Jewish Voice for Peace says: “On April 22, Bob Simon and the US news show 60 Minutes shared the painful truth with 13 million viewers — the primary cause for the exodus of Palestinian Christians from the Holy Land is the nearly 45 year-old illegal Israeli occupation. Now 60 Minutes is being attacked for telling the truth. A range of Israel-first partisan groups have gone on the attack against CBS, and they have received over 29,000 emails of complaint. If 60 Minutes backs down, then other media outlets will do the same.”

Click here to sign JVP’s petition which has already gathered over 5,000 signatures in a couple of hours. (JVP is a national grassroots organization dedicated to promoting equality, democracy and self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians.)

Churches for Middle East Peace also have a petition for the same purpose. (CMEP is a coalition of 24 national Church denominations and organizations in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions.)

And if you missed Bob Simon’s report, here it is:

Considering that this is a story that the Israeli government tried to suppress, it could have been more hard-hitting. In the end, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren made himself the highlight of the piece by parading the rampant paranoia and defensiveness that has come to shape all of Israel’s actions in the international arena.

As for how much influence this report will have on the perceptions of those American Christians who need enlightening about the effects of the Israeli occupation, I fear that their judgements will be more strongly colored by the fact that the Christians interviewed here are also Palestinians than by the fact that they belong to the same faith. In other words, for those for whom there is little distinction between being Christian and being American, it ain’t of no concern what folks say elsewhere, even in the Holy Land.

Human Rights Watch: The farmers of the West Bank village of Beit Surik used to make their living selling oil from their olive trees. Now, says Abu Rami, the head of the village farmers’ association, they cannot produce enough olive oil for their own families. The problem is the system Israel has set up for getting access to their land in the West Bank is on the other side of Israel’s separation barrier. In effect, Israel treats all Palestinians living in or seeking to reach their own lands on the Israeli side of the barrier as though they were security threats.

Israel began building its separation barrier – in some places a fence, in others an eight metre-high concrete wall with guard towers – in 2002, for the stated purpose of preventing Palestinian suicide bombers from attacking Israeli civilians. The International Court of Justice ruled, in 2004, that the barrier route violates international law where it veers into the occupied Palestinian territories. Today, 85 per cent of the barrier’s route lies inside the West Bank, cutting tens of thousands of Palestinians off from lands they own or previously farmed without restriction.

Israel argues that it has opened gates in the barrier to allow West Bank Palestinians to reach their lands. But the daily reality belies this claim. By preventing these Palestinian farmers from reaching their land for most of the year, Israel is reducing many of them to poverty. To pass through the gates, Palestinians must “coordinate” – the Israeli term for getting advance permission from the military. The Palestinians must also obtain special military permits to reach the more than 18,400 hectares on the other side that Israel has designated “seam zones”: areas that are closed military zones to Palestinians, though not to Israelis.

In a confidential report from July 2011, which was later leaked; European Union heads of mission dealing with Palestinian issues recommended that the EU should “encourage Israel to open the gates to the seam zone on a more regular basis without prior coordination”. One affected area is known as the Biddu enclave. It consists of eight villages with 30,000 residents surrounded by the barrier on three sides. The barrier has cut off a group of Palestinian farmers there from 50 per cent of their farmlands and 70 per cent of their grazing lands.

In response to petitions to Israel’s High Court of Justice, the military built five gates for Palestinian farmers in the barrier around the enclave. All five gates require advance “coordination”. And one is also a seam zone gate, meaning Palestinians need special permits to use it. The result has been that farmers from the enclave were unable to reach their farmlands for 268 days in 2009, 282 days in 2010, 328 days in 2011 and 84 days in 2012 – as of April 3, according to UN monitors. On the limited days that Israel grants access, it does so without adequately considering the seasonal variations in farming and harvesting. A farmer from the village of Biddu, Faruq Radad, says that he owns two hectares of grape vines beyond the barrier – but that for the past two years, the days that Israel allowed access did not correspond to the grape harvest season. His grapes rotted on the vine.

