in the year 2000 followed the mass eviction by the army in November 1999, including razing homes, pens, wells, and caves used as homes. These expulsions occurred when the prime minister and defense minister was Ehud Barak, a Labor Party man, and at a time when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization were in negotiations in what the world then called a peace process. The dissonance between a “peace process” and mass eviction didn’t bother the Israeli society. .

The High Court, as usual, missed in the 2000s the opportunity to issue a principled decision against the evictions and to demand the state to act according to international law. It settled then for an interim injunction that allowed the residents to return but barred them from rebuilding the structures that were destroyed or building new housing to meet the needs of a growing population.

Meanwhile, the High Court generously allowed the state to repeatedly postpone submitting its response to the original petitions. During those years, the European Union made clear it opposed any form of forced displacement.. Concurrently, illegal settler outposts multiplied in the area, the land controlled by the settlers expanded, and so did the methods used by the Civil Administration and the settlers to deprive Palestinians of accessing their land.

Despite the fact that the mass expulsion and demolition of entire villages the High Court has now approved go against the stance of the EU and probably of some officials in the U.S. government, the High Court justices know very well that Israel isn’t in danger of being sanctioned over their decision. They also know that forced displacement of between 1,200 and 1,800 Palestinians from their homes does not diverge from any of the standards that now prevail in Israel.

What Happens to a Palestinian Who Protects His Land

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Home Invasions and False Arrests: Aref Jaber defies settlers’ attempts to take over his plot of land near Hebron, and finds himself facing harassment from the army too

Amira Hass, Haaretz, Aug. 28, 2021

On December 11, a structure made of wood and cinder blocks appeared on a piece of land belonging to Aref Jaber of Hebron. Just before he found the structure, relatives told him that Israeli Jews were squatting on his land, on a hill east of Hebron in the West Bank, in an area called al-Bak’aa.

Since that day, Jaber and his family have been constantly harassed: raids on his land and home, other illegal structures going up and being demolished, intrusive drones, imposter Israel Police officers saying they’re from the Shin Bet security service, and false arrests by the army and police.

From the plot at al-Bak’aa to the home in Hebron and all the way to the Ofer military court, Haaretz has been accompanying the Jaber family since March – and the challenges they’ve encountered because they object to a hostile takeover of their land.

The structure discovered on December 11 was demolished; almost immediately a drone appeared over the plot, followed by a military force and Israeli civilians. There were also police officers and vehicles of Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank.

“We told them that strangers had built something on our land; the policemen told us to file a complaint,” Jaber told Haaretz. Later that day, an Israeli settler who lives near him in Hebron’s Old City shouted at him: “Why did you destroy the structure, why did you destroy the structure?”

Jaber filed a complaint about illegal construction on his land as well as vandalism of his car. “From the distance, the children saw Israelis around the car,” Jaber said. The windshield and a headlight were smashed and one of the door handles was broken.

Jaber, 46, the father of five sons and a daughter, does his best to film every trespass and other incident. He backs up his testimonies with those videos, taken in the field by him and others.

That’s how he can report exactly what happened on what date. On December 12, the army declared the plot a closed military zone. Three days later Israelis again started to build a structure there; it was also demolished.

On the night between December 22 and 23, Israelis returned to the plot and in the morning Jaber discovered a concrete surface, iron mesh in preparation for another surface and a new stone fence. On December 29, a Civil Administration order was found on the plot ordering the work stopped.

Then on January 9, two concrete rooms and a pile of planks for construction were found on the plot. The rooms were demolished and the planks were removed.

On January 13, several non-Palestinians, including a man speaking American English, were sowing seeds on his land. “Policemen and people from the Civil Administration came and removed them after I reported it,” he said.

On January 24, Jaber and friends planted 100 olive saplings on the plot. Each sapling cost 35 shekels ($10.80). An Israeli whom Jaber knows is a tenant of a building that settlers have taken over in his neighborhood looked at the people doing the planting and left.

The next day a few Israelis came and tore out the saplings, in front of officials from the Civil Administration, who wouldn’t let Jaber come any closer. He planted again, and the saplings were uprooted again. After that the Civil Administration destroyed the concrete surface.

“In the past we planted barley and wheat at the plot,” Jaber said. But the crop went bad because of the restrictions on movement and the curfews during the second intifada, the ban on driving cars in Hebron, the thugs who destroyed the plot after every sowing and planting, and the overall economic difficulties.

On February 10, Israelis invaded his land once again, and again on February 23. On March 16, a man driving an earth-moving vehicle started clearing a pathway through the plot. Jaber tried to block the vehicle with his body. Neighbors and relatives gathered around and the driver drove away.

On May 4, Israelis placed a mobile home on the plot. Jaber said they sprayed him and his cousin with pepper spray and aimed guns at them when they hurried to the spot to demand that the transgressors leave. The Civil Administration took the mobile home away. A quadrangular fence that the settlers also built, from stones they took from the original fence of an agricultural terrace – thus destroying it – remained. They prayed a few times on that piece of land until the fence was removed and the stones were scattered.

On June 4, soldiers drove Jaber off his plot and showed him an order saying this was a closed military area. Another time they said the area was closed but did not have a valid closure order.

False arrests

On June 21, Jaber came to his land with his friend Imad Abu Shamsieh. Abu Shamsieh, a resident of the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron, is the one who filmed Israeli soldier Elor Azaria when he killed Abdel Fatah al-Sharif, a Palestinian who was already lying wounded on the ground, motionless after stabbing an Israeli soldier. Jaber gathered a few thorns and twigs and lit them to keep snakes away and to dilute the dry, fire-prone thistles. Soldiers soon appeared.

“The soldiers were polite,” Jaber said. They photographed his and Abu Shamsieh’s ID cards and sent the pictures somewhere on WhatsApp. An hour later the soldiers told the two that “the police center wants to talk to you,” referring to the police station opposite the Kiryat Arba settlement, on the land of the Ja’abri extended family. The two were kept in a jeep for several hours and then taken for interrogation.

“The policewoman who questioned me accused me of being on land that wasn’t ours – that I set a fire that endangered settlers, and that we belonged to the leftist organization B’Tselem and were causing problems to make money,” Jaber said.

“I told her why I lit the fire. She asked if I had documents showing that the land was mine. I said of course. She asked me if I knew there were problems with the land. I said sure, I’m the one who’s always calling you when strangers invade the land.”

In their response to Haaretz the police didn’t refer to the question about the policewoman’s allegations. They only said that “in June an investigation opened on suspicions of arson and harm to the security of the area.”

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said that Jaber and Abu Shamsieh had been “arrested and interrogated on suspicion of arson after they were seen setting weeds on fire in an open area.”

After the interrogation, the two were taken to the Etzion military detention facility. On the way they were taken for a medical checkup at an army camp. When they were taken off the jeep, bound, a soldier pulled Abu Shamsieh’s arm harshly and dislocated his shoulder.

Jaber added that the soldiers at the base recognized Abu Shamsieh and started yelling at him, shouting Azaria’s name. An officer quieted them. (The IDF spokesman: “Not familiar with a violent event during the detention.”) Abu Shamsieh was taken to the hospital for treatment, was moved to Etzion and from there, due to his fragile health, on to the Ofer military prison.

The two were brought to military court on June 24 to discuss the extension of their detention. The military prosecution demanded that they be detained until the end of the proceedings, claiming that the plot in question had been declared state-owned land.

Lawyer Riham Nasra, who represented Jaber, showed the prosecution his ownership papers. (Since Israel halted Jordan’s land registration process in the West Bank in 1967, the papers attesting to an owner’s link to the land are property forms from the Jordanian period). Finally, the military prosecution sufficed with a request to release Jaber on bail, which the judge set at 1,000 shekels to make sure he comes to trial, if it ever takes place. No charges were laid, and Abu Shamsieh was released without bail.

In the last three years the army has allowed a few residents of Jaber’s neighborhood in Hebron to drive in it in their cars; this had been forbidden since the beginning of 2000. Jaber is one of them. When he was freed from his false detention on June 24, he found that the permit allowing him to enter the area by car had been revoked. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said: “The decision to restrict the resident Aref Jaber’s entry by car was made by the relevant IDF officials, for reasons intended to preserve the public order there.”

Four days after his release, four right-wing media outlets reported on the arrest. “Two B’Tselem activists were arrested on suspicion of setting a fire on a hill in Judea and Samaria,” a headline in the daily Israel Hayom said. The truth is that the two had volunteered for Israeli rights group B’Tselem a few years ago and filmed acts of violence by settlers. Currently they are active in a group called Human Rights Defenders. Israel Hayom also reported that the information on the two came from a project “that documents the activity of anti-Israeli activists.”

The newspaper added that “Hill 16, which was set on fire, is located on state land. The assumption is that the two suspects set the area on fire to prepare it for farming as part of a plan for a Palestinian takeover of the area in the future.” The right-wing newspaper Makor Rishon added that the project gives the information it gathers to the Israeli defense establishment.

A headline on the right-wing website Hakol Hayehudi added in parentheses a demand that does not appear in the story: “It’s time to outlaw them” – without saying whether this meant the two released detainees or B’Tselem.

