Nothing to Lose But your Life - Suad Amiry

An 18-hour journey with Murad  - Paperback       

Review by Abe Hayeem in Palestine News- Spring Edition 2011

The hazards for Palestinians from the Occupied Territories finding work in Israel are revealed in an illuminating and moving new book by Suad Amiry. In her remarkable earlier diary “Sharon and My Mother–in-Law”, she exposed the horrors of the Israeli invasion in Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 by evoking the personal daily lives of the beleaguered families and community in Ramallah, using a dark sense of irony and humour. Her talent is displayed yet again in this original and gripping narrative.

Israel’s total control of the West Bank and its natural resources has engineered the collapse of the Palestinian economy creating a 31% rate of unemployment. Palestinians have practically no choice but to seek work inside Israel or in building the illegal settlements.

Permits for work are scarce, with migratory workers from other countries (themselves brutally exploited) deliberately brought in to deny employment for Palestinians. In 2009 no more than 23,000 were given work permits, forcing nearly half of the 40,000 Palestinians entering Israel to work illegally. This leads to exploitation of these workers by many Israeli employers who often do not pay them, and then simply hand them over to the authorities if they complain. 15,000 illegal Palestinian workers are arrested annually, and in October 2010 alone, 500 were detained. The desperate search for work, in what should be short journeys can take whole days crossing into Israel. These men, fearing being unemployed more than anything else, say they are not “scared of jail or the oppression of the occupation”. In the ‘cat and mouse’ game escaping the soldiers guarding the borders along the Apartheid Wall, workers can be shot and killed.

It is this scenario that led to the title of this book and the author’s courageous decision to join a group of workers led by the intrepid Murad, a brother of one her staff members at RIWAQ*, in their quest for work across the encroaching barrier mapping out its own illegal boundary separating Israel from the occupied territories. The destination is Petach Tikvah, a major Israeli town north of Tel Aviv, (built on land controversially purchased in 1878 from the Palestinian village of Mlabbis), where Murad and his friends have worked for ‘sympathetic’ Israelis, and where Murad has also found a Jewish girlfriend he longs to see again.

What takes only 18 hours feels like a mini-odyssey. Amiry is disguised as one of the workers, travelling by taxi, bus, and then on foot, bravely scampering over the Palestinian landscape of red earth, olive trees and boulders, in the shadow of the settlements - often going round in circles, negotiating checkpoints, detritus and barriers, dodging the Israeli soldiers in their armoured cars. With a mischievous streak in often-hilarious vignettes, Amiry sympathetically describes the traditional domestic life of Murad’s family, the raw humorous banter;(“had I not decided I wasn’t a woman on this trip, I would have put an end to all their sexist remarks, but I must admit I was enjoying the Big Boys’ political analysis”) the camaraderie, the foibles, hopes and despair of the growing crowd of workers and characters from villages along the route towards and across the enclosing barrier.

The tragedy is that the apartheid separation of the two peoples is so unnecessary, as the Palestinians show an amazing ability to co-exist with the Israelis when allowed to, and feel a longing to move about freely amongst what was the land of their villages and towns, whose access is denied to them. But as Abu Yousef, one of the older workers, who spent twenty eight years in such searches for work through the night says “ No doctora, it is not this darkness that worried me, it is the darkness of their hearts...They have no mercy and they know no God. I spent my whole life working for them and now look at me; like a thief, I steal my own livelihood in the dark...”

When things get tough on this risky sojourn Amiry retreats into lyrical surrealist dream sequences involving zoo animals reacting to the Wall, the ghosts of the villages, and recreating the idyllic life in Mlabbis – with the Nakba still hauntingly pervading the landscape and lives of the Palestinians on both sides of the fence. This important and heart-wrenching book evokes the absurdity and nightmare of denial and dispossession of a people from their own land and is a spur to those who wish to help bring an end to this injustice.

* Su’ad Amiry is the director of RIWAQ, (at the time  of this review) the centre for architectural conservation in Ramallah. The new dirctor is Khaldun Bishara.

http://www.riwaq.org/2010/index.php

See also Suad Amiry at the TEDxRamallah conference held on 16 April 2011

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dSF7Da_GS0&feature=related

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r2DPCzgx68&feature=email

Atlas of the Conflict : Israel -Palestine by Malkit Shoshan

 

Atlas of the Conflict Israel-Palestine
		about 010 archive how to order shopping basket bookshops all titles Grootens books New Year's ideas forthcoming titles recent titles special offers last copies! architecture urbanism design art				Malkit Shoshan Designed by Joost Grootens English 480 pp / 195 x 115 mm / hardcover price € 34.50 ISBN 978 90 6450 688 8 published 2010, recent Share | buy! from the press back   Read more about this atlas: www.atlasoftheconflict.com Look inside this book: click here.   The Atlas of the Conflict maps the processes and mechanisms behind the shaping of Israel-Palestine over the past 100 years. Over 500 maps and diagrams provide a detailed territorial analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, explored through themes such as borders, settlements, land ownership, archaeological and cultural heritage sites, control of natural resources, landscaping, wars and treaties. A lexicon, drawing on many different information sources, provides a commentary on the conflict from various perspectives. As a whole, the book offers insights not only into the specific situation of Israel-Palestine, but also into the phenomenon of spatial planning used as a political instrument.   Made possible by the Netherlands Architecture Fund and the FBKVB

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Europe's alliance with Israel: aiding the occupation

Wednesday, 15 December 2010 09:00

Author: David Cronin
Paperback: 200 pages
Publisher: Pluto Press (2011)
ISBN-13: 978-0 7453 3065 5 (Paperback)

Reviewed by Dr Daud Abdullah

Western journalists often shy away from writing on Palestine. They believe that so much has already been written about the century-old conflict that it is hard to find a new twist to excite and grip their readers. David Cronin has managed to do just that in his fascinating book. He makes a watertight case to prove that Europe is, in many ways, complicit in Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

In private, commentators and politicians may admit this; but no European author has, before now, summoned the courage to make the case in public. When the American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published their book The Israeli lobby and US Foreign Policy in 2007, it seemed that the taboo was broken; it could be only a matter of time before someone in Europe undertook a similar task, and Cronin is that someone. His book is of this genre and must, therefore, be seen as a ground-breaking publication.

The work embodies a wealth of carefully researched and documented information. The author made extensive use of official contacts and reports emanating from Brussels, the seat of the European Union. In a lucid and attractive manner he has subjected EU statements and policies to rigorous interrogation, and has exposed the often yawning gap between what is said and what is (actually hardly ever) done. The book is scathing in its criticism of European officialdom, which Cronin describes as "lily-livered" [133].

In order to explain the thinking processes in Brussels, the author recalls a statement by Javier Solana made at a conference in October 2009, shortly before he stepped down as the EU's foreign policy chief: "There is no country outside the European continent that has this type of relationship that Israel has with the European Union." Solana added, "Israel, allow me to say, is a member of the European Union without being a member of the institutions. It's a member of all the [EU's] programmes; it participates in all the programmes." [2]

Cronin marshals an array of anecdotal evidence to verify Solana's claim. Other European officials and leaders have made no less sycophantic remarks. He explains that the almost servile attitude of European countries towards the US explains, in part, their legendary blind support for Israel. A Czech diplomat told the author, "It is a case of a friend of our friend has to be our friend too." [49] Such admissions are commonplace with the Czechs, notwithstanding the decisive military support given by Czechoslovakia to the Zionist militias during the 1948 war.

Spouting verbal criticism of Israel is one thing, but taking a principled stand against its aggression, independent of Washington, is quite another. The EU has been outstandingly incapable of doing this on the world stage.

