An American President and the outposts of Zion

Ben White, The Electronic Intifada, 9 January 2008

A Palestinian printing press prepares an anti-Bush banner for demonstrations in the Gaza Strip agains US President George W. Bush's visit to the region, 8 January 2007. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

This week US President George W. Bush embarks on a tour of some of the US' Middle East allies, including his first visit while in office to Israel. The trip has been presaged by a lot of media guesswork about what exactly Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will discuss, and one of the likely topics will apparently be the so-called "illegal outposts." [1]

The New York Times last Saturday reported remarks made by Bush in an interview with Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot about the need for Israel to dismantle these outposts and the apparent "awkward" nature of the issue for both US and Israeli governments. [2] However, the issue of outposts -- framed as Bush forcing a reticent Israeli administration to compromise for the sake of peace -- risks clouding far more crucial issues that go to the heart of the conflict.

"Settler outposts" refer to sites scattered around the West Bank where Zionist Jews have established often as little as a tent or a caravan, as part of the wider effort to colonize "Judea and Samaria." [3] They are "illegal" in the sense that they have been established without the official authorization of the Israeli state (although it has been alleged sometimes with the collusion of individual officials). [4]

The language of illegality with regards to the outposts serves as a deliberate distraction from the main colony blocs, many of which began life as mere "outposts." The contrast in scale with these large-scale settlements, illegal under international law, is something that even The New York Times, in the aforementioned article, alludes to:

"... the population of the outposts Israel considers illegal is tiny compared with the 65,000 or so Israelis living in the settlements beyond the barrier, let alone the 465,000 Israelis living beyond the country's 1967 boundaries in settlements and in East Jerusalem."

Bush, however, takes a very different approach to the main settlement blocs, as he makes clear in the Yediot Aharonot interview:

"But the unauthorized settlements, which is different from authorized settlements, is an issue we've been very clear on. But I've also made statements on the settlements, as well. As I said, realities on the ground will help define the border -- the eventual border of what the Palestinian state will look like."

This is not a new development; it was in April 2004 when President Bush wrote to then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon saying:

"In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion." [5]

Despite the public theatre of wrist-slapping and re-commitment to promises never meant to be kept, Olmert is well aware that Bush is "on side" when it comes to Israeli plans for the Palestinian "state." In an interview with The Jerusalem Post last week and quoted by Agence France-Presse, Olmert described the extent of the White House's support for Israeli unilateral annexation in the occupied territories:

"'I don't recall another president who systematically and consistently showed the same level of commitment to Israel as George W. Bush,' adding that 'with him, I know for certain that he backs our red lines'... He reiterated that Israel had no intention of giving up some of the large settlement blocks in the occupied Palestinian territory, notably the Maale Adumim settlement east of Jerusalem -- one of West Bank's largest. 'Maale Adumim is an indivisible part of Jerusalem and the State of Israel. I don't think when they're talking about settlements they are talking about Maale Adumim.'" [6]

Settlers are often portrayed in the Western media as extremists within Israeli society, and the outpost "pioneers" -- those who heeded Ariel Sharon's call a decade ago to "move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can" -- an even more maverick fringe. [7] Yet core ideological characteristics of the settlers are also central to the identity and policies of the Israeli state itself; the settlers of city and caravan are a natural expression of Zionism, rather than an aberration.

While the ultra-religious settlers are more frequently spotlighted as ascribing to slogans such as "Only the Bible is the roadmap of the Jewish people," Israel's very own Declaration of Independence itself celebrates "the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country" and affirms "the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel." [8]

Closely connected to the idea of the Bible as land deeds is a second characteristic of both settlers and the Israeli state: a disregard for and denial of applicability of international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and a refusal to accept the Palestinians' recognized right to self-determination. Again, typically settlers are presented as the kind of extremists who reject any kind of concession to either the "Other" or to the demands of international law. In a recent piece in The Los Angeles Times, the mayor of the Gush Etzion bloc, Shaul Goldstein, looks down at the land owned by a Palestinian family from Bethlehem and assures the reporter: "'If the state wants to give it to me, for my settlement, they will give it to me. All the land belongs to Israel. We can build wherever we want'". [9] Interestingly, while Goldstein rejects the idea of an illegal Israeli occupation -- since the land is Israel -- he also tolerates the limited presence of Palestinian "neighbors," and "says they must be accommodated in what he calls the land of Israel."

This same kind of rejectionism and denial of Palestine's right to exist is not the exclusive preserve of the settlers; it is echoed at the heart of the Israeli political establishment. Speaking to the UN in September 2005, Ariel Sharon made similar remarks to those of Goldstein:

"The right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel does not mean disregarding the rights of others in the land. The Palestinians will always be our neighbors. We respect them, and have no aspirations to rule over them. They are also entitled to freedom and to a national, sovereign existence in a state of their own." [10]

Thus, "according to Sharon ... the Jewish people have a 'right ... to the Land of Israel;' in other words, theirs is the right of ownership and possession -- in practice and in principle. All others, or more exactly, the Palestinians, have 'rights in the land'... [They] do not, it appears, have any right to the land of Palestine itself." [11]

In case even Sharon's views are dismissed as those of an unrepentant right-winger, there is also the example of current Defense Minister Ehud Barak, ex-Prime Minister of a Labor-led government and apparent "hawkish dove." In 1999, a year before the second intifada and well before construction commenced on the separation wall, Barak spoke at length about his vision for the OPT:

"'Only physical separation from the Palestinians will give us both personal and national security, but in no way will we withdraw to the 1967 border,' he explained. 'Bet El and Ofra will be ours forever ... There is no meaning to our identity and to all that we are here without the connection to Shilo and to Tekoa, to Bet El and to Efrat ...'" [12]

Moreover, his opposition to outposts was not "because we do not have such a right." In fact, Israelis "have a complete right to settle there. We didn't steal anything from anyone. We have deep ties with these places." Interestingly, in February of the same year, Barak specified some of Israel's "red lines:" "Alfe Menache, the Etzion Bloc, Ariel, Nirit, the corridor, the Jordan Valley settlements, and many more places are part of the State of Israel, now and in the permanent agreement."