In all four almost-identical versions, Matan Peleg, chairman of the right-wing group Im Tirtzu, is quoted claiming that once again a connection has been proved between “terror acts,” B’Tselem and the New Israel Fund. Makor Rishon and Hakol Heyehudi also quote the spokesman of the Jewish settlement movement in Hebron: “Their affiliation to an organization that calls itself ‘a human rights organization’ … puts it in an antisemitic ideological light adding a hostile terrorist dimension to the crime. We expect law enforcement to act against those who commit hate crimes against Jews.”

On July 4, Jaber says, a bulldozer, a civilian Toyota car, a few civilians and three soldiers appeared on his land. The bulldozer started paving a path on his land and the soldiers ordered him to leave and showed him a long-expired order declaring the plot a closed military area. Jaber remained on the plot.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said: “The area was not declared a closed military area at that date, and the engineering forces at the site did not belong to the IDF.”

‘Immediate release’

After that, the army raided the family’s house three times. Jaber said that on one occasion an army officer mentioned “problems with the settlers.” In the third raid, early on the morning of July 28, two soldiers or police officers asked him in Hebrew: “Is there anything illegal in the house?” Jaber replied in Hebrew: “There are people in the house. I have five children here.”

“Are there weapons?” they asked, and he answered in amazement: “I have no weapons.” They continued: “Are there drugs in the house?” to which a surprised Jaber said: “If you want, you can check.” The soldiers didn’t move a single pillow, he recounted, but their presence in the house frightened his young daughter Farah (though she adamantly denies this).

Jaber said that from Wednesday to Friday that week, a surveillance drone flew over the house. (When Haaretz asked whether this was a drone of the army or settlers, who would have needed an army permit, a security official said: “We are not familiar with an event involving a drone in the area of the Jaber family’s home on the dates in question.”)

Jaber’s 20- and 18-year-old sons, Albaraa and Mohammed, were taken to the police station opposite Kiryat Arba. Ten days later, at their home in Hebron, Albaraa recounted his interrogation and arrest, which would also merit an article of their own.

One of his jailers and several of the police interrogators introduced themselves as being from the Shin Bet. (The police spokespeople didn’t reply when asked if Shin Bet personnel took part in the interrogation, but sources told Haaretz that the agency was not involved in the arrest or interrogation.)


Albaraa Jaber. Credit: Haaretz

Albaraa said that his interrogators accused him of throwing stones and possessing arms. He flatly denied the allegations. He and his brother were released at around 2 P.M. and Albaraa was required to return to the police the following Sunday, when he was again interrogated by someone claiming to be from the Shin Bet and was again asked about weapons in his possession. He was then transferred to the Etzion military detention facility.

On Thursday August 5, a hearing was held in military court on extending his detention. Haaretz accompanied the concerned father, who believed – as he himself experienced more than a month earlier – that his son had already been brought to the military court and was waiting in shackles for several hours in a blazing-hot prefab container. To his surprise, the hearing was held online and his son was still at Etzion.

The judge, Lt. Col. Azriel Levy, explained that the military prosecutor’s office had ordered the case closed, that there was no point in moving the suspect and that he would be released that day. Via an app, Albaraa’s face appeared on the judge’s cellphone. From about two meters away, the judge showed the elder Jaber the screen.

“Hi, Dad,” Albaraa smiled.

“You’re being released today,” the judge declared. Albaraa paused for a moment, digesting what he was just told and replied candidly: “I’m in shock.” Shortly before 11 A.M., the judge dictated the following: “I order the suspect released immediately and unconditionally.” He ordered the court stenographer to underline the word “immediately.”

Albaraa Jaber was only released about nine hours later, and this followed the intervention of Nasra, the lawyer, and repeated questions to the army by Haaretz. “Due to a human error, Albaraa Jaber was not released immediately as the court had ruled,” the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said in response for this article. “When the mistake was noticed, he was released immediately.”

Haaretz asked for the unit’s response regarding the conclusion that the chain of events was evidence that the army was acting in the service of settlers “who aim to break the morale of the Jaber family, which is resisting the efforts to take over their land.”

“Israeli army forces are not acting ‘in service’ of parties who are not the army commanders,” the spokesman’s office replied, adding that the forces aim to protect Israeli citizens and foil terrorism. The army’s activities are “carried out according to operational considerations in coordination and cooperation with the other relevant security entities.”

The village where Palestinians are rendered completely powerless

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Help Harun Abu Aram Heal

Rebuilding Alliance is organizing this fundraiser and will be working with the family to meet their needs. They are a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that works to realize a just and enduring peace in Palestine and Israel founded upon equal rights, equal security, and equal opportunity for all.

Harun Abu Aram was shot and paralyzed by Israeli security forces on Friday in his village, where even having electricity is deemed illegal


Ashraf Amour and family members inside their home, in a cave in the village of Khirbet al-Rakiz, in the West Bank’s south Hebron Hills. (Emil Salman)

Amira Hass and Hagar Shezaf, Haaretz, January 5, 2021

"I blame myself for Harun’s injury,” said Ashraf Amour from the village of Khirbet al-Rakiz, near the cave where he and his family live in the West Bank’s south Hebron Hills.

“Ultimately, all that he did was come and help me when he saw soldiers confiscating my generator, and because of that, they shot him,” Amour said Sunday in describing the incident that left village resident Harun Abu Aram paralyzed from the neck down. 

'All that he did was come and help me when he saw soldiers confiscating my generator, and because of that, they shot him'

“It would have been easier for me if they had demolished my animal pen or my children’s swings or if Harun had been shot in the arm or the leg,” Amour said, not attempting to hold back his tears, “but the bullet hit his neck and came out the other side, hitting nerves. Now he’s lying in the hospital paralyzed.”

The incident near the town of Yatta occurred on Friday and the height of the confrontation was caught on video by one of Amour’s neighbors. The army issued a statement for this article saying that the incident is being investigated.


Ashraf Amour, left, and his son Mohammed stand next to the damaged generator in the village of Khirbet al-Rakiz in the West Bank’s south Hebron Hills. Credit: Emil Salman

Khirbet al-Rakiz is one of 12 villages in the Masafer Yatta region. In the 1980s, Israel declared about 30,000 dunams (7,500 acres) of it as a military firing zone. In 1999, the Israeli army expelled roughly 700 residents from the region and demolished many of their homes.

Petitions were filed to the High Court of Justice, which issued an interim order permitting them to return until a final verdict on the case was rendered, but they were not allowed to rebuild their homes. Efforts to settle the case failed, but any construction that the residents have undertaken, even of the simplest and most necessary kind, has been considered illegal.

The soldiers came to the village following a report from settlers that new construction was being carried out. That same morning, village residents said, a drone with a camera was hovering over Khirbet al-Rakiz. That wasn’t’ the first time. 

They said it belonged to settlers in the area. Some said that it belonged to the Regavim organization, which tracks new Palestinian construction activity in Area C– the 62% of the West Bank under full Israeli control – and which then reports the activity to Israeli authorities. 


Harun Abu Aram's parents at Khirbet al-Rakiz, January 2021. They lived in the cave for decades. Credit: Emil Salman

Around 1 P.M. on Friday, an army jeep arrived along with a car from the Israeli Civil Administration in the West Bank driven by Husam Muadi, the infrastructure officer of the Hebron District Coordination and Liaison Office.

“I was sitting with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law at the entrance to the house in the cave when four soldiers and the district coordination and liaison officer arrived,” Amour told Haaretz. “They entered the house as if it was their own, without an order and without saying why. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked, and the officer, who didn’t introduce himself, responded in Arabic, ‘Be quiet.’ We started to argue.

The soldiers searched the cave and pulled out a generator that provides the family with a few hours of electricity per day

I said, ‘What’s this ‘Be quiet’? According to the accepted rules of courtesy in the world, you need to ask permission before coming into someone’s house. My wife and children are inside.’”

But they insisted on going inside, first to an alcove with a tin roof that is used as a kitchen and then into the cave itself. Amour, who is 36, attempted to prevent them from entering. The soldiers pushed and hit him with their hands and the butt of a rifle, he said. His 11-year-old son, Mohammed, tried to intervene and was also pushed and hit in the same manner. His youngest son, Jabril, who is six, hid in fear under a couch. “We found him a few hours later, and he is still afraid to go out alone,” Amour recounted. 

The soldiers searched the cave and pulled out a generator that provides the family with a few hours of electricity per day. Israel has not permitted Khirbet al-Rakiz and other Palestinian villages in the area to be connected to the electricity grid or a running water supply, which is provided not only to the Jewish settlements in the area but also to the unauthorized Jewish outposts there. The Palestinians spend large sums on home electricity generation to power refrigerators, washing machines and lamps for several hours of the day.

“They didn’t say in advance that they came to confiscate the generator and didn’t provide me with any kind of order or receipt over the confiscation,” Amour said. Outside, the soldiers found a drill and cutting disks, which they also confiscated, as if they had decided on the spur of the moment what to take. “I argued with them all the way up to the path where they parked the cars,” he said, adding that Harun Abu Aram’s father, Rasmi, saw from his house in a cave up the hill that there was a problem and quickly came over.

