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.

Charles Jencks speaks at the Venice Biennale September 2006

This is Rowan Moore and I am with Charles Jencks for the Venice superblog.   Charles we are going to talk about the Israeli pavilion, which I think has provoked people more than many of the exhibits in this Biennale.  Could you firstly explain to me why?

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Settlements Built on Private Palestinian Land

The figures published yesterday by Peace Now's Settlement Watch team on the ownership of land on which the settlements sit presents a scary picture of the State of Israel's behavior in the territories. Approximately 40 percent of the area of settlements is privately-owned Palestinian land, according to the Civil Administration. Put simply, for dozens of years, Israel continued to expand and entrench the settlement enterprise by dispossessing Palestinian residents of their lands, whose private ownership even the State of Israel does not dispute. All of this is in contrast to the frequently voiced argument of official government spokesmen and settlers that "the settlements sit on state lands."

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Little left to save in Jerusalem

Approval of Moshe Safdie's plan for expanding Jerusalem westward has been deferred once more, making it the latest - but not the last - postponement of various unimplemented expansion plans during the course of more than 15 years. From the beginning, this unnecessary plan, drawn up according to conditions and conceptions that prevailed nearly 20 years ago, was based on a statistical fiction wrapped in counterfeit patriotism. It is nothing more than a cynical attempt to exploit the lofty name of the holy city to create construction lots for the nonexistent housing needs of imaginary Jews, to "balance" the "demographic threat" of the Arabs, on paper at least.

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