As part of its ruling against the wall in July 2004, the International Court of Justice made a point of putting on record what international law says about the OPT, concluding: "All these territories (including East Jerusalem) remain occupied territories and Israel has continued to have the status of occupying Power." [13]

Finally, interwoven with the idea of a Jewish "return" and a denial of relevant international law is a deep anti-Arab racism. This year is the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Hebron settlement Kiryat Arba, a religious colony that is notorious for graffiti like "Death to the Arabs" or "Arabs to the gas chambers." [14] Then there are the likes of Moshe Feiglin, a prominent settler activist who gained 23 percent in the Likud leadership primary last August and lives in a West Bank settlement. In a piece in The New Yorker, Feiglin gave his own perspective on the chances for peace:

"'You can't teach a monkey to speak and you can't teach an Arab to be democratic. You're dealing with a culture of thieves and robbers. Muhammad, their prophet, was a robber and a killer and a liar. The Arab destroys everything he touches.'" [15]

Extremist religious settlers may be less refined in expressing their views, but anti-Palestinian racism has been common amongst the Zionist political and military establishment, from the first pre-state leadership to sitting Knesset members today. MK Effi Eitam is a decorated war hero and sits on the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committees. In an interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz he described expelling all the Palestinians of the occupied territories and those living inside Israel as a "politically enticing" solution. [16] "Israeli Arabs," according to Eitam, are an "elusive threat" like that of a "cancer." Eitam can find common cause with Avigdor Lieberman, Minister of Strategic Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister, who said in May 2004 of the Palestinians inside Israel that "they have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost." [17]

Outspoken remarks like these are often hypocritically condemned by the same politicians and generals who will openly worry about the "demographic threat." Reports like the one compiled by Professor Arnon Soffer into the dangers posed by the rising Palestinian population are discussed at length at the very highest level, despite the fact that the underlying presumption is that Palestinians are a "threat" for simply being Palestinian. [18]

Interviewed in Haaretz in 2003, leftist activist and journalist Haim Hanegbi recalled the moment he realized that for all the rhetoric, Israeli settlements were constantly growing:

"I realized that Israel can't abandon its expansionist character; it is shackled, by arms and legs, to its institutionalized ideology, structure, actions and theft. [19]

With Bush's visit to Israel, and the controversy over the outposts, we are set for more posturing politics and veiling of apartheid. It is vital to make the link between the outposts, the settlement blocs, and the identity of Israel itself, in order that proposed solutions to the conflict go to its very core, rather than play around on the edges.

Ben White is a freelance journalist specializing in Palestine/Israel. His website is at www.benwhite.org.uk and he can be contacted directly at ben@benwhite.org.uk.


Endnotes
[1] "Olmert to assure Bush he will dismantle illegal outposts," Haaretz, 7 January 2008.
[2] "Nudged by Bush, Israel Talks of Removing Illegal Outposts," The New York Times, 5 January 2008; Interview of the President by Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer of Yediot Ahronot, 2 January 2008.
[3] "The settlements' outposts: another Israeli Impediment to the peace process," Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem, 2 January 2008.
[4] "Report: Israel Is Funding Outposts," The Washington Post, 9 March 2005; "Israel spent #3.7m building illegal outposts," The Guardian, 6 May 2004.
[5] Letter from US President George W. Bush to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 14 April 2004.
[6] "Olmert says 'hand of God' favors Israel in peace talks," Agence France Presse, 4 January 2008.
[7] "The Unsettlers," The New York Times, 16 February 2003.
[8] "Israel's religious settlers," BBC News Online, 18 August 2003; The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, 14 May 1948 (Website of Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
[9] "A West Bank struggle rooted in land," The Los Angeles Times, 27 December 2007.
[10] "PM Sharon addresses the United Nations General Assembly," 15 September 2005 (Website of Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
[11] "Crumbs from the Master's Table," Palestine Chronicle, 24 October 2005.
[12] "Barak's Election Portends Modifications in Israel's Foreign Policy," Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP), Settlement Report, Vol. 9 No. 4, July-August 1999.
[13] "Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory," International Court of Justice, 9 July 2004, para 78
[14] "In Hebron," London Review of Books, 22 July 2004.
[15] "Among the Settlers," The New Yorker, 31 May 2004.
[16] "Dear God, this is Effi," Haaretz, 21 March 2002.
[17] "LIEBERMAN, Avigdor -- Israeli politician and deputy prime minister," http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/people/658.shtml.
[18] "I'm not a racist, but ..." www.benwhite.org.uk/blog, 15 Jan 2006.
[19] Ari Shavit, "Forget about Zionism," Haaretz, 8 August 2003.

They want us to leave- We are going to stay

They `They want us to leave - we are going to stay!`
By Richard Boudreaux
Los Angeles Times
December 27, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-hilltop27dec27,1,3375978.story?coll=la-headlines-world

NAHALIN, WEST BANK -- From his hilltop farm, Daoud Nassar can see the sun rise over the Jordan Valley and set in the Mediterranean, an arc that spans the territorial breadth of his people`s conflict with Israel.

He also can see the neighbors whose rival claim has drawn the idyllic 100-acre plot deeply into that fight.

The only large Palestinian property to occupy high ground in this part of the West Bank, it is ringed by expanding Jewish settlements and coveted by the one perched on the nearest hill, 800 yards away.

For nearly a generation, Nassar and his family have stood their ground, unarmed, against pistol-toting settlers who have barricaded the farm`s dirt lanes, uprooted its olive groves, tried to bulldoze their own roads and disabled a tractor and a rooftop water tank.

The family has rebuffed anonymous Jewish callers offering blank checks for the property, and spent $145,000 in a marathon legal battle to keep the land that Nassar`s grandfather, a Christian from Lebanon, bought in 1916 when it was part of the Ottoman Empire. For more than 90 years, Nassars have worked the land, growing almonds, figs, grapes, olives, pears and pomegranates.

The feuding over these stark hills, ridges and valleys south and east of Bethlehem, a 27-square-mile region that includes the Nassar farm, is emblematic of the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- a struggle rooted in land.

To open the way to peace talks that resumed this month after a seven-year hiatus, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged to refrain from authorizing new settlements in the West Bank. But he said he would not prevent the `natural growth` of settlements such as the ones in this region, which Jews call Gush Etzion, on land Israel expects to keep under a final peace accord.

`The Israelis want this whole area. Their plan is to force as many of us as possible to leave,` said Nassar, a square-jawed man of 37 with a calm, hopeful disposition and a mop of curly dark hair. `But we have to encourage people, empower them, to stay.`

The struggle over his hundred acres, a drama both intimate and epic, has consumed Nassar`s adult life and reached what could prove to be its final act.

`It is our land, and our land is like our mother,` he said. `I cannot abandon or sell my mother.`

From the Jewish settlement of Neve Daniel, Shaul Goldstein can see the Nassars` farmhouse across a narrow valley. He stops his car on a ridge where workmen are building $500,000 white stone villas with sloping red tile roofs for the settlement`s newcomers.