Harun followed his father down toward Amour’s cave, which sits amid rocky ground and small olive groves. Amour and Rasmi   both recounted that a soldier fired into the air toward Rasmi. “The soldier aimed a rifle and told me: ‘go, go,’” he said.

They said Harun was highly upset by the rifle fire and ran to protect his father. The video of the incident begins when the soldier grabbed Harun by the neck and three other young men tried to free him and then take back the generator. The moment when a soldier shoots Harun in the neck is not on the video. 


A child swings in Khirbet al-Rakiz, January 2021. Credit: Emil Salman

“I stood at the side screaming,” said Amour’s wife, Firyal. “It was fortunate that my eldest son wasn’t here.” Harun fell to the ground, bleeding profusely. Amour’s brother-in-law started his car, intending to take him to get medical treatment, but a soldier shot out one of the car’s tires. The soldiers fired a total of 19 bullets in the vicinity of Amour’s house. 

News that something terrible had happened quickly spread to the adjoining village of al-Twani. Dozens of people began heading toward the scene on foot and by car and the soldiers quickly left. Harun, still bleeding, was put into a car that had arrived from al-Twani and taken to a clinic in the nearby village of Karmil, and from there to the hospital in Yatta. When it became clear how serious his condition was, he was transferred to a hospital in Hebron. 

The generator that sparked the confrontation was ultimately not confiscated and lay damaged outside the cave after falling several times as Amour and his friends tried to take it back from the soldiers. The tools were not confiscated either. 

“On Friday, a report of illegal construction was received in Al-Rakiz,” the Israeli Civil Administration said in its response for this article. “Following that, an Israeli army force and a representative of the District Coordination and Liaison Office came to the site to stop the illegal work and confiscate a number of tools that their owners were using during the construction. The confiscation was carried out in accordance with authority and the rules.” In light of what then transpired, it was decided not to confiscate the generator, the Civil Administration said, but "that is not an indication that it was being used legally". 


Children run in the village of Khirbet al-Rakiz. Credit: Emil Salman

Where any construction is illegal

Amour’s parents lived in the cave for decades. Now Firyal is responsible for maintaining and cleaning it. She has left up decorations that she put up when the couple’s eldest son, Khalil, passed his high school matriculation exams. 

The Civil Administration has issued demolition orders in connection with their kitchen and water cistern, where they store rainwater and water they buy from water tanks. “I can’t cook in the cave, and like everyone, we need water,” she said somewhat apologetically.

Like others in Khirbet al-Rakiz, Amour and his family are always working, scraping by with their herds of livestock and growing grain and vegetables that are mainly for their own consumption. Amour and Khalil also collect discarded items, including clothing from the garbage dump near Bethlehem. They repair what they can while Firyal cleans the clothes and then they try to sell the items at the Friday market in Yatta.

As a child, Harun Abu Aram, who is currently lying unconscious and paralyzed in the hospital in Hebron, also used to collect such things from the garbage dump for settlements in the Hebron area to help support his family. He is featured doing that in the 2012 film “Good Garbage” by Israelis Ada Ushpiz and Shosh Shlam. 

After Harun finished the 6th grade, his mother Farsi said Sunday, he went to work in Israel. About four years ago, he was caught in Israel without a permit and spent four months in jail. He was scheduled to appear in court that day for entering Israel illegally, she said. 


Since Friday, dozens of people have come to visit every day to show their solidarity with the family and the village. Credit: Emil Salman

Since his release from jail, he was mostly helping his father tend their herd. “He has 10 sheep that he really loves,” his mother said. Friday, the day he was shot in the neck, he had planned to celebrate his 24th birthday with his fiancée, Du’a. They were supposed to get married in another two months. 

Since Friday, dozens of people have come to visit every day to show their solidarity with the family and the village. Israel has been demanding that residents of 12 villages permanently vacate their homes so that the area can be used for military exercises.

Khirbet al-Rakiz has been officially excluded eventually from this list, but the ban on any construction and connecting to the water and electricity infrastructure is still on. The Civil Administration considers the Hebron Hills a priority for enforcing demolition orders, as the head of the Civil Administration, Ghassan Alyan told a Knesset hearing in a presentation entitled “Preventing a Palestinian Takeover of Area C.”

In November, the Civil Administration demolished a house that the Harun Abu Aram family had completed there two weeks earlier. For decades, the family had been living in a cave that was plagued by leaks and deterioration. They have now returned to the cave. The abu Aram's home is just one of five that the Civil Administration has demolished there in the past three months. 

The forces sent in to carry out the demolitions also dismantled the water connection that had been installed by the villages’ council. Now they as other families have to rely on supplies from water tanks that cost them 400 shekels ($124) per month, which is well beyond their means.

On a hilltop north of the caves and huts of Khirbet al-Rakiz, one can clearly see the houses in the Jewish settlement of Ma’on. Farsi Abu Aram, who is 47, said she saw the construction for the settlement start when she was about 7 years old and went out to herd livestock.

“The settlers tell us that we had migrated here not long ago,” said Abu Aram’s son-in-law, Hamed al-Nawaja’a. “I work in Israel and with every Israeli whom I ask, one comes from Morocco, the second one from Russia, while our parents and [their] grandparents and so forth were born here.”

#ObliteratedFamilies – Introduction by Amira Hass

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Rubble of the Maadi house

During the 2014 Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, 142 Palestinian families lost three or more members. Some of the families were wiped out entirely.

The #ObliteratedFamilies project tells the stories of some of these families, their loved ones who were killed and those left behind.

Behind every erased Gazan family is an Israeli pilot. Behind every orphaned child who has lost his brothers and sisters in the bombing is an Israeli commander who gave the order and a soldier who pulled the trigger. Behind every demolished house are the Israeli physicist and hi-tech specialist who calculated the optimal angles for maximal impact. And there is the army spokesperson (backed by legal experts) who always evaded the journalist’s question: how proportional is it to shell an entire building with all its inhabitants? What – in your laws – justifies killing 23 family members, babies, children and the elderly among them, in one fell swoop of a missile?

There is one very present absentee in the “stories” below: Israeli society. Whether those members of society directly responsible, from government ministers and general military staff down through the ranks, or those who are indirectly responsible in their support and refusal to know. Have the direct accomplices – most of whom preserve their armed anonymity – ever shown any interest in knowing who was targeted by their sophisticated smart bombs? Or how many unarmed civilians they killed, their names, how many girls and boys, how many members of a single family, how many entire families have been erased? Disastrously, the safe guess is that physical distance and the fact that both soldiers and commanders did not have to soil their hands with blood nor see the mangled bodies with their own eyes helped them greatly to bury any information, knowledge, and thought.

Before and between the major onslaughts of 2008-9, 2012 and 2014 “smaller-scale” Israeli assaults were carried out, and they too wiped out lives, or erased the toil of many years and added traumas onto past disasters. Another link in such a long chain of injustices that one’s head is dizzy with disbelief, or the need to forget. At times, Gazans themselves help one forget: with their humor, their warmth, the continuity of life and vitality their creativity which breaks through all barriers and limitations of the siege and the pain, their silences – for they are sick of telling, or because what’s the point. But more than ever, more than any previous large-scale or smaller-scale assault, after 2014, the quenched eyes of Gazans have recounted how that was the most horrific of attacks.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) calculated that 142 families lost three or more members, each of these families in a single Israeli shelling or bombing. The total was 742 persons, more than 25% of all Palestinian casualties of that summer. There is nothing more difficult than gathering testimonies from people whose families have been nearly wiped out, to try and describe the horrendous vacuum which has been created and cannot be filled. The choice of “only” ten families, is a statement: testimony gathering and reading must not become automatic. It mustn’t, lest feelings be dulled. Therefore, the silences and the spaces between the spoken and the unspoken, between the written and the unwritten, speak for all the rest.

The erasure of entire families was one of the appalling characteristics of the 2014 assault. These were no errors or mistaken personal choices on the part of a pilot or a navigator or a brigade commander. This was policy. There are no anonymous players here: the identity of the policy makers is well known, as are their names and positions. Between July 7 and August 26, Israel carried out about 6,000 air raids on the Gaza Strip and fired 14,500 tank shells and about 35,000 artillery shells. 2,251 Palestinians were killed, among them 1,462 civilians, 551 of whom were children, and 299 women. Some of the non-civilians killed – namely combatant members of the armed organizations – were not killed in battle but under the same civilian circumstances where their relatives were also killed: in their beds, in their own homes, during the fast-breaking meal, in their residential quarters.

As stated in B’Tselem’s report “Black Flag”, which investigated 70 of the 142 incidents, with the exception of a few cases Israel never gave any explanation for bombing or shelling those houses with their inhabitants inside. In other words, Israel never disclosed what and who were its targets: perhaps one of the family members, perhaps a weapons stash in the house or fire opened from a neighboring house? But the systematic action and the silence both show that Israel finds it ‘legitimate’ and ‘proportional’ to kill entire families: if one of their members is a Hamas fighter, if a weapons stash is held nearby or in their home, or for any other similar reason. What does it mean? That it is legitimate to shell nearly every home in Israel, for nearly every Israeli family has an armed soldier, and many homes are inhabited by senior army officials, and important military and security installations are situated in the heart of Israeli civilian population. This is an absurd and criminal criterion of warfare, opposed to international law and basic principles of justice. But the majority in Israeli society embraces it as right and justified.

