Obama “peace” envoy ridicules notion that Palestinians have “rights”

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Fri, 05/09/2014 - 15:41

A screenshot shows US official Martin Indyk using scare quotes as he utters the words “justice” and Palestinian “rights.”

Martin Indyk, the career Israel lobbyist who US President Barack Obama placed in charge of the Palestinian-Israeli “peace process,” has publicly ridiculed the notion that Palestinians have rights or are seeking justice.

Indyk’s comments come amid sensational new allegations by US officials of Israeli spying activities against the United States.

In an 8 May speech at the AIPAC-affiliated Israel lobby think-tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Indyk gave an overview of the Obama administration’s “peace” efforts, which he said are now “suspended.”

Indyk claimed the the nine-month effort led by Secretary of State John Kerry failed because neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor Palestinian Authority de facto leader Mahmoud Abbas “feel the pressing need to make the gut-wrenching compromises necessary to achieve peace.”

He faulted Israel for its relentless construction of settlements in the West Bank – a fact the United States has done nothing about.

Here’s the moment where Indyk ridicules Palestinian rights:

It is easier for the Palestinians to sign conventions and appeal to international bodies in their supposed pursuit of “justice” and their “rights,” a process which by definition requires no compromise. It is easier for Israeli politicians to avoid tension in the governing coalition and for the Israeli people to maintain the current comfortable status quo. It is safe to say that if we the US are the only party that has a sense of urgency, these negotiations will not succeed.

Indyk’s qualifier “supposed” and the appearance of quotation marks around the words “rights” and “justice” in the official transcript of his talk indicate contempt for the notion that Palestinians have rights at all.

In fact, in the video of the speech (at about 56:30), Indyk actually uses air quotes or scare quotes when he speaks the words “justice” and “rights,” a hand gesture used to indicate a speaker’s skepticism or disagreement with the quoted words.

This stands in marked contrast to the Obama administration’s frequent insistence on Israel’s claimed “right to exist as a Jewish state,” an idea that necessarily negates basic Palestinian rights.
Abbas collaboration

Indyk also praised Abbas’s US-backed “security forces” for their ongoing collusion with Israeli occupation. He said that Israel’s “IDF and the Shin Bet now highly appreciate” Abbas’s ongoing efforts, coordinated with them to “promote nonviolence in the face of pressure from extremists.”

Of course what Indyk did not state is that Abbas’ US-backed intelligence agencies and security forces work against any form of resistance, armed or unarmed.
Worried about Palestinian babies

Indyk also repeated a familiar theme of US and “liberal” Zionist concern: the unspoken fear of the births of Palestinian babies undermining the Jewish majority in present-day Israel.

The envoy affirmed that – in line with his previous statement – the whole purpose of the “peace process” is not to restore Palestinian rights, but to save Israel from the horror of too many Palestinian bodies:

I also worry about a more subtle threat to the character of the Jewish state. Prime Minister Netanyahu himself has made clear, the fundamental purpose of these negotiations is to ensure that Israel remains a Jewish and democratic state – not a de facto bi-national state. The settlement movement on the other hand may well drive Israel into an irreversible binational reality. If you care about Israel’s future, as I know so many of you do and as I do, you should understand that rampant settlement activity – especially in the midst of negotiations – doesn’t just undermine Palestinian trust in the purpose of the negotiations; it can undermine Israel’s Jewish future. If this continues, it could mortally wound the idea of Israel as a Jewish state – and that would be a tragedy of historic proportions.

Nothing achieved

Indyk strained to present the latest failed US effort as successful. He claimed that “In twenty rounds over the first six months, we managed to define clearly the gaps that separate the parties on all the core issues.”

In other words, there’s no chance of an agreement to produce a “two-state solution” even though Indyk insisted that the negotiations, while suspended, are not over.
Spying

Indyk also took the opportunity to affirm that the US-Israeli relationship has never been better. “Only those who know it from the inside – as I have had the privilege to do – can testify to how deep and strong are the ties that now bind our two nations,” he said.

Yet not all is right, as new tension has arisen over dramatic revelations of “aggressive” Israeli spying efforts directed against the United States.

In Newsweek Jeff Stein reveals that “American counter-intelligence officials told members of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees at the end of January that Israel’s current espionage activities in America are ‘unrivaled and unseemly,’ going far beyond the activities of other close allies, such as Germany, France, the UK and Japan.”

Stein also reports that Israeli efforts to recruit Americans involve such tactics as inviting them on all expenses paid trips to Israel and offering to ply them with drugs and sex.

The spying has mostly been directed, according to Newsweek, at stealing US industrial and technical secrets.

The extent of the spying is such that it has been cited as a factor in why the US has refused to allow Israel to join the Visa Waiver Program.

Indyk did not mention the matter, nor the fact that as part of Kerry’s unsuccessful efforts to extend the “peace talks” the US had reportedly been ready to release Jonathan Pollard, the American citizen convicted in the 1980s of spying for Israel.