Israel’s High Court has rejected arguments that security needs could be met with a less restrictive system, such as soldiers checking farmers for weapons before allowing them to cross the barrier. But Israel imposes a much less restrictive system on Palestinians working in Israeli settlements. For example, about 150 Palestinians from one of the villages in the Biddu enclave work in the settlement of Har Adar – according to the Beit Iksa village council. Their settler employers collect their identification documents and give them to the Israeli military for security checks. The Palestinians receive permits that are typically valid for three months, generally renewed, and they can cross through a gate in the separation barrier six days a week. It appears that Israel is willing to adopt a more discerning security system when the issue is the convenience of settlers, but not when it concerns Palestinian farmers trying to make a living on their own land.

The Israeli military now allows only 15 farmers from Beit Iksa to pass through the same gate, and has only opened that gate to them on 10 days so far in 2012 – according to United Nations monitors. In November 2010, the military granted permits to 70 farmers – which were valid for three weeks. Months later, in March 2011, the military renewed only 15 of the 70 – for bureaucratic rather than specific security reasons. It has been 10 years since Israel began constructing its separation barrier. Without meaningful pressure on Israel to change its barrier policies, Palestinian farmers are likely to suffer continued rights violations. The EU could best help Biddu’s farmers avoid being forced into poverty by vigorously advocating for Israel to allow them to work their land.

It might be the biggest, most expensive and most influential construction project in Israel’s history. To mark the 10th anniversary of its inception, +972 will be publishing in coming days a series of stories about the separation wall and its history, arguments in favor and against its construction, its effects and side effects and an analysis of its possible implications on regional politics in years to come. Chapter one – the Israeli story of the wall.

Haggai Matar writes: Looking at it from here, for just one minute, the whole project of the wall appears to be nothing more than an absurdity. I’m standing at the furthest, deepest part of this massive barrier, in the settlement of Ariel. Located about 20 kilometers east of the green line, less than thirty to the Jordan River, it is the very heart of the West Bank. In front of me I see some olive groves, behind them – the “separation fence” with its electric detection, cameras and barbed wire, and on the other side is the Palestinian village of Marda, the residents of which own these trees. So far, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before.

However, a short walk to either direction leads to an abrupt end to the fence. In one direction it reaches a nearby road, and simply doesn’t continue on the other side, as it does elsewhere. Instead, there is a small area near the road with turned earth, suggesting that construction was planned here but was stopped. Oren, the photographer, tells me he was at a demonstration here against the planned route of the fence five years ago, and that nothing has changed on the terrain since. He takes some pictures, and I think of several other places along the route where the fence or wall simply comes to an end, enabling dozens, hundreds or thousands of Palestinians to cross it on a daily basis. Some are caught by patrols. Others aren’t. Looking at it from here, for just one minute, the whole project of the wall appears to be nothing more than an absurdity.

On April 14, 2002 then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that a separation fence would be built in the West Bank (a matter of terminology: The barrier is part fence, part wall. I will be using the two terms interchangeably). It was the height of the second intifada, which started with mass demonstrations that were murderously repressed by the IDF, and continued with a series of deadly suicide attacks against citizens inside Israel. After the 2002 attack on a Passover dinner in a Netanya hotel, Israel launched operation Defensive Shield, during which some 500 Palestinians were killed, and mass destruction caused to houses and infrastructure across the West Bank. At that point, no planned route or budget existed for Sharon’s fence, announced during the operation. But the project, which was to become probably the largest in Israeli history, was born.

Ten years have passed, and much has changed. The route of the wall was drawn, altered and changed time and time again by both the government and the Supreme Court. Construction went ahead, come to a halt, was restarted and frozen once more – due to political debates on its route, international pressure regarding the annexation of Palestinian lands and lack of funds. Here are a few figures to help get an idea what this project is all about:

The entire route of the wall – between 680-709 kilometers (the first is a Ministry of Defense figure, the second B’Tselem’s). This is more than twice the length of the Green Line, Israel’s recognized border with the West Bank (320 kms).

• Portions already built- 525 kms
• Portions inside Palestinian territory – 85 percent
• Palestinian lands currently on the Israeli side of the wall – 8.5 percent
• Palestinian lands in on the Israeli side in earlier plans – 17 percent
• 8-meter-high concrete wall comprises 10 percent of the barrier
• 2-meter-high electronic fence – 90 percent
• Total cost so far – over NIS 10 billion ($2.6 billion)
• Cost of maintenance per year – NIS 1 billion ($260 million)
• Scheduled end of construction – unknown. Most construction has been stopped.