According to OCHA, Hamas and other Palestinian armed organizations launched 4,881 rockets and fired 1,753 mortar shells against Israel. 94% of these reached the maximum range of 50 kilometers, mentions B’Tselem. This fire targeted mostly Israeli civilian communities. Because of the limited technology of Hamas’ weapons, and thanks to Israel’s state-of-the-art defense capacities and the evacuation of numerous Israeli residents, the number of Israeli civilian casualties was minimal: six Israeli civilians were killed, among them one 5-year old child. The 67 Israeli soldiers killed during the onslaught were casualties in battle. The Palestinian combatants who killed them were defending their own population from the invader.

The Gaza Strip is not a sovereign state, even if the Hamas regime sometimes behaves like a sovereign government of a liberated territory. According to international agreements, the Strip is an inseparable part of the Palestinian state which the world is still committed to creating, at least by declaration. It is still under Israeli occupation – even though the parameters of control differ from those in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. For example, the population registry of Gaza, as that of the West Bank, is subordinate to the Israeli Ministry of Interior and its policies. Only upon Israeli approval is the Palestinian Authority able to issue new ID cards to 16-year-olds in the Gaza Strip every year, as in the West Bank. Thousands of Palestinians, among them refugees from Syria, live in the Gaza Strip without Palestinian IDs: Israel will not have it. As an occupying force, Israel is supposedly responsible for the population – while it shirks this responsibility with increasingly brutal measures of domination and revenge. Its military assaults were and still are the continuation of Israel’s consistent policy of separating the Gaza Strip from the rest of the Palestinians in its attempt to crush the people and turn it into a collection of separate, disconnected groups and individuals.

As the occupied, Palestinians have the right to fight the occupier. But this right is also subject to international law, to common sense, to international circumstances, to the leadership’s responsibility towards its public. Hamas has had its own internal political considerations in choosing the military path in spite of all the previous rounds of warfare that failed to achieve its declared national objectives. True, over the years Hamas has developed its own means and skills of warfare. But, as the 2014 war showed, it has been – and remains – inferior to Israel’s military might. Military confrontations are Israel’s home field, where it excels. It is precisely the field that should be avoided.

Amira Hass
6 July 2016

The Gaza Strip is part of the Palestinian Occupied Territory; together with the West Bank and East Jerusalem, it has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. More than 70% of Gaza Palestinians are refugees, forced to leave their homes in the lands grabbed by the nascent state of Israel in 1948 and forbidden from returning.

The Gaza Strip is a tiny Palestinian enclave, just 360 km². It is one of the most densely populated places in the world. The siege imposed by Israel and enforced by Egypt turned this place into the world’s largest open air prison. 2014 summer’s 51-day long Israeli assault from land, air and sea left the Strip in ruins and 100,000 Palestinians homeless. 2,200 people, the vast majority of whom civilians and nearly a fourth of whom children, were killed; more than 11,000 were injured; and at least 1,000 children were permanently disabled.

Amira Hass: Introduction to #Obliterated Families

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Gaza: A gaping wound

#ObliteratedFamilies

Behind every erased Gazan family is an Israeli pilot. Behind every orphaned child who has lost his brothers and sisters in the bombing is an Israeli commander who gave the order and a soldier who pulled the trigger. Behind every demolished house are the Israeli physicist and hi-tech specialist who calculated the optimal angles for maximal impact. And there is the army spokesperson (backed by legal experts) who always evaded the journalist’s question: how proportional is it to shell an entire building with all its inhabitants? What – in your laws – justifies killing 23 family members, babies, children and the elderly among them, in one fell swoop of a missile?

There is one very present absentee in the “stories” below: Israeli society. Whether those members of society directly responsible, from government ministers and general military staff down through the ranks, or those who are indirectly responsible in their support and refusal to know. Have the direct accomplices – most of whom preserve their armed anonymity – ever shown any interest in knowing who was targeted by their sophisticated smart bombs? Or how many unarmed civilians they killed, their names, how many girls and boys, how many members of a single family, how many entire families have been erased? Disastrously, the safe guess is that physical distance and the fact that both soldiers and commanders did not have to soil their hands with blood nor see the mangled bodies with their own eyes helped them greatly to bury any information, knowledge, and thought.

Before and between the major onslaughts of 2008-9, 2012 and 2014 “smaller-scale” Israeli assaults were carried out, and they too wiped out lives, or erased the toil of many years and added traumas onto past disasters. Another link in such a long chain of injustices that one’s head is dizzy with disbelief, or the need to forget. At times, Gazans themselves help one forget: with their humor, their warmth, the continuity of life and vitality their creativity which breaks through all barriers and limitations of the siege and the pain, their silences – for they are sick of telling, or because what’s the point. But more than ever, more than any previous large-scale or smaller-scale assault, after 2014, the quenched eyes of Gazans have recounted how that was the most horrific of attacks.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) calculated that 142 families lost three or more members, each of these families in a single Israeli shelling or bombing. The total was 742 persons, more than 25% of all Palestinian casualties of that summer. There is nothing more difficult than gathering testimonies from people whose families have been nearly wiped out, to try and describe the horrendous vacuum which has been created and cannot be filled. The choice of “only” ten families, is a statement: testimony gathering and reading must not become automatic. It mustn’t, lest feelings be dulled. Therefore, the silences and the spaces between the spoken and the unspoken, between the written and the unwritten, speak for all the rest.

The erasure of entire families was one of the appalling characteristics of the 2014 assault. These were no errors or mistaken personal choices on the part of a pilot or a navigator or a brigade commander. This was policy. There are no anonymous players here: the identity of the policy makers is well known, as are their names and positions. Between July 7 and August 26, Israel carried out about 6,000 air raids on the Gaza Strip and fired 14,500 tank shells and about 35,000 artillery shells. 2,251 Palestinians were killed, among them 1,462 civilians, 551 of whom were children, and 299 women. Some of the non-civilians killed – namely combatant members of the armed organizations – were not killed in battle but under the same civilian circumstances where their relatives were also killed: in their beds, in their own homes, during the fast-breaking meal, in their residential quarters.

As stated in B’Tselem’s report “Black Flag”, which investigated 70 of the 142 incidents, with the exception of a few cases Israel never gave any explanation for bombing or shelling those houses with their inhabitants inside. In other words, Israel never disclosed what and who were its targets: perhaps one of the family members, perhaps a weapons stash in the house or fire opened from a neighboring house? But the systematic action and the silence both show that Israel finds it ‘legitimate’ and ‘proportional’ to kill entire families: if one of their members is a Hamas fighter, if a weapons stash is held nearby or in their home, or for any other similar reason. What does it mean? That it is legitimate to shell nearly every home in Israel, for nearly every Israeli family has an armed soldier, and many homes are inhabited by senior army officials, and important military and security installations are situated in the heart of Israeli civilian population. This is an absurd and criminal criterion of warfare, opposed to international law and basic principles of justice. But the majority in Israeli society embraces it as right and justified.

According to OCHA, Hamas and other Palestinian armed organizations launched 4,881 rockets and fired 1,753 mortar shells against Israel. 94% of these reached the maximum range of 50 kilometers, mentions B’Tselem. This fire targeted mostly Israeli civilian communities. Because of the limited technology of Hamas’ weapons, and thanks to Israel’s state-of-the-art defense capacities and the evacuation of numerous Israeli residents, the number of Israeli civilian casualties was minimal: six Israeli civilians were killed, among them one 5-year old child. The 67 Israeli soldiers killed during the onslaught were casualties in battle. The Palestinian combatants who killed them were defending their own population from the invader.

The Gaza Strip is not a sovereign state, even if the Hamas regime sometimes behaves like a sovereign government of a liberated territory. According to international agreements, the Strip is an inseparable part of the Palestinian state which the world is still committed to creating, at least by declaration. It is still under Israeli occupation – even though the parameters of control differ from those in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. For example, the population registry of Gaza, as that of the West Bank, is subordinate to the Israeli Ministry of Interior and its policies. Only upon Israeli approval is the Palestinian Authority able to issue new ID cards to 16-year-olds in the Gaza Strip every year, as in the West Bank. Thousands of Palestinians, among them refugees from Syria, live in the Gaza Strip without Palestinian IDs: Israel will not have it. As an occupying force, Israel is supposedly responsible for the population – while it shirks this responsibility with increasingly brutal measures of domination and revenge. Its military assaults were and still are the continuation of Israel’s consistent policy of separating the Gaza Strip from the rest of the Palestinians in its attempt to crush the people and turn it into a collection of separate, disconnected groups and individuals.

As the occupied, Palestinians have the right to fight the occupier. But this right is also subject to international law, to common sense, to international circumstances, to the leadership’s responsibility towards its public. Hamas has had its own internal political considerations in choosing the military path in spite of all the previous rounds of warfare that failed to achieve its declared national objectives. True, over the years Hamas has developed its own means and skills of warfare. But, as the 2014 war showed, it has been – and remains – inferior to Israel’s military might. Military confrontations are Israel’s home field, where it excels. It is precisely the field that should be avoided.