But Indyk did affirm that “President Obama and Secretary Kerry would never suspend US-Israel military relations as their predecessors did … Those military relations are too important to both our nations” – in effect a green light for Israel to continue to do as it pleases with impunity.

Israel – as it always does – has strenuously denied the allegations.

But now, whenever one hears Israel propagandists claim that Israel is the high-tech “Start-Up Nation” and tout some new invention, the proper response should be: did Israel invent that itself, or steal it from the United States?

How Israel tried to recast Palestinians as strangers in their own land

NOTE: I used to wonder why Israel even granted citizenship to the Palestinians who remained within the borders of Israel in 1947 in spite of the all-out efforts of the Zionists to kill, terrorize and drive out as many of them as they could in order to create an ethnically pure Jewish state. This is the book that explains why this "inclusive and liberal" policy was enacted: to mollify strong outside pressure from the UN (which rejected early applications by Israel to join because of the undefined status of non-Jewish residents of Israel), and to try and blunt the hostile reaction of many countries to the Israeli government's trying to fudge the legal status of non-Jews.
R. Congress

Rod Such
The Electronic Intifada
7 May 2014

If anyone still believes that the apartheid label applies only to Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and not to present-day Israel itself, they need only read Shira Robinson’s Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford University Press) to be disabused of the notion.

Robinson is an associate professor of history at George Washington University, and her scholarship in this work is impressive, drawing extensively on Israeli state archives, oral history interviews with Palestinian citizens of Israel, and numerous other primary sources. Citizen Strangers joins a host of studies focusing on Palestinian citizens of Israel, including Ilan Pappé’s The Forgotten Palestinians (2011).

What distinguishes Robinson’s study is her in-depth look at the period of military rule over the largely rural Palestinian population from 1948 to 1966 and her analysis of the settler-colonial mentality that guided the Israeli state’s attempt to recast Palestinians as strangers in their own land.

Robinson sets out to examine the contradictions that emerged from Israel’s foundation as a colonial state that had to expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in order to establish a “democracy” for the new Jewish majority. Her thesis is that “Israel’s attainment of sovereignty did not alter the fundamental status of the local Jewish population as settlers.”
Facade of democracy

She defines Israel as a “liberal” settler state because it had to grant voting rights and other limited rights to those Palestinians who escaped being forcibly expelled. The need to gain admission to the United Nations and present a façade of liberal democracy to the rest of the world was behind this.

But Robinson makes clear that the “handful of rights” Palestinians with Israeli citizenship did enjoy could only be determined by the Jewish settler community, which at the same time guaranteed an “array of social and political privileges” for themselves alone.

Roughly 100,000 Palestinians remained within Israel after the 1949 armistice. Having achieved his stated goal of at least an 80 percent Jewish majority to prevent the potential inclusion of any Palestinian political parties in a coalition government, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, set about confiscating Palestinian land, razing approximately 500 Palestinian towns and villages, and placing 90 percent of Palestinians under a draconian military regime.

As early as May 1948, when Israel declared its independence, the Provisional State Council had adopted all the laws inherited from the British Mandate, including the 1945 Defense Emergency Regulations which allowed military commanders to suspend all civil liberties, including property and habeas corpus rights. Jewish settlers had chafed under these same laws during the Mandate, regarding them as traits of “a police state” and “worse than the Nazis.”

In February 1949 the Council expanded on these regulations, adding a provision that enabled the Israeli defense minister to designate virtually every Palestinian village and town “a closed zone” from which Palestinians could not leave without a permit. Military commanders were also allowed to create “security zones” along the borders that resulted in the destruction of another eleven Palestinian villages.

The result, according to Robinson, was that “virtually every aspect of daily life required a military pass.” Its purpose was to make the Palestinians utterly dependent on the regime for “their basic means of survival.”

Zionist leaders repeatedly charged that the Palestinians represented a dangerous “fifth column” that posed a security risk to the new state. But through an analysis of charges brought against Palestinians for violating the pass laws, Robinson shows the political purpose of the system. Some 60 percent of offenders were merely fined and 30 percent could choose between fines or detention.
Brutal

“It was precisely because the authorities did not view those convicted on administrative violations as security risks,” Robinson observes, “that parents were permitted to serve out the jail sentences of their children, and young adults often sat in detention on behalf of their elderly parents.”

An advisor to Ben Gurion candidly admitted in 1957 to the political purpose of military rule, saying that if it had not been for the restrictions, the Communist Party, which Palestinians viewed as their main political advocate, “would invite Arab refugees to squat on their ruins, demand their lands back … [and] the return of the refugees. They will form organizations, parties, fronts, anything to make trouble.”

Israeli military rule was brutal, particularly in the border security zones where Palestinian refugees attempting to return to their homes or just to tend their fields were slaughtered under a free-fire-zone policy. Thousands were killed in this way, but the most notorious incident was the massacre in October 1956 of 48 Palestinian farmers and day laborers at the village of Kafr Qassem, who were not notified of an emergency curfew imposed on their village and were summarily executed when they returned from their work.