[Continue reading…]

AFP reports: Israel’s construction and housing ministry on Wednesday published tenders for 1,121 settler homes, most of them them in annexed east Jerusalem, with others in the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

Of that number, 872 are to be built in Har Homa, a contentious settlement neighbourhood in the southern part of Arab east Jerusalem, according to documents published on the ministry website.

Another 180 are to be built in Givat Zeev, just to the north of Jerusalem, while the remaining 69 are to be built in Katzrin in the occupied Golan Heights, the documents showed.

Contacted by AFP, a ministry spokesman dismissed the tenders as “nothing new,” but settlement activists said it was the first time the offers had been made public.

Jeff Halper writes: Driving Palestinians out of their homes in “east” Jerusalem is, as you can imagine, a dirty business. But its not terribly difficult. The Palestinians are a vulnerable population, poor (70% subsist on less than $2 a day), completely unprotected by the law or Israeli courts, and targeted by determined Jewish settlers with all the money and political backing in the world – much of its coming, of course, from the US, mainly from orthodox Jews and Christian Zionists.
police

Over the past few days settlers led by Arieh King have been harassing Palestinian residents of Beit Hanina where, according to King, settlers will “very soon” take over four houses, plus an additional two houses in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where violent nighttime evictions aided by the Israeli police have become commonplace. The immediate target of window-breaking, curses, violent encounters and now a police search of the home “for weapons” is the Natche family of Beit Hanina.

King is the front-man for Irving Moskowitz, a wealthy owner of bingo casinos in Hawaiian Gardens, a poor Latino community near Los Angeles, who is bankrolling some 17 settlements around East Jerusalem to “buffer” the Old City and “Judaize” East Jerusalem (see the StopMoskowitz website.) A friend and benefactor of Netanyahu, Moskovitch was behind the opening of the tunnels under the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem in 1996 that resulted in the deaths of 80 Palestinian protesters.

The Moskowitz/King strategy is to establish settlements in the heart of Palestinian neighborhoods, often in houses acquired by dubious and violent means. Among the settlements established or on the way are the City of David (Silwan), just below the al-Aqsa mosque; Ma’ale Zeitim and Ma’ale David in the Ras-el-Amud quarter on the southern side of the Mount of Olives; Beit Hoshen on the Mount of Olives, where several Palestinian families were violently evicted from their homes and which flies an enormous Israeli flag; Beit Orot, on the northern part of the Mount of Olives, where last year Mike Huckabee laid the foundations for an expanded settlement; the Shepherds Hotel and Sheikh Jarrah, now renamed Shimon Hatzadik; a plot in the village of Anata to the east of the Hebrew university; and now the homes in Beit Hanina. [Continue reading…]

Akiva Eldar reports: For years Israel’s Civil Administration has been covertly locating and mapping available land in the West Bank and naming the parcels after existing Jewish settlements, presumably with an eye toward expanding these communities.

The Civil Administration, part of the Defense Ministry, released its maps only in response to a request from anti-settlement activist Dror Etkes under the Freedom of Information Law.

In some places the boundaries of the parcels outlined in the maps coincide with the route of the West Bank separation barrier.

The state has argued before the Supreme Court and the International Court of Justice in The Hague that the route of the separation barrier was based on Israel’s security needs. But Civil Administration’s maps and figures, disclosed here for the first time, suggest the barrier route was planned in accordance with the available land in the West Bank, intended to increase the area and population of the settlements.

A total of 569 parcels of land were marked out, encompassing around 620,000 dunams ‏(around 155,000 acres‏) − about 10 percent of the total area of the West Bank. Since the late 1990s, 23 of the unauthorized outposts were built on land included in the map. The Civil Administration is endeavoring to legalize some of these outposts, including Shvut Rahel, Rehelim and Hayovel.

Etkes believes this indicates the settlers who built the outposts had access to the administration’s research on available land − more proof of the government’s deep involvement in the systematic violation of the law in order to expand settlements, he says.