`In my view, Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan Valley is a Jewish state,` said Goldstein, 48, a mechanical engineer and air force veteran who is mayor of a group of settlements that form the Gush Etzion Regional Council. `Its lands are earmarked first and foremost for Jewish citizens.`

Goldstein is a tall, energetic and articulate defender of the settler movement and one of its more moderate leaders. He boasts of `very good relations` with his construction company`s Palestinian employees and most of his Palestinian neighbors, and says they must be accommodated in what he calls the land of Israel.

But he complains that his initiatives to cooperate with Palestinian village mayors on issues such as earthquake preparedness and water purification have been vetoed by the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. He depicts the Nassar family`s legal battle, which blocks his settlement`s expansion, as an example of the same rejectionist stance.

`It is very difficult to make coexistence and civil relations with people who consider themselves part of a society that declared war against you,` Goldstein said.

Israel says it has a special claim to this part of the West Bank, dating to David`s biblical kingdom.

A Jewish community flourished here until the Roman era and was reestablished in the 1940s as the Kfar Etzion kibbutz on land purchased the previous decade. But it was overrun by Jordan`s Arab Legion on the next-to-last day of Israel`s 1948 war for independence, a battle in which Goldstein`s father fought.

The community was again revived in 1967, becoming the first settlement on land captured from Jordan in the Middle East War that year -- and a symbol of the Zionist dream of restoring biblical Israel.

Since then, Israel has vastly expanded the kibbutz`s pre-1948 holdings by seizing agricultural land from long-settled Palestinians and turning it over to Jewish settlers, a practice replicated across the West Bank.

Although that practice is widely viewed as a violation of international law, it is codified in Israel`s legal system. A military committee identifies coveted land it deems un-owned or unused and declares it `state land.` Any Palestinian with a claim has 45 days to appeal to a military court.

Most West Bank Palestinian families lack formal land titles. In theory, Israeli law allows them to keep rural land acquired without title before 1967 as long as they keep it cultivated. In practice, Israeli and Palestinian lawyers say, titled and cultivated land is often seized.

`The burden of proof is always on the Palestinians,` said Sani Khoury, a Jerusalem-based Palestinian lawyer who handles land holders` appeals. `The other team makes the rules.`


Palestinians often learn they are being dispossessed when Israeli bulldozer crews with military orders and police escorts start clearing the land in question, the lawyers say. By then it is too late for legal recourse.

Parcel by parcel, Israel is taking control of farms, pastures and underground water sources to expand the Gush Etzion settlements for a growing population that now totals more than 55,000. According to Taayush, a Tel Aviv-based organization that advocates Israeli-Palestinian cooperation, the region`s 20,000 Palestinian residents have lost at least one-fifth of their land to the settlements, which sprawl closer to their homes by the day.

If Israeli planners get their way, the Nassar property, eight nearby farming villages and the 10 Jewish settlements in their midst will end up on the Israeli side of the barrier being erected between Israel and the West Bank, making them a de facto part of the Jewish state. Israeli leaders want to annex the enclave formally under any peace accord that would yield the bulk of the West Bank to an independent Palestinian state.

That would enclose the Nassars and the villagers in a mostly Jewish enclave, cutting them off from Bethlehem, the West Bank city that sustains them.

`They would be severed from their places of work and education, their medical services, their extended families and, indeed, the rest of Palestine,` said Ghiath Nasser, a lawyer who is challenging the planned barrier route on behalf of the Palestinian villages. `I don`t believe that these small communities could survive for long.`

Showing a visitor around his property -- a scattering of vineyards, orchards, livestock and cave dwellings around a low cinder-block house -- Daoud Nassar recalls the sinking feeling, on his first day in court, that he was about to lose it all.

In 1991, the Israeli military committee had ordered three-fourths of the farm taken by the state, claiming it was neither privately owned nor actively cultivated. The family went to court to challenge the order with land ownership papers dated and stamped 1924. But the military judge rejected the challenge, ruling the hand-drawn map inadmissible as evidence.

The ownership papers had been honored by Turkish, British and Jordanian rulers who came and went. And until the 1991 order, there had been no hint of trouble with the new Jewish overlords.

`I had nothing against the Israelis as a people, but to see them coming from other countries and trying to take this land, which we had owned for generations, it really frustrated us,` said Nassar, who was a 21-year-old undergraduate at Bethlehem University when the case went to court. `What else did we need, a document from God?`

Nassar, who has since married and fathered three children, sprinkles his conversation with biblical citations. He speaks with the upbeat certitude of someone who, not unlike the Jewish settlers, views his land battle as a matter of religious faith.

`There is a goal behind why we are here,` he said, explaining what he accepts as a Christian calling: While mounting a legal defense, he has plowed his frustration over judicial setbacks and delays into a project that uses the farm as a center for nonviolent activism.

With help from volunteers in Germany, where he did postgraduate studies in accounting, Nassar and his wife, Jihan, have started a summer camp called Tent of Nations, where children 12 to 16 years old, from war-torn countries, are invited to come learn about cross-cultural understanding and reconciliation. They also play host to visiting peace groups.

`We have to move out of this circle of blaming others,` Nassar said over tea on his wide porch as a large group of European peaceniks unloaded camping gear from a bus. `Frustration is a power. It can prompt us to react violently, or to despair. We need to invest it creatively, building something, even if it is small.`

The Nassars returned to military court with a new survey map and scores of witnesses to back their land claim. The case languished until 2002, when the judge, without explanation, ruled against the family.

Few Palestinians have the money, will, know-how or faith in Israeli justice to challenge land takeovers in court, much less to appeal the military courts` routinely unfavorable rulings. But Nassar tapped his family`s modest wealth and a peace-activist network that includes interfaith organizations in Europe and the United States, the Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights and his own Lutheran congregation in Bethlehem.

The Nassars appealed to Israel`s Supreme Court.

`Their faith in nonviolent resistance is a bit unusual,` said Jonathan Kuttab, a Virginia-trained Palestinian lawyer who teamed with Khoury to represent the family. `They had this crazy idea that maybe they could get justice.`

Eventually, the family got what it considered a fair hearing.

A skeptical Supreme Court panel demanded an explanation of the military court`s ruling and ordered a halt to the settlers` incursions onto the property. The state attorney`s office argued that the farm`s coordinates did not precisely match those in the 1924 land documents.