One of the more original elements of Citizen Strangers is the depiction of government attempts to get Palestinian citizens of Israel to acknowledge not only that they had “internalized their defeat” but also that “they were grateful for it as well.” Thus, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed laws that coerced Palestinians to publicly celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. Even more cruelly, Israeli authorities organized a sulha (reconciliation) in Kafr Qassem a year after the massacre.
Contradictions remain

That public relations stunt only served to further inflame Palestinian resistance, which Robinson ably documents, showing how over the years Palestinians had created a kind of “underground railroad” to enable refugees to return. They had also found other ways to organize in their defense, including civil disobedience, mass protests, petitions and ultimately a general strike.

One of the drawbacks of the liberal settler state for Israel was that Palestinians could take advantage of the limited rights they had to resist their ongoing dispossession and curtailment of freedoms.

Robinson concludes that military rule ended in 1966 only because Zionist leaders determined that Jewish colonization had basically succeeded, particularly after the passage of the 1960 Basic Law that prohibited Palestinians from owning, leasing or working on 97 percent of state-owned land.

Moreover, Israel’s security forces believed they “had the Arabs well covered” and could target individual activists effectively without punishing the Palestinian citizens of Israel collectively.

The contradictions of the liberal settler state remain. They have long made Israel inherently unstable, Robinson argues. And that instability, she writes, is now greater than ever.

Rod Such is a former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopedias. He is active with Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace-Portland Chapter and the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign.
Image of Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and I)
Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and I)
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"The Right to Exist," of a state vs the right to exist of a people

Does a particular type of state have an inherent right to exist? Is there anything in international law on this right? Or even in common sense?

Did the Confederate State of America (1860-1865) have an inherent right to exist? How about the USSR? Don't the right-to-exist fans of apartheid Israel regret the lack of existedness of Apartheid South Africa? (I know Dick Cheney does). The Iroquois Nation's history of existence didn't seem to trouble the minds of the North American colonists who wiped it out. Does West Virginia have a right to exist? Abe Lincoln created it by waving his hand during the Civil War because the hilly terrain of that part of the rebelling slave state of Virginia wasn't suitable for big slave-worked plantations and the hill people didn't support the planting class's war. Maybe we should reconsider it's right to existence and deprive the Southern right-wing nutcases of two Senate seats.

States are not people. States rule over people, either by happy consent or miserable force of arms. They can come and go without a bloodbath, without killing or chasing out anyone in particular. States are expendable. When a particular state form oppress people and cause their deaths then it has forfeited its right to exist...it has to be abolished and a new more just state established.

Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that the people have a right to abolish a state that oppresses them. What's wrong with that?

Israel does not have any inherent right to exist any more than France, or Tahiti or anyplace else. Its existence should depend on representing democratically those who live under its rule. If Israel is for the Jews only, a supposed "Jewish state for all the Jews in the world," then it has no right to rule over the 25% non-Jews within the borders the rest of the world recognizes as defining the State of Israel (what the government of Israel thinks the borders are is something entirely else); nor does it have any right to rule over the West Bank where non-Jews are under martial law with no rights at all. Nor does it have the right to blockage and starve the people of Gaza.

A Palestinian member of the Knesset, Mohammed Tibbi, famously quipped "Israel is democratic toward the Jews and Jewish toward the Arabs."

Israel's elastic borders and its supposed right to exist no matter what form its governance takes is going from bad to worse. Ethnic dictatorship and pogrom-like violence against Palestinians and the African refugees who are "enemy infiltrators" according to majority Jewish opinion in Israel is happening and is getting worse (all the New York Times and other media coverups to the contrary).

The Jews who live in Israel/Palestine have a right to live there, but don't have any inherent right to rule the roost, to lord it over everyone else and enact laws that give them precedence over any other people who live there. If you want democracy then it's one-person-one-vote. Period.

Nor does the idiot argument that an exclusively Jewish state has to exist because of the holocaust hold any water. Jews are safer in LA, Chicago and New York than in a stolen land where the native inhabitants have been expelled, killed and humiliated.

By Jeffersonian standards the state of Israel should qualify as having forfeited its right to exist in its present form. But Jefferson had his inconsistencies--slaves, Indians-- his democracy was for white men. But it took a civil war and more to make adjustments to that...and we can see that the civil war in the USA was not really pushed to a decisive social victory...and it's not even over yet.

As racist Jews of European origin were rioting against African refugees who were living in Tel Aviv (there are videos of lynch-mob behavior of the chosen people fire bombing the homes and businesses of Somali and other African refugees)a cabinet minister in Netanyahu's governign coalition declared publicly that "Israel is for the white man." This is what you get with a "democratic" Jews-only state.

But the point is that there is not any current form of a state that has a lock on unchanging existence no matter the consequences. Humans have a right to live, states are only worthwhile if that help that process.

