Israel's War Against Palestine: Documenting the Military Occupation of Palestinian and Arab Lands
A recent ruling demonstrates the bureaucratic machinery the state has created to restrict the Palestinians’ ability to enter, live and work on land west of the separation fence.
IOA Editor: This is an important news story which points to the ultimate effect of Israeli supreme court decisions: supporting Israel’s methodical process of ethnic cleansing, bit by bit — as the old Zionist saying goes, “duman here, and dunam there” — this time 9.5% of the West Bank territory. Next time what?
Juliano was angry. His rage was the kind that only a Jew like him, who was born on the left and craved equality until the end, can allow himself to express as a way of life. Palestinians must conquer the anger, mellow it; they must tame it, repress it, sublimate it. That’s the only way to stay both alive and sane (without getting arrested, wounded or killed ) under the conditions of physical and non-physical violence dictated by Israel.
The ministry has been ordered to release information regarding the minimum nutritional requirements needed to sustain Gaza residents, names of officials responsible for policy of limiting the entry of goods into the strip.
So for all those who demonstrated in support of the Gazans when they were trapped under Israeli fire, all those planners of past and future flotillas, this is your moment to raise your voices and say clearly: The Qassams merely feed Israel’s madness. It is not the Qassams that will ensure the Palestinians, both in and out of Gaza, a life of dignity. It is not the Qassams that will topple the Israeli walls around the world’s largest prison camp.
The author is reminded that the Palestinians are under occupation when almost all Egyptians refuse to meet with her because she writes for an Israeli newspaper.
The Israeli-made machinery of [occupation] repression has learned how to manufacture a protective net in the form of the Palestinian Authority. It does all it can not to upset the order of things, so no match will be lit that blows up the mirage of economic prosperity and the construction of national institutions.
Both Palestinian rivals know how to use the resilience and creativity of their people in the face of the daily torture that is foreign rule. But they do not help translate this personal and collective stamina into a strategy of unarmed popular struggle.
Imad Samouni: I know Hebrew and I told the family not to worry because Jews have better hearts than we do, I worked with them for 10 years. They tied us up… There were 46 of us… “The soldiers passed among us, made our home into their hostel… [The shackles] hurt me terribly and my fingers swelled. A soldier tried to open them but couldn’t, and only made them tighter. My wife cried that they hurt me. He brought scissors and cut down to the flesh to open them. My wife cried… And I’m a man, I told them not to cry, and he brought new plastic ties. We stayed that way from Sunday to Monday…
The army’s seizure of land “for military and security purposes” quickly turned into large-scale appropriation for the exclusive benefit of Israel’s super-citizens, at the expense of the subpar species.
“Although it was not my usual custom, I made a point of kissing my children every night,” one young father from Gaza City told me. “I never knew which of us would still be alive the next day, and I wanted to say goodbye properly.”
Vilnai is depending on Israelis’ total indifference to our Qassams: our soldiers’ nearly daily firing on Gaza civilians, regularly wounding and sometimes killing them.
As many as 90% of Palestinian prisoners are denied this basic right despite civilian and military legislation, says study produced by Public Committee Against Torture and Palestinian Prisoners’ Society.
Shin Bet: “[W]e know what you are doing and … it will have repercussions. At the moment, what you are doing is on the borderline of the law and it is quite possible that information on you will show your actions are illegal. We know about all your files.”
Amira Hass has been a correspondent in the Occupied Territories for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz since the early 1990s. Hass describes her work as “writing about the Israeli occupation and Apartheid regime and about Israelis through the experiences of Palestinians.” She also covers internal Palestinian issues. She is the author of the widely acclaimed Drinking the Sea at Gaza and two books of collected articles.
It would be wrong to dismiss the wisdom of our leaders. Perhaps they’ve gotten exactly what they wanted – to strengthen Hamas in the Gaza Strip, both for perpetuating the intentional division between Gaza and the West Bank and to encourage perpetual low-intensity warfare (which sometimes escalates).
IOA Editor: Hamas, one of Israel’s most important – yet, invisible – allies, affords Israel the opportunity to conjure up “evidence” that an arrangement between Israelis and Palestinians is inherently impossible, particularly on account of Hamas, thus freeing Israel to colonize the little of historic Palestine that is still Arab – while dividing, ruling, and repressing Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel itself. (Lest we leave out Israel’s other excuses for not ending the Occupation, before Hamas it was Arafat who was “not a partner” for peace, and before him it was the Arab World, etc.)
Since Hamas took control of Gaza, [Israeli] officials have employed mathematical formulas to monitor goods from aid groups entering the Strip to ensure amount was in line with what Israel permitted.
Amira Hass: The many incidents described in the human rights organizations’ reports indicate that the drone photographs are not as precise or clear as they are said to be, or that the technology considered “objective” also depends on commanders’ interpretation: Children playing on the roof are liable to be regarded as “scouts,” people trying to speak to their relatives over the phone are liable to be “signal operators for a terrorist brigade,” and families that went to the garden to feed the goats, squads of Qassam launchers.
What is delaying treatment of a 47-year-old Palestinian woman, if not punishment of someone who opposes her foreign rulers?
No one thinks to ask about the consensus among the residents of Palestinian cities and villages on whose land the settlements have been built. The millions of Palestinians don’t count at all.
“I wish these pictures reached leftists abroad,” my friend said … as she watched Hamas police use rifle butts and clubs to beat her friends – activists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Although my friend has never been a fan of the Fatah government in the West Bank, she is outraged by the romanticization of Hamas rule by foreign activists.
NOAM CHOMSKY:
