Militant Jewish settlers set up 11 outposts in the occupied West Bank
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- Written by Rachel Shabi in Tel Aviv Rachel Shabi in Tel Aviv
- Published: 28 July 2009 28 July 2009
- Hits: 3980 3980
[PHOTO: illegal israeli settlement in West Bank]
Givat Tzuria, West Bank: Israeli girls peer through a hole cut through a makeshift structure in an illegal settlement Photograph: David Furst/AFP/Getty Images
Israeli settler groups have set up 11 new outposts in the occupied West Bank, in a direct rebuttal of mounting US calls to freeze settlement activity.
Young Jewish groups are reported to have set up the structures – mostly tents and huts on hilltops – in the West Bank over Monday night, in a move timed as a precursor to the meeting between the US special envoy, George Mitchell, and Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu today. On Monday, hundreds of settlers set up an outpost near the Palestinian village of Tulkarem, reportedly without intervention from the Israeli army.
Settler groups said they were mimicking the fabled activities of 1946, when the area was ruled by British mandate and 11 Jewish outposts were defiantly erected in the Negev desert during one night.
The mostly young Israelis are associated with settler organisations such as Youth for Israel, a militant group set up in response to Israel's evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2005.
According to the Jerusalem Post, settlers were canvassing support and distributing flyers over the weekend at existing settlements in the West Bank – which, like the outposts, are illegal under international law.
One flyer read: "The nations of the world do not want us here and we are responding by strengthening the connection to the land and by establishing new communities."
Haaretz newspaper reported that 40 teenage girls spent three days in an established West Bank outpost in "spiritual preparation" for the "relentless battle on the right to settle the Land of Israel".
One 16-year-old girl from Tel Aviv told the paper: "I don't know if I personally would live in an outpost but it contributes to the entire people of Israel that the land is being settled."
Today, the Israeli army chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, said he had not received orders to prepare for the evacuation of outposts in the West Bank.
Netanyahu and Mitchell said they had made progress in their meeting in Jerusalem to discuss the settlements issue, but reported no firm development.
Obama! Yes, you can!
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- Written by Uri Avnery Uri Avnery
- Published: 28 July 2009 28 July 2009
- Hits: 4163 4163
A historic responsibility rests on the shoulders of Barack Obama: not to fold, not to give in, not to “compromise”. To insist on the total freeze of the settlements, as a first and necessary step towards peace. For his sake, and for ours too
{josquote}The battle is not about 20 outposts, nor about 20 apartments in the
grounds of the Shepherd hotel. Every house in every West Bank
settlement serves one supreme purpose: to destroy any possibility for
peace. Every Israeli house in East Jerusalem serves the same sublime
aim. The opponents of peace know that no Arab leader will ever sign a
peace agreement that does not designate East Jerusalem as the
Palestinian capital, and no Arab leader will ever sign a peace
agreement that does not assign all of the West Bank to the State of
Palestine.{/josquote}
BINYAMIN NETANYAHU’S AIM is to Judaise Jerusalem. This week he boasted that in his last term in office, ten years ago, he had set up the fortified Jewish neighbourhood of Har Homa.
To Har Homa — whose real name is Jebel Abu Ghneim, Mountain of the Father of Sheep — I have a sentimental attachment. I spent many days and nights in the struggle to prevent the creation of the monstrous housing project that looms there now.
The leader in this struggle was the unforgettable Feisal Husseini. I held him in high esteem. I don’t hesitate to say that I loved him. He was a nobleman in the real sense of the word: a scion of nobility but modest in his manners, generous and approachable, a man of peace but fearless in his confrontations with the occupation troops, a real Palestinian patriot, moderate in his opinions, wise and courageous. He was the son of Abd-al-Kader al-Husseini, the leader of the Arab fighters in the Jerusalem district in the 1948 war, who was killed in the battle for the “Castel” near the city. I had no part in that battle, but I passed by a few hours later in a relief convoy for the besieged Jewish part of Jerusalem. Like most of my comrades, I respected him as an honourable enemy.