The Nassars countered with a surprise star witness. At a cost of $70,000, they had hired a leading Israeli surveyor and sent him to London and Istanbul, Turkey, to dig up colonial land records, which were used in 2004 to rebut the state`s argument.


The state attorney`s office did not challenge the surveyor`s evidence but stalled for three more years before dropping the case -- before the Supreme Court could rule. It has notified the Nassars that they may register their land, a process expected to take an additional year.

`For now they have won,` Kuttab said. `They get to keep their land -- until the Israelis find another way to try to take it.`

That`s exactly what Shaul Goldstein was thinking as he eyed the Nassar farm from the neighboring ridge.

The Jewish mayor still rejects the Palestinian family`s claim to any land except the patch where its farmhouse sits.

`That is state land,` he said, pointing to a steep, uncultivated stretch. `Daoud Nassar went to court and tried to claim it, but he has not proven a thing.

`The state will decide what to do with that land,` he said, predicting that the family would not be allowed to register all 100 acres it claims. `If the state wants to give it to me, for my settlement, they will give it to me. All the land belongs to Israel. We can build wherever we want.`

Later, the mayor lamented that the settlers are not really so powerful. `The Supreme Court despises us,` he said, and `that provocateur, Daoud Nassar,` is using the legal system to stir up opposition to the settlers among Israelis as well as Palestinians.

The two adversaries, who live about half a mile apart but have never met, might be stuck with each other for years to come.

That is why Nassar proposes a dialogue with his Jewish neighbors, as long as they meet him unarmed.

`We have to change the picture we have of each other -- the enemy picture, radical settlers and radical Palestinians,` he said. `If we talk face to face, we could lay a foundation for peace, a peace that cannot be dictated by our leaders.`

For his part, Goldstein said he has no objection to talking to Nassar.

`I will ask him to show me one document that proves he owns that land,` the mayor said, `and I will show him dozens of documents [from the military court] that prove otherwise.`

Told about the mayor`s idea, the farmer smiled.

`If he believes the land is given to him in the Bible as the Promised Land, then he ought to believe in the whole Bible,` Nassar said. `The Bible also says: `Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.`

`If we can live by that rule, we can end this conflict.`

boudreaux@latimes.com

A.K.

An Unholy Land Grab

AN UNHOLY LAND GRAB: THE STORY OF A PALESTINIAN FARM AND SETTLERS
by Janine Roberts

Wed, 2 Jan 2008
 
The following special report exclusive to PalestineChronicle.com is written by Janine Roberts. Roberts’s investigative features have been widely published in the major Australian newspapers as well as in the Independent and Financial Times in the UK. Her investigative film "the Diamond Empire" was shown on Frontline WGBH in the USA and on the BBC - it was researched partly in Israel.
 
http://palestinechronicle.com/story-010108174759.htm
 
No matter what was promised in Annapolis, a Two State Solution for Israel and Palestine now seems utterly impossible, judging from what I have just seen during a 3-week visit to the West Bank.
 
Its hills, terraced with olive groves, are now totally dissected by fortified highways and crowned by luxurious illegal housing developments - the latter occupied by nearly a half a million Israelis. Seized Arab land has clearly provided a bonanza for investors who think their money secure. What remains is a shredded West Bank from which it will be near impossible, in my view, to construct anything truly independent of Israel.
 
I went to the West Bank at the invitation of a Fair Trade Palestinian olive oil company, Zaytoun.  I expected a healthy break from chilly English weather; to pick olives, eat with farmers and learn from them how 60 years of military occupation has affected their lives.  But it turned out to bea far more dramatic a visit than ever I had envisioned.
 
One morning I went with three olive pickers to help Omar, a Palestinian who farms in the northern part of the West Bank. Leaving our car on what was then a quiet main road, we met him on the farm on which he had 250 olive trees.  The police just evicted the Israeli settlers who had illegally occupied it. They had done so at the behest of a judge who ruled in favour of the Palestinian owners of this farm of fig, olive and almond trees. It is managed for her family by the 61-year-old Dadriya Amar who lives, as does Omar, in the local Palestinian village of Kafr Qaddum. She had filed her complaint when the settlers first occupied the farm in October. This led to the eviction of the settlers by the army - not once but three times. But every time they were expelled, the army did not stop them from returning hours later. When she came to pick the olives, the settlers had chased her away with stones.
 
We had not yet started picking the olives when suddenly a large armoured army truck arrived and soldiers massed by the farmhouse. They clearly had foreknowledge of something about to happen - and sure enough, a bus load of Israeli settlers minutes later disembarked and charged to the farmhouse. However it was a gentle, almost ritual, clash.  No tear gas, no arrests.  The settlers retired after some pushing and chatting with the soldiers. The army then declared the farm a 'closed military zone' and we had to leave.
 
It was only when we started to drive away that we realised our front tires had been slashed. The young settlers waiting nearby for us to discover this, jeered and laughed and came towards us. My companions ran back to ask the army to protect us while nervously I stayed with the car.  The youths that then surrounded the car were all wearing the tzitzit, the tasselled under-shirt of Orthodox Jews.  But there was nothing religious it seemed in their behaviour. I was seriously scared. I feared they would discover that I could not lock my doors. Stories of Palestinian cars torched by settlers came back to me. Our crime seemingly was that we had just spoken to the Palestinian farmer.
 
When my companions returned minutes later that seemed like hours, I learnt the army had refused protection on the grounds that we had driven a few feet out of their 'military zone.' They said we were now the responsibility of the absent police. When passing motorists slowed to ask if we needed help, the settlers ordered them not to stop.
 
 When a police armoured jeep approached we thought we were safe, but a policeman said; 'We don't speak English' and drove on. But ten minutes later they returned. This time they mounted an armed protection of us, ordering the settlers off the road, guarding us until a tow truck arrived.
 
But that night the army and police withdrew from the farmhouse, just as they had done after every other eviction, and the young settlers reoccupied it as they had done every other time, planting the Israeli flag upon its rooftop. The army evicted them once more but the settlers again returned at night. Two days later the farmhouse had a Hebrew sign on it, the settlers were picking Omar's olives and wires strung to the farm from Mitzpe Ishai, the Jewish settlement across the valley that is part of the larger illegal Israeli settlement of Kedumim (also spelt as Qedumim), to make the farm part of an 'Eruv,' a Rabbi-authorized area in which Orthodox Jews can travel to and fro on the Sabbath. Normally this requires permission, a 'kinyan kesef,' from landowners but apparently not in this case. The farm was also renamed - it was now "Shvut Ami," meaning 'The Return of the People.' There was however one very small victory for Omar. He used photographs we had taken to persuade the police to arrest one of the settlers for stealing his olives. He got a bucket of his olives back. This was a very small return for losing the many sacks of olives produced by 250 trees.
 