The maps name numerous communities that do not exist. These include Shlomzion, on land belonging to the Palestinian town of Aqraba, east of Nablus; Lev Hashomron, on the land of Kafr Haja, between Nablus and Qalqilyah; Mevo Adumim, on the lands of al-Azariya and Abu Dis; and Mitzpeh Zanoah and Mitzpeh Lahav, in south Mount Hebron.

The names of several sites suggest they are earmarked for the expansion of existing settlements, although some of the parcels are several kilometers distant from their namesakes. These include Immanuel Mizrah, Elkana Bet, Beit Aryeh Gimmel and Tekoa Sheet’hei Mir’ey, among others.

The maps also mark 81 sites on 114,000 dunams in areas A and B, which are under Palestinian civil control, indicating the Civil Administration began identifying available land before the Oslo Accords. But these parcels have not been updated in several years because Israel cannot build settlements on them.

All the other areas − 506,000 dunams in Area C, have been updated in the past decade. This implies the administration earmarked the sites as reserves for future use, says Etkes.

More than 90 percent of this land is east of the separation barrier, beyond the main settlement blocs.

“This means the administration currently updates the ‘land bank,’ flouting the peace process, which is based on the two-state principle,” Etkes said.

Most of the marked areas − 485,000 dunams in area C − are classified as state lands. About 7,600 dunams are classified as “Jewish land” from before 1948, and 12,800 dunams are unclassified. way. Presumably the administration sees them as state lands, says Etkes.

Under international pressure Israel has drastically reduced new claims of land for the state. In a letter to Nir Shalev of Bimkom − Planners for Planning Rights, the Civil Administration said that in 2003-09 a total of 5,000 dunams were declared state lands, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of dunams in previous decades.

Some 375,000 dunams in Area C are not included in the jurisdiction of the settlements, which take up some 9.5 percent of the West Bank.

A 2007 Peace Now report indicated that only nine percent of the land in the settlements’ jurisdiction were in use. The administration’s map reveals the existence of another land reserve. Although only a small part has been officially allocated to the settlements, it is being constantly updated by the administration.

The Civil Administration said in a response that the maps are a data bank that is updated from time to time and does not indicate plans to expand settlements, which is a complex procedure requiring discussions and permits.

Noam Sheizaf points out that Israelis are not divided between those who support the two-state solution versus those who favor annexing the West Bank. What most Israelis prefer rather than any of the alternatives is the status quo — a situation in which Palestinians are deprived of human rights.

For some reason, people find it hard to accept that the current situation is desirable for Israelis. It certainly isn’t optimal, but considering the alternatives, it is probably the best.

It’s enough to come on a week’s visit to Israel to understand the appeal of the status quo. Despite occasional outbreaks of violence in the south and north, Israelis enjoy stability, prosperity and a general sense of security. According to the theory of “convincing Israelis to abandon the West Bank,” this was supposed to be the right moment for concessions, but the exact opposite is true: When things are going so well, it would be totally irrational to move in any other direction, either by annexing the West Bank or by leaving it.

Israelis understand that instinctively, regardless of what they say in polls on the desired solution to the conflict. Actually, even in polls, when faced with the option of maintaining the status quo, Israelis are likely to prefer it to the two-state solution. A Palestinian state becomes the preferable option only when presented on its own (“do you support/oppose…”) or when it is compared to annexing the West Bank.

See for example question 6 of the January 2012 Peace Index: A clear Jewish majority (57.3 percent) agrees with the following statement:

… even long-term continued rule in the territories will not prevent Israel from remaining a Jewish and democratic state.

This result is consistent with previous polls, I was told. In a panel I attended at Tel Aviv University, Prof. Ephraim Yaar, who runs the peace index, explained that Israelis’ political choices are irrational, since they don’t elect leaders that reflect their support for the two-state solution. But his own polls prove the opposite: that Israelis actually support the status-quo, and choose their leaders accordingly. The record-breaking support for Prime Minister Netanyahu, a man whose entire political history is a tale of maintaining the diplomatic status quo, can be easily explained in this framework, and so can the collapse of the parliamentary peace camp. There is not one Knesset party that has leaving the West Bank as the single most important issue on its agenda today – mainly because everyone knows that the public prefers the current state of affairs. So maybe it’s time to stop blaming the settlers alone.