There are several contractual reasons for this. For example, the EU Lisbon Treaty stresses that while EU countries have their own military capabilities, they are ultimately subservient to NATO which provides "collective defence". Given America's de facto role as commander in chief of NATO, and Israel's relentless efforts to become integrated into the alliance, it is self-explanatory why the Europeans have been unable to challenge Israel. The American head of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Brussels, Ronald Asmus, supports the status quo because of what he calls, "Israeli exceptionalism". [55]

Speaking of exceptionalism, Cronin highlights the policy of Britain's Tony Blair in the Balkans and his military intervention there. The former Prime Minister justified the use of military force against Serbia because Britain "could not allow in the case of Kosovo ethnic cleansing and genocide to happen right at the doorstep of Europe and do nothing about it." [45] But, for reasons best known to himself, Blair has allowed Israel to get away with flagrant crimes, including ethnic cleansing and genocidal acts, in occupied Palestine.

Another notable case in point is Jack Straw, who succeeded Robin Cook as Britain's Foreign Secretary after the latter had initiated to great fanfare what he termed a new era of "ethical foreign policy" in 1997. The following year, Cook incurred the wrath of Zionist settlers after he decided to listen to aggrieved Palestinians affected by the illegal Israeli settlement in Jabal Abu Ghuneim. Once comfortably ensconced in office, Straw saw fit to oppose a UN recommendation to refer the issue of the Israeli Wall to the International Court of Justice, on the grounds that it would embroil the body in "a heavily political bilateral dispute". [44]

Cronin is under no illusion about the nature and consequences of Israel's occupation of Palestinian land. He refers to the origins of the term "genocide", which was coined by a Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who survived the Nazi holocaust. Lemkin said genocide was not simply the immediate destruction of a nation but also included a coordinated plan of action aimed at destroying the foundation of the life of a national group. Lemkin's opinion was later incorporated in the definition of genocide by the UN in 1948 in its Genocide Convention. Cronin berates the Europeans for being quick to urge African states to respect the Convention and to punish any crime of genocide "whether committed in time of peace or in time of war". [29] And yet, when it comes to Israel, European politicians recoil and display an appalling reluctance to uphold the law. Cronin says that Israel may be all things – democratic, industrialised and modern   but it is, nevertheless, engaged in crimes "that fulfil the text book definition of genocide". [33]

Chapter three gives the book its subtitle – "aiding the occupation". Here, Cronin cites the case of the Rafah border control which was "subcontracted" to the Europeans when Israel abandoned and destroyed its settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2005. "Each morning," he notes, "the EU personnel had to report to the Israeli security forces at Karem Shalom [Karim Abu Salam]", another border post located a few kilometres south of Rafah. [69]

When challenged on their policy on Palestine, Europeans leaders are quick to point out that they are the largest donors of aid to the Palestinians. This is true and, as the book confirms, the Palestinians have received proportionately more foreign aid than any other people in the world since the Second World War. But the Palestinian problem is not economic or humanitarian; it is a national issue and, as the former head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), David Shearer, pointed out, "pouring an immense amount of aid into a conflict without either the structure of a peace agreement or a solid analysis of its impact is comparable to speeding along a road at night without headlights". [75]

What is often omitted from the official disclosures concerning aid is the fact that according to UN estimates, 45% of all foreign aid to the Palestinians finds its way back into the Israeli economy. Israel has used the levers of fiscal control, trade regimes and labour mobility to ensure this. The case of the Israeli firm Dor Alon is especially poignant. It has a network of petrol stations and convenience stores in the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Yet, it was given €97 million by the European Commission to supply industrial diesel for energy generation in the Gaza Strip. The company, however, works in tandem with the Israeli government to deny supplies to the population under siege in that beleaguered territory. International law has thus been sacrificed to maintain the instruments of a failed peace process.