Thus we witnessed another small part of the West Bank passing into Israeli hands. The farmer Omar swore he would never give up but with nine children, and access to several hundred olive trees lost, the task had just become much harder.
 
We soon discovered that behind this occupation were the guiding hands of Daniella Weiss, a former Mayor of Kedumim to which the farm had now been added as an 'eruv' - and joined to its water mains. The New York Times has called her "one of the leading ideologues of the outpost movement."   The settlers documented their takeover of the farm by posting videos to U-Tube. These showed a Rabbi leading rituals at the farmhouse with Weiss prominently in attendance.
 
After the Annapolis conference, the Israeli National News reported: 'Daniella Weiss, the head of the Kedumim regional council  ... stated this [the West Bank] is holy land that is temporarily inhabited by non-Jews.' The Guardian also reported, in an interview published on June 5, 2007, that she believed the land of Israel should be the Biblical Promised land, stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.  She also warned, in an interview published in the Washington Post: 'Anyplace in Israel where we do not reside, is the home of terrorists.'
 
She now stated: 'Most of the people singing peaceful Shabbat songs in the new settlement of Shvut Ami didn't know much about Annapolis - its location or its agenda. They did know that their persistent hold on the new hill west of Kedumim in the heart of Shomron [Samaria] will affect politics, will affect the Israeli agenda and will have a lasting influence on the morale of Israeli society.' She reported that that, simultaneously with its occupation, some five other outposts were being established. All these are illegal under international law for military occupations.  Much of Kedumim itself is built on land confiscated from Kofr Qadum - although some was part of a pre-1967 Jordanian army base. When we went to stay in Kafr Qaddum to help with its olive harvest, we soon discovered it had no regular electricity, despite having a generator since 1999, installed as a gift of the Belgian government.   The Israelis will not permit its use since it is sited 'too close' to the Israeli settlement of Kedumim - a weak excuse as this is a quarter of a mile away! This action has crippled the local industries. We went to see the site of the unused generator and found it is in a building adjacent to the houses of the village - on the former main road to the regional capital, Nablus; also out of use since 2000 since it passes through a new extension of Kedumim. It seems to be Israeli policy to only allow Palestinian villages and small towns a single road into them - for this makes it easy for the army to isolate them.
 
The next day we went to pick olives there, to our disappointment the Israeli army came to stop us - on the grounds that they were evicting the settlers from the previously mentioned farm and that this might make the settlers angry enough to attack us.  The farmer had an Israeli permit to pick for 7 days - but needed 20. He also knew he might not be able to come back next year - for the Wall is planned to permanently cut him off from his trees.
 
His land was rich - bringing in a summer crop of wheat as well as olives in the autumn. It will be stolen by Israeli settlers despite being in a quiet valley 7 miles inside the legal boundary of the West Bank. Kafr Qaddum's Deputy Major told us: 'The wall will cut us off from about 35% of our olive groves. We will do everything to stop them building it.' The Israelis planned to build the wall through the olive groves alongside the town hall.  It was going to be a tough fight.
 
Omar, to illustrate that the wall is essentially a 'land-grab,' took us to visit nearby Qalqilya, a sizeable West Bank town already closely encircled by the Wall with only one main entrance allowed into it, one with a checkpoint adjacent to an Israeli army base. It was a rich market town - but its fertile lands now lie beyond the wall and are now used by Israeli farmers. The nearby town of Jayyus has similarly lost 68% of its lands to Israeli farmers. UN aerial photographs show the greenhouses beyond the wall that Palestinians can no longer use.
 
Today Kedumim with just over 3000 Jewish settlers is equal in size to Kafr Qaddum - although the latter has many empty houses from which the owners fled at the time of the Israeli invasion. The Israelis will not allow them to return to live on the West Bank - but the village elders ensure their homes are kept ready for them.
 
On our last visit there we found much harder to get into Kafr Qaddum. The remaining main road into it, the bus route, had just been blocked with a high rock and earth wall by the Israeli army. The villagers dug it away at night to let the buses through - but after our visit the army returned to make it impenitrable. It now takes the residents some 3 hours to get to Nablus, including the time needed to walk the fields past this blockage and pass through army checkpoints. It used to take 20 minutes.  Olive pickers from overseas who had been coming here for 3 years told me they had observed the situation for the Palestinians sadly deteriorating every year.
 
A few days after our visit, the army again temporarily evicted the settlers from the farmhouse. This time it was reported that 'right wing activists at Shvut Ami caused damage to two police cars.' The police arrested 32 of them - but apparently soon let them go. They reoccupied the farmhouse and pinted it pink - and up went the small orange flags marking the wire of the 'eruv' making it one with the nearby Jewish colony. The road passing by the farmhouse became littered with stones thrown at Palestinian cars by the squatters at the farmhouse, according to Zakaria Seda of nearby Jit. 'The settlers threw stones from five metres above the road' smashing car windows and causing injuries. They could tell the Palestinian cars because they have green number plates. Israeli cars have yellow plates and pass through checkpoints with scarcely any need to slow down. (as we found with our hired car.)
 
Then the mounting Palestinian fury and frustration took its toll.  A 29-year-old Israeli, Ido Zolden, was killed in a drive-by shooting. He had links with the seized farm and lived at Kedumim, building settlement homes 'throughout the West Bank' according to the New York Times.  He was shot on the Qalqilvah-Nablus main road between the seized farm and the Arab village of Funduk where our slashed tires were replaced. The Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a militia affiliated with the mainstream Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the attack. Apparently it had been the only such attack in this area in recent months.
 
In the UK, the lobbying group 'Labour Friends of Israel' reported this incident in its regular briefings to Prime Minister George Brown - but they did not say what happened next.   'Hundreds of settlers rampaged, smashed windows, demolished cars, destroyed a lot of property', according to Feras Beileh, the mayor of al-Funduk. Some 18 cars had their tires slashed. The townspeople reported that some 400 settlers were involved - and members of the army. Beileh added: "I understand very well why the settlers were angry at the killing of their fellow, but they know very well that his killer did not come from Funduk. [the police had already established this] They attacked and caused an enormous damage, just because we are Arabs who happen to live near the place where it happened.'
 