But aren’t Israelis concerned about the long run? Well, when making political choices, most people don’t pay much attention to the long run, and politicians are even more likely to be focused on the immediate impact of their decisions. Anyway, the “unsustainable” occupation is proving itself to be pretty sustainable thus far. In the last decade, and especially since the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005– a move that was initiated, as Sharon himself said, in order to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank– Israel has been able to resist international pressure at a relatively low cost and maintain control over the territories it captured in 1967, while suffering the lowest number of casualties than at any other time. Never in its history has the gap – military, economic and in terms of international support – between Israel and its neighbors been so wide. The status-quo might not be perfect, but from the point of view of the average Israeli – not to mention that of his elected official – it represents the best alternative.

In other words, the major problem right now is that an inherently immoral order represents the most desirable political option for Israelis. All the left’s effort to demonstrate the problems the occupation creates – like the burden on the state budget – won’t help, since political choices are made based on alternative options, and right now the alternatives are more expensive, more painful, and more dangerous.

It should be noted that the status quo will remain the best option regardless of developments on the Palestinian side. Even if the Palestinians in the occupied territories recognize Israel as a Jewish state or vote Hamas out of office – even if they all join the Likud – from an Israeli cost/benefit perspective, keeping things as they are will remain preferable to the alternatives of either pulling out of the West Bank or to annexing it.

Haaretz reports: Israel decided Monday to sever all contact with the United Nations human rights council and with its chief commissioner Navi Pillay, after the international body decided to establish an international investigative committee on the West Bank settlements.

The Foreign Ministry ordered Israel’s ambassador to Geneva to cut off contact immediately, instructing him to ignore phone calls from the commissioner, a senior Israeli official said.

Israel will also bar a fact-finding team dispatched by the council from entering Israel and the West Bank to investigate settlement construction.

“We will not permit members of the human rights council to visit Israel and our ambassador has been instructed to not even answer phone calls,” said the official. “The secretariat of the human rights council and Nabi Pilawai sparked this process by establishing an international investigative committee on settlements, and we will thus not work with them anymore and will not appear before the council,” said the official.

Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi (Ra’am-Ta’al) criticized the move, saying that it amounted to a “boycott of the UN,” and asked what “Lieberman and Yisrael Beiteinu have in common with human rights.”

MK Dov Khenin (Hadash) also condemned the decision, saying that Israel “prefers settlements over human rights and contact with the international community.” Khenin called the move “dangerous,” saying that “through disconnecting from the world, the government is only isolating itself.”

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Friday that the move by the UN body proves that the Palestinians do not want to renew negotiations with Israel. “We are dealing with Al-Qaida terror on the one hand and diplomatic terror by Abu Mazen on the other,” Lieberman said, referring to PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

Senior officials in the Prime Minister’s Bureau and the Foreign Ministry said then that Israel would not cooperate with the UN committee. The Prime Minister’s Bureau decided Friday that the committee’s members – who are yet to be determined – would not be allowed into Israel.

Israel is also considering sanctions against the Palestinian Authority in response to the human rights council decision.

The Guardian reports: Jewish settlers in the West Bank are conducting a systematic and expanding campaign of violence against Palestinian farmers, families and children with the Israeli authorities turning a blind eye, according to confidential reports from senior European Union officials.

In two reports to Brussels from EU heads of mission in Jerusalem and Ramallah, obtained by the Guardian, the officials found that settler violence against Palestinians has more than tripled in three years to total hundreds of incidents.

“Acts of settler violence are becoming a serious concern for the Israeli state which has so far failed to effectively protect the Palestinian population,” says the report sent to EU ambassadors in Brussels last month.

The report notes 411 attacks by settlers last year resulting in Palestinian casualties and damage to property, against 132 attacks in 2009.

The campaign of intimidation is especially targeted at Palestinian farmers and their livelihood, the reports found, noting that settlers damaged or destroyed Palestinian olive groves en masse.

Around 10,000 trees were destroyed last year. But last autumn’s olive harvest season was quieter than previous years.