Amira Hass
6 July 2016

This is the introduction to #OBLITERATEDFAMILIES, the stories of families whose lives shattered during the 2014 Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip.

Amira Hass: I Went to See the Plight of the Dried-out Settlements. I Found a Pool

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Amira Hass, Haaretz, June 26, 2016

With Israel having cut the Palestinians’ water supply, I visited two settlements where the people are supposedly suffering too.

Thus tweeted MK Bezalel Smotrich (Habayit Hayehudi) on Friday: “No joke: We’ve gone back 100 years!” He reported on five stations for providing drinking water that were placed that morning in the settlement of Kedumim.

That day, the religious Zionist weekly Makor Rishon published an article titled “The water crisis in Judea and Samaria: In the settlement of Eli huge bags of drinking water were distributed to the residents.”

So I set out to witness this suffering at two settlements. I left before I saw the tweet by one Avraham Benyamin in response to Smotrich: “We’re waiting for a series of empathetic articles in Haaretz. We’ll continue to wait.”

Indeed, last week I started writing my annual series of articles on the systematic theft of water from the Palestinians. I was surprised not to find any newspaper reports about water problems in the settlements. There weren’t any on Army Radio and Israel Radio – notorious clandestine supporters of the BDS movement. But neither did I find any mention of it on websites linked to the settlement lobby.

After all, since the beginning of June, when the Mekorot national water company began cutting water supplies to the Palestinians in the Salfit and Nablus areas by some 30 to 50 percent, Israeli spokespeople have claimed there is a shortage in the settlements too. (Or in the unsanitized words of a Palestinian employee in the Civil Administration: They’re cutting back from the Arabs so there will be water for the settlers.)

Makor Rishon reporter Hodaya Karish Hazony wrote: “In the communities of Migdalim, Yitzhar, Elon Moreh, Tapuah, Givat Haroeh, Alonei Shiloh and others there have been water stoppages. ‘We’re between insanity and despair on this matter,’ said one resident.”

So I went to check the water shortage that’s driving the people from insanity to despair in Eli. I looked for people lining up for water. I didn’t find them. Then I drove from the center of the lush settlement to isolated Hill No. 9, the site of the Hayovel neighborhood mentioned in the article.

There I found two huge and swollen blue sacks from the Water Authority, with faucets attached to them. A sign requests that you “maintain order” while waiting and notes that “priority will be given to the elderly, the ill and children.”

At about 3 P.M. I didn’t see any elderly, ill people or children waiting next to the faucets. Nor did I see any ordinary adults. A few drops leaked from the faucets and wet the asphalt. People entered or left their cars. Artificial grass adorned areas near the neighborhood’s prefab homes.

Near the soldiers’ guard post, about 50 meters from one sack of water, there was an area of natural grass that was quite green. Next to it were a few tree saplings, and the soil around them was wet, with several puddles. A soldier said that over the week there had been several water stoppages, and he thought the sacks were brought on Thursday. The article said Wednesday.

In a small public building nearby, the bathroom was open and sparkling clean. The toilet flushed nicely, and refreshing water flowed from the sink’s faucet. A woman who got out of her car next to the sack of water said, hesitantly, “I’ve used it sometimes.” And why not more? “It’s unpleasant; the water is warm.”

Further down, in the center of Eli, I came across girls holding bags with towels and bathing suits. “Is the pool open? Where is it?” I asked.

Following their instructions I arrived at the Eli pool. Splashing sounds and the joyful shouts of swimmers could be heard from behind the fence. The lawns around the pool were natural and green. I wondered: Where’s the solidarity? Why don’t they bring water from the center of Eli to the neighborhood that’s suffering because of its altitude?

Makor Rishon quoted Meir Shilo, head of infrastructure for the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council: “The problem is overconsumption caused by the [settlers’] population increase and mainly, it seems, because of the consumption of water for agriculture.”

Dror Etkes, an independent researcher of the Israeli colonization policy, told Haaretz that in the settlement bloc surrounding Shiloh, “settlers are cultivating 2,746 dunams [679 acres; most of this is around Shiloh: 2,600 dunams]. Of this, 2,133 dunams are private Palestinian land.”

Meaning: In recent years, the settlers have discovered that piracy (as opposed to state theft) for agricultural purposes facilitates the grab of more Palestinian land than the construction of villas or prefab homes does.

The army, by preventing the lawful Palestinian owners from reaching their land, has made this piracy possible. And along with the private illegal agriculture comes the increase in water consumption at the expense of the Palestinians and their agriculture and drinking water.

From Eli I traveled west to the settlement of Kedumim, where the lush streets welcomed me. I looked for the water stations that Smotrich had tweeted about.

From my car windshield I saw a sign: “The swimming pool in Kedumim is open. Register now.” They probably forgot to take it down from last year.

In the Rashi neighborhood I arrived at a water-distribution station, under the awning of the Rashi religious study hall. Opposite stood a truck with a large water tank. Someone returned from it with a pail and headed for the prefab homes at the top of the hill.

“Yes, there are water stoppages,” he confirmed. “An opportunity to get a taste of the siege of Jerusalem,” he added, referring to the events of 1948.

And why not go down to fill up with water in Kedumim’s lower neighborhoods? “It’s more convenient this way, close to home,” he replied.

At the faucet children were filling various containers. The girl next to the red sack told the man who was taking her picture: “Make sure the bottle is seen in the photo.”

Amira Hass: Israel Incapable of Telling Truth About Water It Steals From Palestinians

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Water is the only issue in which Israel (still) finds it difficult to defend its discriminatory, oppressive and destructive policy with pretexts of security and God

Amira Hass, Haaretz, Jun 21, 2016

Israeli spokespeople have three answers ready to pull out when they respond to questions on the water shortage in West Bank Palestinian towns – which stands out starkly compared to the hydrological smugness of the settlements: 1) The Palestinian water system is old, so it suffers from water loss; 2) the Palestinians steal water from each other, and from the Israelis; and 3) in general, Israel has in its great generosity doubled the amount of water it supplies to the Palestinians, compared to what was called for in the Oslo Accords.

“Supplies,” the spokespeople will write in their responses. They will never say Israel sells the Palestinians 64 million cubic meters of water a year instead of the 31 million cubic meters agreed to in the Oslo Accords. Accords that were signed in 1994, and that were supposed to come to an end in 1999. They will not say that Israel sells the Palestinians water that it first stole from them.

Bravo for the demagogy. Bravo for the one-eighth portion of truth in the answer. Water is the only issue in which Israel (still) finds it difficult to defend its discriminatory, oppressive and destructive policy with pretexts of security and God. That is why it must blur and distort this basic fact: Israel controls the water sources. And being in control, it imposes a quota on the amount of water the Palestinians are allowed to produce and consume. On average, the Palestinians consume 73 liters per person per day. Below the recommended minimum. Israelis consume a daily 180 liters on average, and there are those who say even more. And here, unlike there, you will not find thousands who consume 20 liters a day. In the summer.

True, some Palestinians steal water. Desperate farmers, regular chiselers. If it was not for the water shortage, it would not happen. A large part of the thefts are in Area C, under full Israeli control. So please, let the IDF and police find all the criminals. But to justify the crisis with theft – that is deceit.

With the Oslo Accords, Israel imposed an outrageous, racist, arrogant and brutal division of water sources in the West Bank: 80 percent for Israelis (on both sides of the Green Line), and 20 percent for the Palestinians (from wells drilled before 1967, which the Palestinians continued to operate; from the Mekorot water company; from future wells to be drilled in the eastern basin of the mountain aquifer; from agricultural wells and springs. Many of the springs, by the way, dried out because of Israeli deep wells, or because the settlers took them over. The ways of theft know no bounds.)

Twenty percent is actually good, because now only about 14 percent of the water from the mountain aquifer is accessible to Palestinians in the West Bank. Technical reasons, irregularities and human error, insufferable Israeli bureaucratic foot-dragging, whose entire goal is to delay the development of the Palestinian water infrastructure and the upgrading of what now exists; unexpected difficulties in producing water from wells in the allowed places, old wells that have dried out or whose production has fallen, and which Israel does not allow to be replaced by newly-drilled wells – all these explain how we have reached 14 percent instead of what was signed in Oslo, and why Israel sells the Palestinians more water that it committed to back then. After all, it has been left with more water to produce from this natural resource, which, according to international law, an occupying country is forbidden to use for the purposes of its civilian population.

During the summer, the problem becomes worse, of course. The heat rises and the Palestinians’ demand for water rises, not just the settlers’. So in the Salfit district and east of Nablus, Mekorot reduces the amount of water it sells to Palestinians. The spokespeople will not state it that way. They will say “regulating,” they will say, too. that in the settlements “there are also complaints about a water shortage” (it seems I missed the report on Arutz 7 about it).

But in Farkha, Salfit and Deir al-Hatab people describe, on the verge of tears, how humiliating it is to live for weeks without running water. And we have not even spoken about the dozens of Palestinian communities on both sides of the Green Line that Israel, a light unto the nations, refuses to allow to connect to the water infrastructure.