The owner of a local marble factory, Hani Salman, reported. 'Settlers broke in and started to smash marble slabs - the most expansive kind, imported from Italy, costing between 130 and 150 dollars apiece.' He watched while 'besieged in the factory office' and saw 'a settler girl, 17 or 18 years old, tried to push over a marble slab and smash it, but it was too heavy for her. Then soldiers smashed it for her.'
 
Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace organisation, investigated and reported:  'Throughout the pogrom, soldiers demanded of the villagers to remain in their homes and threatened to shoot anyone who would go out. The owner of a carpentry told: "We live above the workshop. The settlers broke into the lower floor and intended to set the woodpiles on fire. We might have all been burned. My wife was hysterical with panic... I was arrested and kept in detention for four days, just because I tried to protect my wife and children. Now my wife went back to her parents' home in another village, she is afraid to come home because she thinks the settlers might come again.'
 
But the most terrifying of the threats made that night was not reported until Gideon Levy, a writer for the Haaretz newspaper, spoke to Naama Masalha whose home in Funduk was 'stormed' by the settlers when she was at home with three young children.
 
While the settlers rampaged, she hid with her children in the bathroom. Her brother Mohammed managed to join her - and recorded on his phone what the settlers were shouting. Levy reported: 'Now he plays the recordings for us: "Erase this village - erase this house," one can hear a woman screaming in Hebrew, in a hoarse voice. And then one hears the sound of blows. The soldiers and policemen stood by and watched. The woman continues to scream on the recording: "People of Funduk, pay attention: You will suffer, this village is erased. In blood and in fire, this village will be erased. Come out, come out of your homes." The settlers had sticks and iron poles in their hands and were smashing windows - but none were arrested. On the contrary, Levy reported the settlers were protected and assisted by the army.
 
Two days later the police reported they had arrested the men suspected to be responsible for the shooting. They were Palestinian policemen resident at Kfar Kadum, a township of 4200 inhabitants, bigger than Kedumim, but with access only over hillside tracks. A hundred settlers set off on foot from Kedumim to carry out a similar revenge attack there - but what happened next seems to be unreported.
 
There has long been tension between these towns. Kedumim was illegally founded on the only paved road to Kfar Kadum and settler security guards have for years prevented traffic from passing through to this Palestinian town. After the killing the army imposed a total curfew over the local Palestinian towns and villages region - including Kafr Qaddum, so that no one could leave their homes for days.  The army also carried out town patrols every night during which they throw 'sound bombs' that woke up all the children, terrifying them. They also sealed more of the roads used by Palestinians - but not the track to the stolen farmhouse; now painted pink by the settlers.  
 
The al-Funduk Town Secretary, Jaber, declared: 'Collective punishment is not just. We have children, wives, infants, ill and elderly people. If they want to arrest someone, let them. To close off Al Funduk is to close off one-third of the West Bank. All the traffic between the north and the center of the West Bank passes along our road. It's the only road. We hear every day about the peace process, but on the ground we don't feel a thing. When I'm in my house and they come to demolish my home and my car, what should I do?'
 
Omar Shari, a local contractor whose tractors were badly damaged, added: 'The settlement of] Kedumim has been here for 20 years, and it wants to dominate the entire area. It's the army that allows the settlers to dominate.' About 500 people live in Al Funduq. It is a village that has not suffered any casualties and is almost without prisoners in Israeli jails. It is home mostly to stonemasons, grocers and garages that serve both the settlers and the Palestinians in the area. But Shari had a warning to give: 'There are no shaheeds [martyrs] in Al Funduk, but [after] what they're doing now to the children, in another 10-15 years, when they grow up - you'll be hearing what happens here.'
 
The main food store here, the one where we did our shopping while at Kofr Qaddum, has long stocked kosher food for the settlers who buy on credit - but after this rampage most of them are staying away. The shopkeeper, Sakr Bari, suspects that many of his Israeli customers had taken part in the rampage. A new road block has now been installed by the army - blocking traffic past the auto-repair shop in the neighbouring village of Jinsafut. No one in this village knows why they are being punished. It seems to have been picked out at random.
 
Everywhere I travelled around the West Bank, from Nablus in the north to Hebron in the south, from Jerusalem to Jericho, I heard much the same.  Israeli's army aggressively patrols every Palestinian town and village seemingly at least once a week - and everywhere the Israeli settlements were busily expanding and establishing new outposts on Palestinian agricultural lands.
 
They have now occupied strategically chosen areas through out the West Bank. Keddumim boasts of its own position on its website, saying its settlers have seized the tactical high ground overlooking routes from the Jordan towards Tel Aviv. In October this year the UN reported that over 38% of the West Bank is now occupied by Israeli settlements and by Israeli military areas. Since the West Bank and Gaza Strip only amount to 22% of the historical land of Palestine - it means that, in the current Two State negotiations, the Palestinians are expected to settle for just 13.2% of the land, despite having a population equivalent to Israel's, or greater.
 
All the Palestinians I met were adamant that they would not let Israel force them to emigrate. This is their answer to what Weiss and others in the settler movement are trying to achieve. They say Palestinians can either vow allegiance to a Jewish Israel or leave their homes and emigrate.
 
The 16-year-old Yedidya Slonim at the occupied farm told the New York Times that its Palestinian owners should move to Jordan or Egypt or some other Arab state. 'God gave this to us.' In saying this, he reflected the views of the Zionist Orthodox Jewish movement well established in Kedumim known as the 'Ne'emanei Eretz Yisreal' [The Land of Israel Faithful].
 
One of its leaders, Rabbi Uziyahu Sharbaf, stated recently: 'Neither the Torah, secular law nor morality can condone any past, present or future Israeli government conceding any part of Eretz Yisrael anywhere.' 'Precisely now is the time to establish new settlements and outposts throughout the Land, especially in Judea and Samaria, and concurrently to build thousands of homes in every existing settlement ...  We must feel once more that this is truly our land, and that other peoples are only here temporarily.'
 
His claims are based both on seeing the Bible as a title deed and the Palestinians as not of equal ancestry in these lands. But recent archaeological findings have seriously questioned this. The answer, if strict scholarship is the criteria, seems to be that both are partly descended from the ancient race of the Canaanites, just as both speak related Semitic languages.  
 
It is in other words, a family quarrel of very great and tragic proportions in which one partner occupies the other's home and then spends billions to suppress or prevent any ensuing protest or revolt.
 
But I reflected as I drove past the seemingly endless walls of the vast castle that Israel is creating in the West Bank that surely Israel was thus creating a most impractical gigantic folly that would prove impossible to maintain and garrison for decades - and might even eventually cripple it?
 