The Israeli authorities are accused of structuring their security operations to minimise the cost to the settlers of the campaign of harassment, intimidation and violence.

The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation just released its first policy paper, “U.S. Military Aid to Israel: Policy Implications & Options,” [PDF] which calls for the United States to end military aid to Israel.

The paper highlights the following facts, among others:

• From 2000 to 2009, the United States appropriated $24.1 billion of military aid to Israel, transferring more than 670 million weapons, rounds of ammunition, and related equipment.
• From 2000 to 2009, Israel killed at least 2,969 unarmed Palestinians, including 1,128 children, often with U.S. weapons in violation of the Foreign Assistance Act and Arms Export Control Act.
• From 2009 to 2018, the United States is scheduled to give Israel $30 billion in military aid, a 25 percent annual average increase over previous levels of military aid, despite its negative political and strategic ramifications.
• From the Eisenhower to Bush, Sr. Administrations, at least 10 times the United States conditioned aid to Israel, threatened to cut off aid to Israel, or sanctioned Israel for violating U.S. laws and/or working against foreign policy objectives.
• Since 2000, Members of Congress and/or the State Department have investigated or requested investigations into Israel’s potential misuse of U.S. weapons at least five times; however, no public action has been taken to hold Israel accountable for its violations of U.S. laws.
• With the same amount of money that the United States gives each year to fund weapons for Israel, the federal government could instead fund affordable housing vouchers for 350,000 low-income families, or green jobs training for 500,000 unemployed workers, or early reading programs for 900,000 at-risk students, or primary health care to 24 million people without insurance.

“The West Bank: Whose Promised Land?”

Esti Marpet made this film about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank almost 30 years ago. The settlement project was already gaining pace even though at that time there was only a fraction of the population that now numbers over 700,000.

What strikes me about the people represented in this film is this: the two sides do not simply reflect an imbalance in power.

I don’t hear the Palestinians denying the humanity of the Israelis. They are angry but not filled with contempt.

The settlers on the other hand express the purest contempt, denying the Palestinians’ rights, their history, and their existence as human beings. This contempt is so deeply embedded in their outlook that it buries the Palestinians alive.

Anyone who dehumanizes their adversary in this way, cannot do so without sacrificing their own humanity.

Mya Guarnieri writes: Earlier this month, The Atlantic published “2011: The Year in Photos.” It included a picture of Palestinian protesters climbing the fence that separates, according to The Atlantic, the “Israel-Syria border… near Majdal Shams.” The caption explained that Majdal Shams is located in “northern Israel.”

Imagine the fury if mainstream media outlets referred to the occupied West Bank as “Judea and Samaria.” That would be equivalent to calling the Golan Heights, which also lies beyond the Green Line, “northern Israel.” Calling the Golan “northern Israel” tacitly legitimizes the 1981 Israeli annexation, which has been rejected by the United Nations on numerous occasions in numerous resolutions and goes unrecognized by the international community.

It is this kind of blind repetition of the Israeli government line that has caused both Israeli citizens and the world to forget that the Golan Heights is occupied territory, not unlike East Jerusalem. Those who live in both East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights are not citizens of the state but residents who pay taxes to the Israeli government and receive next to nothing in return. The residents of the Golan run their own hospitals. They build their own schools. And, as is the case in East Jerusalem and Area C in the West Bank, they usually build without permits as Israel will not allow for natural population growth.

As is the case in the West Bank, Arab residents of the occupied Golan Heights have faced restricted access to their lands, land confiscation, and tight water restrictions that impede their farming. According to the NGO Jawlan- Golan for the Development of the Arab villages, the area’s Israeli settlers use as much as17 times more water per capita than the indigenous inhabitants of the Golan.

As is the case with Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Palestinian citizens of Israel, Israeli expulsions and expansion has split Golan families into two. In 1967, 130,000 Arab inhabitants were expelled from the Golan Heights, leaving only 6000 residents behind. As a number of Majdal Shams residents told me, every house in the Golan is divided. Everyone has family in Syria, loved ones they see through binoculars at Shouting Hill, cousins they talk to through bullhorns, brothers they have never met.