The site of Har Homa, for those who have already forgotten, used to be a unique place of beauty between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, a rounded hill covered with a dense wood. The destroyers of Jerusalem — that brutal coalition of real estate sharks, fanatical Zionists, American millionaires and religious mystics — had decided to eliminate that last spot of beauty in order to build a dense, fortified and particularly ugly Jewish settlement.
Under the leadership of Feisal and Ta’amri, the former husband of a Jordanian princess, a tent camp was set up. When the bulldozers started to cut down the trees and level the top of the hill, we held dozens of demonstrations and vigils. In one of them I suffered a haemorrhage and would have ended my life there and then, if a Palestinian ambulance had not succeeded in reaching me in that road-less stone desert and got me to the hospital in time. So I have a sentimental attachment to the place.
The Shepherd hotel provocation is a part of the tireless effort to “Judaise” Jerusalem. In simple words: to carry out ethnic cleansing. This campaign has been going on for 42 years already, from the first day of the occupation of East Jerusalem, but the timing of this particular operation results from tactical considerations.
Netanyahu is facing heavy American pressure to freeze the settlements in the West Bank. He is quite unable to do so, as long as he remains at the head of the coalition he himself chose, which consists of Rightists, religious zealots, settlers and outright fascists. He has offered several “compromises”, all based on various fraudulent ploys, but the Americans have learnt the lessons of the past and did not fall into any of his traps.\
His Siamese twin, Ehud Barak, is busy leaking to the media “news” about a grandiose operation: at any moment, with one stroke, like Alexander and the Gordian knot, the dozens of settlement “outposts” that have been set up since 2001 with secret government support will be uprooted. But except for the media people themselves, hardly anyone believes that this will really happen. Certainly not the settlers, judging by their knowing smiles.
So what to do in order to avoid having to dismantle the outposts? Netanyahu, the King of Spin, has a solution: a new provocation to draw attention away from the last one. The Shepherd hotel is now diverting the world’s attention away from the hills of “Judea and Samaria”. When you have a toothache, you forget about your bellyache.
What, he says, the Goyim want to stop us building in Jerusalem, our Holy City?! Our eternal capital, which has been reunited for all eternity?! What Chutzpah! Will they prohibit Jews from building in New York?! Will they forbid Englishmen to build in London?!
Netanyahu really hit his stride when he declared that any Arab can live in West Jerusalem, so why should a Jew not build a home in East Jerusalem?
Clear and to the point — and absolutely false. When Netanyahu says things like that, it is hard to know whether he is spreading lies consciously (though they can easily be exposed), or if he believes his falsehoods himself. Thus, for example, he claimed to remember the British soldiers in front of his home when he was a child — when the last British soldier left the country a year before he was born.
The truth is that with extremely rare exceptions, no Arab can acquire an apartment in West Jerusalem, not to mention building a house there — though large sections of the Western part of the city consist of former Arab neighbourhoods, whose inhabitants fled or were driven out during the 1948 war. The former owners of the houses in these quarters (including Talbiya, Katamon, Dir Yassin), who found refuge in East Jerusalem, were not allowed to return to their homes when Jerusalem was “united” in 1967, neither were they paid compensation (as I proposed in the Knesset).
But Netanyahu does not care so much whether people believe him or not. This week, like every other week since he returned to power, he was fully occupied with survival. In order to survive, the coalition must remain intact. To achieve this, he must show that he does not “fold” under American pressure. No better place to prove this than Jerusalem.
About Jerusalem, as official spokesmen never tire of telling us, about Jerusalem there is a national consensus. From wall to wall. From left to extreme right.
However, this myth is long dead. No such consensus exists. Right now, most Israelis are ready to return the Arab quarters of East Jerusalem to Palestinian rule in return for real peace. I know of no Jewish mother who is ready to sacrifice her son in a war for the Shepherd hotel.