‘We are not second class citizens, we are fifth class citizens’: Interview with Educational Bookshop owner Mahmoud Muna

from mondoweiss.org

Pamela Rillon on May 6, 2014 15

There it was, in the middle of the frenzy of Salah Eddin Street, the oasis called “The Educational Bookshop“. Highly recommended to me in my home country of Chile, the recommendations fell short. I was dazzled. I loved its spectacular modern architecture, bookshelves, coffees, muffins and an atmosphere that only the magnificent city of Jerusalem can offer. Every time I went, Mahmoud Muna was attending the cash register. As a manager of the family business he always greeted me with a quiet and Zen moderation. A patience that contrasted with my hyperventilating Latina blood that fueled me to buy books as if the world were ending. With infinite patience, Mahmoud helped me buy piles of books (book tax in Chile is 19%), and assisted me in locating difficult to find publications that Chilean-Palestinians friends had requested I bring back for them.

During the long hours that I spend at the bookstore, I wondered about how is it to be an Arab resident in East Jerusalem. One day my journalist soul couldn’t hold it anymore. I asked for an interview. I thought I would have to argue why. He did not resist. Jerusalemites know they are world news.


Raised in the city’s schools and having done three years of studies in local universities, he did not finished due to the political situation. After the last Intifada, Mahmoud leaves to study in the UK. From Europe he returned more open minded, and with a degree in Computer Science, a MA in Digital Media from the University of Sussex and a MA in Communications and Public Relations from Kings College in London. Mahmoud was very happy in England. The multiculturalism really captivated him, as did the dream of staying ten years there to establish a career. However, he also knew that wish was impossible to reach. Any citizen of the world with a job offer can stay in any country, as long as he wants, but not him. He doesn’t have that right; instead, he has a duty.

Living Inequality

In a corner of the bookshop we talked and sometimes laughed. Well, I laughed, and he with his usual parsimony, smiled. Two words into the conversation and I knew I was in front of a highly educated person, but at the same time very grounded and practical.

Is there a dilemma of being a Jewish and democratic state?

It’s a big discussion now. You can’t have a Jewish and democratic state. I don’t consider Judaism as an ethnicity; I consider it as a religion. For me anyone can be Jewish, and any person can stop being Jewish. This seems different than the views of the state of Israel, which believes that you are born Jewish. This a very important junction, because it make a huge different in how we perceived the state and how they perceived us.

How does the state perceived you?

For them, there is not a problem of saying a Jewish state for the Jewish people, because for them Jewish people is like talking about a nationality. It’s like saying France is for the French, Germany is for the Germans, Israel is for the Jewish people. For me, Israel statement is unadaptable to democracy, because Judaism is a religion and in the 21st century we don’t have religious states. We have the Vatican, Iran, we have Saudi Arabia, but I don’t thing the world is very happy with them. In the 21st century we are looking for democratic states that represents everyone regardless their religion, color, ethnicity…

Many countries in Latin America call themselves Catholic, but they are democratic.

Exactly, because the laws of the countries are civic. The people who decided on what it is possible, what is allowed or not are not the people of the church, are the people in the parliament. In Israel we have a parliament, but it is hugely influenced by the religious institutions. How can we be non-Jewish in a Jewish state? We will definitely be discriminated against from the start. Because we belong to a state, that doesn’t belong to us technically. Because if you say a Jewish state and I’m not Jewish, then it is not my state.

If Israel separates religion from the state more, would you accept it as a Jewish state?

Then you wouldn’t say a Jewish state. Because you don’t say in Chile, a Christian state. You say the state of Chile with a majority of people being Christians. You can say the Israeli state, but not the Jewish state. Just like Jordan or Syria or Egypt are democratic states –to some extent, of course- but they are not Muslims states. The problem here is that Israel is not defining itself as an Israeli state, is defining itself as Jewish state.

If they would give you equal rights…

Personally, and this probably is not the case for many people, I wouldn’t mind belonging to the state of Israel if it decided tomorrow not to be a state for the Jewish people, but a state where anyone can live equally.

You wouldn’t mind the symbols, the flag, the star…?

I don’t mind the star… because I´m not religious anyway. It doesn’t matter as long as I´m equal to anyone else in this state.

You wouldn’t mind to become an Israeli?

I mind being an Israeli now, under the framework that exists now. But generally if we speaking about a state that is fully democratic, that just happens to be called Israel, that just happens to have a flag with a Jewish star, I don’t care. Because all of these are just symbols.

Is your way of thinking, consider too liberal in your community?

Maybe, but I got over the emotions that it has to be called Palestine, it has to be the flag of Palestine (he sighs). I don’t think it matters. Once we are equal, we have to get busy with our daily lives, we can get busy of having a decent economy, making good for our country, taking care of the environment, taking care of each other, like any other state. In the end, it´s all about having a decent life.