Amira Hass
Haaretz Correspondent

 

Amira Hass: Israel Admits Cutting West Bank Water Supply, but Blames Palestinian Authority

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Israel says region’s intense heatwave combined with Palestinian Water Authority’s refusal to approve additional infrastructure had led to ‘old and limited pipes being unable to transfer all the water needed.’


A water tanker in the Palestinian village of Halhul, near Hebron. Michal Fattal

Amira Hass, Haaretz, Jun 21, 2016

Since the start of this month, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been suffering the harsh effects of a drastic cut in the water supplied them by Israel’s Mekorot water company.

In the Salfit region of the West Bank and in three villages east of Nablus, homes have had no running water for more than two weeks. Factories there have been shut down, gardens and plant nurseries have been ruined and animals have died of thirst or been sold to farmers outside the affected areas.

People have been improvising by drawing water from agricultural wells, or by buying mineral water or paying for water brought in large tankers for household use and to water their livestock. But purchasing water that way is extremely expensive.

Palestinian Water Authority officials told Haaretz that people at Mekorot have told them the supply cuts were going to last the entire summer. The sources said they were told by the Israelis that there is a water shortage and that everything must be done to assure that the local reservoirs (located in the settlements) stay full so that the necessary pressure can be maintained to stream the water through the pipelines leading to other settlements and Palestinian communities.

Palestinian municipal officials say that Palestinian workers for the Civil Administration who are sent to regulate the quantities of water in the Mekorot pipes told them the water cuts were made to meet the area settlements’ demand for water, which is rising in the hot weather. Similar cuts were initiated in the same areas last year, when the severe water supply interruptions also occurred during Ramadan.

Mekorot would not answer questions, referring Haaretz to the Israel Water Authority and the Foreign Ministry. Uri Schor, the Water Authority spokesman, wrote that the quantities of water Israel sells to the Palestinians throughout the West Bank, including in the Salfit area, has gone up over the years.

“A localized water shortage has developed for Israelis and Palestinians alike in northern Samaria and it stems from the especially high consumption because of the region’s intense heat,” Schor wrote. He added that the shortage developed because the Palestinian Water Authority is refusing to approve additional water infrastructure in the West Bank through the joint water committee, “which has led to the old and limited pipes being unable to transfer all the water needed in the region.”

An Israeli security source said settlements are also complaining about water shortages.

Palestinians deny foot-dragging, say water goes to settlements

A senior Palestinian Water Authority official denied that Palestinian foot-dragging was contributing to the water shortages.

“The Israeli Authority is misleading the public,” he said. “The pipes do not need to be upgraded. USAID, for example, just finished the new pipeline in Deir Sha’ar to serve the population in Hebron and Bethlehem. Israel needs to increase the pumping rate from the Deir Sha’ar pumping station and more than half a million Palestinian would receive their equitable share.

“Israel, however, submitted a project to increase the size of the pipe serving Israeli settlements in the Tekoa area, and the Israel Water Authority is blackmailing the Palestinian Authority to approve the Israeli project in exchange for increasing the water from the Deir Sha’ar booster station.”

Schor brought examples from the months of January-May over the past four years that show that there has indeed been an increase in the quantities of water supplied to the Salfit and Nablus districts, from 2.7 million cubic meters of water in 2013 to 3.48 cubic meters this year.

But the internal records of the Palestinian Water Authority show that in May of this year there was a cut in the water supplied to the town of Bidya, with 12,000 residents, from 50,470 cubic meters in March, to 43,440 in May. In May of last year, Bidya received 45,000 cubic meters.

In the town Qarawat Bani Hassan, consumption in May was higher than in March (17,000 cubic meters compared to 15,000), but last May consumption reached 20,000 cubic meters, and according to a Palestinian official there’s no way to explain the drop in usage other than by a drop in supply. The supply cut in June, meanwhile, has been much sharper – of up to 50 percent per hour.

The Oslo Accords, which were meant to remain in effect until 1999, preserved Israeli control over the West Bank’s water sources and discriminates in how the water is divided. Under the agreements, Israel gets 80 percent of the water from the West Bank mountain aquifer, while the rest goes to the Palestinians. The agreement also sets no limit on the amount of water Israel can take, but limits the Palestinians to 118 million cubic meters from the wells that existed prior to the accords, and another 70 million to 80 million cubic meters from new drilling.

For various technical reasons and unexpected drilling failures in the eastern basin of the aquifer (the only place the agreement allows the Palestinians to drill), in practice the Palestinians produce less water than the agreements set. According to B’Tselem, as of 2014 the Palestinians are only getting 14 percent of the aquifer’s water. That is also why Mekorot is selling the Palestinians double the amount of water stipulated in the Oslo agreement – 64 million cubic meters, as opposed to 31 million.

The Coordinator for Government Activity in the Territories said, “As a result of increased water consumption in the summer, it’s necessary to manage and regulate the flow to enable the highest possible supply to all the populations. Given the problem, the head of the Civil Administration has approved an emergency regulation to operate the Ariel 1 drill rig to increase the amounts of water to residents of northern Samaria, with an emphasis on the Salfit area; another 5,000 cubic meters of water per hour was also approved for the southern Hebron Hills.”

The coordinator also noted that the Civil Administration has to battle theft from water lines that lead to Palestinian communities. Just yesterday, it said, it had discovered two thefts of water from a pipeline that supplies the Salfit area.

Amira Hass
Haaretz Correspondent

 

April 3, 2008
Amira Hass in Madison

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Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
7:30 pm
Pyle Center, UW Campus

Amira Hass is a world-renowned Israeli journalist, and the only one who actually lives among the Palestinians that she reports on. She is a courageous and articulate voice on the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.

Hass covers Palestinian affairs for the Israeli daily Haaretz. She is the author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza and Reporting from Ramallah. Known for her honest and often brutal portrayals of the impact of Israeli occupation on the lives of ordinary Palestinians, she received the 1999 International World Press Freedom Award in recognition of her work in the Gaza Strip. She gave this talk as part of the “Reporting the Middle East” lecture series at UW-Madison in October 2003.

Hass will also be a guest on A Public Affair on Friday, April 4th from noon to 1:00 p.m. on WORT 89.9 FM with host Judith Siers-Poisson.

Sponsored by the UW Middle East Studies Program. Co-sponsors include the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project and Playgrounds for Palestine — Madison.

Amira Hass: What a Strange ‘Abroad’

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Amira Hass, Haaretz, Feb 14, 2007

The Gaza Strip is ‘abroad’ in a strange way. Israelis need a passport to get there, and Palestinian Jerusalemites need a laissez passer – the same one they need to present when they fly to Paris via Ben-Gurion International Airport.

Now it is official: The Gaza Strip is “abroad.” As of February 1, the few Israelis whose entry into the Strip is approved by the army have had to present a passport at the Erez crossing, and they are listed on the Interior Ministry’s computer as having crossed the country’s borders.

The Gaza Strip is “abroad” in a strange way. Israelis need a passport to get there, and Palestinian Jerusalemites need a laissez passer – the same one they need to present when they fly to Paris via Ben-Gurion International Airport. But when these same Jerusalemites go to Jordan via the Allenby Bridge, they use a Jordanian passport. And the Palestinians who live in that “abroad” – the Gazans – are, for the meantime, exempt from crossing with a Palestinian passport; this exemption also applies to residents of the West Bank, by order of the interior minister.

The confusing multiplicity of procedures is still more remarkable in light of the fact that Israel allows only a few people to enter and leave the Strip. Only a small number of Israelis receive this permission – mainly those with relatives in Gaza or people, primarily women, who have been married to Gaza residents for years. Receiving a permit requires prior coordination, which is very cumbersome, and it sometimes takes days until the request for a permit or a permit extension finds a fax line without a busy signal at the “office for Israeli affairs” in the Civil Administration, a military body to which the interior minister has granted the authority to continue operating the crossing.

Crossing the approximately half a kilometer that separates the Palestinian side from the Israeli one requires additional coordination, on the phone, and an hours-long wait until the soldiers and clerks on the Israeli side allow permit holders to walk through. But this is not what makes the strangeness of the Gazan “abroad” unique; to many, this is simply reminiscent of the difficulties that totalitarian regimes imposed on travel between countries in Eastern Europe.

The “abroad” of Gaza is strange primarily for a different reason, a more fundamental one: All its residents are listed in the same population registry as residents of the West Bank, which is not “abroad,” and the entire list is controlled by Israel’s Interior Ministry. This control gives Interior Ministry representatives in the Civil Administration authority that the Palestinian interior minister lacks. This control allowed Israel to deprive hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their residency status after 1967. It allowed the continuation of marital, social, economic, religious and cultural ties between Gaza and the West Bank until 1991 – and then, it severed those ties. This control allows Israel to prevent the addition of foreign residents to the population registry; it allows Israel to intervene in, and even decide, the choice of a partner, place of study, type of medical treatment, address, quality time with children, participation in celebrations and funerals, the writing of wills and distribution of family property. Israel has the authority to ban the entry of friends or family members who are not Palestinian residents – not just their entry into Israel, but also into the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since October 2000, the ban has been comprehensive.