I beg to contradict yet another myth that is being propagated relentlessly by our media: that a national consensus against President Obama is forming.
As we say in classical Hebrew: No bears and no forest. Or more colloquially: No birds and no shoes.
Many Israelis, very many, hope that Barack Obama will do for them what seems impossible without him: bring them peace. They have despaired of our political system, of both the coalition and the opposition, of both Right and Left. They are convinced that only an outside force can realize this hope.
If indeed Obama does clash with Netanyahu over his refusal to freeze the settlements in the West Bank and his insistence on continuing to build in East Jerusalem, it is for Obama’s victory that many Israelis will be praying. They know that in this battle, it is not Netanyahu but Obama who represents the true interests of Israel.
The question is whether Obama has the power to follow through, as no preceding president since Dwight Eisenhower has done.
Netanyahu does not believe so. His American partners — the defeated Republicans, the neocons who are now in hiding, the almost-silent Evangelical preachers — this defeated camp is hoping to recover its fortunes by encouraging the Jewish lobby and the Israeli government to provoke Obama. Netanyahu, who has mobilised Congress against the White House in the past, believes that he can do it once again.
Our newspapers are gleefully reporting, with charts and graphs to bear them out, that Obama’s standing in America is sinking. It is not hard to divine that most of this information emanates from Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Office, the same source that is feeding the American media with reports of the growing opposition of the Israeli public against Obama. Soon the American media will show Israeli protesters waving posters with Obama in SS uniform, as happened with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin before him.
The battle is not about 20 outposts, nor about 20 apartments in the grounds of the Shepherd hotel. Every house in every West Bank settlement serves one supreme purpose: to destroy any possibility for peace. Every Israeli house in East Jerusalem serves the same sublime aim. The opponents of peace know that no Arab leader will ever sign a peace agreement that does not designate East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and no Arab leader will ever sign a peace agreement that does not assign all of the West Bank to the State of Palestine.
A historic responsibility rests on the shoulders of Barack Obama: not to fold, not to give in, not to “compromise”. To insist on the total freeze of the settlements, as a first and necessary step towards peace. For his sake, and for ours too.
As an Israeli, I feel like calling out to him: Yes, You Can!
Uri Avnery is an Israeli peace activist who has advocated the setting up of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. He served three terms in the Israeli parliament (Knesset), and is the founder of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc)
Obama administration officials in Israel to demand end to settlement building
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- Written by Chris McGreal in Washington and Ian Black Chris McGreal in Washington and Ian Black
- Published: 27 July 2009 27 July 2009
- Hits: 4026 4026
Middle East envoy George Mitchell reportedly discussing deal to allow completion of homes currently under construction
Barack Obama has dispatched a clutch of senior American officials to Jerusalem to press his demand for an end to Jewish settlement construction and move along a diplomatic process aimed at imposing a blueprint for peace if negotiations fail.
Obama's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, is reportedly discussing a deal with the Israeli leadership that would allow the completion of several thousand homes for Jewish settlers already under construction but impose a total halt to building once they are complete. Such an agreement would amount to a concession by Obama, who laid down an immediate and complete freeze on construction as a marker of a more interventionist policy at a testy meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in Washington in May.
But American sources close to the negotiations say that getting Netanyahu to agree that no new construction can begin is an important step toward forcing a new diplomatic process that is no longer hostage to Israeli intransigence.
The diplomatic moves came as the Israeli military announced that the number of Jewish settlers on the West Bank has risen above 300,000 for the first time with about 200,000 more in East Jerusalem. About 2.5 million Palestinians live in the same territory.
The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, is also in Israel as part of the drive to secure a comprehensive Middle East peace agreement.
The aim is to win a regional consensus on Iran's nuclear programme but also reassure the Israelis that Washington has not gone soft on the issue in an effort to dampen Israeli threats of military action. Gates said he did not believe that Barack Obama's timetable would "increase the risks to anybody" — a reference to Israeli concerns that its nuclear monopoly may soon be challenged by the Islamic republic.