Mahmoud Muna 032The Status of Palestinians

In Israel/Palestine if you are an Arab, you are going to be classified in general in four different categories. You can be either a citizen of Israel (the ones that remained within the Israel borders when Israel was founded in 1948); you can be a resident of Jerusalem (Palestinians that became part of Israel, when Israel occupied the city after the Six Days War of 1967). You can be a Palestinian of the West Bank and in the last place of the pyramid a Palestinian from Gaza. According to Mahmoud, Palestinians of Jerusalem, live in a real limbo. “We are residents, but not citizens. This a very weird situation, because if I go to Chile and spent five years, I will become a resident and if a stayed another five years I would became a citizen, in here we are residents, we never qualify for the next step”.

It is a permanent status?

No, actually we have to renew it every two years. So that’s why if we leave the country for four or five years our residency becomes a question. You live in a country, you pay taxes, but you always remain a resident and all because you are not Jewish.

What does this residency allowed you?

It allows as to travel inside historic Palestine, inside Israel and inside the West Bank, it allows us to own land, buy and sell houses as if we were citizens, but it doesn’t allow us to vote in the Israeli Parliament and doesn’t allowed us to live anywhere else outside Jerusalem, because the minute we leave anywhere outside Jerusalem we lose our residency. So all people in Jerusalem fight day and night to stay in Jerusalem and the state always asks us about our documentation to prove that we live in here. So we always have to collect our tax payments, our bills, electricity, gas to prove that we live within what Israel define as the borders of Jerusalem.

Do you feel that your options are limited?

It limits your options of where to live, where to work, where the kids go to school, it limits your life. And this it is not something for a few years, this is your whole life, where you have to make the decision or either continue to live in Jerusalem or somewhere else.

Is that the reason why you returned from the UK?

After my studies in the UK I would have liked to stayed for ten years to establish my career a little bit more and then come back to my country. That’s what I envisioned for myself. But I couldn’t do this. Because if I stayed for ten years in the UK, I wouldn’t be allowed to come back. So I would have to stay forever in the UK.

What did your friends say about your decision of coming back?

Most of my friends not even understand why would I leave the UK to go back to the misery of living in Jerusalem.

Why you did it?

I have a duty. I’m an educated guy, if I leave Jerusalem, then the city will not have very educated people. I can’t lecture the world on the problem of Palestine. I myself can’t forfeit this fight that is strong and difficult. And this means that I have to confine my life in Jerusalem. If I compare it to the UK, then this is a downgrade for my career, for my life. But at one point I was thinking, eventually I am going to have a family, have kids. I can’t take away their right to live in Jerusalem. And on the national level it is letting go the battle.

Mahmoud Muna 055At the Hilton for 120 Years

The problem of land in Jerusalem is dramatic. Mahmoud says that land prices have increased hugely. “About 1,000 square meters in Jerusalem costs not less than two million dollars, it is an amazing amount of money. In the West Bank you can buy the same for ten thousand dollars”.

What do people do?

People start building on top of their houses, building expansion. But to do so, you required Israeli permissions. And this is a long, long and expensive procedure. So what do you have to do? You build without permission. And then the State has the excuse to come and destroy your house. For Europeans it could sound perfectly normal for a democratic state to do that, but the problem is that Israel omits that they don’t give permits.

What happen if you follow the procedure?

If you comply with the long Israeli system, it could take — like with my family — eight years to get the permit. Just the paper work cost us half a million dollars. I calculated that for that amount of money, my whole family could have stayed at the Hilton Hotel for 120 years. That is to give you an idea of how expensive it is to build houses.

Why do you think Israel is doing this?

Israel wants to push the Palestinians outside Jerusalem. They want to make our lives so difficult, so expensive, so impossible, that you have to live outside the city. Once you live outside Jerusalem you lose your residency. And you are not associated in anyway to the state of Israel. So the state becomes more Jewish and less Arab.

Where is Israel pushing you?

To the West Bank, like Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jericho, or any place in the world.

Can you move to another place in Israel?

No, if you leave Jerusalem, you can’t live in Israel. You can’t become a citizen; your residency is in Jerusalem. So moving to Tel Aviv is like moving to another country. You lose your residency.

To Vote or Not to Vote

Regarding political representation, the Palestinian of Jerusalem don’t vote in Israel and their vote in the last Palestinian elections was just symbolic — “to establish that Jerusalem is Palestinian.” They are not represented by the Palestinians or the Israelis. “We are lost,” claims Mahmoud.

Can you vote for municipal elections?

Even though we pay taxes, we decide not to vote because we don’t want to give authority to the municipality over us. If we vote, we would have to recognize the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem. If you engage in the system, it is one step towards the recognition. We are 30% of the voting power of Jerusalem. But we don’t have a single way to influence the Israeli municipality.

Have you thought about maybe changing the strategy?

(He sighs) This probably needs a revision. Might need to rethink it. Maybe we should engage, so we can change it. Meanwhile we suffer.