Another disturbing feature of the European-Israeli alliance which the book addresses adeptly is the transfer of scientific technology and military cooperation. Israel enjoys closer ties to the European Union than even those countries which are poised for membership. It is the main external participant in the Union's "framework programme" for scientific research and Israeli arms companies are eligible for EU funding. Prominent among the main beneficiaries of these grants is Motorola Israel, which participates in an EU financed surveillance project, known as iDetect4All. Motorola has installed a radar system in 47 Israeli settlements in the West Bank over the past five years.

During the last Labour government's first decade in office (1997-2007), British companies exported more than £110 million in military hardware to Israel. Cronin asserts that not only did the flow continue under Blair, but it actually intensified during critical periods, such as during the war against Lebanon in 2006 when Britain allowed US planes transhipping weapons to Israel to refuel on British soil.

Despite the overwhelming mass of evidence, European officials are nowhere near to admitting that they have been facilitating the development of Israeli technology for the abuse of human rights. The most one official was prepared to concede was that they are "complicit with Israel settlements". [100] That in itself is a crime under humanitarian law.

Does the European Union have the means to put pressure on Israel? This book asserts that it does. It notes that two-thirds of all Israeli exports are to the European Union and if the political will existed the EU could use trade sanctions or the threat thereof to pressure the Israelis. Instead, EU officials pass the buck on to consumers; the British government, for example, says that Israeli goods should be labelled so the consumers can make informed choices about what they buy. Cronin says this form of tokenism should not be taken seriously as Israel's denial of Palestinian rights should not be reduced to an issue of consumer choice. "Nobody should have to make a choice about whether or not to support an illegal activity when shopping for groceries." [135]

Europe's alliance with Israel is an indictment of policies which are not simply flawed but duplicitous. All over the continent ministers criticise Israeli settlements from one side of their mouths and woo Israeli companies from the other. Cronin sums up his case in one sentence: "Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is cruel, vindictive and illegal."

Clearly, we are where we are today because of the support Israel receives from the international community. The Europeans are in a unique position to put an end to this epic of human suffering, if only they could muster the moral courage, in spite of American pressure. It can be done by limiting Israel's access to European markets. In the absence of such measures, Cronin believes that the only way forward is to intensify the international campaign.

This book is compelling, illuminative and painful. It is an indispensible pioneering work essential for students, tax-payers, policy- and decision-makers and, most of all, those who aspire to rid our world of the last vestiges of colonial domination and states built on supposed racial superiority.



Eyal Weizman on writing 'Hollow Land'

by Eyal Weizman

In the two years since the book was first published in English and the three years since it was written much has taken place. If you have taken this book into your hands you must surely know the order of events: Hamas winning the Palestinian elections at the beginning of 2006, the War in Lebanon half a year later in the summer of 2006, Hamas taking power in Gaza in the summer of 2007, the War on Gaza in 2008/2009.

On the other hand a less spectacular but not less significant process has continued: the Jewish settlements sprawled on, growing in both number and population count, the construction site of the Wall snaked on, almost complete, strangling Palestinian communities like a closing trap. New military checkpoints and outposts have been built, separating cities and villages, the people of Palestine from access to and even vision of their landscape. Almost nothing recognizable is left of the Palestine into which a 42-year-old Palestinian was born. Here the landscape and the built environment are not a panoramic allegory for power relations. This landscape does not only signify or aestheticize power relations, but is the medium of a constituted power. This landscape is not just the site of war, but its very tools.

It is the relation between these two types of transformation – the mediatized punctuating event of spectacular violence – bombing, assassinations, rocket fire, bulldozers (that for most people seem to have appeared from nowhere) – and the more processual and slower events – building, paving, tunneling – not less violent and destructive, that the book seeks to uncover. The crimes of landscape are less obvious and harder to measure. They require a different order of forensic investigation. But the two types of violence are related and they surely interact.