I also visited the large ever-expanding Israeli West Bank settlements of Ariel and Ma'ale Adumim  - and found they are made up of luxurious housing developments reserved nearly entirely for Jews only. Surely this in itself is a grave affront to the Muslim majority of the West Bank? Ariel, to add insult to injury, has now declared itself the capital of Samaria - despite it only being accessed on its hilltop by a road from which Palestinian vehicles are banned.
 
The West Bank is now riddled by such colonialist and exclusive housing schemes. I observed such housing developments, marked by their 'European' red tiled roofs, on hilltops throughout the West Bank, all laced together with expensive highways, all with privileged access to scarce water resources, and I have to ask: surely these expensive schemes have already totally undermine the feasibility of a Two State solution, leaving only one outcome possible - the one Israelis say they do not want - that of the One State Solution in which the great effort is put, not into building a wall, but into building a society in which both peoples can live together?
 
But I fear, the way to this now probably inevitable outcome, the Palestinians will have to continue for years to live in apartheid-like Bantustans, with over four million people subjected to cruel controls and millions more former residents with their keys and title deeds waiting in refugee camps.
 
Israel likes to pretend it is part of Europe, with its membership of European football and singing contests.  One day perhaps it will learn that if it wants to build a state of which it can truly feel proud, and all feel secure, it must be more like Europe in outlawing all forms of racial and religious favouritism. Currently it would not meet the legally required standards for E.U. membership

REPORT ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF HAR HOMA IN ANNEXED EAST JERUSALEM

By Middle East Peace Report- Vol. 9, Issue 14
In Americans For Peace Now
December 10, 2007

ADDING A WALL IN JERUSALEM: Israel issued a tender Tuesday for the construction of 307 new homes in Har Homa, an East Jerusalem neighborhood near Bethlehem. Har Homa, where about 4,000 Israelis now live, lies in territory that Israel de facto annexed in 1967 in an act that also expanded Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries.

See: http://www.arij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=175&Itemid=26&lang=en
 
In Israel, the construction announcement drew criticism. Peace Now issued a statement explaining that “Har Homa is not an integral part of urban structure of the city. It is an isolated quarter in the middle of Palestinian villages and is an obstacle to achieving a peace agreement on the issue of Jerusalem.”
 
The announcement of the tender drew international criticism as well. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a press conference on Friday that “we’re in a time when the goal is to build maximum confidence between the parties and this doesn’t help to build confidence… there just shouldn’t be anything that might try and judge final status, the outcomes of final status negotiations. It’s even more important now that we are really on the eve of the beginning of those negotiations.” Secretary Rice added, “I’ve made that position clear to the Israeli Government.”
 
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon characterized the move as “not helpful.” Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said that he was “astounded” by the report. Jordanian Minister for Information Nasser Judeh also criticized the construction.
 
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said plainly that construction at Har Homa “is undermining Annapolis.” He added that “Israel’s ever-expanding settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territory poses the single greatest threat to the establishment of an independent, viable and contiguous Palestinian state, and hence, to a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”
 
However, Israel contends that construction within East Jerusalem does not violate its commitments, including the Road Map’s call for a settlement freeze. “Israel makes a clear distinction between the West Bank and Jerusalem,” said Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. “Israel has never made a commitment to limit our sovereignty in Jerusalem. Implementation of the first phase of the Road Map does not apply to Jerusalem.”
 
Regev’s comments were backed by Vice Premier Haim Ramon, who told Israel Radio that “We must come today and say, friends, the Jewish neighborhoods [in Jerusalem], including Har Homa, will remain under Israeli sovereignty, and the Arab neighborhoods will be the Palestinian capital, which they will call Jerusalem or whatever they want." Ramon added that such a clear statement would prevent the current tension: “Then we won’t get embroiled, as is happening now, in an uncalled-for and badly timed debate with the United States, at a time when we need its support.”
 
Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar takes the long view in his analysis of this diplomatic crisis, recalling that this is the second crisis involving Har Homa: “Har Homa Crisis No. 1 also broke out a short while after an American attempt to revive the peace process. In February, 1997, a few weeks after it signed the Hebron agreement, the Netanyahu government decided to erect 6,500 housing units on the southern border of East Jerusalem, about one-third of them on private land owned by Palestinians. In the Palestinian Authority (and the Israeli peace camp) this plan was seen as another step in a scheme to cut off their capital from the West Bank. Yasser Arafat threatened to declare the establishment of an independent state and the Palestinian Legislative Council announced a general strike in the territories.”
 
Eldar recalls that this “crisis was the focus of Arafat’s visit to the White House the following month. Clinton asked the Palestinian leader to be sensitive to Netanyahu’s ‘coalition pressures.’ Arafat explained that he, too, had troubles at home and begged the president to at least demand that Israel delay the implementation of the decision to establish the neighborhood. The president sent envoy Dennis Ross to Netanyahu with a letter in which he demanded that the establishment of the neighborhood be postponed. On the other side were the settlers and the activists from the right. They were flanked by then-mayor Olmert… who declared that Har Homa was ‘the most substantive test of the government’s ability to withstand pressure and demonstrate leadership.’ Work at the site began four days later. The U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, called U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk at 5:30 A.M. and instructed him to go to Netanyahu with a firm message stating that the United States saw the establishment of the new neighborhood as ‘a step that undermines everything that we are trying to do.’ The ambassador made his protest, the Arabs demonstrated, the UN Security Council met, the United States cast a veto - and Har Homa was taken off the international agenda. Arafat licked another wound and Hamas threw more salt on it.”
 
Eldar identifies this failure as a turning point in the Oslo peace process and wonders if Prime Minister Olmert will learn from those events: “The new neighborhood - or, from one point of view, the ‘settlement’ - which arose on the southern hills of Jerusalem became a mark of Cain on the forehead of the Oslo camp in Ramallah… Netanyahu identified the weakness of the international community and continued to nurture the settlers. The response today of spokesmen for the Olmert government gives rise to the fear that the Annapolis conference did not change the situation on the Israeli side… We have already forgotten that the prime minister agreed that everything would be open to negotiation, including Jerusalem. Is this the way to build a wall to fortify the status of PA President Mahmoud Abbas? And what will ‘the world’ do - all those people who were in attendance at Annapolis - if Olmert decides to hide behind ‘pressures from the coalition’ and approves the new construction?” (AP, 12/5/07; Ha’aretz 12/6, 12/7, 12/9 & 12/10/07; State.gov, 12/7/07; AFP, 12/8/07)
 
MOUNDS OF PAPER: Israel’s Defense Ministry has done little to enforce the law against violations of Israeli building codes in settlements, carrying out only 3% of demolition orders, according to a report released Tuesday by Israel’s Peace Now movement. The report is based on data provided to Peace Now by the Civil Administration, an Israeli government agency.
 