Loving Local

Mahmoud laughed when I suggested that this system must have affected the marriage market. “You want to go personal” he said. “Of course”, I answered mischievously. He told me that this point is really important, because if you marry outside Jerusalem, “she can’t come here and if you go outside to live with her, in a few years you lose your right to live in Jerusalem”. He maintained that historically the university was the place for love, but this has stopped. “Because now people can’t move between the cities anymore. Now the place where the person lives is one of the criteria when you meet someone”.

So you ask friends not to set you up with someone that is not from outside Jerusalem?

Basically the parents do the match making. It’s a bit weird. But your mother is in charge of finding someone from the city. But I think these types of limitations are not healthy in any society. There is an increase level of diseases. Because this entire people are from the same pool of genes.

So this system has affected you in every way possible.

The birth rate is dropping and this is not because of modernity, it is because of the political system. The occupation has gone into every small element of our life. Even in how we get married, choose our love, or what we choose to study.

What is the effect on education?

When you choose what to study, you need to know that you are going have to find a job in Jerusalem, so you need to study something that can secure you a good life here. It’s not about your dream, your passions, what you love, it is about in which direction is the economy of Jerusalem going and I think this is catastrophic. On the other hand, universities are not international, not even national. Everyone knows each other, they are either family or neighbors, the teacher is from the same city. The university education is dropping as well because of the situation. The occupation is a political structure sitting on your neck that one day will be over, but the effects of it are going to stay with us for generations.

Fifth Place

Mahmoud has to run. He has received a lot of phone calls. He is a busy man. I keep him for the last questions.

Do you think Palestinian in the West Bank are in a better situation that the residents of Jerusalem?

In some ways it’s better and in some ways worse. It’s better because people in Ramallah can move to Bethlehem, to Jenin, and then go back because you have this continuity within a state. They have more freedom, but limited. Because the minute you want to do something that the occupation doesn’t allow you to do, you remember that you are not free.

In what way are you in a worse situation?

I have to interact with the Israeli occupation every day. I have to pay taxes, if there is a crime I have to go to the Israeli police… I get reminded every day that these people are occupying me against my will. And they don’t treat us very well. If I go to the bank, for example, I can bring them a lot of money, but they’d rather not have my money at all, they are forced to open an account for me.

What do you think about the situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel?

They are an example that we might want to adapt. They accept Israel as their state, and they try to change it from within. A lot of things had happened to their identity, they don’t speak Arabic that much, they speak Hebrew. They became part of the system, even though the system still refuses them, but it does it in a less harsh way than they refuse us. In Jerusalem we have this choice in front of us. Basically it is being more Palestinian or being more Israeli. For now we are in the limbo. A lot of people think we have to join the Israeli example, the problem with this is that those guys have been in this fight for 60 years and they haven’t achieved anything.

Do you think they are second class citizens?

No, not second. Because first you have the Ashkenazi, then the Arab Jews, then the black Jews.

So they are fourth class citizens?

Yes, actually they are. It’s quite funny.

So you are the fifth class citizens?

Yes, we are the fifth, and then come the Palestinians of the West Bank and then the ones in Gaza. (We laugh).



About Pamela Rillon
Pamela Rillon is a Chilean journalist and holds a Masters in International Affairs from the University of Chile.
View all posts by Pamela Rillon →

Israeli soldier becomes overnight hero for pointing loaded gun at Palestinian youths Submitted by Rania Khalek on Mon, 05/05/2014 - 22:53

Attempting to shoot a minor

Israeli soldier David Adamov has become an overnight hero in Israel. Why? Because he cocked his assault rifle at unarmed Palestinian youths in Hebron.

Adamov’s actions were caught on camera and posted to YouTube by the activist group Youth Against Settlements. In the video, Adamov is seen talking trash to a Palestinian teen in Hebron, a city in the occupied West Bank, as several onlookers watch with cameras in hand.

Adamov then loads his assault rifle and points it at the teen’s face and takes aim at several others while threatening them with “a bullet in your head” if they don’t stop recording.

Sadly, the video’s content is not unusual or surprising. The Internet is teeming with visual representations of Israel’s occupation enforcers dishing out vicious cruelty against unarmed Palestinians of all ages with total impunity.

But this particular video struck a nerve among soldiers following rumors that Adamov was sentenced to 20 days in military jail for aiming his gun at civilians. The Israeli army quickly clarified that Adamov was being held for assaulting a superior officer for the second time. In fact, it was the Palestinian youth who was arrested and interrogated. But it was too late to stop the backlash.

Within hours a storm of outrage erupted within the Israeli army, culminating in the Facebook page “David from the Nahal brigade” — or “David Hanahlawi” in Hebrew. With more than 129,000 likes as of this writing plus thousands of photos of Israelis, mostly soldiers, holding up signs in Hebrew that say “We are with David Hanahlawi,” the page is still gaining traction.
A dangerous victim complex

Several Israeli politicians have expressed solidarity with Adamov, including economy minister Naftali Bennett of the far right Jewish Home party.