Only Palestinians registered as residents in the Israeli computer system can cross at the Rafah terminal, when it is open. Israel has the authority to ban Gazans from traveling to the West Bank or living there, and has been doing so with increasing fervor since 1991, when it began implementing the closure policy. This is the “abroad” that Israelis require a passport to enter. This is the “abroad” for which Israel argues that it has no responsibility. And this is the greatness of the Israeli occupation: It manages to present itself as nonexistent, while its authority reaches all the way to the bedroom.

No, this is not a recommendation to take another unilateral step and erase the Gazans from the Palestinian population registry, which is under Israeli control, in addition to the geographic and human separation. On the contrary! It is preferable for Israel to continue snooping around in their bedrooms than to take a step that would finally complete the separation between Gaza residents and their brothers in the West Bank.

There is reason for concern. A move such as erasing the Gazans from the registry fits the thought process that has characterized Israeli policy toward the Strip since 1991. Over the past 16 years, residents of the crowded, 360-square-kilometer Strip have been ordered to get used to its transformation into a kind of isolated autarkic economy and make do with the little it produces: increasingly little (and increasingly polluted) water; diminishing land; declining sources of income; industry and agriculture with no markets; and inferior educational and health institutions, due to their isolation from the world and the West Bank.

The peak of this policy, so far, was the disengagement in 2005. This is a policy that contradicts what is written in the Oslo Accords, which call the Strip and the West Bank a single territorial unit, as well as international resolutions about the solution for peace. But evacuating a few thousand settlers from the Strip was successfully marketed as Israeli moderation, even as Israel strengthened all its methods of control over the West Bank. Israel is also liable to market the deletion of Gazan names from the population registry as some kind of goodwill gesture. But such a move would only intensify the human distress of Gaza’s 1.4 million residents, as well as their separation from the world. And that is a proven recipe for keeping a reasonable peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians at a distance.

Amira Hass: Strangled in Gaza

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1.5 million Arabs under Israeli siege

Amira Hass, Haaretz, Mar 22, 2006

In the elections, Israelis will not be voting just for themselves. Not only will they choose parties that affect their own lives for four years, but also those of 3.5 million occupied Palestinians – as they have done for 39 years now. The winners in Israel will form a government that will determine the most minute details of every Palestinian’s life.

This is the essence of occupation. One people casts its votes and thereby authorizes its democratic government to be a dictator in a place that it rules by military hegemony. In that place there lives a separate nation that is entirely excluded from any rights in this democratic game.

For the past two months the dictator democratically elected by the Israeli public has determined that Gaza’s residents should go on a “diet,” as Attorney Dov Weissglas advised the cabinet, immediately after Hamas’ election victory.

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz decided that Gaza’s residents should eat less and less fresh produce and dairy produce, then less and less rice and then no bread.

By closing the Karni crossing to merchandise for prolonged periods, Mofaz intervened (as a cabinet representative) not only in the Palestinians’ eating habits. He also sent tens of thousands of Gazan Palestinians on unpaid leave. Drivers, merchants, porters, sewing workshop workers, farmers, construction workers and contractors, whose materials are not arriving, are all out of work. The already large number of people dependent on charity in Gaza will grow. The chain reaction will affect every family’s life and choices: the children’s education, medical treatment, visiting relatives, building an additional room to alleviate the crowded conditions at home.

No elected Palestinian government, headed by Hamas or Fatah, has ever intervened in everyday life to such an extent, or had such an influence on it.

At Israel’s order, the Palestinian security branches dug four tunnels with a total length of 1.5 kilometers, but did not find the suspected tunnel that served as the rationale for closing the merchandise terminal. On the day five kilos of explosive was found on Road No. 1 in a car carrying Palestinians – security explanations are all Israelis want to hear.

Since the disengagement Israel has claimed that “Gaza is no longer occupied territory,” so whatever happens there is not its responsibility. This version is more palatable to Israelis than hearing that Israel’s control over the Palestinians’ life in Gaza has ended; that Gaza is only one part of the Palestinian territory and that its population, economy and health and education institutions are tied to those in the West Bank; and that the international community has decided that the Palestinian state would be established on both parts, Gaza and the West Bank.

But the Israeli voter scorns the international community’s choices. It has decided that Gaza would be “returned” to Egypt. That is the logical meaning of closing the Karni crossing for a long time – after the number of Palestinians passing through the Erez crossing has already dwindled. Even if international pressure enables bringing “humanitarian” aid through the Karni crossing here and there – as though Gaza had been struck by natural disaster – Israel’s leaders will probably close it again for “security reasons.”

All this is intended to accustom Gaza residents and the international community to think that perhaps it is logical to direct Gaza’s products, business and plans southward, to Egypt, which will not be able to remain idle while almost 1.5 million Arabs are being strangled under the Israeli siege.

Thus Israelis will not be voting only on the Palestinians’ fate, but will also intervene in the lives of Egypt’s citizens.

Amira Hass
Haaretz Correspondent

Amira Hass: The Remaining 99.5 Percent

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For the sake of about half a percent of the population of the Gaza Strip, a Jewish half-percent, the lives of the remaining 99.5 percent were totally disrupted and destroyed – worthy of wonderment indeed.

Amira Hass, Haaretz, Aug 24, 2005

“I want to ask you as a Jew to a Jewess,” the young man said a few days ago. In these days, a beginning such as this invites a dialogue of the kind in which we have been drowning for several weeks now – a dialogue in which the definition “Jew” has been appropriated to describe some type of unique entity, one that is set apart from the other human species, a superior one. Sometimes it’s the Jewish boy with his arms raised from the Warsaw Ghetto; sometimes it’s the young girl whose orange shirt bears the slogan, “We won’t forget and we won’t forgive;” and sometimes it’s the soldier who refuses to evacuate a Jew. A unique entity of ties of blood, sacredness and land.

“As a Jew to a Jewess,” said the young man, who turned out to be a tourist from South America who has family in Israel and also understands Hebrew. It was at the Erez crossing, among the barbed-wire fencing, the locked gates, the revolving gates, the intimidating guard towers, the soldiers using special cameras to keep an eye on the handful of individuals passing through, and the booming loudspeakers through which they bark out their orders in Hebrew to women who have been waiting in the heat for five hours to go visit their sons imprisoned at the Be’er Sheva jail.

“Is it possible,” he continued with his question, “that the Israelis, who are so nice and good – after all, I have family here – are unaware of the injustice they have caused here?” The images of destruction left behind by Israel in Palestinian Gaza and witnessed by him in the past few days have left a look of shock in his eyes. “I am a Jew, and my father is a Holocaust survivor, and I grew up on totally different values of Judaism – social justice, equality and concern for one’s fellow man.”

As naive as it may have been, the question was like a breath of fresh air. Here was a Jew who was voicing his opinion on the fate of 1,300,000 people, while the entire world appeared to be focused on every one of the 8,000 Jews who are moving house. Here was a Jew who was moved by what have become dry numbers – 1,719 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip from the end of September 2000 until today; and according to various estimates, some two-thirds of them were unarmed and were not killed in battles or during the course of attempts to attack a military position or a settlement.

Based on figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, of those killed, 379 were children under the age of 18; 236 were younger than 16; 96 were women; and 102 were the objectives of targeted liquidations during the course of which the Israel Defense Forces also killed another 95 individuals who, according to the military too, were “innocent bystanders.”

Some 9,000 Gaza residents were injured; 2,704 homes to some 20,000 people were razed by the IDF’s bulldozers and assault helicopters; 2,187 were partially destroyed. Some 31,650 dunams of agricultural land were left scorched.

The Israeli responses to these numbers are standard: They invited it upon themselves, or: What do they expect when they fire Qassams at children and peaceful homes, or try to infiltrate and murder citizens in their houses – that the IDF won’t come to their defense?

A direct line is drawn between these questions, which expressed the public’s support for the Israeli assault policy, and participating in the sorrow of the evacuees and the wonderment at this “magnificent chapter” in the history of the Zionist settlement enterprise – a direct line of fundamental belief in the Jews’ super-rights in this land. Indeed, one can join those who are amazed by the settlers in general, and the Gaza Strip settlers in particular.

What talent it takes to live for 35 years in a flourishing park and splendid villas just 20 meters from overcrowded, suffocated refugee camps. What talent it takes to turn on the sprinklers on the lawns, while just across the way, 20,000 other people are dependent on the distribution of drinking water in tankers; to know that you deserve it, that your government will pave magnificent roads for you and neglect (prior to Oslo, before 1994) to the point of destruction the Palestinian infrastructure. What skill it takes to step out of your well-cared-for greenhouse and walk unmoved past 60-year-old fruit-bearing date trees that are uprooted for you, roads that are blocked for you, homes that are demolished for you, the children who are shelled from helicopters and tanks and buried alongside you, for the sake of the safety of your children and the preservation of your super-rights.

For the sake of about half a percent of the population of the Gaza Strip, a Jewish half-percent, the lives of the remaining 99.5 percent were totally disrupted and destroyed – worthy of wonderment indeed. And also amazing is how most of the other Israelis, who did not go themselves to settle the homeland, suffered this reality and did not demand that their government put an end to it – before the Qassams.

A big, well-fed goat was removed from the Gaza Strip this week. And therefore, the sense of relief felt by many of the 99.5 percent is understandable – although it is a far cry from the reality emerging from the so-superficial media reports that are focusing on the celebrations of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. In the words last week in the Khan Yunis refugee camp of a former worker at one of the settlements: “The settlements divided the Strip into three or four prisons. Now, we will live in one big prison – a more comfortable one, but a prison nevertheless.”