Israel has hinted at a pre-emptive attack on Iran should it deem diplomacy to be at a dead end. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said today that he reaffirmed to Gates "the need to use all means to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear military capability".
While the Obama administration continues to say that negotiation is the way forward, Gates today said that the promise of talks with Iran "is not an open-ended offer".
Two other US officials are also visiting Jerusalem as part of the diplomatic push - Obama's national security adviser, James Jones, who in an Israeli diplomatic memo was reported to have told European officials that the administration will take a hard line with the Israelis, and Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton's special envoy to the peace process who was brought back to focus on Iran.
The immediate effort is around a settlement freeze.
Tel Aviv newspapers report that Israeli officials say that talks are moving toward a deal in which the Americans will permit the completion of 700 buildings with nearly 2,500 new homes in them that are already well under construction, mostly in two settlements close to the green line which are likely to fall inside the Jewish state's border under a final agreement.
But as part of the agreement, the US intends to rigorously monitor the building work to ensure that the Israelis do not push it beyond the agreed limits.
The Americans are acutely aware that in the past Israel has agreed to contain settlement expansion and then promptly broken its word. This time the US is insisting on detailed plans of what would amount to a final bout of construction before a total halt to building comes in to force.
Mitchell is also pressuring Arab countries for gestures in response to an Israeli settlement freeze such as trade delegations or overflight rights.
Mitchell said at a press conference that the disagreement over settlement construction is a "discussion among friends" but it is also a test of Obama's authority.
One former official who monitors the negotiations closely said that the US is prepared to give ground because it sees a settlement freeze as an important step toward reviving Israeli-Palestinian talks.
There is no great expectation in Washington that talks will go anywhere but that they should have been tried and failed once again will help smooth the diplomatic path for the administration's plan to force its own proposals on to the table later this year which could force Israel to make significant territorial concessions.
The Palestinians have been insistent that there can be no talks without a settlement freeze.
That still leaves the question of Jerusalem as a major obstacle.
Netanyahu very forthrightly spurned US demands to block a new settlement project in the occupied east of the city where an American millionaire plans to bulldoze an old hotel and build Jewish-only housing.
The prime minister said that Israel will not be dictated to on where its citizens can live in what it says is its eternal and indivisible capital. Netanyahu later said that all of Jerusalem will remain under Israeli jurisdiction even after a peace settlement.
Some American officials think Netanyahu may be overplaying his hand because if he puts himself in a position where he is unable to give ground on Jerusalem, that will require others to lay down Israel's final borders.
East Jerusalem is crucial to two-state solution
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- Written by Ghassan Khatib Ghassan Khatib
- Published: 27 July 2009 27 July 2009
- Hits: 3839 3839
| East Jerusalem is crucial to two-state solution |
| by Ghassan Khatib |
According to international law and the many resolutions of both the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council, East Jerusalem is part of territories under an illegal and belligerent Israeli military occupation. Consequently, the Israeli policy of settling Israelis in East Jerusalem is as illegal as it is in the rest of the occupied territories, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip.
The United States, which at times has toned down its objection to Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, has recently come out very clearly stipulating that the expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem is as illegal there as it is in the rest of the West Bank. That is also the position of almost every single country in the world, including the best friends of Israel outside the US, the EU member states.
Partly, the international community was alerted by Israel's policy in recent years of targeting areas of East Jerusalem not previously settled by Israelis. This includes the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, in the heart of Palestinian East Jerusalem and outside the walls of the Old City, which sparked the protest by the US State Department.
The reason there seems to be worldwide consensus to condemn Israel's expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem is that it is obvious not only to Palestinians but to all concerned parties that without East Jerusalem as its capital, the practical as well as political possibility of establishing a Palestinian state disappears.
In addition, Israel has expanded its geographic definition of Jerusalem to include a wide swath of West Bank territory, either to the east, toward Jericho, or to the south and north, toward Bethlehem and Ramallah respectively. With such expansion of Jerusalem and its settlements, the West Bank is being divided into two parts between which movement is gradually becoming more and more difficult. Moreover, the available area for a Palestinian state is being gradually diminished.