“I would have done the same as David the Nahal soldier,” Bennet declared. “Violence was directed at him. He was alone, surrounded by violent, provocative Arabs. He didn’t shoot. He defended himself and those surrounding him reasonably and ended the incident.”

Construction and housing minister Uri Ariel, also of the Jewish Home party, added his voice to the chorus of incitement from high level officials, saying, “The reality in which soldiers have to absorb harm and humiliation on a daily basis without being able to respond, even when their lives are really in danger, because we’re afraid of criticism, is intolerable.”

Ariel was echoing the main complaint from Israeli soldiers that their “hands are tied” in the face of Palestinian aggression. But the facts tell a far different story.

According to reality, Israeli soldiers are free to act as belligerently as they wish toward the mostly defenseless population they are tasked with dominating. Sure, Palestinian children sometimes throw rocks, but they are aiming at heavily-armed Israeli soldiers who have a habit of launching tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets at Palestinian school children, not to mention the live ammunition routinely fired at unarmed Palestinians.
Trigger-happy impunity

In a damning investigation released in February, Amnesty International found that “trigger-happy” Israeli soldiers and security forces since 2011 have critically injured 261 Palestinians, including 67 children, in the West Bank with live ammunition.

In 2013 alone, Amnesty documented 22 Palestinian civilians, including four children, killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank. They found that none of them posed a threat and that some were “willful killings” that “amount to war crimes.”

Nevertheless, Israeli soldiers, whose hands are supposedly tied, are rarely — if ever — prosecuted, let alone convicted. As Amnesty notes, not one soldier has been convicted for willfully killing a Palestinian since 1987.

With this in mind, the notion that Israeli forces are the victims in this scenario is laughably absurd. It is Palestinians whose hands are tied (or more accurately, shackled) in the face of checkpoints, land theft and forced displacement executed by trigger-happy soldiers with a callous disregard for Palestinian life.
Media’s troubling tone

In typical biased fashion, The New York Times’ Jodi Rudoren characterized the incident as “an aggressive confrontation with Palestinian teenagers,” as though the encounter was between two equally powerful parties rather than a heavily armed occupation soldier and unarmed civilian youths.

Rudoren went on to report as fact an Israeli army lie that one of the Palestinian youths in the video was holding brass knuckles. This was disproven the following day when a second video emerged (embedded below) showing the Palestinian teen, whose name is Saddam Abu Sneinah, holding prayer beads, not brass knuckles.
david the Nahlawi2 الجندي الذي طرد من الجيش

Other media outlets — like Reuters, the BBC and The Guardian — centered the story around Israeli reactions to the Facebook campaign, an unfortunate reminder that Israeli opinions about the occupation take precedence over the often-ignored daily violence inflicted against Palestinians.
Israeli extremism

This entire episode should serve as a warning about the extremism and anti-Palestinian fervor permeating Israeli society, where reality is so warped that heavily-armed occupiers genuinely see themselves as victims to defenseless population they are actively wiping off the map. It is a scandal that the world is silent while Palestinians are at their mercy.

Palestinian Unity: Hope and Gloom in the Beach Refugee Camp

By Ramzy Baroud



For years, Palestinian factions have strived for unity, and for years unity has evaded them. But is it possible that following several failed attempts, Fatah and Hamas have finally found that elusive middle ground? And if they have done so, why, to what end, and at what cost?



On April 23, top Fatah and Hamas officials hammered out the final details of the Beach Refugee Camp agreement without any Arab mediation. All major grievances have purportedly been smoothed over, differences have been abridged, and other sensitive issues have been referred to a specialized committee. One of these committees will be entrusted to incorporate Hamas and the Islamic Jihad into the fold of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).



A rift lasting seven years has been healed, rejoiced some headlines in Arabic media. Israelis and their media were divided. Some, close to right-wing parties, decried the betrayal of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas of the 'peace process'. Others, mostly on the left, pointed the finger at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for pushing Abbas over the edge -"into Hamas's arms" per the assessment of Zehava Galon, leader of the left-wing party Meretz.



It is untrue that the rift between Fatah and Hamas goes back to the January 2006 elections, when Hamas won the majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), and formed a government. The feud is as old as Hamas itself. The Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, was founded in Gaza with two main objectives, one direct and the other inferred: to resist the Israeli military occupation at the start of the First Palestinian Intifada in 1987, and to counterbalance the influence of the PLO.



Since then, a staple argument has clouded the judgment of many analysts, most of them sympathetic to Palestinians. They claim that Hamas was the brainchild of the Israeli intelligence Shin Bet, to weaken Palestinian resistance. That too is a misjudgment.



Hamas founders were not the only Palestinians to have a problem with the PLO. The latter group, which represented and spoke on behalf of all Palestinians everywhere, was designated by an Arab League summit in 1974 as the sole and only representative of the Palestinian people. The target of such specific language was not Hamas, for at the time, it didn't exist. The reference was aimed at other Arab governments who posed as Palestine's representatives regionally and internationally.