Amira Hass: Khan Yunis / No Compensation for Arabs Losing Their Jobs in Katif

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Amira Hass, Haaretz, 14 Aug 2005

Today is Omar’s last day of work for his employer in one of the religious settlements of Gush Katif. He will finish what he began a week ago: packing up the contents of the house and dismantling whatever can be dismantled. “I asked my boss if he would give me something from his house, as a gift,” the 29-year-old says without embarrassment. As someone who has to support his wife and two children, along with the households of his unemployed brothers and as someone who almost daily crossed over from crowded Khan Yunis, with its dowdy concrete houses pockmarked by shelling and bullets to the spacious settlement surrounded by greenery, he is not ashamed to expect a present from the man he has worked for since 1996.

Some employers, he says, gave their workmen a gift: a refrigerator, a fan, or NIS 150-200. But his boss told him he cannot give gifts and is selling whatever he cannot take to his new home.

Bidding farewell to his boss is not difficult for Omar; they had not forged a particularly affectionate tie and Omar says the same is true for most Palestinian laborers in the settlements. He does lament the loss of income and the reality of almost certain unemployment.

Some 3,200 Palestinians worked in Gaza Strip settlements in July, but neither the state nor their employers is compensating them for losing their jobs. The Evacuation Compensation Law passed by the Knesset provides two benefits for people whose job is terminated by the evacuation: a monthly adjustment payment for a former employee or business owner, and the right to quit yet be eligible for severence pay. But the new law specifically grants these benefits to Israelis only.

Asked his opinion of the discriminatory law, Omar laughed. “We never received our basic rights as workers. Not minimum wage, not vacation, not sick leave. So should we be surprised that the Israeli Knesset did not pass a law that would compensate us too?” he says during a meeting in Gaza with him and two other laborers from Khan Yunis at the Palestinian Center for Democracy and Workers’ Rights.

Omar began working for his boss nine years ago for NIS 32 a day. In July 2005 his daily wages were NIS 50. His friend Khaled makes NIS 45 for an eight-hour day’s work. The hourly minimum wage in Israel is NIS 17.93, or almost NIS 145 per day. Omar, who is active in an independent workers committee that was founded in the Gaza Strip this year, says the maximum paid to Palestinian workers there was NIS 60 per day. An Israeli who spent a lot of time in Gush Katif in recent months heard from employers that the daily wage is between NIS 40-80.

K., a secular Gush Katif farmer, employed in his greenhouses some 20 Palestinians, four Nepalese and three Israelis who lived outside Gush Katif. A week ago, as the conversation with him was taking place, the Palestinian laborers were dismantling his house and greenhouses. The veterans among them had been in his employ 14 years. Asked whether he would give his workers severence pay, he said: “I’m supposed to compensate the workers, but who is supposed to compensate me? We’re not really compensated for what we’re losing. I didn’t fire them, the state fired them, let the state pay them. Why didn’t it think about that?”

K. insists his Palestinian workmen made NIS 2,800 a month, and up to NIS 3,200 with overtime. Informed that this was much more than other Gush Katif employers pay, he replied: “Minimum wage doesn’t apply here. Palestinians in the Strip have no work rights. I pay more because I have long-standing laborers.” (Omar said in response that he has never heard of a Palestinian earning a basic salary of NIS 2,800 in Gush Katif).

Yossi Tzarfati, who heads the Agricultural Committee of Gush Katif, could not say whether employers are giving or will give their Palestinian laborers dismissal letters – so they can receive severence pay. He also did not know how much Palestinians earn because that is “an individual matter between employers and workers.” He did say that the Palestinians “are not part of the minimum wage.”

But the minimum wage requirement does apply to Israeli employers in the occupied territories with Palestinian workers. Back in 1982, a GOC Command order was issued in the territories stipulating that “a person employed in a community [an Israeli settlement – A.H.] is entitled to receive wages from his employer that do not fall short of the minimum wage and will also be entitled to cost of living adjustment, all as updated in Israel from time to time.” The Civil Administration is supposed to oversee and enforce that order, but the office of the Government Coordinator in the Territories (to which the Civil Administration is subordinate) stated that “so far, we know of no complaints filed about the lack of enforcement of this order.”

Indeed, Omar and his friends have not complained officially that the wages they get in the settlements are almost a third of the obligatory minimum wage. Low income and high unemployment in the Gaza Strip, particularly in the past five years, have shielded employers from complaints and let the Civil Administration off the hook. Now Omar is troubled by a more pressing problem: he knows about a dozen laborers whose employers have already left, without paying them wages for the past week or two. Now they have no way of locating their bosses to get at least those few hundred shekels.

Amira Hass: What Business Is It of Chirac?

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The Jordan Valley, the settlement blocs that continue to merge into each other, the monumental Jews-only roads, the demilitarized zone long since annexed to Israel, the area annexed to Jerusalem in 1967, the de facto annexations of the fence – these already cover most of the West Bank.

Amira Hass, Haaretz, Aug 03, 2005

A European journalist was asked to write about the wall being built around Anata, which will transform it into an enclosed ghetto within Jerusalem. Sorry, she said, the paper’s editors are only interested in the disengagement. It has it all: upbeat news, lots of action, Jews cursing Jews, Jews beating up Jews. We’re fed up with the repetitious details of the wall’s damages.

The other side of that coin is the affection with which Ariel Sharon was welcomed in France last week. And honestly, should Jacques Chirac care that last week the Israeli authorities demolished three homes in the village of al-Khader? And is it his responsibility that a short distance from there, the illegal settlement of Efrat continues to expand at the expense of the biblical landscapes of al-Khader?

What is it to him that the crossings Israel is now building, east of the Green Line, rob hefty square kilometers from West Bank territory and the private property of hundreds of families, with a transparent objective of institutionalize them as “international terminals?” And why should he and other European leaders be shocked by the news that the West Bank’s main roads have nearly no Palestinian traffic, as though a transfer has been implemented there? Israelis are not shocked by this information.

Who can find the words to explain to Europe’s newspapers that once every few weeks, Israel Defense Forces soldiers prevent all residents of the northern West Bank from driving south? At the Za’atara checkpoint south of Nablus, near the illegal settlement of Tapuah, they send people packing as the IDF declares a “hot security alert.” In the creative diction of the IDF, this is called “separation.” They separate between Judea and Samaria. Sometimes this lasts four days, sometimes 10. As usual, whoever is determined to reach his destination finds a roundabout way that takes several hours, between hills and dales, rocky terrain and olive groves. But most forgo their right to mobility.

Why should Chirac and Le Monde, or Le Figaro, be interested in shepherds in the southern Hebron Hills whom IDF soldiers kicked off their grazing lands on Monday, shouting distance from another illegal settlement?

Why should Chirac and the other European leaders take an interest in the millions of trifles of the calculated dispossession, which dictate the lives of the Palestinian people? Trifles that add up to a clear picture: Sharon is determinedly striving to realize the master plan – integrating most of the West Bank into the sovereign State of Israel.

The Jordan Valley, the settlement blocs that continue to merge into each other, the monumental Jews-only roads, the demilitarized zone long since annexed to Israel, the area annexed to Jerusalem in 1967, the de facto annexations of the fence – these already cover most of the West Bank. They will call the densely populated Palestinian pockets that will remain a state, and the world will applaud.

Reasons abound for not taking an interest in the trifles of this dispossession: a mere three and a half million people are at stake, with no oil and no support from any international power; their brethren in the Diaspora and in Israel do not constitute a lobby. There are places in the world where tens of millions are being wronged far more cruelly, and nobody makes a peep. And, after all, Israeli colonialism doesn’t even come close to the murderousness of the European variety.

But Europe does take an interest. The billions of dollars it’s pouring in here prove that it knows that this “little” usurpation is being perpetrated at a highly sensitive juncture. Perhaps European leaders are hoping that the money being showered on the Palestinian Authority – and effectively on Israel, which thus escapes its responsibility as the occupying power – will compensate for their impotence. It was they, after all, who failed to implement international decisions regarding the illegality of the settlements.

Europe and its media – which were hoodwinked by the peace propaganda of Oslo while Israeli colonization accelerated – has a duty to stop ignoring the reality depicted by their diplomatic envoys to the region. Israel is perceived as part of the West, the enlightened world which presumes to have drawn lessons from its colonialist and Nazi past and to combat racism.

The Citizenship Law and the law against intifada compensation which passed in the Knesset, along with other laws, contradict proclaimed European concepts of “combating racism and discrimination.” But Israel participates in European sports tournaments and maintains close economic, scientific and cultural ties with Europe, as though it met the criteria of the human rights charter.

Indeed, it is impossible to separate, historically, the establishment of the State of Israel from the genocide of European Jewry. Therefore, Europe bears historic and moral responsibility for both peoples living in our land – the occupied Palestinian people and the Jewish-Israeli people – the occupier.

This should be enough to obligate Europe not to assist Israel in implementing its master plan, regardless of whether or not that plan jeopardizes the security of the region and the world.