It is also worth mentioning that such development has very significant negative economic consequences. Most economic analyses of a two-state solution indicate that tourism will be one of the major economic pillars of the economy of a future Palestinian state. But East Jerusalem is absolutely crucial to that.
Another major source of concern arising from the Israeli settlement of East Jerusalem is for the future of Arab-Israel peacemaking generally. Arabs and Muslims, as well as Christians, attach enormous religious significance to the city. But Israel's practices in Jerusalem are changing its Arab Islamic and Christian character as well as its demography, forcing Muslims and Christians to leave. All this will reflect negatively on future Arab-Israel relations.
Israeli policy on Jerusalem is consistent with the current Israeli government's reluctance to seriously entertain a two-state solution as the way to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Certainly, this Israeli government does not want to see an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
As a result, Israel's settlement policy in general, and in East Jerusalem in particular, is seriously endangering the two-state solution that the international community is supposedly still committed to. And with the two-state solution go chances for peace in the region.- Published 27/7/2009 © bitterlemons.org
Ghassan Khatib is coeditor of the bitterlemons family of internet publications. He is vice-president for community outreach at Birzeit University and a former Palestinian Authority minister of planning.
Interview with Dr. Jamal R. Nassar and Steve Niva: Palestine-Israel and propects for peace
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- Written by Will Seaman, Hala Gores, KBOO 90.7fm Will Seaman, Hala Gores, KBOO 90.7fm
- Published: 24 July 2009 24 July 2009
- Hits: 4694 4694
Now available via streaming audio at the KBOO Community Radio website:
Leading authority on Middle
East politics, Dr. Jamal R. Nassar and Professor of International
Politics and Middle East Studies, Steve Niva, talk about the propects
for peace and changes in US policy towards Palestine-Israel.
Jamal R. Nassar is Dean, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at California State University, San Bernardino. Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, professor Nassar earned a B.A. from Jacksonville University in 1972, an M.A. from the University of South Florida in 1974 and a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 1978. Prior to joining California State University, Dean Nassar was professor and chair at the Department of Politics and Government at Illinois State University. Professor Nassar has established himself as a leading authority on the politics of the Middle East. His many publications include such books as Globalization and Terrorism: The Migration of Dreams and Nightmares, Politics and Culture in the Developing World, Intifada: Palestine at the Crossroads, The Palestine Liberation Organization: From Armed Struggle to the Declaration of Independence, and Change Without Borders: The Third World at the End of the Twentieth Century. Many of his articles, chapters and reviews have appeared in highly rated publications and have been translated to about a dozen other languages. Dr. Nassar has chaired a number of national and international conferences on the Middle East. In 1987, professor Nassar was awarded a Senior Fulbright Fellowship to teach on the West Bank. Between 1991 and 1995, he served as editor of Arab Studies Quarterly and he currently serves on its editorial board as he does on the boards of other distinguished journals on the Middle East region. Dr. Nassar shares his knowledge of the region's politics through speeches and interviews. He has addressed the United Nations as an expert on the Question of Palestine, and was consulted or has appeared as an expert witness on the area in highly visible court cases in the United States and Canada.
Steve Niva is a Professor of International Politics and Middle East Studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. His primary areas of research and writing include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East; Islamist movements; and Asymmetrical and Insurgent Warfare. He has written for and served on the editorial board of Middle East Report magazine (www.merip.org), and his recent writings have also appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF.org), Peace Review, Middle East International, Al-Ahram Weekly, The Seattle Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Open Democracy, Z Magazine, Common Dreams, and Counterpunch, among others. He is currently finishing a book on the history of Palestinian suicide bombings and their relationship to Israeli military violence, particularly, Israel's assassination policy. He is also writing a book on counterinsurgency and insurgent warfare, with a focus on Israeli and U.S. military strategies in Palestine and Iraq.