The spatial conflict over Palestine has re-articulated a certain principle: to be governed the territory must be constantly redesigned. This goes beyond a search for a stable and permanent “governable” colonial form, but rather points to the fact that it is through the constant transformation of space that this process of colonization has played out. Unpredictability and the appearance of anarchy are part of this violent logic of disorder. Violence is a kind of performance that does not take place within the fixed grids of space but actually reshapes it.

The nature of the transformation of the built environment includes the complementary acts of strategic form making: construction and destruction. For example, the recent, massive destruction of homes in Gaza could be understood as the reshaping of the built environment. It was indicative that Israeli politicians were speaking about the how of “reconstruction” in Gaza while ordering the murderous bombing to continue on the people least protected in this world. The furious violence of Israel’s attack left 1,400 people dead and 20,000 buildings, about 15% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip, either fully or partially destroyed.

Destruction, so the Israeli government imagined, is to be followed by development attempts that combine welfare and architecture to replace the refugee camp with “housing projects.” One of the aims is to break the historical, spatial and social continuity of the refugee camp and with it the collective political identity of the refugee, which is seen as the biggest threat to the current political order.

If, as the last example demonstrates, politics is registered in the contours of spaces, than formal and topological analysis, such as the one undertaken in this book, are important components to help comprehend political and military processes otherwise hidden because of their slower temporalities. I think of this book as a forensic investigation, but not in the sense that fatalistic terms such as “urbicide” imply - it’s not an autopsy of a dead body – its subject is still very much alive and twisting under enormous pain.

It would be too easy to say that the events that have taken place since the book was written have validated its analysis, but I would like to think that the history of the occupation – told from the point of view of space – holds the key to understanding the complexities of our present but also the possible contours, as blurred as they may be, of a future. In the description of the crimes performed on the environment – the very milieu of physical and cultural life – there is also a disguised love – a love not directed at a state but at a country and its peoples, and even a shameless modicum of unextinguished hope, a hope that the power and beauty of the land would be strong enough to resist the ongoing attempts at its partition and that politics would gradually grow to accept the fundamentals of sharing and equality between two people on a single land.

Eyal Weizman is an architect and director of the Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2007 he is a member of the architectural collective “decolonizing architecture” in Beit Sahour/Palestine. His books include The Lesser Evil [Nottetempo, 2009], Hollow Land [Verso Books, 2007], and A Civilian Occupation [Verso Books, 2003].

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Facts on the Ground - Nadia Abu El-Haj

Archaeological Practice and Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society

Published 2001  Chicago University Press

REVIEW – 10 June 2009 -  Palestine News -Summer 2009

Abe Hayeem

This fascinating book is like an archaeological exploration itself, impeccably researched with quiet forensic rigour that has divided critics. While winning academic awards, it was nevertheless condemned by pro-Israel detractors, the notorious Campus Watch, in 2007, who tried (unsuccessfully) to have the writer’s academic tenure at Columbia terminated.

Edward Said, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University until his death in September 2003, wrote of being "indebted" to the book and work of Abu El Haj, in Freud and the Non-European (2003):

"What she provides first of all is a history of systematic colonial archaeological exploration in Palestine, dating back to British work in the mid-nineteenth century. She then continues the story in the period before Israel is established, connecting the actual practice of archaeology with a nascent national ideology - an ideology with plans for the repossession of the land through renaming and resettling, much of it given archeological justification as a schematic extraction of Jewish identity despite the existence of Arab names and traces of other civilizations. This effort, she argues convincingly, epistemologically prepares the way for a fully fledged post-1948 sense of Israeli-Jewish identity based on assembling discrete archaeological particulars -scattered remnants of masonry, tablets, bones, tombs..."