The 'sole representation' bit, however, endured even after surpassing its usefulness. Following the Israeli war on Lebanon in 1982 that mainly targeted PLO factions, the leading Palestinian institution, now operating from Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and other Arab entities, began to flounder. Its message grew more exclusivist and was dominated by a small clique within Fatah, one that was closest to former leader Yasser Arafat.



When the 1987 uprising broke out, it was a different breed of Palestinians who seemed to reflect the new mood on the ground, far away from Tunis and all Arab capitals. New movements included the United National Leadership of the Intifada, although it was quickly coaxed by PLO leadership in exile. Other movements, like Hamas, survived on its own.



That was the original rift, which grew wider with time. When Arafat signed the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993, the once unifying character of the 'sole representative' of Palestinians began to quickly change. The PLO shrunk into the Palestinian Authority, which governed parts of the West Bank and Gaza under the watchful eye of Israel; and the parliament in exile became the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), a much more restricted parliament at home that was still under occupation. The blurred lines grew between the PLO, the PA and Fatah. It was clear that the liberation project, mounted by the PLO and Fatah in the early 1960's, became anything but that.



In fact, the whole paradigm was fluctuating at all fronts. 'Donor countries' became the true friends of Palestine, and geography suddenly became a maze of confusing classifications of areas A, B and C. The status of Jerusalem was a deferred topic for later discussions; the refugees' Right of Return was a mere problem that needed to be cleverly and creatively resolved with possible symbolic gestures.



The befuddling peace process has remained in motion, and is likely to continue even after the unity deal. On April 18, former Israel lobbyist and current US peace envoy Martin Indyk returned to the region in a last desperate effort to push both parties to an agreement, any agreement, even one that would simply postpone the US-imposed deadline for a 'framework agreement'. But little could be done. Netanyahu had no reasons to move forward with the talks, especially being under little or no pressure to do so. Abbas's only hope that Israel would release a few Palestinian prisoners, from the thousands of prisoners it currently holds, was dashed. He had nothing to show his people by way of an 'achievement'.



20 some years after Abbas helped facilitate the Oslo agreement, he had nothing to show except for more settlements and a seemingly unbridgeable divide between factions within his own Fatah party, but also with others. With the imminent collapse of the peace process, this time engineered by Secretary of State John Kerry, Abbas needed an exit, thus the Beach Refugee Camp agreement with Hamas.



The timing for Hamas was devastatingly right. The group, which once represented Palestinian resistance, not just for Islamists, but for others as well, was running out of options. "Hamas is cornered, unpopular at home and boxed in as tightly as ever by both Egypt and Israel," wrote the Economist on April 26. "Its former foreign patrons, such as Qatar, have been keeping their distance, withholding funds for projects that used to bolster Hamas."



Indeed, the regional scene was getting too complicated, even for resourceful Hamas, a group that was born into a crisis and is used to navigating its way out of tough political terrains. Despite putting up stiff resistance to Israeli wars and incursions, the group has in recent years been obliged to facilitate hudnas (ceasefires) with Israel, doing its utmost in keeping Gaza's border with Israel rocket-free. The destruction of the tunnels since the Egyptian army coup against the government of Mohammed Morsi in July had cost the Hamas government nearly 230 million dollars. To manage an economy in a poor region like Gaza is one thing, to sustain it under the harshest of sieges is proving nearly impossible.



As is the case for Abbas's PA, for Hamas the agreement was necessitated by circumstances other than finding true ground for national unity to combat the Israeli occupation. In fact, the Beach Camp deal would allow Abbas to continue with his part of the peace process, as he will also remain at the helm of the prospected unity government, to be formed within a few weeks from the signing of the agreement. Although Arab governments were not directly involved in bringing both parties together - as was the case in previous agreements in Sana, Mecca, Cairo and Doha - some still hold a sway.



Egypt in particular holds an important key, the Rafah border with Gaza. Hamas is looking for any space to escape the siege and its own isolation. Egypt knows that well, and has played a clever game to manipulate, and at times, punish Hamas for its closeness to the Muslim Brotherhood.



The Americans and the Israelis have the largest keys to quashing the unity deal. Netanyahu immediately suspended the peace process, as the Hamas-Fatah agreement was a last minute escape route for his government to disown the futile talks, whose collapse is now being blamed on the Palestinians. The Americans are in agreement with Israel, as has always been the case.



Scenes in Gaza tell of much hope and rejoicing, but it is a repeated scene of past agreements that have failed. Sometimes despair and hope go hand in hand. The impoverished place has served as a battlefield for several wars and a continued siege. It is aching for a glimmer of hope.



- Ramzy Baroud is the Managing Editor of Middle East Eye. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press, London). (A version of this article was first published in Middle East Eye - www.middleeasteye.net)