The report found that from 1997 to March 2007, at least 3449 demolition orders were issued for structures in the settlements, yet only 107 of them were demolished by the Civil Administration. Another 171 were taken down by the offenders, but many of these were simply moved illegally to another site in the West Bank. Included in the 3,449 reports of unauthorized construction are 1,934 caravans, 606 permanent buildings, 325 building starts, 133 roads and 451 other structures, including nine cellular antennas.
 
While there has been a great deal of media attention to unauthorized construction in proto-settlements known as outposts, most of the offenses found in the Civil Administration’s data took place within established settlements. Peace Now added that the numbers made available by the Civil Administration likely understate the problem of illegal construction within settlements because of an IDF decision in 1998 that effectively suspended inspections within established settlements.
 
The Peace Now report did not surprise attorney Talia Sasson, who was charged by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to examine outpost construction in the West Bank. She warned in her March 2005 report that thousands of demolition orders had not been acted upon. “All this information was given to the government two-and-a-half years ago, and it is a shame that until today nothing has been done,” Sasson told the Jerusalem Post.

(PeaceNow.org.il, 12/4/07; Jerusalem Post, 12/4/07; Ha’aretz, 12/5/07)
 

Living in Hebron. Detail

Tamar Goldschmidt, Vivi Sury and Aya Kaniuk
Mahsanmilim
Feb 2007

How does one describe total gloom, absolute violence, a city disguised into oblivion, a dead stand-still, pathways no longer trodden, barred windows caged-in by Palestinians for their own protection. Palestinians that have become shadows of visibility for soldiers and their rifle-sights, Palestinians quick-pacing, head drawn in between their shoulders, making themselves non-existent, transparent.

Soldiers in concrete-slab posts at street junctions agenting authorized violence, and the colonists, swarming in and out of self-confident, malignant settlement.

Faces flattened by force that has spread like a scourge. Silence resonates in the empty streets, broken only by the hammering of soldiers` boots or colonists. You would never guess there are people here. No sounds emerge from inside the houses. They come out of back alleyways, climb roofs, forbidden to move in the light of day, in the streets, on the roads, incarcerated in their own homes, their mouths sewn shut, their voice molten, just like the locks sealing empty, closed shops that shriek what has been and is now no longer. Silence thunders. Cage-less window panes are now shattered in houses that now stand empty, having been trashed, looted by soldiers or colonists. Justice is silent. Gone. In the deadly silence a pulse arises ­ echoing the footsteps of those who see themselves as the master race, and their bodyguards.

Three of us ­ Tamar, Vivi and myself ­ were there, witnessed how a forty-year old man stood shackled, dazed, in one of the many soldier posts throughout Hebron, whose purpose is to secure colonists while harassing-abusing Palestinians, and preventing Palestinians residents them from going about their lives.

Why are you arresting him? Why don`t you listen to him? What has he done, after all? Approached the cemetery to collect his sheep ­ he lives nearby, that`s his home ­and the sheep got away, ate grass there. We shouted, pleaded. Maybe he`s a spy, gathering information, what do I know, the soldier shrugged.

Ask him. Talk to him. This is a grownup. A person. He has a family. His children are at your mercy. You ruin his life. You don`t know where you`re sending him. Take responsibility. Say what you suspect him of, why you`re arresting him, ask him what he did, talk to him. Find out.

Don`t bother me. I don`t want to. Why should I talk to him? He won`t tell me the truth, anyway. The soldier turned his back to us, walked away scolded, with his dangling rifle and stupid helmet-mounted torch.

A camera is mounted on a very tall post inside the Jewish cemetery, amidst Palestinian homes at the touchy zone between H1 and H2. It commands the entire area, looking into the yards of the Palestinian residents, into their windows. This camera has been installed by Baruch Marzel, one of the colonist leaders. For his own reasons. The camera spotted A. whose sheep had been grazing and entered the cemetery. He was detected entering to get them out.

It is no secret that Marzel regularly gives the army orders, and the troops arrive and obey. They don`t even need to see for themselves. Suffice it for them to hear Marzel. Suffice it for A. to be a non-Jew. So it seems.

So the soldiers indeed arrested A., the sheep were left to their own devices and got lost. A. was dragged to the army post, shackled, blindfolded with a greasy rag used to clean rifles, and taken out of sweaty fatigue pockets.Some time passed, during which he simply stood there, then they forcefully stuffed him into an army jeep, he got in, they followed, slammed the door shut and took off. Now ­ perhaps because we called the Center for the Protection of the Individual who intervened, perhaps because the soldiers were seen not by colonists, not by Palestinians, but this time by middle aged `Jewish women` (the adjective used metaphorically and synonymous to the local master race), perhaps because they no longer felt like it, that they sense there was no great sensation involved here, perhaps because they had other business at hand, and there will always be enough of this type of scapegoats for their youthful urges ­ perhaps because of any of the above, A. was held in custody for `only` five hours.

He could just as well have been held for weeks or months or years, accused of belonging to some hostile organization, or of attempting to injure soldiers, or not accused of anything and just stuck in administrative detention without any kind of due process ­ in order to force him to collaborate, or just because it`s possible.

A., seen doing exactly what he was doing ­ grazing his sheep and entering the cemetery to retrieve some of them that strayed ­ was arrested because he is a Palestinian. That is the reason he might not have been allowed to go home. The reason he could be beaten up, or disappear, or get killed. And for this reason, in spite of his serious misdeed as it were, he could be released five hours later with not a word of explanation or apology. The soldiers ­ if for the fun of it, or for obeying their orders ­ harass the Palestinians because they can, they`re permitted to do so, this is what they`ve been sent to do.

His sheep are gone, those sheep that he had not been able to purchase on his own, but were given to him by the International Red Cross as a possible source of livelihood. Their loss is a loss that has no criteria, and has no name.

After we shouted at the embarrassed soldier, he said ­ see you at the demonstration. As if telling us he was one of the good guys, shooting and weeping, weeping and shooting. That he wasn`t like that. You are like that, kiddo, you are like that through and through. As long as you are there, you are like that. Harassment is harassment is harassment. That` the way it is.