Nadia Abu El- Haj analyses the practice of archaeology as a field science and it’s political use and manipulation by archaeologists, in particular Christian archaeologists in Palestine upto 1948, and thereafter in Israel, and in Occupied Jerusalem and the West Bank after 1967. It is an investigation into the methodology used by Israeli archaeologists, and the nature of territorial self-fashioning in Israeli society and identity politics of what she interprets as the ‘colonial –national’ ideology of Zionism. Archaeology has been central to the formation of Israeli identity since the establishment of the state. It has been used to ‘prove’ Jewish continuity and ownership of Palestine since biblical times, “despite the existence of Arab names and traces of other civilizations”, and to justify extending Israel’s sovereignty and occupation, as the pretext for an Israeli return to their sacred land. The existing terra firma of Palestine contained ‘the historic biblical landscapes, battlegrounds, Israelite settlements and sites of worship’  that could be revealed by “digging the soil with our own hands”, as described by Ben Gurion.

The author describes the use of bulldozers in a dig at Jezreel, to get through the strata containing 5,000 years of past histories and all the intervening debris until the deeper levels of the Bronze Age/Canaanite and Iron Age/Israelite are reached – the ones Israeli archaeologists are interested in – which cover the period of the Bible. Immediately after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, bulldozers were also used to demolish the 400-year-old Mughrabi Quarter which contained important Islamic buildings, to clear the space in front of the Western Wall. While generally, the upper layers of Muslim and Ottoman periods were marginalised in digs and museums exhibiting the finds, in excavations around the city wall, an Umayyad Palace complex was retained, as part of monumental history, at the expense of smaller remains.

Anyone visiting the Old City should read Nadia’s book beforehand, to gain a detailed insight into the annexation of the whole of East Jerusalem in June 1967. The entire Old City was declared a site of Antiquity, and all the archives and collections of the Rockefeller Museum (including the Dead Sea Scrolls), and other institutions particularly of Jewish and Israelite relevance, were declared to be the state’s ‘national and cultural’ property, contravening UNESCO’s Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954). This ‘ownership’ is still emphasised today by Israel’s ‘new’ PM Netanyahu who has declared: “United Jerusalem is Israel's capital. Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours”

The whole area around the old Jewish Quarter was subject to a comprehensive archaeological excavation, before it was expanded to 5 times its original size, with the old Roman Cardo excavated, and reconstruction “fashioned over ruins incorporated into the new structures, so as to appropriate previous historical narratives into the expansion of the Jewish nation State. Past histories – Crusader, Ottoman, Arab are subsumed and de-nationalised or stripped of their significance”. The museums – Burnt House and the Western Heritage Tunnel – the opening up of it by Netanyahu in 1996 under prompting by the Religious Affairs Ministry causing riots – reconstruct only the Herodian history relevant to the original Jewish aspect of the Temple, establishing a ‘priority of right’.

Most controversially, excavations have been allowed to be taken under control by the ultra religious authorities and organisations like Ateret Hacohanim in the Western Heritage Tunnel, and the radical settler movements like Elad in Silwan creating the integration of the sacred, colonial, and national aspects where the tunnels become places of prayer, the Bible becomes history, and the cultural politics of a supposedly modern secular nation are reconfigured. This is now being questioned by professional archaeologists themselves, worried at the dangerous concoction of its use as part of the colonial expansion in the Old City and the ‘Holy Basin”.where religious Elad settlers have taken over all the open spaces, using armed guards backed by the Israeli soldiers, and is tunnelling under houses without concern for the Silwan residents, to try and find evidence, so far lacking, of the biblical City of David, which some Israeli archaeologists doubt actually existed.

The whole irony, in the spirit of El_Haj’s exposition, was commented on by Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, “Archaeology provided not only a pretext for an Israeli return to occupy Palestinian land, but also the ‘footprint’ of historical authenticity that could be developed into built form by Israeli architects. Biblical archaeology was used to validate the claim that vernacular architecture was in fact “Jewish’ at source and allowed ‘Israeliness’ to define itself as a local ‘native culture’ appropriated and altered by the latecomer Palestinians.”

Dr.Nadia Abu El-Haj is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University, NY.

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